E.-F. Berlioux
Les Atlantes: Histoire de l’Atlantis et de l’Atlas Primitif
1883
translated by Jason Colavito
2018
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NOTE |
E. F. Berloux was a French geographer who suggested in 1874 that Atlantis had been located in Morocco, opposite to Spain and in the shadow of the Atlas mountains. He did so by identifying the Atlantis of Plato with the Atlantes of Diodorus Siculus. In 1883 he published a book called The Atlantes: The History of Atlantis and the Primitive Atlas in which he detailed his argument. Below is a translation of the introduction, which lays out the basics of his argument and the major lines of evidence he used. The argument is of particular interest for its naked ethnocentrism, openly celebrating European supremacy and interpreting the story of Atlantis in such a way as to connect it to France, which was then the colonial master of the lands Berlioux identifies as Atlantis.
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Introduction
The land of Atlas is one of the first lands whose name is found in the memory of men. The priests of Egypt reported that King Atlas, son of Poseidon (that is, of the sea), had reigned over a mighty empire which took the name of Atlantis after him, and which extended its influence on both sides of the Mediterranean to the south, to Greece and the Nile Valley. Hesiod sang of Atlas, the son of Iapetus, and brother of Prometheus. The traditions of Greece placed this hero in the West, towards a great mountain which touched the ocean, and they attached his brother to the Caucasus, the chain at the foot of which have passed the peoples who came to occupy central Europe. The two giants guarded the two ends of the known world, and the two mountains on which their names were fixed served as pillars to support the sky. If one goes through the old legends that told the history of the Atlas, this country seems hardly less wonderful than India or Egypt. It would have even had the privilege of extending its knowledge to land unknowns located beyond the ocean.
The problems raised by these legends have been debated many times; but they remained unsolved. That of Atlas has even been abandoned for a long time, and in the end, they declared that this mountain was a simple fiction. When they looked for the great mountain range to which the Greeks gave this name, that of the giant who supported the sky, according to Hesiod; that high summit which was lost in the clouds, as Herodotus related; this massif crowned with snow, as represented by Virgil, according to the old poets, they never dared to believe that it referred to the superb chain rising in the south of western Mauritania in front of the Ocean. It could not be understood that travelers from the Mediterranean had visited that distant mountain before the time of Hesiod and told of its wonders to the first inhabitants of Greece. Then it was decided that the Atlas of the legend had been only the representation of a cosmographic idea; it had been invented to represent a support of the sky and to act as a counterpart to the Caucasus; if there really was a powerful chain at the point where the ancients placed it, it was by pure chance.
The question of Atlantis (and not Atlantide) was much more complex; At the same time, it presents great problems of geography and history. An Egyptian tradition collected by Solon, the legislator of the Athenians, and preserved by Plato, who speaks about it in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, said that Atlantis was the domain of a powerful and rich nation; that this nation had extended its conquests over a large part of Europe and Africa, and that the invaders were exterminated after a battle which took place in the environs of Athens. The land of the Atlanteans, at least the province where the capital was located, was so well known that Plato gives the most precise details about this city and the countryside that surrounded it.
According to this tradition, the people of Atlantis had made their conquests nine thousand years before the time of Solon, and yet these same wars had taken place at a time when Athens already existed, in the period that has passed between the reign of Cecrops and that of Theseus. The details given about Atlantis itself are no less contradictory in appearance. It was an island larger than Libya and Asia combined, but only two provinces of this vast country were known. It was located not far from the Pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic Sea, but this sea was not the ocean to which we give this name, because that one was called the Universal Ocean according to the Egyptian legend. For all the facts connected with this tradition, for the dates and for the geographical position of the lands, there is always a double indication, one which gives to these facts disproportionate proportions, the other which presents them as ordinary facts available for discussion.
However, science considered Atlantis only under the first aspect, as a continent which would have occupied the center of the Atlantic Ocean, which would have sent a great invasion nine or ten thousand years before our era and which would have been engulfed in the waves in just one day. Under these conditions, the legend took on a character that seduced the imagination but confounded research. As a result, scientists have stopped at these facts without trying to analyze them. We even ended up by ignoring the real name of the land of the Atlanteans, which was called Atlantide and not Atlantis. Plato gives this name only to the genitive and the dative; he writes Ἀτλαντὶδος-τὶδι which does not allow it to be translated as Atlantis. This simple detail suffices to show that the geographical and historical indications given by the philosopher on this mysterious land have not been discussed closely. If we had carried out this discussion, we perhaps would have seen that Atlantis is found on our charts as well as the primitive Atlas, and that the wars of Atlantis are not entirely unknown to history.
