Louis Figuier
La terre et les Mers (4th. ed.)
1872
translated by Jason Colavito
2016
|
NOTE |
Louis Figuier was a French scientist and a writer of popular works of science. In La terre et les mers (1864), known in English as Earth and Sea, Figuier presented the natural history of the Earth. In the first edition, he was open to the reality of the lost continent of Atlantis because of his study of modern geologic upheaval: “Are we in a position to deny positively the former existence of the famous Atlantis, which according to Egyptian traditions, has disappeared beneath the waves, when we shall have to refer to contemporary events of an analogous character?” (trans. W. H. Davenport Adams). In 1866, a devastating eruption began on Santorini, ancient Thera, which lasted until 1870. Figuier saw in it the possible origins of the legend of Atlantis and added a chapter on it to the fourth edition of his book in 1872. This material remained unfamiliar to English-speakers because the English edition was translated from the third edition. A century later, the discovery of evidence for a massive eruption of that same volcano on ancient Thera around 1600 BCE would receive new attention as the possible cause for the Atlantis legend, something Figuier had suggested but did not have the evidence to prove.
The following is translated from Figuier, with the exception of the excerpt from Plato, which I have reproduced from the standard edition of Benjamin Jowett, with the italics that Figuier used to emphasize the most important lines for his argument. |
Volcanic eruption of the island of Santorini (Feb. 1866), after a photograph taken by M. Lenormant.
The detailed account we have just made of the volcanic upheaval that the island and the bay of Santorini experienced in 1866 will allow us to treat here a very interesting question of scientific history and prehistoric geography. We will try to prove that an event that was extensively commented upon by scholars over the ages, namely the disappearance of Atlantis, of which Plato has given us the very ancient tradition, is of a quite similar nature to the geological phenomenon which affected in 1866 the inhabitants of the islands of the Greek archipelago. In other words, we hope to establish that the Atlantis of Plato, accepted by some and denied by others, and interpreted a hundred ways at different times, actually existed and disappeared under the waves because of a concussion, a convulsion of the ground similar to that which recently upset the vicinity of Santorini. The Atlantis that Plato was talking about was, we believe, an island in the Greek archipelago, which a volcanic eruption convulsed, swallowing it beneath the waters of the Mediterranean in prehistoric times.
First, let us report the precise text of the philosopher of antiquity that has preserved this tradition.
It is in Plato’s Timaeus that we find the original passage that must be read in order to understand what the ancients wrote about Atlantis.
An Egyptian priest had told Solon of the existence and destruction of Atlantis. Critias, great-grandson of Dropidas and brother of Solon, presented this tradition, which was, he said, kept faithfully in his family. This Critias is one of the interlocutors of Plato’s Timaeus, which recounts the episode of the travels of Solon in Egypt. The text of this passage of the Timaeus:
First, let us report the precise text of the philosopher of antiquity that has preserved this tradition.
It is in Plato’s Timaeus that we find the original passage that must be read in order to understand what the ancients wrote about Atlantis.
An Egyptian priest had told Solon of the existence and destruction of Atlantis. Critias, great-grandson of Dropidas and brother of Solon, presented this tradition, which was, he said, kept faithfully in his family. This Critias is one of the interlocutors of Plato’s Timaeus, which recounts the episode of the travels of Solon in Egypt. The text of this passage of the Timaeus:
In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athene; they are great lovers of the Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he 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. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world-about Phoroneus, who is called "the first man," and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. 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. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient.
The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed-if there were any actions noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old, and are preserved in our temples. Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word. For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of heaven.
Solon marvelled at his words, and earnestly requested the priests to inform him exactly and in order about these former citizens. You are welcome to hear about them, Solon, said the priest, both for your own sake and for that of your city, and above all, for the sake of the goddess who is the common patron and parent and educator of both our cities. She founded your city a thousand years before ours, receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your race, and afterwards she founded ours, of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be eight thousand years old. As touching your citizens of nine thousand years ago, I will briefly inform you of their laws and of their most famous action; the exact particulars of the whole we will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred registers themselves. If you compare these very laws with ours you will find that many of ours are the counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. In the first place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated from all the others; next, there are the artificers, who ply their several crafts by themselves and do not intermix; and also there is the class of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of husbandmen; and you will observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt are distinct from all the other classes, and are commanded by the law to devote themselves solely to military pursuits; moreover, the weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a style of equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in your part of the world first to you. Then as to wisdom, do you observe how our law from the very first made a study of the whole order of things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which gives health, out of these divine elements deriving what was needful for human life, and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to them. All this order and arrangement the goddess first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones, and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children and disciples of the gods.
Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars.
But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.
