The Story of Atlantis: The Legend of the Lost City and Where It Came From

The story of Atlantis is the legend of a great island — described by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato as larger than Libya and Asia combined — that is said to have sunk beneath the ocean in a single catastrophic day. Whether it was a genuine lost civilization, a distorted memory of a real disaster, or a philosophical parable invented to make a moral point remains unresolved after more than two thousand years of debate. This page follows the myth from its origin in Plato's writings through the fiction it inspired and the scientific hypotheses that still try to locate it.

The history of Atlantis: legend, hypothesis or reality?

Islands appear and vanish just as seas and lakes do, and Atlantis is the most famous example of a landmass said to have disappeared. Even in Plato's day people pictured the sizes of Libya and Asia differently than we do now, yet by any measure the island of Atlantis was described as enormous. That single claim — an island bigger than two known continents, swallowed whole by the sea — has kept the question alive since the fourth century BCE, and no final answer has ever been reached.

What is Atlantis: the origin of the myth

Atlantis is a mythical island civilization first described in the philosophical dialogues of Plato, who placed it in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules and said it was destroyed and sunk beneath the waves. The account raises an immediate problem of interpretation: is Plato retelling an ancient legend, inventing a fable of his own, or passing on real information about a lost civilization that reached him by chance? Because Plato is the sole ancient source for the tale, every later theory — scholarly or fantastical — ultimately traces back to his text.

Plato and the first mentions of Atlantis

Plato is the earliest writer to speak of Atlantis, and the whole hypothesis begins with him. He frames the story as history handed down through the Athenian statesman Solon, who supposedly heard it from Egyptian priests, giving the tale a chain of transmission that stretched from Egypt to classical Athens. For readers who want the wider intellectual context, the era's thought is discussed in the Biography of Aristotle of Stagira.

The dialogues Timaeus and Critias

The two dialogues Timaeus and Critias are the original source of everything known about Atlantis. In them Plato describes a large island in the Atlantic Ocean that was engulfed by the depths of the water after a war against ancient Athens. Timaeus introduces the tale and sets the scene, while Critias gives the fuller picture — the island's geography, its rulers, its wealth and its downfall — before breaking off unfinished, leaving the account tantalizingly incomplete.

How the ancient Greeks viewed their own past

The Greeks of Plato's time knew almost nothing of the Bronze Age kingdoms that had preceded them on their own soil, which is one reason the Atlantis story is so striking. Plato had no obvious reason to invent a powerful state in Attica many centuries before the start of recorded Greek history, yet his dialogue describes exactly that. This gap between what classical Greeks could have known and what the text actually says is precisely what convinced some later researchers that Plato was working from older material rather than pure imagination.

The civilization of the Atlanteans

Plato portrays Atlantis as a rich, powerful and highly organized maritime empire that ruled colonies far beyond its own shores. Its wealth, its architecture and its dynasty of god-descended kings are described in enough concrete detail to make the account read like a report rather than a fairy tale — which is exactly why it has fascinated readers for millennia.

The wealth and character of the Atlantean civilization

The Atlantean civilization was defined by extraordinary natural abundance and lavish use of precious metals. Plato mentions gold, silver, lead, iron and the mysterious metal orichalcum, which he says gleamed like fire with a reddish colour. Because gold and silver occur naturally in nugget form, their abundance in the Atlantean capital does not by itself prove advanced metalworking; iron is named only once and may have been meteoric. Metals were used chiefly to face the great stone walls and adorn the temples, so the picture that emerges is of a stone-and-copper culture at the very threshold of the Bronze Age rather than a technologically advanced empire.

Poseidon, Cleito and the sons who inherited Atlantis

According to Plato, Atlantis was created by the sea god Poseidon, who fell in love with a mortal woman named Cleito and fathered ten sons with her. Poseidon divided the island among these demigod sons, giving the eldest, Atlas, the largest share and the kingship — and it is from Atlas that both the island and the Atlantic Ocean are said to take their names. This dynasty of divine descendants formed the governing structure of Atlantis, and worship of Poseidon stood at the religious heart of the state, centred on a colossal statue of the god that Plato compared in scale to the Zeus of Olympia sculpted by Phidias.