Despite these errors that have misled research, the problem of Atlantis has not been ruled out like that of Atlas. It is related to too many questions to be removed; it touches on the history of the New World as well as that of Europe and Africa, the geological problems of the formation of the continents, and all the philological and ethnological researches which relate to the origin of the European peoples. All the scientists and all the curious who have approached this great research question have found themselves before the name of the Atlantes and that of Atlantis. These names have been dismissed as myths, yet, despite these convictions, they have not been made to disappear.
The philosophers who discussed Plato’s work, led by M. T. H. Martin, attributed a purely mythical character to the history of Atlantis. Humboldt, who examined the question of the name in his general science of Cosmos, in which astronomy, geology, history and geography meet, also saw only a cosmographic myth. Others had more confidence in Plato and sought the place of Atlantis in the middle of the ocean; M. Gaffarel wondered if it was submerged under the Sargasso Sea. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, in his learned study, The First Inhabitants of Europe, discards the geographical question; he only notes that Atlantis may well be the Atlas Mountains.
For the historical question, he admits facts as real; he further notes that Plato has assigned two very different dates to the wars of the Atlanteans yet recalls these events as if they had taken place in the most remote ages, without trying to relate them to the history of Greece and Egypt.
In summary, in the current state of science, the questions of the primitive Atlas, Atlantis and Atlanteans have been suppressed rather than resolved.
Some have seen only myths in the facts attached to it; others have referred these facts to an epoch and a theater which escape the criticism of history and geography; no one has tried to discuss the ancient texts, especially those of Plato, by taking the details one by one, to examine their value, and to see if these documents do not recall real facts.
However, these problems are once again up for discussion. They no longer present themselves to scholarly research as questions of erudition relating to ancient texts, but take on an entirely new form. Indeed, the lands of Atlas are not only rich in memories recorded in the books, they are also dotted with monuments dating back to the most remote ages and whose history must be found. The dolmens are more numerous than in Armorica. This is the end of the long trail of these megalithic monuments, the other end of which is in India. The tumuli mark the traces of a second period equally mysterious; but these funeral mounds that form these lines through the old world do not stop at the ocean; they cross it to reappear on American lands. Every day, as this area becomes more closely examined, more vestiges of the past are discovered. These treasures are all the richer as this land has been closed longer to research.
In addition to the monuments of the early ages, there are others which recall a higher civilization. On the southern side of the African chain, which seems particularly rich in memories of this second period, rocky walls are covered with inscriptions written in unknown characters, and barbaric drawings engraved with lines which represent men and animals. Other inscriptions, which seem to have the same origin, were found on the rocks of the Canaries: these islands were thus connected to Atlas. Elsewhere, in the inhospitable solitudes of the Algerian Sahara, the explorer’s pick discovers cities hiding under the sand.
As for the Carthaginian ruins and especially those of the Roman era, they are found everywhere with a profusion that surprises, attesting to the old prosperity of this country and showing what it can become one day. These riches of the past are so numerous that the high school of Algiers has just been officially commissioned to undertake their exploration and study. It is assimilated to the French schools of Rome and Athens or the Cairo mission, and placed under the patronage of the Academy of Inscriptions.
The field of exploration for which the academic scholars will draw the plan is vast; the limits assigned to this little book are much more modest: It is simply a matter of knowing where the Atlas was, which peoples of primitive Greece regarded it as one of the highest mountains of the globe, saying how this mountain was visited before the times of Hesiod; explaining why travelers from the central Mediterranean undertook this distant exploration; finding the location of Atlantis (which did not sink into the ocean), and telling the story of the Atlanteans, who did not live nine thousand years before our era, since they still existed around the time of Herodotus; in other words, it is only a question of writing the first chapter in the history of the Atlas. This period did not see the fabulous events whose legend filled it; but it saw others, much more interesting, which had the greatest influence on the following ages, not only for Africa, but also for Europe.
