Original subtitles

Look at this map I found.

Now we've all heard of a legend of Atlantis.

Here's a map that shows the mythical land of Atlantis. Whether Atlantean or

giant. And it matches all the characteristics of Atlantis. Atlantis. I

believe it. And this map asserts that it's maybe not so mythical.

It shows exactly where it is. I mean, everything else about this map, if you

just look at like the... lines of the current day world is accurate it's a

-made map it was made at the end of the 1800s and yet it shows atlantis and a

bunch of other crazy stuff saying that it existed about a million years ago i

bought the originals and if i look giddy it's because i am i love bold original

maps and it's not just one map it's four of them

These maps claim to explain some of the greatest mysteries of human

civilization. How ancient civilizations, despite not being able to communicate

with each other, invented similar looking structures an ocean away. It's a

about the birth of civilization, the spread of technology. I want to tell you

the story of these maps. These maps that assert that Atlantis is real and that

we can learn something from it. I also think we can learn something from these

maps. These are effectively treasure maps.

purporting to show you the location of Atlantis.

They're part of this book that argues that Atlantis is real. A detailed

and explanation.

So let me tell you the story of these maps, which is the story of Atlantis.

So it all starts with Plato.

Plato was one guy living in Athens 2 ,400 years ago. He had some really good

ideas. ideas about justice, education, government, science, and a bunch of

things that influenced how our Western society developed.

Pretty influential, incredible guy.

And here he is in one of his texts describing a land called Atlantis. He

was a utopia that was located, quote, past the Pillars of Hercules, so

in the Atlantic Ocean. According to Plato,

Plato says that Atlantis had an advanced military and navy, which ruled over

this huge island civilization.

Okay, before we go on here, let me make one thing crystal clear, which is that

most historians agree that Plato wasn't describing a literal place.

In his mind, Atlantis was a parable. It was a lesson that he was using to talk

about utopian societies and the hubris of man and the downfall of humans and

of these things, and that it wasn't actually real. But the idea of this

civilization in the middle of the Atlantic did not go away. It stuck

centuries, especially when Europeans started exploring the world.

It's like the 1500s, Europeans are out discovering new lands, and a lot of

explorers were secretly hoping that they would stumble upon some advanced lost

civilization.

like Plato's Atlantis, where maybe they would find all these precious resources

and advanced technology. But the idea of Atlantis didn't really take off in any

sort of serious way until a couple centuries later with the arrival of

Science was

not invented

by Europeans in, like, the 1700s, but...

Europe was going through a scientific revolution where more and more people

tinkering with instruments and methodologies that were teaching them

reality. They were displacing the old explanation that God was responsible for

all of reality, and they were gathering empirical evidence that explained the

world in new ways.

As a part of all of this science, European explorers were stumbling upon

cities, cities they thought were just myths.

If these thought -to -be mythical cities ended up being real and scientists are

finding them, what else was out there?

Maybe Plato's Atlantis?

So yeah, it's the 1800s, science is having a big moment, and Atlantis is

trending once again.

There was no concept in the mid -1800s that civilization had been around for...

thousands and thousands of years. You know, most people were still kind of

the Bible as the main source of information about the human past, so

thought that the Earth was relatively young. People were approaching the idea

Atlantis with a much more scientific lens.

There was a bunch of scientific theories on offer at the time.

For example, we were learning just how much the continents we stand on aren't

fixed. They're actually all floating around, bumping into each other. And

helped explain why scientists were finding fossils that matched up with

other even though they were an ocean apart.

They were seeing this same sort of thing with cultures as well.

The Egyptians and the Mayans both had created pyramids, but there's no way

could talk to each other. Their arches, their writing systems, their

agricultural practices, all very similar.

How could you explain this?

And this is where this idea caught hold.

What if there was one civilization where all of this knowledge had stemmed from?

One that was perhaps right in between the new and old world.

What if it was Plato's Atlantis?

People in Europe and America really started to think about Atlantis through

lens of science. They started producing books and lectures and studies and

graphs and maps.

And this gets us to the maps that I've been obsessed about. The maps that I

pulled the trigger on and just bought the originals because I couldn't...

help myself.

Can we just get a short montage that shows how beautiful these maps are,

Thank you. Okay, so here's where the story gets a little bit wild. I'm going

show you finally what these maps show.

This is also where things get a little bit dark. These maps were created by a

Scottish banker turned amateur cartographer and anthropologist at the

of the 1800s and into the early 1900s.

You have to understand something about that time. Yes, a scientific revolution

was taking place. Yes, science was trending and we were revolutionizing

everything about how we saw the world. And yet at the same time, there was

another revolution, which was a spiritual revolution.