The "City of a Hundred Golden Gates" and the layout of the island

The capital of Atlantis was built as a series of concentric rings of land and water surrounding a central hill — a three-ring island city crowned by the temple of Poseidon. Plato even records that the walls and towers of this City of the Golden Gates were built from stone of three colours, white, black and red; remarkably, cities on the Azores are built from stones of exactly these three colours, and some observers have treated the Azores as the mountain peaks of a sunken Atlantis. The city was fed by two springs, one of hot and one of cold water — precisely what one would expect on a volcanically active island — and its plan, gigantic statues and encircling canals all fall, as later analysts noted, within the bounds of the physically possible.

The conflict between Atlantis and Athens

The dramatic core of Plato's story is a war between imperial Atlantis and a virtuous, much smaller Athens. In the dialogue, Atlantis had grown into an aggressive power seeking to enslave the peoples of the Mediterranean, and Athens led the resistance that ultimately stopped it — a contrast the philosopher clearly designed to set noble simplicity against corrupt ambition.

The wars and conquests of Atlantis

Plato describes Atlantis as expanding beyond its Atlantic homeland to conquer lands as far as Egypt and the western Mediterranean, holding colonies in Africa and, by some readings, beyond. He even records that the Atlanteans kept horses and elephants in these overseas colonies — a detail that does not contradict the evidence, since both horses and elephants died out in the Americas comparatively recently. It was this campaign of conquest, checked and thrown back by Athens, that formed the prelude to the island's sudden destruction.

The decline of Atlantis: greed, hubris and tyranny

Plato tells us that Atlantis fell because its people, once noble, became corrupted by wealth and consumed by greed, arrogance and lust for power. As the divine bloodline of Poseidon was diluted through the generations, the Atlanteans lost their virtue and gave in to hubris, and it was this moral collapse of the leadership — not merely a natural disaster — that provoked divine punishment. The physical destruction of the island, in Plato's telling, is the outward expression of an inward decay.

Atlantis as moral allegory and philosophical metaphor

Many scholars read Atlantis chiefly as a moral allegory rather than a geographical report — a philosophical metaphor about the fate of a proud society that abandons justice. In this reading Plato invented, or heavily reshaped, the story to dramatize his own ideas about good governance and the corrupting effect of unchecked power and riches, using the doomed empire as a mirror in which his fellow Athenians could see the dangers of their own imperial ambitions. The lesson embedded in the fable — that a civilization's decline begins with the moral decline of those who lead it — is arguably the most enduring part of the entire legend.

The end of the island: how Atlantis went under the water

Plato states that Atlantis, having lost its war and its virtue, was destroyed in a single terrible day and night when earthquakes and floods swallowed it into the sea. The image of a whole civilization sinking beneath the waves under the thunder of volcanic eruptions has proved irresistible to artists ever since. Later researchers noted that Plato's date for the catastrophe — roughly the timescale he gives for the island's demise — was echoed by studies of Atlantic sediments; radioisotope analysis of core samples from the North Atlantic showed that the warm Gulf Stream first broke into the northern seas around twelve thousand years ago, and American scientists found that volcanic ash appeared in Atlantic seabed deposits at about the same date. To some, these coincidences seemed to confirm the legendary date on which Atlantis went to the bottom of the ocean.

Atlantis in imaginative literature

The legend of Atlantis has inspired writers and poets almost without limit, generating an endless stream of beautiful inventions born from a single ancient tale. The sunken island has served novelists as a symbol of vanished grandeur, of the fragility of civilization, and of the mysteries hidden beneath the sea.