The elements of this story exist; they are in the hands of the public; but they have never been collated or even understood. To understand what the ancients told of the Atlas, it was necessary for the moderns to sufficiently explore this country. Before we had visited the mighty mountains rising up in the south of Morocco before the ocean, it was impossible to find the place of the great peaks encountered by the travelers of old; before we possessed the Egyptian inscriptions which told of the invasions of the Libyans, it could not be understood that this would have sent conquerors to the regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, as Solon had said; before tumuli had been found in the mountains of ancient Mauritania, Diodorus’ account of a Libyan nation burying its dead under large mounds at the foot of the Atlas looking out to the ocean could not be explained. The many texts of the ancients that apply to this country were closed until the lands they mentioned were seen.
One fact shows how much these documents need to be reviewed in order to be subjected to new criticism:
Herodotus, in the passage which has been pointed out above, gives a very curious description where he indicates a route from Egypt to the land of the Atlanteans. Now, this description, which is quoted in all the studies on Africa, has been discussed so incompletely, that no one has sought the particular range to which the Egyptians gave the name of Atlas. The critical work applied to the ancient texts that refers to the great African chain must therefore be redone. This is the subject of this study.
We can see how important it is to study the primitive Atlas, if we observe the historical and geographical character of this region. From the historical point of view, the ancients affirmed that this land had been one of the first occupied in the western basin of the Mediterranean, and the presence of the dolmens proves that this assertion was true; they said that the Atlas had been the domain of an island of Iapetus, and it is found that these megalithic monuments are spread over an area which has the same dimensions as the inheritance of the sons of Japheth; they reported that the Atlanteans had crossed the ocean to reach a vast continent beyond, and it is found that the tumulus, whose trail passes over the Atlas, will be repeated in North America. These multiple coincidences show in advance what will be the revelations of this old land: it will answer questions which interest at the same time the Old World and the American continent.
Geography explains this vast influence. The land of the Atlas is located at the mouth of the Mediterranean, in front of Western Europe, on the direct extension of the Egyptian coast, at the head of the shortest line that leads to the New World. It forms a kind of continent apart, placed at the limits of Europe and Africa, and belonging, in fact, neither to one nor the other of these two continents.
It is like an island between the Mediterranean and the desert, between the Sea of Sirte and the Ocean, and which presents as a huge quadrilateral. The four corners of this land are marked by names that count among the most famous in history. To the northwest is the strait to which the ancients had attached the name of Heracles, a hero who disputed Europe and Asia, and whose historical role will be better known when the Atlas will have revealed to us its secrets. In the northeast, facing Sicily, is the land of Carthage, the rival of Rome, which is about to rise from its ruins.
At the second eastern corner, the one looking at the Little Sirte, the land of the Atlas stops at the lake of Triton, whose name is again popular because of the enterprises of which it is the object, and whose banks were inhabited by Athena the Tritonian, who gave her name to the Athenian city. The fourth angle, which stands on an inhospitable coast opposite the ocean, is the most beautiful of all, since it is dominated by the great chain which at first bore the name of Atlas. It was also the most illustrious, since it was at the foot of these heights, on the south side, that sat the metropolis of Atlantes, the great populous city from which one left for lands beyond the ocean. Between these four promontories marked by the names of Heracles, Carthage, Triton, and Atlas lies a vast area, crowned with mountains, which was of a marvelous richness in olden times, and which still counts among the most beautiful in the universe.
To find the history of this land in ancient texts, without exposing oneself to the errors which have so far misled research, there is a method which gives definite results; you have to control each of these texts by comparing it with a map of from Crete to the Ocean via the Southern Atlas; such coincidences cannot be fortuitous. The same goes for the expeditions that led the Atlanteans to the borders of Tyrrhenia and, later, to Greece, passing through Sicily. It is certain that these invasions are something other than a myth, if they left traces on the ground marked by geographical names. Geography serves as a control for all these texts, and this control is sufficient to recognize, in a general way, the authenticity of each piece when considered under standardized conditions.
After submitting all the ancient documents to this test, there remains a large enough number to reconstitute, in its entirety, the history of the Atlas, since the arrival of the first men who occupied this country, until the time when it was invaded by the Phoenicians; to distinguish the different lines of immigrants colonized this land, the men of dolmens, those of tumuli, the European populations, and the Semites who came from Asia; to discover the conflict between two races; to follow the distant expeditions of European Atlanteans beyond the Ocean and to the lands of the East; to recognize the share of wealth and ideas they have left in the inheritance of humanity; finally, to discover how this race succumbed after a glorious struggle of several centuries, how it abandoned its land to the Berbers and Phoenicians. It is at the arrival of the latter that this study stops. With the Phoenicians begins the second period of African history.
