Filmmaker Claims "New Evidence" of Egyptian Atlantis Knowledge, But It's Just Plato

​Giorgio Tsoukalos recently started referring to the December 2017 New York Times story that launched the current wave of Congressional UFO interest as “the Pentagon Papers,” and that wasn’t even the dumbest thing a fringe pseudo-historian said this past week. When I saw the Daily Mail headline promising “Astonishing New Evidence of Atlantis Reveals Advanced Civilization Preserved by Ancient Egypt’s Priests,” I will admit that I did not have terribly high hopes. It is the Daily Mail after all. But, truly, the article, available only to premium subscribers (a free version is archived here), boggles the mind. You will never believe that the Mail considers “new”—or pretends to, since it’s obvious that reporter Stacy Liberatore understands that it’s bullshit but had to write it anyway.

​The article features claims from Michael Donnellan, the filmmaker behind the Atlantica documentary, which repeats the century-old idea that Cádiz in Spain was the Atlantis of Plato and synonymous with the Biblical Tarshish. (By sheer coincidence, Cádiz happens to be where Donnellan makes his home.) Donnellan claims that underwater ruins found near Cádiz are the remains of Atlantis.
 
In the Mail article, however, his “new” evidence for Atlantis and Egyptian priests should sound familiar to anyone who has devoted more than a moment to researching Atlantis:

Filmmaker and archaeologist Michael Donnellan claims that evidence preserved by Egypt’s ancient priests of Sais points to an advanced civilization that once thrived in Atlantis, before vanishing some 11,600 years ago.
 
Donnellan told the Daily Mail that the priests described Atlantis as the homeland of their ancestors, a civilization that existed outside the Mediterranean world and ‘beyond the Pillars of Heracles.’
 
He said their account was passed down to the Greek lawmaker Solon, who visited Egypt around 600 BC and recorded the tale that would later inspire the philosopher Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias.
 
According to Donnellan, Egyptian priests told Solon of a powerful empire that predated both Greece and Egypt but was destroyed ‘in a day and a night.’
 
The cataclysm, they said, wiped out both Atlantis and ancient Athens, reshaping the Mediterranean and sparking flood myths that echo across cultures.

This is just Plato’s backstory for the transmission of the Atlantis myth in the Timaeus. Donnellan has added nothing to it and is simply repeating the Timaeus as though it were “new” evidence.
 
The majority of the article is simply Donnellan repeating the Timaeus line by line, and at one point Liberatore interjects to remind readers that there is no evidence supporting any of Plato’s claims about what Egyptian priests supposedly told Solon three centuries earlier. In defending Plato’s account, the sheer ignorance Donnellan displays is astonishing.

Donnellan insisted Solon’s Egyptian journey was historical, not mythical. ‘Solon was no fool,’ he said. ‘He was the man who wrote many of the laws of ancient Athens.’
 
Donnellan described Solon’s meeting with Egypt’s high priests as a rare exchange between two of the ancient world’s great civilizations.
 
‘You could sail from Athens to the Nile Delta easily,’ he said. ‘For a Greek, that would have been a straightforward voyage, almost like tourism.’

​Rare? The Greeks and the Egyptians had regular interactions from the Bronze Age onward. We know that as far back as Mycenaean times, Greek traders were present in Egypt. During the so-called Greek Dark Ages, this contact largely ceased (so it was not “tourism” in those days), but regular commerce began again in the seventh century, about half a century before the time Solon allegedly visited Egyptian priests. Greeks served as mercenaries for the pharaoh beginning in the seventh century (Herodotus records a mythologized memory of this in Histories 2.152), and in the early sixth century, a Greek city, Naucratis, was founded in Egypt.
 
No other Greek brought back any story of Atlantis after speaking with Egyptian priests, not even Herodotus.
 
Donnellan also told the Mail that he believes that the Knights Templar and the Freemasons have secret knowledge of Atlantis not shared with the rest of the world. “People have been guarding this information for eons,” he told the Mail, claiming that he alone has found the truth about Atlantis.
 
Sigh.
 
I assume that he buys into the phony notion that the Knights Templar gave rise to the Freemasons, a claim jury-rigged from Freemason Andrew Michael Ramsey’s eighteenth-century effort to tie the Masons to the Knights of St. John (not the Templars) to give the organization a more impressive pedigree. “Our Order [was] founded in remote antiquity, and renewed in the Holy Land by our ancestors in order to recall the memory of the most sublime truths among the pleasures of society,” Ramsay said in 1737. The Austrian historian Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall twisted this into a connection to the Templars in order to cast Masons, then being suppressed in Austria, as heretics and idol-worshipers, like the Templars of old. He did this at the behest of Emperor Francis I, who wanted an intellectual foundation for banning “revolutionary” Masonry from Catholic Austria during the Napoleonic wars.
 
Anyhow, there is no reference to Atlantis in the early Masonic documents, and the only way you can make one is by assuming Atlantis is the same as the antediluvian world of the Nephilim (a claim popularized by Ignatius Donnelly and dating back to Cosmas Indicopleustes in the sixth century) and then reading Masonic revisions of Enochian lore about the pre-Flood world, the temple of Enoch, and the Flood as encoding Atlantis stories.