Atlantis: the Andes Solution
Date: Friday, December 16th, 2005 (CDT )
Topic: Ancient History
 When we think of South America, we think of either Machu Picchu or the Maya, a mysterious civilisation capable of impressive feats of engineering and creators of complex interrelated calendar systems that ranged from days in length to millions of years in duration.
Most scholars would agree that South America has a rich archaeological history that we are only just beginning to discover. Is it possible that the continent we know as South America is something even more amazing, could it be the lost continent of Atlantis? One man, author Jim Allen, certainly believes so and has built up an impressive dossier of evidence to support his theory.
Probably the biggest doubt to South America being Atlantis is that Plato said that the continent was lost beneath the sea in the space of a single day. Is it possible that only key areas were lost beneath the waters, ones that the very infrastructure of the continent depended upon such as its capital city?
If we expand
on Jim’s research a little, further east from its key port, what we now
know as Cuba might also have been a casualty, because Cuba was once a
physical part of the continent until a massive earthquake made it an
island.
Jim
Allen’s research has interesting comparisons that make South America
(in particular Bolivia and the Andes) a very plausible candidate for
Atlantis. Jim says of the sinking of Atlantis;
“The
continent of Atlantis is still there opposite the Pillars of Hercules
(Strait of Gibraltar) only now it has been re-named South America. The
part which sank was a small volcanic island which sank into a large
inland sea in the centre of the continent.”
He
also comments, “People sometimes say; ‘How can Atlantis be in the Andes
when it is supposed to have sunk into the sea?’ We must remember that
Atlantis according to Plato was on a level plain "high above the level
of the sea and surrounded by mountains". In fact the entire plain has
been periodically submerged beneath the sea i.e. it became a giant
inland sea at various dates going back thousands of years succeeded by
dry periods.
Plato
described Atlantis as being a vast island continent the size of Libya
and Asia combined. When you consider this description in terms of
landmass, South America becomes an intriguing possibility; the size of
South America makes Plato’s description of ten kingdoms within the
island continent a possibility.
According
to Plato, the Atlanteans asserted themselves over the geography of
their land, flattening and trimming a large plain on the central island
into a long, perfect rectangle of impossible dimensions. There is a
place in Bolivia that contains such a rectangle, the Altiplano. The
Altiplano is high above sea level in the Andes. The area also contains
a wealth of minerals including the mysterious Orichalcum, an alloy of
gold and copper that is only found in the Andes. There is also evidence
of manmade canals, which were used for irrigation purposes as Plato
described.
According
to Jim, “Plato’s description exactly fits South America because he
describes a level rectangular-shaped plain which he said lay in the
centre of the continent, next to the sea and midway along the longest
side of the continent. He also described the capital city of Atlantis,
which was built on a small volcanic island and also called Atlantis.
The city lay on the level rectangular plain, five miles from the sea
and according to Plato the whole region was high above the level of the
Ocean sea, rising sheer out of the ocean sea to a great height on that
side of the continent. Thus, we have both a lost city of Atlantis as
well as a lost continent of Atlantis.”
 The
Altiplano is the largest drainage basin in South America and spans 800
km from north to south and around 120 km. from east to west. It is home
to the largest body of water in the South American highlands, Lake
Titicaca. The lake formed where the two mountain chains of the Andes
are furthest apart and its water levels are known to have fluctuated by
as much as 50 metres in the past. Underwater archaeologists surveyed
Lake Titicaca in 2004 exploring the ruins of long forgotten city that
is certainly pre-Incan in origin, but which is now hidden below its
waters.
The
site seems to fit every description that Plato mentioned; firstly, it
is in the centre of the level rectangular plain at a distance of 50
stades from the sea. It has the required red, black and white stone and
it also has underground hot and cold springs. Most remarkable of all,
both geology and local legend confirm that the site has been sunk by
earthquakes.
A
Bolivian legend called the legend of the Desaguadero details how the
gods decided to punish a city on the edge of a lake by submerging it in
a day of earthquakes and floods. The principal god, Tunapa then sinks
into the waters of Lake Poopo at Pampa Aullagas, which even today,
during times of heavy flooding, becomes an island. It seems highly
likely that the legend of Atlantis is based on the Bolivian legend of
Desaguardero.
Cuba – lost Atlantean Port?
In
July 2000, just off the western tip of Cuba two ocean engineers made an
amazing discovery, what they found appeared to be the remains of
another sunken city. The question people began to ask was, had the
survey ship found the remnants of the lost continent of Atlantis?
One
theory that has been discussed is that Cuba acted as a staging post for
some of the survivors of Atlantis as they searched for new lands to
colonise. Another possibility is that Cuba was already part of
Atlantis, possibly serving as a port and that most of its inhabitants
perished in the cataclysm. Many geologists who have studied the area
agree that Cuba was once connected to the mainland by a ninety
mile-long land bridge that connected present-day Cuba to Mesoamerica's
Yucatan Peninsula. They speculate that catastrophic events possibly a
series of volcanic eruptions or earthquakes could have caused the land
to sink.
Survivors of the Cataclysm
As
early as the sixteenth century, at least one Spanish priest suggested
that the Maya and their counterparts originated from Atlantis,
survivors from the highly advanced civilisation that disappeared in a
great earthquake and volcanic eruption many thousands of years ago. If
the Maya are indeed direct descendents of the Atlantean people, this
could account for their highly advanced understanding of astronomy,
engineering and maths.
It
is also possible that the catastrophic event that led to the
destruction of Atlantis caused the dispossessed survivors to find new
civilisations either elsewhere in their own kingdom, or further afield
in places such as Egypt.
It’s
interesting to consider for example that in Critias, Plato describes a
ceremonial capture of bulls already in captivity in Poseidon’s royal
quarters. In Ancient Egypt, bull cults appeared in ancient texts as far
back as the First Dynasty. The most well known of the Egyptian Bull
cults worshipped the Apis Bull to such an extent that bulls’ remains
were buried in an underground chamber; known as the Serapeum. The Apis
bull was of course linked to Ptah and Osiris, gods of creation, death
and rebirth. The theoretical timeline between the destruction of
Atlantis and the creation of Egypt is also very close.
Although
there is a huge amount of work to be done to fully document the site,
through Jim Allen’s painstaking research and expeditions to Bolivia, it
seems that the area is slowly revealing its secrets. It remains to be
seen if those secrets will lead us to conclusive proof as to the
location of Atlantis but just as Troy was once considered nothing but a
myth, the possibility remains that Atlantis, long considered little
more than a philosophical metaphor, might just turn out to be a
physical reality that has been under our noses all along.
Further reading
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