Comparing these two epochs, that of the Atlanteans and that of the settlers from Phoenicia, we shall see, with astonishment, that the most brilliant period, the most well-known also, is not that in which the masters of Tyre and Carthage dominated West Africa, but the Atlantean period.
With this European population, the country of Atlas was open to foreigners and visited by travelers from different countries that surround the Mediterranean. It had large industrial centers and even schools whose works were not all lost. On the other hand, as soon as the Phoenicians established their colonies around this land, the Atlas was closed to foreign trade. It still had great markets, but it ceased to be a wide-open space for science and it returned to obscurity, that is, to barbarism.
Herodotus gives an obvious proof of this transformation. At the time of the great prosperity of Carthage, this curious historian, who was always in search of information and who collected some that was very valuable on the Southern Atlas, then occupied by the heirs of the Atlantes, found no trace on the littoral between Carthage and the Pillars of Hercules. For all this northern land, he knows only the name of the Carthaginian metropolis and that of the Straits; he did not even hear of the Numidians or the Moors: this area had been closed by its new masters who watched over their domain with jealous care.
It is clear from these indications that the history of the Atlanteans is of the utmost importance for science. Whatever the value of the book that tries to tell it, it is certain that the events of this story are in themselves of the most powerful interest and that they are still unknown for the most part. Because of this, the author will limit himself to exposing them, without stopping for a critical discussion of the other works which have treated the same subject; he follows a path along which nobody has passed. He will therefore confine himself to quoting the books from which he borrows, with no mention of the others.
It is useless to display erudition and more useless to criticize the scientists who opened the way and who went astray, especially because they walked first. There will be discussion only of of a few major facts that relate more to the history of Europe than to that of the Atlas.
The story of Atlantis and Libyans is as important and even more important to Europe than to Africa. These two peoples were the first inhabitants of the European lands, and on these lands, they had good fortune which they lacked on the other side of the Mediterranean; their race has not disappeared, it has not been exterminated or suppressed. Far from it! The immigrants of the different colonies who came one by one to establish themselves beside the others, except for one group, that of the Vascons or Basques, whose influence was very limited, were all related to this population of the early ages, so that they were their heirs rather than adversaries.
From the first days, Europe was inhabited by the race which occupies it today. On this earth, there has been unity of population, unity of work, and even unity of thought. The first peoples who inhabited it transmitted to those who replaced them not only their domains, but also their fortune and a part of their knowledge.
There has never been an interruption in the transmission of their heritage. This unity of thought and of European work is written on the very soil of the country we inhabit; the geographical nomenclature of this country contains many names, names of rivers and also names of localities or cities, which date from the very time when it received its first inhabitants. Such a unity gives the history of Europe a special mark of greatness and a better understanding of the role or mission of this privileged land.
The problems raised by these legends have been debated many times; but they remained unsolved. That of Atlas has even been abandoned for a long time, and in the end, they declared that this mountain was a simple fiction. When they looked for the great mountain range to which the Greeks gave this name, that of the giant who supported the sky, according to Hesiod; that high summit which was lost in the clouds, as Herodotus related; this massif crowned with snow, as represented by Virgil, according to the old poets, they never dared to believe that it referred to the superb chain rising in the south of western Mauritania in front of the Ocean. It could not be understood that travelers from the Mediterranean had visited that distant mountain before the time of Hesiod and told of its wonders to the first inhabitants of Greece. Then it was decided that the Atlas of the legend had been only the representation of a cosmographic idea; it had been invented to represent a support of the sky and to act as a counterpart to the Caucasus; if there really was a powerful chain at the point where the ancients placed it, it was by pure chance.
The question of Atlantis (and not Atlantide) was much more complex; At the same time, it presents great problems of geography and history. An Egyptian tradition collected by Solon, the legislator of the Athenians, and preserved by Plato, who speaks about it in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, said that Atlantis was the domain of a powerful and rich nation; that this nation had extended its conquests over a large part of Europe and Africa, and that the invaders were exterminated after a battle which took place in the environs of Athens. The land of the Atlanteans, at least the province where the capital was located, was so well known that Plato gives the most precise details about this city and the countryside that surrounded it.