Aleksei Tolstoy's "Aelita" and Belyaev's "The Last Man from Atlantis"

In "Aelita", Aleksei Tolstoy painted an unforgettable scene: from the golden summit of a giant pyramid, spacecraft shaped like enormous eggs lift off to carry the last of the Atlanteans away from the raging elements to distant Mars, while ocean waves already lick the pyramid's base and the shocks of a furious earthquake swallow the legendary City of a Hundred Golden Gates. Alexander Belyaev's tale "The Last Man from Atlantis" gives us another vivid image — the priest Aksa Guam, who rebelled against the all-powerful priesthood, stepping at last onto the rocky shore of Europe. Both authors turned Plato's fragment into full-blooded drama.

Captain Nemo and the dead Atlantis of Jules Verne

Jules Verne gave the myth one of its most haunting images in the figure of Captain Nemo, who stands with his arms folded across his chest and gazes at a beautiful city lit by an underwater volcanic eruption — before him lies dead Atlantis. The scene fixed in the popular imagination the idea of the drowned city as a place one could actually descend to and behold, an idea that would later feed the dream of searching the ocean floor for its ruins.

Atlantis in scientific and occult literature

Alongside the fiction there is a body of writing about Atlantis that claims the status of scholarship while being scarcely less fantastical. One such book was confidently titled "The History of Atlantis"; another was written by a grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, the man who uncovered the stones of legendary Troy from beneath the accumulation of centuries. Trading shamelessly on his famous grandfather's name, he gave his book the pretentious title "How I Found the Lost Atlantis." Both belong to the flood of so-called occult literature that wrapped the Atlantis question in such a thick mystical fog that, for some scholars, it still obscures the genuine scientific interest of the problem.

Real science, however, does take the Atlantis question seriously, because an enormous number of unanswered questions cluster around it — questions reaching into botany, comparative linguistics, cultural history, ethnography and zoology alike.

The poet Bryusov and the "Teachers of Teachers"

One of the first in modern times to attempt a serious investigation of the history of Atlantis was the remarkable Russian poet Valery Bryusov — poet, writer, mathematician and a great connoisseur of ancient history and of research across the natural sciences. The problem of Atlantis interested him from childhood; in his youth he worked on a poem titled "Atlantis," and in his creative maturity he wrote a whole cycle of poems on the same theme and published a large scholarly work, "Teachers of Teachers." By that phrase the scholar-poet meant the ancient inhabitants of Atlantis, in whom, he wrote, "all knowledge arose" and who "grasped all that was possible, the first children of the Earth."

Bryusov set out to trace the influence of these people on the world's most ancient nations, above all on the Cretan-Mycenaean culture. Analyzing the development of ancient civilizations, including the Egyptian and the Aegean, he found their earliest stages strangely abrupt: Egyptian culture begins mysteriously, with the very oldest pyramids also being the tallest, and its arts appear before an astonished world fully formed, like Pallas Athena springing armed and robed from the head of Zeus. He saw something similar in Cretan-Mycenaean culture, where the legendary labyrinth seems to arise all at once on an island that had previously yielded only the remains of people not yet out of the Stone Age.

Bryusov's method was simple and logical: he read Plato's dialogues and measured them against the objective level of knowledge available to a philosopher of the fourth century BCE. On that basis he concluded that much of the information in the dialogues could only have reached Plato from people who knew of Atlantis. He noted, for instance, that Plato — like all Greeks — knew nothing of the Aegean kingdoms that had preceded the Hellenes on Greek soil, and so had no reason to invent a powerful Attic state many centuries before recorded history. Plato also wrote that Atlantis lay on islands beyond the Pillars of Hercules — beyond the Strait of Gibraltar — and that sailing further west one could reach another "opposite" continent, though the Greeks knew nothing of America.

If we suppose Plato's description to be invention, we must credit Plato with a superhuman genius able to foresee the development of science for thousands of years — to foresee that scholars would one day discover the world of the Aegean and establish its links with Egypt, that Columbus would discover America, that archaeologists would reconstruct the civilization of the ancient Maya, and so on. It seems simpler and more probable that Plato had at his disposal Egyptian materials descending from deep antiquity.

