Graham Hancock Defender Claims Proof of the Atlantis Myth's Egyptian Origin

​In a posting on X today, Graham Hancock announced that “archaeologists aren't going to like” a new article Hancock posted to his website, implying that the argument convincingly challenges scholarly views. Written by Manu Seyfzadeh, a dermatologist who hunts for the Atlantean Hall of Records, the article seeks to prove that Plato drew on a genuine ancient Egyptian tradition of Atlantis when he ascribed the allegory of Atlantis to a story the Egyptians told his distant ancestor Solon in the sixth century BCE. However, Seyfzadeh admits to having no training in Classics or Egyptology, and his arguments are rather transparently ignorant of the broader context of Near Eastern cultures.

​Plato wrote of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus, written c. 360 BCE, and Critias, left unfinished at his death in 328 BCE. According to Plato’s story, Solon went to Egypt and “asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old.” The priests then told Solon the story of Atlantis, which Solon recorded in an unfinished epic poem, which came down to Plato through family.
 
In his book Magicians of the Gods, Hancock attempted to relate Plato’s allegory of Atlantis to Egyptian myths and legends inscribed in the Temple of Edfu, as summarized in a secondhand account from a 1969 book, and a handful of other Egyptian stories. Hancock, for instance, tried to see in the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor, about a man who lands on an island of talking snakes, a prototype of Atlantis. (The Edfu texts were collated and inscribed hundreds of years after Plato and likely reflect Ptolemaic ideas, but they draw upon older material of uncertain date.) To defend Hancock’s speculation, Seyfazadeh cherry picks a number of elements from disparate parts of the Edfu texts and attempts to show that they are close analogues to parts of Plato’s Atlantis story.
 
These are not terribly convincing. For example, he attempts to link Atlantis, ruled over by the ten sons of Poseidon (in the Critias at least), to the Egyptian creation myth as given in the Edfu texts, where a mound of earth emerges from the waters of creation and the eight primeval creator gods spring into being. The numbers aren’t the same, of course, and in the Critias, Atlantis already existed, with Poseidon acquiring it during the division of the earth among the gods—an important clue Seyfzadeh ignores.
 
Seyfzadeh similarly tries to connect the orichalcum pillar on which the first kings wrote the laws governing royal relationships to Horus writing out a decree of creation on papyrus. As I think ought to be evident to anyone who has read my blog over the past decade, or my book Legends of the Pyramids, the idea of a pillar inscribed with ancient wisdom is a distinctly Mesopotamian idea, originating in the pillars of law erected by the Mesopotamian kings (Hammurabi’s Code being the most famous, but not the first) and transferring to Near Eastern flood myths, where antediluvian wisdom was preserved on great pillars. This story comes down to us in many forms, including Enoch’s pillars of wisdom from the extra-biblical Jewish literature as well as some Greco-Roman examples, notably Eusebius’ almost identical pillar of royal history in his story of Panchaea (Diodorus 5.67), which he even specifies is written in Egyptian sacred script (he was parodying Plato), the sacred pillars consecrated in blood in Sanchuniathon (just as Atlantis consecrated its pillar with blood), and the iron pillar of Hermetic wisdom in the Kyranides, of uncertain date. (Of course, if Seyfzadeh and Hancock can use texts written down after Plato to assert knowledge of myths before Plato, then I can as well.)
 
He concludes by trying to relate Platonic philosophy to Egyptian theology, particularly the idea of souls and cosmic realms, and ends by trying to derive the name “Atlantis” from an Egyptian sequence of words meaning “flood-born pristine sites” from the Edfu Building Texts. Of course, “Atlantis” isn’t exactly the name of the island, since “Atlantis” is actually the genitive of “Atlas,” and its Greek name, Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος, just means “the island of Atlas.” Trying to etymologize the genitive is unhelpful, unless the argument is that the Greeks mistook an Egyptian nominative for a Greek genitive.
 
More to the point: All of the material Seyfzadeh sees as Egyptian in origin is more readily explained by Plato’s more obvious inspiration: Near Eastern flood myths. If the pillar of wisdom didn’t clue you in, the words attributed to Egyptian priests in the Timaeus should, for they reflect not Egyptian belief but Mesopotamian: “There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.” The idea of repeated destructions by fire and water is a hallmark of Near Eastern mythologies such as those of the Babylonians, Hittites, and the various peoples of the Levant. We see it in the records of Berossus and Sanchuniathon, as well as in ancient cuneiform texts. We do not see it in Egyptian mythology until the Hermetic writers, with Greek and Jewish influence, long after Plato. Early Greek sources demonstrate clear influence from Hittite mythology (e.g. Hesiod’s Theogony) and other Near Eastern sources, but rarely Egyptian.
 
Similarly, the final surviving section of the Critias tells of Zeus’s plans to punish the Atlanteans for their hubris and sin by destroying them, which we know from the Timaeus happened by drowning the continent. In structure and even in wording it is a very close copy of the Near Eastern flood myth, made famous in the Bible’s tale of Noah, and known to the Greeks in the story of Deucalion and Pyrrah. Plato’s version, though, is less like Deucalion’s story (which involved Zeus being upset at a lack of sacrifices) and more like Babylonian and other Near Eastern version, known to the Greeks from translations of Gilgamesh and Lucian’s Syrian Goddess. Obviously, Plato lived before Lucian, but Lucian testifies to Greek knowledge of Near Eastern material, of which Lucian was unlikely to have been the first.
 
Plato’s knowledge of Egypt is unlikely to be an accurate account of what Solon had learned two hundred years earlier, but it is a fair assessment of the role Greeks imagined for Egypt as an elder culture and keeper of secrets. Much of what Plato wrote about Egypt is similar to what Herodotus said, but the specifics of the Atlantis story show much closer connections to Hittite and Mesopotamian lore than they do to genuine Egyptian legends. This doesn’t preclude an Egyptian source, of course, but by the time of Plato (or even Solon), there was plenty of cross-cultural exchange across the eastern Mediterranean that even a story told in Egypt may not have originate there.
 
However, even if Solon did leave an unfinished poem reworking some Near Eastern antediluvian and flood mythology, the story as we have it today is almost certainly the product of Plato’s imagination.