Original subtitles

(film tape whirring)

(eerie music)

- What do you know about the past

and how do you know it?

Our species stretches back over 300,000 years,

yet we only have written records

for the last 2% of that time.

Across the long proceeding ages,

how many cultures, kingdoms, and even empires have vanished?

All evidence of their existence now turned to dust.

Today, archeologists can carbon-date artifacts

and sequence DNA with computers.

Yet the picture of the deep past that emerges

is often frustratingly incomplete.

For the majority of our time on this planet,

humanity has relied on myth to tell us the story

of who we are and where we came from.

Today we often think of myths as fantasies,

fairytales for simple-minded primitives.

We read about science myth-busting old ideas,

demonstrating how superior our knowledge is

to that of our ancestors.

But perhaps we shouldn't be so quick

to draw these conclusions.

We begun to discover that some myths are rooted in truth.

(upbeat music)

Troy, the famous city attacked

by Greek heroes in the Iliad had been thought fiction

for hundreds of years, an invention of Homeric epic poetry.

That is, until Heinrich Schliemann's team

discovered its remains

and those of its arch rival, Mycenae,

in the late 19th century,

completely shifting the paradigm around the credibility

of ancient sources.

The great flood myths of many cultures

have often been considered religious parable,

yet recent studies suggest they may reflect

cultural memories of rapidly rising sea levels,

like those that caused massive catastrophic flooding

of the Black Sea around 7,300 BC.

Such evidence opens a tantalizing door,

inviting us to wonder about ancient civilizations

of which no true records exist.

But there's one myth that's unlike others

for a simple reason,

it has dates attached to it.

That myth is Atlantis.

Most of us only have a foggy notion

of what the Atlantis myth was really about.

Was it an advanced civilization from a missing period

in prehistory?

Or a decadent society on a lost continent

crushed by the wrath of the gods in a cataclysmic event?

And if so, how exactly does a continent

get lost in the first place?

Let's begin with what Atlantis is,

a story written down around 2,400 years ago here in Athens.

The story is a strange one.

Solon, famous law giver of the Athenian state

and one of the seven sages of Ancient Greece

journeyed to the Temple of Sais in the Egyptian Nile Delta

around 600 BC.

He spoke with the high priests there

about the prehistoric past,

and told them the Greek's own mythical version

of these events,

stretching back to the great flood of Deucalion,

and estimated what the true dates might have been.

An elder priest responded,

"Oh, Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children.

"No Greek is old.

"You are young, let us say, in psyche

"because you do not have inside you

"any hearing of ancient knowledge,

"and you have not learned of things of the past."

The priest describes a past

interspersed with natural disasters, droughts, wildfires,

and not one, but many floods.

It's a long past the Greeks have forgotten

through a lack of continuity.

Their culture had to reinvent itself after each disaster,

its populace reduced to a life of basic subsistence.

The Egyptians, by contrast,

has escaped most of these disasters

and maintained ongoing records of events in their temples,

including a major story the priest is quite certain

the Greeks have forgotten: Atlantis.

It was said to be a continent

with a mighty empire that existed around 9,600 BC,

ruled by 10 kings descended from Poseidon, God of the Sea.

Its capital city was astoundingly large and decadent,

its army and navy enormous.

Its wealth was unmatched, as was its thirst for conquest.

It swept across North Africa,

eventually conquering Egypt,

and assaulted the western Mediterranean coast of Europe

up to central Italy.

After a series of wars, it was finally defeated

by the ancestors of the Athenians

who liberated Egypt and many other peoples,

only to lose their army in the final assault

on the capitol of this belligerent power

during a horrific earthquake and series of floods.

The idea that an unknown continent sank into the ocean,

and the mystery surrounding its location

has generated debate for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Most doubt it ever existed,

but perhaps the most bizarre thing

about the myth of Atlantis is its source,

Plato, the greatest philosopher

of the classical Greek world.

Plato was born into the noble classes of Periclean Athens

toward the end of its golden age of culture

and worldly success.

He grew up during the worst civil war in Greek history

between Athens and Sparta,

and as a young man was educated by distinguished teachers.

Following the defeat of Athens and the death of his mentor,

Socrates in 399 BC, Plato packed up and disappeared.

For the next 12 years,

we're told that he traveled the Mediterranean,

studying with the greatest minds of the age

in places like Sicily, southern Italy, and Egypt.

Around age 40, he returned to Athens

where he founded a school called The Academy,

and taught great thinkers like Aristotle,

as well as authoring dozens of books on philosophy.

The fact he wrote about such a strange story,

and not just one, but two of his books

is something of a puzzle in itself.

He wasn't an entertainer for kids' birthday parties.

He was a masterful thinker

who crafted some of the most complex works

at the very foundation of Western thought.

Vague notions of a lost civilization

that sank beneath the waves

have sparked innumerable interpretations

from Jules Verne to Disney

in the roughly 2,400 years since Plato's death.