According to this tradition, the people of Atlantis had made their conquests nine thousand years before the time of Solon, and yet these same wars had taken place at a time when Athens already existed, in the period that has passed between the reign of Cecrops and that of Theseus. The details given about Atlantis itself are no less contradictory in appearance. It was an island larger than Libya and Asia combined, but only two provinces of this vast country were known. It was located not far from the Pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic Sea, but this sea was not the ocean to which we give this name, because that one was called the Universal Ocean according to the Egyptian legend. For all the facts connected with this tradition, for the dates and for the geographical position of the lands, there is always a double indication, one which gives to these facts disproportionate proportions, the other which presents them as ordinary facts available for discussion.
However, science considered Atlantis only under the first aspect, as a continent which would have occupied the center of the Atlantic Ocean, which would have sent a great invasion nine or ten thousand years before our era and which would have been engulfed in the waves in just one day. Under these conditions, the legend took on a character that seduced the imagination but confounded research. As a result, scientists have stopped at these facts without trying to analyze them. We even ended up by ignoring the real name of the land of the Atlanteans, which was called Atlantide and not Atlantis. Plato gives this name only to the genitive and the dative; he writes Ἀτλαντὶδος-τὶδι which does not allow it to be translated as Atlantis. This simple detail suffices to show that the geographical and historical indications given by the philosopher on this mysterious land have not been discussed closely. If we had carried out this discussion, we perhaps would have seen that Atlantis is found on our charts as well as the primitive Atlas, and that the wars of Atlantis are not entirely unknown to history.
Despite these errors that have misled research, the problem of Atlantis has not been ruled out like that of Atlas. It is related to too many questions to be removed; it touches on the history of the New World as well as that of Europe and Africa, the geological problems of the formation of the continents, and all the philological and ethnological researches which relate to the origin of the European peoples. All the scientists and all the curious who have approached this great research question have found themselves before the name of the Atlantes and that of Atlantis. These names have been dismissed as myths, yet, despite these convictions, they have not been made to disappear.
The philosophers who discussed Plato’s work, led by M. T. H. Martin, attributed a purely mythical character to the history of Atlantis. Humboldt, who examined the question of the name in his general science of Cosmos, in which astronomy, geology, history and geography meet, also saw only a cosmographic myth. Others had more confidence in Plato and sought the place of Atlantis in the middle of the ocean; M. Gaffarel wondered if it was submerged under the Sargasso Sea. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, in his learned study, The First Inhabitants of Europe, discards the geographical question; he only notes that Atlantis may well be the Atlas Mountains.
For the historical question, he admits facts as real; he further notes that Plato has assigned two very different dates to the wars of the Atlanteans yet recalls these events as if they had taken place in the most remote ages, without trying to relate them to the history of Greece and Egypt.
In summary, in the current state of science, the questions of the primitive Atlas, Atlantis and Atlanteans have been suppressed rather than resolved.
Some have seen only myths in the facts attached to it; others have referred these facts to an epoch and a theater which escape the criticism of history and geography; no one has tried to discuss the ancient texts, especially those of Plato, by taking the details one by one, to examine their value, and to see if these documents do not recall real facts.
However, these problems are once again up for discussion. They no longer present themselves to scholarly research as questions of erudition relating to ancient texts, but take on an entirely new form. Indeed, the lands of Atlas are not only rich in memories recorded in the books, they are also dotted with monuments dating back to the most remote ages and whose history must be found. The dolmens are more numerous than in Armorica. This is the end of the long trail of these megalithic monuments, the other end of which is in India. The tumuli mark the traces of a second period equally mysterious; but these funeral mounds that form these lines through the old world do not stop at the ocean; they cross it to reappear on American lands. Every day, as this area becomes more closely examined, more vestiges of the past are discovered. These treasures are all the richer as this land has been closed longer to research.
In addition to the monuments of the early ages, there are others which recall a higher civilization. On the southern side of the African chain, which seems particularly rich in memories of this second period, rocky walls are covered with inscriptions written in unknown characters, and barbaric drawings engraved with lines which represent men and animals. Other inscriptions, which seem to have the same origin, were found on the rocks of the Canaries: these islands were thus connected to Atlas. Elsewhere, in the inhospitable solitudes of the Algerian Sahara, the explorer’s pick discovers cities hiding under the sand.