People were throwing off the old ways of thinking about God, but were still in

this kind of awkward middle ground where they wanted to embrace science, but

they also had some leftover thinking from the religious days.

making claims about reality, but using kind of superficial empirical evidence,

and then filling in the blanks, connecting the dots with more evidence

had gathered by being in touch with spirits or psychic powers. These

powers boosted their ability to do science, which, you know.

It wasn't really science.

We're talking about the late 19th century, and so we don't know that much.

don't have some of the same skills and the same tool set that we have today in

archaeology. And this makes Atlantis the perfect target for this sort of

thinking. And it's that kind of thinking that produced these masks.

So let me decode them for you. Okay, real quick, I'm going to pause the story

because I need to thank today's sponsor. Thank you, Incogni, for sponsoring

today's video, longtime sponsor of our journalism.

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So, Incogni sponsors this video. I'm really happy they do that. They give a

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let's keep talking about atlantis because there's so much more to cover

okay this first one atlantis at its prime so you

can see that you have a map of the modern day world that's all this black

here okay that's like the map today but then the red shading over it is what the

author william scott elliott says the world looked like all these years ago so

it looked kind of like this

The bluish green is another set of land that the author said existed a long time

ago. But I'm going to focus on the red here because that's where we get

Atlantis. The reason it's four maps is because this author wanted to represent

what the world looked like over time as the ocean rose and fell.

Which, remember, that's a real thing that happens in real life.

Tectonic plates move around and the ocean rises and falls. Like the entire

coast of the United States used to be underwater.

That's like an undisputed fact.

William Scott Eliot is pulling from that real scientific theory to create his

own theory of Atlantis.

So if you look right here, this is what William Scott Eliot says is the

continent of Atlantis. It's labeled right there, Atlantis.

The main population center is right here, the city of the Golden Gate.

Oh, but it's not just math.

There's a whole book.

Boy, this book. This book is wild. In this book, William Scott Eliot describes

in detail the city of Atlantis. It follows a lot of what Plato described in

terms of a circular city that was full of sophisticated canals and palaces and

stuff. But boy, William Scott Eliot takes it to an entirely new level. I

let me show you.

Welcome to William Scott Eliot's Atlantis.

an ancient civilization that reached its prime a million years ago.

Most of the details of this version of Atlantis were revealed not through real

scientific inquiry, but through William Scott Eliot's brain, through spiritual

clairvoyance, which he blended with a few scientific factoids at the time to

build out this story.

Atlantis is a circular city with this massive palace at the center. The

engineering is highly sophisticated, with a complicated canal system that

manages the city water.

And look, there's an underwater reservoir in the shape of a heart from

city gets its drinking water. At its height, he says, two million people

here, and they were of a unique Atlantean race with unique powers and

characteristics. They wielded advanced tech, like these flying battleships.

that used a type of energy from a different plane, not measurable by our

understanding of physics, an etheric plane, whatever that means.

This understanding of different energy planes allowed the Atlantean race to

wield nature in powerful ways, creating a kind of powerful sorcery that could be

used for both good and evil. They wrote on sheets of metal, they drank blood hot

from the animal, they had explosives that released poisonous gas, and the

were treated equally.

Wow. Okay, before we get too drunk on all these juicy tantalizing sci -fi

details, let's just check in on like what's going on here. Is this guy

piece of fiction or is he trying to do science?

Yes, he produced a set of painstakingly detailed maps that look like real maps.

Like there is the world. I see the world in the shape of the world. And yet he's

describing a civilization with supernatural powers.

All of this happening a million years ago, which is about...

990 ,000 years before scientists say that humans started farming,

animals, and developing what would become civilization.

Okay, but don't worry. William Scott Elliott has an explanation for this.

Catastrophes. He says that there was a global catastrophe 800 ,000 years ago.

was an ice age that ripped through the Earth and reshaped the entire planet,

which is how you get from this to map number two.

So here's the world starting 800 ,000 years ago after the Big Ice Age.

Atlantis is still here, but it's starting to kind of sink into the sea.

Fast forward, that gets us to map number three and map number four. According to

William Scott Eliot, it's these catastrophes that sunk Atlantis into the

until it became this smaller island, which is what he says Plato was

to when he was talking about this utopian society.

And then, finally, the ocean rose.

And Atlantis sunk completely in the year 9564 BC.

Pretty specific there, William. Which is the time that he says there was a

massive flood that covered the whole planet. He says it's the same flood that

happened in the Bible. Noah's Ark, remember?

And that the flood sunk Atlantis once and for all into the ocean.

Goodbye, Atlantis. Great civilization is now gone. But before it sunk, people

from Atlantis had fled east and west.

across the world, bringing with them their knowledge about advanced

engineering, architecture.

And this is his explanation for why the Egyptians and the Mayans had pyramids.

Oh, and he also says that the descendants of these Atlanteans would go

the Aryan race, which would be the most advanced civilization. Yeah, we'll get

back to that in just a sec, because it gets pretty messed up.