This is the story that gave rise to endless disputes, from Aristotle to Humboldt. We thought it would be useful to put it under the eyes of the reader, because the principal issue which can be isolated, is to give an idea of the geographical knowledge of the Greek philosophers in Plato’s time, and even those of Plato himself, who in the Timaeus more than anywhere else, charged his characters with expressing his particular views.
We might add that this dialogue, also entitled Nature, contains not only the geography, but all of the geometry, all of the physics, all of the astronomy, and the whole cosmogony of Plato.
We can deduce from this that it contains the following three geographic views about Atlantis, as then generally prevalent among Greeks:
That our continent is an island of the Ocean, the large external sea that surrounds the earth, and whose interior sea, or the Mediterranean, is a gulf;
That the ocean is a circular basin, surrounded on all sides by a vast land, which is the real mainland in comparison to the island we inhabit;
That the lands, especially coastal and island areas, suffered at various times great cataclysms, as attested by history or by tradition, where fable mingles more or less often with history.
Of the three proposals, the last has an especially great importance for the subject at hand.
In terms of the existence and destruction of the island of Atlantis, many ancient writers after Plato accepted these as historical facts. Although he had very clearly indicated that the island was situated on the ocean near the Pillars of Hercules, they did not reject searching locations elsewhere, especially elsewhere. They wanted to at least find its ruins, for an island that would have been greater than Africa and Asia combined must necessarily have left some traces, and that was the main point of dispute. We can see in Proclus what kinds of discussions the issue raised in the school of Alexandria.
Subsequently, Delisle de Sales, the author of the Philosophy of Nature, made Plato’s Atlantis none other than Homer’s Ogygia, inhabited by Calypso. Delisle de Sales found that the Pillars of Hercules signify the Gulf of Tunis, and since the vanished island was very great, Sardinia could be its remains. This does not even take us very far; but, by contrast, Delisle de Sales speaks of another author, whom he does not name, who claims to prove that the ancient Taprobana (Ceylon) is the remains of Atlantis.
A lawyer from Marseilles named Claude-Mathieu Olivier published in 1726 a memoir in which, by interpreting the Timaeus using the Bible, he concluded that Atlantis is represented today by Palestine.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, a Swede of vast erudition, Olaus Rudbeck, would also have his say on the matter. As a good Scandinavian, he consulted not the Bible, but the Edda, and at a glance he recognized that Atlantis was Sweden.
As regards the scholar Bailly, who was always preoccupied with the Northern peoples, through whom he attributes all the science and civilization in the world, when he goes in search, in turn, of the Platonic island, it must necessarily lead him to the polar circle. Also, approaching and interpreting in his own way the texts of the Timaeus and Critias, he first finds that Atlantis could be one of the islands of the Arctic sea. One that seems to merit his preference among the others is Spitsbergen.
We must not finish this review without mentioning the opinion of those who want to see Atlantis in the continent of America. They are very numerous, and they showed up almost immediately after the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.
In the sixteenth century, the scholar Guillaume de Postel was so convinced of it that he proposed giving the new continent the name Atlantis.
In the following century, a skeptical author, but a scholarly critic and quite wise, La Mothe Le Vayer declared in his Géographie du Prince that he believed was signaled in the Timaeus was a brief appearance of America.
Bolder than La Mothe, a French geographer of the eighteenth century, Robert de Vaugandy published in 1762 an atlas representing the primitive state of America and Europe.
Finally, in our day, the learned Hellenist Stallbaum in his argument on the Critias and in his notes on the Timaeus says in the most formal way that he reads nothing in Plato on Atlantis that appear to designate America to him very clearly.
We cannot seriously argue today that America is a remnant of this great submerged island. It would be even less possible to claim that it represents the whole of it, because then we would be in flagrant contradiction with the text of the Timaeus, who says that Atlantis disappeared.
It is precisely the passage of the Timaeus that specifically says that Atlantis disappeared under the water that causes us to believe that this island really existed, and that it existed, not beyond the Pillars of Hercules, as in the text of the Timaeus, but we believe in the Greek islands in the archipelago frequented by inhabitants of Egypt, like those of Ionia and Greece. As a living tradition that Plato preserved for us, and that goes back to ancient times, this assumes a material fact, some event, which left lasting traces in the memory of the generations that succeeded them in the same places.
We believe that this event, which would have left such a deep impression, and which would have been transmitted from age to age, was a volcanic eruption that suddenly engulfed an island in the Greek archipelago beneath the waters.
In other words, we believe that the upheavals of the Greek archipelago that we see today, and in prior centuries, had already occurred in quite similar circumstances in ancient times, before Homer, which is to say in prehistoric times.
The story of Plato is therefore explained very naturally by our hypothesis, without complicating the subject with this faraway America that was quite wrong to introduce into the matter.
No doubt what we offer here is only a conjecture. But this conjecture is based on historical considerations and serious enough scientific data that we dare submit it with confidence to the examination of scholars and the judgment of naturalists.