As for the Carthaginian ruins and especially those of the Roman era, they are found everywhere with a profusion that surprises, attesting to the old prosperity of this country and showing what it can become one day. These riches of the past are so numerous that the high school of Algiers has just been officially commissioned to undertake their exploration and study. It is assimilated to the French schools of Rome and Athens or the Cairo mission, and placed under the patronage of the Academy of Inscriptions.
The field of exploration for which the academic scholars will draw the plan is vast; the limits assigned to this little book are much more modest: It is simply a matter of knowing where the Atlas was, which peoples of primitive Greece regarded it as one of the highest mountains of the globe, saying how this mountain was visited before the times of Hesiod; explaining why travelers from the central Mediterranean undertook this distant exploration; finding the location of Atlantis (which did not sink into the ocean), and telling the story of the Atlanteans, who did not live nine thousand years before our era, since they still existed around the time of Herodotus; in other words, it is only a question of writing the first chapter in the history of the Atlas. This period did not see the fabulous events whose legend filled it; but it saw others, much more interesting, which had the greatest influence on the following ages, not only for Africa, but also for Europe.
The elements of this story exist; they are in the hands of the public; but they have never been collated or even understood. To understand what the ancients told of the Atlas, it was necessary for the moderns to sufficiently explore this country. Before we had visited the mighty mountains rising up in the south of Morocco before the ocean, it was impossible to find the place of the great peaks encountered by the travelers of old; before we possessed the Egyptian inscriptions which told of the invasions of the Libyans, it could not be understood that this would have sent conquerors to the regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, as Solon had said; before tumuli had been found in the mountains of ancient Mauritania, Diodorus’ account of a Libyan nation burying its dead under large mounds at the foot of the Atlas looking out to the ocean could not be explained. The many texts of the ancients that apply to this country were closed until the lands they mentioned were seen.
One fact shows how much these documents need to be reviewed in order to be subjected to new criticism:
Herodotus, in the passage which has been pointed out above, gives a very curious description where he indicates a route from Egypt to the land of the Atlanteans. Now, this description, which is quoted in all the studies on Africa, has been discussed so incompletely, that no one has sought the particular range to which the Egyptians gave the name of Atlas. The critical work applied to the ancient texts that refers to the great African chain must therefore be redone. This is the subject of this study.
We can see how important it is to study the primitive Atlas, if we observe the historical and geographical character of this region. From the historical point of view, the ancients affirmed that this land had been one of the first occupied in the western basin of the Mediterranean, and the presence of the dolmens proves that this assertion was true; they said that the Atlas had been the domain of an island of Iapetus, and it is found that these megalithic monuments are spread over an area which has the same dimensions as the inheritance of the sons of Japheth; they reported that the Atlanteans had crossed the ocean to reach a vast continent beyond, and it is found that the tumulus, whose trail passes over the Atlas, will be repeated in North America. These multiple coincidences show in advance what will be the revelations of this old land: it will answer questions which interest at the same time the Old World and the American continent.
Geography explains this vast influence. The land of the Atlas is located at the mouth of the Mediterranean, in front of Western Europe, on the direct extension of the Egyptian coast, at the head of the shortest line that leads to the New World. It forms a kind of continent apart, placed at the limits of Europe and Africa, and belonging, in fact, neither to one nor the other of these two continents.
It is like an island between the Mediterranean and the desert, between the Sea of Sirte and the Ocean, and which presents as a huge quadrilateral. The four corners of this land are marked by names that count among the most famous in history. To the northwest is the strait to which the ancients had attached the name of Heracles, a hero who disputed Europe and Asia, and whose historical role will be better known when the Atlas will have revealed to us its secrets. In the northeast, facing Sicily, is the land of Carthage, the rival of Rome, which is about to rise from its ruins.
At the second eastern corner, the one looking at the Little Sirte, the land of the Atlas stops at the lake of Triton, whose name is again popular because of the enterprises of which it is the object, and whose banks were inhabited by Athena the Tritonian, who gave her name to the Athenian city. The fourth angle, which stands on an inhospitable coast opposite the ocean, is the most beautiful of all, since it is dominated by the great chain which at first bore the name of Atlas. It was also the most illustrious, since it was at the foot of these heights, on the south side, that sat the metropolis of Atlantes, the great populous city from which one left for lands beyond the ocean. Between these four promontories marked by the names of Heracles, Carthage, Triton, and Atlas lies a vast area, crowned with mountains, which was of a marvelous richness in olden times, and which still counts among the most beautiful in the universe.