This is also the point at which the disputed metal orichalcum enters the argument. When no place could be found for it in the periodic table, its very existence became doubtful; Bryusov thought the unknown metal might be aluminium, even though its extraction requires the electric current the Atlanteans did not possess. Modern scholars more soberly suggest orichalcum was a natural alloy of copper and zinc — in effect brass — since ores containing both metals do occasionally occur, and such an alloy matches the described "fiery red" colour.

A curious historical anecdote reported by the ancient historian Pliny fits Bryusov's aluminium speculation: in the early years of our era an unknown craftsman brought the Roman emperor Tiberius a metal cup that shone like silver yet was extraordinarily light, saying he had obtained the metal from clay-rich earth. Fearing the new metal would devalue his stores of gold and silver, Tiberius ordered the craftsman beheaded — and it is quite possible the story concerns aluminium.

Bryusov also argued that even the plants and animals of Atlantis are described with startling realism. He treated the account of the Golden Gates capital as remaining "within the bounds of the possible," noting that nothing in the description betrays deliberate invention. Later scientists returned to these details and kept finding coincidences: the two springs of hot and cold water fit a volcanic island, and the mysterious tree "that gives drink, and food, and ointment" could be the coconut palm, which indeed yields drink in its milk, food in its flesh and an ointment in its semi-liquid oil.

The Russian hydrogeologist M. M. Yermolaev, examining core samples from the floor of the polar seas by radioisotope analysis, established that the hot flow of the Gulf Stream first penetrated the northern seas about twelve thousand years ago. The atlantologist Ye. F. Hagemeister proposed that the end of the last ice age was triggered when the warm Gulf Stream broke through into the cold Arctic Ocean — and this, she argued, happened because "Atlantis sank to the bottom of the ocean and opened the way for the Gulf Stream." The academician V. A. Obruchev agreed, writing that the sinking of Atlantis "again freed the path of the Gulf Stream, and in the north its warm waters gradually ended the glaciation around the North Pole."

Indirect evidence: botany and linguistics

Some of the most intriguing arguments for a lost trans-Atlantic culture come from fields that seem at first far removed from the problem — botany, comparative linguistics and cultural history. Each raises a puzzle about how identical plants, words or customs came to be shared across the ocean by peoples supposedly out of contact.

The riddle of the banana and maize

The origins of the banana and of maize pose questions that some atlantologists connect to Atlantis. The banana was domesticated so long ago that it can now reproduce only from cuttings, yet it turns up as a cultivated plant on both sides of the ocean, in the Americas and in Africa. Maize is stranger still: modern corn cannot reproduce by self-seeding, no wild ancestor has been securely identified, and yet the plant was long known not only in America but in Africa. How, the atlantologists ask, did these crops come to belong to the cultivated grains of two continents?

Shared roots in the languages of the Maya and Europe

Comparative linguistics offers its own puzzles about roots shared between Old World and New. Researchers have asked how the roots of Greek words came to appear in the language of the Maya, one of the peoples of Central America, and how the word "atlas" travelled between America and Europe. From North Africa that word passed into the name of the Atlantic Ocean, yet it has nothing in common with European languages — while in the language of a people long resident in Mexico, words with the same root mean "water," "sea" and "destruction."

Links with the ancient civilizations of the Americas (Maya, Aztec)

Parallels between Old World and New World cultures extend well beyond language. The practice of making mummies was widespread not only in Egypt but among the Maya of Central America; American myths preserve tales of a land destroyed beyond the ocean to the east, just as European legends speak of a drowned land beyond the ocean to the west. The book "Riddles of the Most Ancient History" by A. A. Gorbovsky collects many such facts — from the Aztec habit of depicting the planets as small balls the gods played with, to the shared division of the year into twelve months in the Near East, Egypt, India and South America, to the Mexican legend of a tall tower whose builders' tongues were suddenly confused so that "they could no longer understand one another and went to live in different parts of the Earth." Some of these threads reach back into ancient ideas about the structure of the Universe, and even to the knowledge of the Earth's spherical shape preserved among the ancient Egyptians and Aztecs. The English ethnologist J. Frazer noted that of 130 native peoples across the Americas, not one lacks a myth of a great catastrophe.