We might add that this dialogue, also entitled Nature, contains not only the geography, but all of the geometry, all of the physics, all of the astronomy, and the whole cosmogony of Plato.
We can deduce from this that it contains the following three geographic views about Atlantis, as then generally prevalent among Greeks:
That our continent is an island of the Ocean, the large external sea that surrounds the earth, and whose interior sea, or the Mediterranean, is a gulf;
That the ocean is a circular basin, surrounded on all sides by a vast land, which is the real mainland in comparison to the island we inhabit;
That the lands, especially coastal and island areas, suffered at various times great cataclysms, as attested by history or by tradition, where fable mingles more or less often with history.
Of the three proposals, the last has an especially great importance for the subject at hand.
In terms of the existence and destruction of the island of Atlantis, many ancient writers after Plato accepted these as historical facts. Although he had very clearly indicated that the island was situated on the ocean near the Pillars of Hercules, they did not reject searching locations elsewhere, especially elsewhere. They wanted to at least find its ruins, for an island that would have been greater than Africa and Asia combined must necessarily have left some traces, and that was the main point of dispute. We can see in Proclus what kinds of discussions the issue raised in the school of Alexandria.
Subsequently, Delisle de Sales, the author of the Philosophy of Nature, made Plato’s Atlantis none other than Homer’s Ogygia, inhabited by Calypso. Delisle de Sales found that the Pillars of Hercules signify the Gulf of Tunis, and since the vanished island was very great, Sardinia could be its remains. This does not even take us very far; but, by contrast, Delisle de Sales speaks of another author, whom he does not name, who claims to prove that the ancient Taprobana (Ceylon) is the remains of Atlantis.
A lawyer from Marseilles named Claude-Mathieu Olivier published in 1726 a memoir in which, by interpreting the Timaeus using the Bible, he concluded that Atlantis is represented today by Palestine.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, a Swede of vast erudition, Olaus Rudbeck, would also have his say on the matter. As a good Scandinavian, he consulted not the Bible, but the Edda, and at a glance he recognized that Atlantis was Sweden.
As regards the scholar Bailly, who was always preoccupied with the Northern peoples, through whom he attributes all the science and civilization in the world, when he goes in search, in turn, of the Platonic island, it must necessarily lead him to the polar circle. Also, approaching and interpreting in his own way the texts of the Timaeus and Critias, he first finds that Atlantis could be one of the islands of the Arctic sea. One that seems to merit his preference among the others is Spitsbergen.
We must not finish this review without mentioning the opinion of those who want to see Atlantis in the continent of America. They are very numerous, and they showed up almost immediately after the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.
In the sixteenth century, the scholar Guillaume de Postel was so convinced of it that he proposed giving the new continent the name Atlantis.
In the following century, a skeptical author, but a scholarly critic and quite wise, La Mothe Le Vayer declared in his Géographie du Prince that he believed was signaled in the Timaeus was a brief appearance of America.
Bolder than La Mothe, a French geographer of the eighteenth century, Robert de Vaugandy published in 1762 an atlas representing the primitive state of America and Europe.
Finally, in our day, the learned Hellenist Stallbaum in his argument on the Critias and in his notes on the Timaeus says in the most formal way that he reads nothing in Plato on Atlantis that appear to designate America to him very clearly.
We cannot seriously argue today that America is a remnant of this great submerged island. It would be even less possible to claim that it represents the whole of it, because then we would be in flagrant contradiction with the text of the Timaeus, who says that Atlantis disappeared.
It is precisely the passage of the Timaeus that specifically says that Atlantis disappeared under the water that causes us to believe that this island really existed, and that it existed, not beyond the Pillars of Hercules, as in the text of the Timaeus, but we believe in the Greek islands in the archipelago frequented by inhabitants of Egypt, like those of Ionia and Greece. As a living tradition that Plato preserved for us, and that goes back to ancient times, this assumes a material fact, some event, which left lasting traces in the memory of the generations that succeeded them in the same places.
We believe that this event, which would have left such a deep impression, and which would have been transmitted from age to age, was a volcanic eruption that suddenly engulfed an island in the Greek archipelago beneath the waters.
In other words, we believe that the upheavals of the Greek archipelago that we see today, and in prior centuries, had already occurred in quite similar circumstances in ancient times, before Homer, which is to say in prehistoric times.
The story of Plato is therefore explained very naturally by our hypothesis, without complicating the subject with this faraway America that was quite wrong to introduce into the matter.
No doubt what we offer here is only a conjecture. But this conjecture is based on historical considerations and serious enough scientific data that we dare submit it with confidence to the examination of scholars and the judgment of naturalists.
Source: Louis Figuier, La terre et les mers (4th. ed.) (Paris: Librarie Hachette et Cie, 1872), 415-421.