To find the history of this land in ancient texts, without exposing oneself to the errors which have so far misled research, there is a method which gives definite results; you have to control each of these texts by comparing it with a map of from Crete to the Ocean via the Southern Atlas; such coincidences cannot be fortuitous. The same goes for the expeditions that led the Atlanteans to the borders of Tyrrhenia and, later, to Greece, passing through Sicily. It is certain that these invasions are something other than a myth, if they left traces on the ground marked by geographical names. Geography serves as a control for all these texts, and this control is sufficient to recognize, in a general way, the authenticity of each piece when considered under standardized conditions.
After submitting all the ancient documents to this test, there remains a large enough number to reconstitute, in its entirety, the history of the Atlas, since the arrival of the first men who occupied this country, until the time when it was invaded by the Phoenicians; to distinguish the different lines of immigrants colonized this land, the men of dolmens, those of tumuli, the European populations, and the Semites who came from Asia; to discover the conflict between two races; to follow the distant expeditions of European Atlanteans beyond the Ocean and to the lands of the East; to recognize the share of wealth and ideas they have left in the inheritance of humanity; finally, to discover how this race succumbed after a glorious struggle of several centuries, how it abandoned its land to the Berbers and Phoenicians. It is at the arrival of the latter that this study stops. With the Phoenicians begins the second period of African history.
Comparing these two epochs, that of the Atlanteans and that of the settlers from Phoenicia, we shall see, with astonishment, that the most brilliant period, the most well-known also, is not that in which the masters of Tyre and Carthage dominated West Africa, but the Atlantean period.
With this European population, the country of Atlas was open to foreigners and visited by travelers from different countries that surround the Mediterranean. It had large industrial centers and even schools whose works were not all lost. On the other hand, as soon as the Phoenicians established their colonies around this land, the Atlas was closed to foreign trade. It still had great markets, but it ceased to be a wide-open space for science and it returned to obscurity, that is, to barbarism.
Herodotus gives an obvious proof of this transformation. At the time of the great prosperity of Carthage, this curious historian, who was always in search of information and who collected some that was very valuable on the Southern Atlas, then occupied by the heirs of the Atlantes, found no trace on the littoral between Carthage and the Pillars of Hercules. For all this northern land, he knows only the name of the Carthaginian metropolis and that of the Straits; he did not even hear of the Numidians or the Moors: this area had been closed by its new masters who watched over their domain with jealous care.
It is clear from these indications that the history of the Atlanteans is of the utmost importance for science. Whatever the value of the book that tries to tell it, it is certain that the events of this story are in themselves of the most powerful interest and that they are still unknown for the most part. Because of this, the author will limit himself to exposing them, without stopping for a critical discussion of the other works which have treated the same subject; he follows a path along which nobody has passed. He will therefore confine himself to quoting the books from which he borrows, with no mention of the others.
It is useless to display erudition and more useless to criticize the scientists who opened the way and who went astray, especially because they walked first. There will be discussion only of of a few major facts that relate more to the history of Europe than to that of the Atlas.
The story of Atlantis and Libyans is as important and even more important to Europe than to Africa. These two peoples were the first inhabitants of the European lands, and on these lands, they had good fortune which they lacked on the other side of the Mediterranean; their race has not disappeared, it has not been exterminated or suppressed. Far from it! The immigrants of the different colonies who came one by one to establish themselves beside the others, except for one group, that of the Vascons or Basques, whose influence was very limited, were all related to this population of the early ages, so that they were their heirs rather than adversaries.
From the first days, Europe was inhabited by the race which occupies it today. On this earth, there has been unity of population, unity of work, and even unity of thought. The first peoples who inhabited it transmitted to those who replaced them not only their domains, but also their fortune and a part of their knowledge.
There has never been an interruption in the transmission of their heritage. This unity of thought and of European work is written on the very soil of the country we inhabit; the geographical nomenclature of this country contains many names, names of rivers and also names of localities or cities, which date from the very time when it received its first inhabitants. Such a unity gives the history of Europe a special mark of greatness and a better understanding of the role or mission of this privileged land.
Source: E.-F. Berlioux, Les Atlantes: Histoire de l'Atlantis et de l'Atlas Primitif (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1883), 1-14.