How advanced was Atlantis, really?

Bryusov's great flaw, for all his insight, was to accept the enchanting legend so completely that he imagined the Atlanteans as a super-advanced civilization surpassing every later nation on Earth. That view owed much to the occultist books that credited the Atlanteans with aeronautics and rocketry. The Russian chemist Dr. N. F. Zhirov, the leading Soviet atlantologist, examined the question carefully and reached a far more restrained conclusion: the culture Plato describes belongs to the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, with weapons, tools and household goods made of stone and bone, metals used only to face walls and adorn temples, and a tendency toward gigantism in architecture typical of that developmental stage. Some authors even link the mysterious megalithic monuments scattered along coastlines from Western Europe to Madagascar with this Stone Age culture.

Zhirov held that the existence of Atlantis is a question for science, and above all for oceanography, which must decide whether a large island could have stood a few thousand years ago in the Atlantic opposite Gibraltar. His answer was that it could: the Mid-Atlantic Ridge runs down the middle of the ocean and could have stood subaerially — above the water — in times close to those Plato names, with some patches of land perhaps surviving into historical times.

Scientific hypotheses about the location of Atlantis

Because Plato's own text places Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Hercules, location theories divide broadly into two camps: those that hunt for the island in the open Atlantic Ocean, and those that read Plato's tale as a garbled memory of a real disaster within the Mediterranean Sea. Beyond these, proposals have ranged across the whole globe — southern Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, Malta, Sweden, even Antarctica — with each theory trying to reconcile the dialogues with real geography.

The Azores hypothesis and ancient seafaring

The islands of the Atlantic — the Azores, Madeira and the Canaries — have long drawn the attention of atlantologists as possible surviving peaks of Atlantis. Curious legends attach to them: on the island of Corvo a mounted statue is said to have been found with the rider's arm outstretched toward the west, a report recorded among others by the German scholar R. Hennig; on other islands gravestones bore inscriptions in an unknown tongue; and on one of the Cape Verde islands a dolmen and rock inscriptions in the Berber language were discovered. Some specialists have even regarded the population of the Canary Islands — the Guanches, who spoke languages of Berber origin and possessed neither metal nor firearms — as direct descendants of the Atlanteans; after the brutal Spanish conquest not a single pure-blooded native remained alive by 1600. Rock inscriptions of two types survive there, one thought to be related to the writing of Crete, though none has yet been deciphered.

Underwater structures off Cadiz and sonar investigations

The seafloor itself has yielded tantalizing finds. In the mid-1950s a marine dredge brought up about a tonne of strange limestone discs from the Atlantic floor south of the Azores — plate-like objects roughly fifteen centimetres across and four thick, smooth outside but rough within their hollows. Their odd, deliberate form points to artificial origin; their age was fixed at some twelve thousand years, matching the supposed date of Atlantis, and they were shown to have been made in atmospheric conditions before ending up on the summit of an undersea mountain. Zhirov compared these "sea biscuits" to plates used by some Caucasian peoples to offer food to the spirits on mountaintops, suggesting the same purpose. In the same spirit, modern searches concentrate on submerged structures near Cadiz and the shallow waters off southern Spain, where sonar surveys and diving expeditions probe the seabed for traces of the drowned city.

The link with Crete and the Minoan civilization

The most widely supported scholarly theory today identifies the seed of the Atlantis myth with the Minoan civilization of Crete and the nearby island of Thera. The Minoans built the great palace of Knossos with its labyrinthine plan, developed a maritime, art-loving culture, and wrote in the still-undeciphered Linear A script — undeciphered Minoan texts whose meaning remains locked, much as no Guanche inscription has ever been read. The aesthetic and historical influence of this Bronze Age sea power, whose artefacts fill the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, offers a real, datable maritime empire that a later Greek could have half-remembered. Crete's place in Greek myth — as the home of the labyrinth and the Minotaur — has since carried the island into popular media as well, from children's mythology books to video games such as Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, whose portrayal of ancient Greece deliberately telescopes different eras.

