Cracking The Code of Atlantis: Part 2
Cracking The Code Of Atlantis, Part 1
You can sign up for the occasional Elements newsletter, follow Mark David on Twitter @authorMarkDavid. You can read more about his fiction on The Elements homepage or here on medium.
This second in a series of articles explores the origins for Atlantis.
Names For Atlantis
Atlantis was not believed originally to have been that big. It was a palace built on a mountain surrounded by a island, according to the ancient Egyptians. They called it the land of Amenti. In the 1180 BC Harris papyrus it is called Ataka. Its historical section mentions that Setnakhte (1189–1186 BC), Ramesses III’s father and predecessor, restored order and stability to Egypt after a time of internal civil conflict, expelling Asiatic followers of Irsu. Ramesses III himself reorganized the state bureaucracy and the army and fought wars against the Peoples of the Sea and claims to have subdued them and made them subjects of Egypt.
The Medinet Habu Tablets clarify that the Sea Peoples, as prisoners, declared: “Our islands are uprooted and carried away. The might of Nun [ocean] broke forth and fell in great wave on our towns and villages. The head of their cities has gone under the sea; their land is no more” (inscriptions 37, 46, 80, 102 & 109).
Etelente is another Egyptian name for Atlantis. The Hanebu was a sea people from from the sunken Kingdom of Neteru who Pharaohs had to fight to keep away from the lands of the Nile.
Egyptians referred to their lands of the dead as lying West in the middle of the ocean, in the ancestral homeland called Sekhet-Aaru ‘the field of reeds’, Aaru, Alu and Amenti. The Greeks referred to Atlantis as Hesperides, The Fortunate Isles.
Dating
The 9,000 BCE date is incorrect since the priests of Ancient Egypt used lunar years to record history — providing a date nearer to the time of the eruption at Thera for the date of the Atlantean cataclysm. It isimportant to mention, is that if you substitute aruoras or ‘side’ for stadia, the dimensions of Atlantis as described by Plato, you get a much more accurate and believable picture of what Atlantis really looked like.
The Minoans thrived between 3000 to 2000 BC, and reached its peak in the period between 2000 and 1580 BC. The eruption of Thera was between 1550 and 1600 BC — some time before the time of Ramses III when he declared on the walls of Medinet Habu that “the whole delta of the Nile is flooded by the sea.” Later he states, as does the archeological evidence, that there were vast fires in the Near East: “Libya became a desert; a terrible torch hurled flame from heaven to destroy their souls and lay waste their land [as] their bones burn and roast within their limbs [and] the Nile was dried up and the land fell victim to drought” (Tablet 105). Again, like Homer, the fires are said to be the result of a source from outside of the Earth.
Links to the Goddess of the dead
Amentet (Ament, Amentit, Imentet, Imentit) was the Egyptian goddess and friend of the dead, and the personification of the Land of the West, ‘Amenti’. It was she who welcomed the deceased to their new dwelling place in the netherworld. She was also a goddess who helped with the rebirthing process, and thus a goddess of fertility and rebirth, who regenerated the deceased with food and water. She was depicted as a beautiful woman as wearing the hieroglyph of the west.
On her head, carrying a scepter and the ankh of life in her hands. She is occasionally seen as a winged goddess, when linked to the goddesses Isis and Nephthys. The standard of the west is usually a half circle sitting on top of two poles of uneven length, the longer of which is tied to her head by a headband. Often a hawk or an ostrich feather is seen sitting on top of the standard. Occasionally, she is shown wearing just the hawk on her head. She was believed to live in a tree at the edge of the desert, a place where she could watch the gates to the underworld. She was often shown not only in tombs, but on coffins, being a goddess of the dead.
To word ‘Amentet’, as used by the Egyptians, was applied to the west bank of the Nile — Egyptian cemeteries and funerary places were all on the west. To the Egyptians, west was a direction linked to death. Amentet was also the name of the underworld — the place where Ratraveled during the night. The place where the sun set was also called by this name, being the entrance to the land of the dead according to Egyptian belief. Amentet — ‘She of the West’ — was therefor the goddess of not only the land of the dead, but also of the entry to the underworld, and of the west itself.
Standing at the entry to the land of the dead, Amentet offers food and drink to the deceased, regenerating them. This is connected to regeneration of the dead — the rebirth of the souls in the afterlife. Thus she is also a fertility goddess, who was often represented by other fertility-related goddesses such as Hathor, Isisand Nit, Mut, and Nut. She was also connected with Nephthysand Ma’at. As the goddess Hathor-Amentet, she was a solar goddess of the west, paired with Ra-Horakhty, who was believed to regenerate and welcome the newly deceased. She was sometimes depicted with Iabet, the goddess of the east.
12, 000 years ago there was certainly a land mass that very well could be the mythical lands that became developed into the Atlantis legend, but the people of Atlantis were of an age slightly earlier than Egypt most likely the developing Minoan civilisation.
Dating Atlantis
Atlantis can be dated by reference to Athens, being one of the oldest named cities in the world, having been continuously inhabited for at least 5000 years. Atlantis was destroyed by Fire (Volcanic) and Water (Oceanic), and the event is universally commemorated as the Cosmogonic Hierogamy of Fire and Water — synonymous with the eruption of Thera in 1600 BC.
The site on which Athens stands was first inhabited in the Neolithic period, perhaps as a defensible settlement on top of the Acropolis (‘high city’), around the end of the fourth millennium BC or a little later. [According to legend, Athens was formerly ruled by kings (see Kings of Athens), a situation which may have continued up until the 9th century BC.]
So, if Athens is no older than 4000 BC, then neither can Atlantis… this dispells in one the myth that Atlantis is, as Plato claimed, 12,000 years old. Neither was it until 5000 BC in the Neolithic period that the first signs of advanced agriculture appeared in the Aegean, marking the beginning of civilization. The pre-classical Minoan civilisation flourished from approximately 2600 to 1400 BC.
My bet is on Atlantis being the lands of the Cyclades, as the first pre-Minoan agricultural civilisation that fostered boat building and contact with ancient Egypt in the period 3000–2500 BC.
Eruption of Santorini would have brought the later flourishing civilisation to an end about 1600 BC and bringing to an end the culture of Atlanteans.
The Size of Atlantis
Atlantis was described as being 555 km by 370 km (3000 to 2000 stadia — plain of Atlantis).
The probable coastline of the mythical land Atlantis: Depending on the age of the sea levels — preceding the historical people of Atlantis, the Minoans, by some 5 millennia.