Anyway, so you get the story. There's so much more to this that, like, I'm just

going to leave all my reading in the source document so you can see it

it gets nuts and there's so much more kind of racializing of this story. But

what this is is a pseudoscientific attempt to tell a story that was based

spiritual revelations, meaning not science, but it is clothed in science -y

looking things. That's what this is.

Let's just be very clear. I'm not saying it's anything other than that. At the

time, that was kind of accepted by some circles.

My big question here is why?

Why would this guy do this? Did he make a bunch of money off of duping people

into the legend of Atlantis?

I don't think so.

Why would he make all of this up? We'll never know exactly why, but my theory is

that he really believed this stuff.

I think, like a lot of us, William Scott Elliot had constructed a worldview that

helped explain the mysteries he didn't understand.

And he used a variety of rational and spiritual means to construct a story

helped him make sense of the world. We all kind of do this. This guy just

happened to do it in a map that 120 years later we can all look at and like

at, even though it's a really beautiful map. And I'm totally going to hang this

on my wall.

This was his explanation. Someone trying to explain how the native people in a

new world who Europeans saw as primitive and inferior had somehow built such

sophisticated structures.

This story helped explain that. So the world those guys are talking about is a

world in which mainly dark -skinned people are kind of backward and kind of

primitive and a cadre of white folks who are...

Members of this advanced civilization travel around the world and give them

culture. And yes, it resulted in this implication that there was one superior

Aryan race, an idea that unfortunately endured into the 1930s when one man

became obsessed with trying to use scientific sounding methods to prove the

thing. This is Heinrich Himmler. He's the architect of the Holocaust.

And before World War II, he funded archaeological expeditions in search of

evidence that would prove the existence of a superior ancient civilization in an

attempt to validate his horrible motives for trying to wipe out entire races.

It's an effort that was loosely depicted in this Indiana Jones movie.

One of the leaders of this Nazi archaeological effort speculated that

ancestors of the German people were actually from Atlantis, and that they

escaped when the continent sunk and came to Germany. It was the same thing that

William Scott Eliot was doing, building a bogus story using an old parable, but

in this case to justify some of the most heinous acts of violence in our

history.

So, the big question that I should just answer very clearly, is there any

evidence? that Atlantis existed?

Well, it depends what you mean by evidence.

If you're someone who looks at the many mysteries in our world and is

comfortable filling in the blanks with your own guesses, especially the ones

that feel good, then yes, there's a million different things that you could

at, connect the dots on, that would make you believe that Atlantis is real. But

if you're somebody who believes in the long, slow process of scientific

knowledge, where many different scientists gather, analyze, and debate

over decades until they establish a consensus of what is true. If that's

definition of compelling evidence, then no.

Atlantis, which was constructed by Plato as a parable to teach people, has no

basis in empirical fact. It simply does not.

And yet my big lesson out of all of this is that even after centuries of, like,

good science and archaeological methodologies that tell us what's real

are still trying to discover the other mysteries, we still are so intoxicated

this story for the same reason these guys were. It's a really tempting idea,

kind of a comforting idea.

I think a lot of people want there to be something wonderful and fascinating and

lost out there that they don't know about. As an archaeologist, I often try

communicate to them that the human past is interesting enough without making a

bunch of stuff up.

But to me, this is just a good story closed in scientific language and

which is perhaps the most dangerous of them all because it looks real. It co

-ops the language of science to tell lies.

And it continues to live on in the form of History Channel documentaries, a

recent Netflix documentary that indulge these same ideas because people like

to believe.

So to me, not only is this map beautiful, but it also serves as a

tale. I want to hang this on my wall to remind me that even if it looks science

-y and has a lot of big scientific words, that doesn't make it proof.

That doesn't make it true.

We've been scanning these maps, and we've created a poster that you can buy.

We will create 500 of them. There are four original maps I bought for this

story. I'm keeping one of them. But three of them are up for grabs. The

map that was printed at the time. Nick, who has been doing all of this scanning,

has some thoughts on why one would want to purchase a map like this for their

home. Nick? Own a piece of Western esoteric history. An original 1900

Scott Elliot Atlantis map.

It really represents the, like, Late 1800s and early 1900s fascination and

obsession with mysticism and like the esoteric in general. So people became

totally obsessed with things like Atlantis and seances and stuff. So it's

thing to be able to own.

a piece of like mystical history and like where science and mysticism really,

really intersected. Maps are for sale. Go get them now in the description.

you all for being here, for being on this journey as we continue to learn

the history of evidence and science and how we know what we know.

It's an ongoing discussion and debate and boy, it's an important one to have

these days. So thanks for being here and I'll see you in the next one.

i love just holding these maps and the old paper you can like see the fiber in

the old paper the original printing artifacts that are just like you can't

recreate this stuff with digital i've tried we've gotten pretty close but like

there's just nothing like it also some bold font choices here