Whatever the Atlantis myth once represented

has been washed from our minds by a tsunami of pop culture.

- [Narrator] Atlantis, a land that harnessed the power

of a volcano's fiery heart

and learned to store the energy of the sun

in giant crystals.

Then used them to create secret weapons

whose disintegrating rays

could destroy the rest of the world.

- All this bogus Atlantis imagery has also had a side effect

spawning an almost obsessive interest by fringe theorists

in uncovering a lost continent sunken beneath the ocean.

(calming music)

Ignatius L. Donnelly's "Atlantis,

the Antediluvian World" of 1882

was among the first to propose a massive continent

that sank into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean,

the survivors of which allegedly fled

to start new civilizations,

everywhere from the Yucatan to Egypt.

Donnelly surmised the Azores islands

were the tips of this huge landmass,

a theory that despite being incorrect

has somehow persisted to the present day in some circles.

The fact that Plato borrowed

certain allegories and metaphors from older traditions

has led a number of scholars to propose the myth of Atlantis

was inspired by a series of actual events,

such as the powerful and deadly eruption

of Thera on Santorini,

the Sea People's Invasions, or even the Trojan War.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The location of Atlantis has been proclaimed

across the globe.

With such a flood of wild goose chase theories,

it's not surprising that most classicists today

consider the Atlantis myth as simply an allegory

invented by Plato to explain the dangers of hubris,

bad government and military aggression.

But not everyone agrees.

(waves crashing)

- Plato was the greatest philosopher of all times.

My major question was why so rational a man

was occupied writing myths?

This is the beginning of the story 20 years ago.

- [Jack] George Sarantitis does not believe

in sinking continents.

An independent researcher of the Ancient Greek world,

he's authored papers on a broad range of topics,

combining his knowledge of the ancient language

with geography, sailing, and climate change

to reconstruct pictures of the past

that have confused scholars for centuries.

His work on dating the Iliad

through reference to astronomy

has even been recognized by the Greek Academy.

Nearly 20 years ago, George turned his attention

to the work of his favorite philosopher, Plato.

- The main characteristic of Plato

is to put you in the problem.

It demands a very logical sequence.

You cannot escape by doing things that do not fit,

otherwise you don't have results.

- Unlike many other philosophers

who sought to build perfect systems,

few, if any of Plato's writings

can be said to advocate a cut and dried set of positions.

His dialogues often seem to have

dissatisfaction and puzzlement,

even with the doctrines he seems to be presenting

for our consideration.

In this sense, his exact positions

often seem something of a mystery.

- Plato was writing these myths

for other highly educated people.

What is the benefit for an educated person

or a student of Plato,

what could he take from a myth?

That was the puzzle that I would like to solve.

- [Jack] George began analyzing

Plato's philosophical dialogues,

looking for patterns in the way he wrote about myths,

and over time formulated a series of axioms.

The theory he developed,

he titled, "Methodology of Mythology",

a theory he formally presented in a series of papers

at conferences throughout the first decade

of the 21st century.

The theory suggests Plato deliberately constructed his myths

for use as a teaching tool,

and that consistent grammatical clues within them

turn the stories into a kind of mental gymnasium

for advanced students.

- Gradually you see that there is a systematic writing

of a myth.

There is a frequent appearance of axioms,

or the axiom that you find from the beginning.

You might see it later on and later on,

and you can predict that you're going to

find in front of you,

such a thing,

because there are also some warnings within the text.

He might use two similar sounding words

at the beginning and at the end of the paragraph,

but with much different meaning.

Do not underestimate any detail to find out the tricks,

the laws or axioms or systems

the mythographer is following to construct the myth.

It's a very high scientific document,

and you can use it to teach either a child or an initiate.

- The story of Atlantis is briefly summarized

in a book called Timaeus.

The rest of this long dialogue then goes on

to focus on seemingly unrelated subjects.

Plato's later dialogue, Critias, on the other hand,

is a description of the ancient conflict

between the Athens of 9,600 BC

and the hostile Atlantean empire,

and it seems to have been cut off mid-sentence.

Most believe that either the book was unfinished

or that the rest has simply been lost to history.

George collected several

of the best modern Greek and English translations

of Critias and Timaeus and began to dig into them.

Soon he noticed an unusual pattern.

All the translations were in agreement for the most part,

but certain areas of complex description

were often rendered completely differently

with various degrees of incompatible,

even conflicting logic.

- When you see so many different meanings

coming out of different translations,

something is wrong.

(George speaking Ancient Greek)

- [Jack] He went back to to the source documents,

the Ancient Greek texts themselves,

and began to compare the modern translations

to Plato's original words.

- One of the very first things

is that I had read Atlantic Ocean.

There is no Atlantic Ocean in the ancient text.

- [Jack] We can see the same thing

in many common English translations.

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.

- It says Atlantic Pelagos.

"Pelagos" and "ocean" have no connection at all.