The Thera eruption and the Minoan collapse

The catastrophic eruption of the Thera volcano — on the island now called Santorini — is the leading candidate for a real event behind the sinking of Atlantis. The eruption devastated Thera and, through tsunamis and ashfall, is widely thought to have crippled the Minoan civilization on Crete, offering a genuine instance of an advanced island culture struck down almost overnight by the sea and by fire from the earth. The parallels are close enough that many scholars see in the Thera Eruption the historical kernel that Plato, working from Egyptian memories, magnified into a whole vanished continent.

The Bronze Age Collapse as a possible historical basis

Some researchers connect the Atlantis story more broadly to the Bronze Age Collapse, the wave of destruction that swept the eastern Mediterranean around 1177 BCE. Within a few generations the great powers of the age — the Mycenaeans of Greece, the Hittite Empire, New Kingdom Egypt — were shattered or gravely weakened, and Egyptian records blame mysterious raiders remembered as the Sea Peoples. This real historical trauma of a flourishing world plunged suddenly into ruin provides, for some, the emotional and factual backdrop against which a tale of a mighty maritime empire destroyed for its aggression would have made perfect sense to an Egyptian priest passing the memory on to Solon.

The search for Atlantis: modern methods

The modern search for Atlantis relies on underwater exploration — bathyscaphes, sonar surveys and, increasingly, deep diving. Researchers have already reached the ocean's greatest depths in bathyscaphes, and even without descending they can now study the seabed in the hope of finding the ruins of giant temples, remnants of city walls and the surrounding canals. There is little doubt that such searches will be undertaken; the question is only with what machines they will be carried out, since the clumsy, slow bathyscaphes that made the first reconnaissance of the deep are poorly suited to detailed work on the ocean floor.

The most likely explorers may in fact be diving atlantologists, and the history of the aqualung shows why that is not as absurd as it sounds. The aqualung appeared only in 1943, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau at first supposed his invention would let a person master at most twenty or thirty metres of water — yet in our time yesterday's record swiftly becomes today's routine, exactly as happened with the speeds of cars and aircraft after the sound barrier was broken. Corroborating evidence for a real sinking keeps surfacing too: a fragment of coral raised from a peak of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge onto the research vessel Mikhail Lomonosov came from a depth of two and a half kilometres, yet corals live only in shallow water — implying that this stretch of ridge recently subsided by at least two kilometres.

The chief obstacle to deep diving is physiological. Breathing highly compressed air oversaturates the blood with dissolved oxygen and nitrogen; oxygen excess causes convulsions, and nitrogen brings on narcosis and, on ascent, decompression sickness, as dissolved nitrogen bubbles out directly into the veins and arteries. To avoid it, divers once had to rise so slowly that surfacing from a hundred metres took five or six hours. The ingenious idea of the Swiss scientist Hans Keller — using different gas mixtures during ascent — broke this barrier: on one test he rose from 222 metres in just 53 minutes, and he later descended to 400 metres. English divers reached 457 metres in 1970, the French pushed past the half-kilometre mark to 520 metres later that year, and by 1972 a still greater depth of 565 metres had been taken.

The next step astonished by its boldness: four American volunteers descended to 1,520 metres, spent four hours at that depth and returned to the surface unharmed — the experiment carried out in a pressure chamber, but the essential fact unchanged, the depth achieved. Double or treble it, and the depths of Atlantis would fall within reach of divers who could search for the sunken land and rest between dives in special underwater houses, prototypes of which are already being tested in several countries. It may be, then, that Atlantis will be discovered not by heavy, cumbersome deep-sea suits and bathyscaphes but by light, mobile, specially trained deep divers, clad only in a woollen suit beneath a thin rubber cover.