They have much different properties.

- [Jack] To get to Atlantis from Greece,

you had to cross a large body of water,

previously translated as Atlantic Ocean,

but the actual Ancient Greek says "Atlantic Pelagos" -

something more like the Aegean Sea,

partially enclosed by land.

This meant something important.

Atlantis couldn't possibly be

where earlier researchers like Ignatius Donnelly

had said it was.

But if Plato wasn't referring to the Atlantic Ocean,

what was this mysterious Atlantic Pelagos

that led to Atlantis,

and were there other aspects of the Ancient Greek

that were being lost in translation?

- It's like mathematics.

If you are using wrong data, you have a wrong result.

A lot of different translators

were not able to translate correctly the ancient text,

and this was the spark and the main cause

to push me to start to retranslate the whole two books,

Timaeus and Critias, from the beginning.

- [Jack] George proceeded to spend

over two years and 4,000 hours

working with Athens University philologist, Eva Dakia,

to formulate new translations of these two books

to ensure he was correctly verifying

every rule of syntax and grammar.

- The same word on the sixth century

might have different meaning on the fifth century,

different on the fourth century, different.

You need the correct meaning of every word,

phrase, line and paragraph.

Otherwise you are reading a wrong story.

- [Jack] Once he had the words, then he rebuilt the phrases,

then the sentences,

because a changed sentence

will change the meaning of a paragraph,

which can alter the meaning of an entire book.

George began to see that Plato's geography

was far more specific than he or anyone else

had realized before.

Bit by bit the pieces of the map began to take form

based on the meaning of key words.

Besides "Okeanos," Greek has three main words

for large bodies of water we would call "seas."

The Mediterranean Sea is a "thalassa."

The Aegean is a "pelagos,"

a sea that encloses islands like an embrace.

"Pontos" - what we call in English, the Black Sea,

Greeks called the "Euxenos Pontos."

- And a pontos, it's not a pelagos, and it's not an ocean,

but in all the translations,

all these are named ocean or sea.

- [Jack] Through close analysis of the grammar

in Critias and Timaeus,

George was also able to identify and define

three key terms that had previously been translated

interchangeably as island, to great confusion.

A continent, an island, and the sacred center island

of the Atlantean capital city.

The size and concentric-ringed shape of which

are explained in great, albeit confusing detail.

Tradition has it that the phrase,

"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here"

was carved above the door to Plato's Academy.

If he included complex geometrical diagrams,

very specific geographic terms and directional orientations,

we have to ask, "Why are they there?"

- If it was about a fairy tale,

you don't need to give such details.

It was instructions how to approach Atlantis,

start entering the Pillars of Hercules,

which is characterized as a mouth

where the larger cavity is the Mediterranean

and the smaller cavity is an Atlantic Pelagos.

After you pass these Pillars of Hercules,

you are in front of an Atlantic Pelagos,

and then you have in front of you an island,

a very large one,

and he characterizes it as well as a continent.

For this continent, he describes a semi-curved shape of land

larger than Asia and Libya in length,

where either by going through the continent

or through islands, step by step,

somewhere in the middle of this curve,

you can find something like a harbor, then a "poros,"

a narrow passage to pass into another pelagos

after you have left behind you a pontos - different sea -

Then you are in front of an island

which is located in the middle of this landmass

of the island continent.

And then suddenly I had a new reality in my mind.

- [Jack] According to Plato, to get to Atlantis by sea,

one first had to pass the Pillars of Heracles.

So not surprisingly, George's first question was,

where are the Pillars of Heracles?

The answer, ever since Rome conquered

the entire Mediterranean,

has been that the pillars are located

near the Strait of Gibraltar,

perhaps with one in Europe and one in Africa,

but this was not always the case.

When George began to dig,

he found there had been considerable confusion and dispute

among ancient authors over precisely what and where

the Pillars of Heracles were.

- As average person, I knew that the Pillars of Heracles

are somewhere in Gibraltar.

But Plato is giving you instructions

and he's giving a different direction

where to find the Pillars of Heracles.

You have to study the text very hard

to understand where this place is.

- While examining the differences in descriptions

between the two books,

George realized Greek grammar

was the key to narrowing in on the location of the pillars

and the mysterious Atlantic Pelagos.

There's a subtle difference

in how language is used in Timaeus versus Critias.

The closest parallel in English might be the way

we use this versus that, or here and there.

"This here" means something proximate,

"that there" means something distant.

The Egyptian priest speaks of "this here Libya,"

referring to a place that's adjacent to his location

in the Nile Delta Sais.

This grammatical nuance can be used

to pin down relative locations in the story

based on who was speaking and where that person was

at that moment in time.

The writings refer to how mighty was the force

that marched in arrogance at the same time

against all of Europe and Asia,

that campaigned out of the Atlantic Pelagos.

The fact that the Atlanteans campaigned

out of the Atlantic Pelagos suggests

it is inside the Pillars of Heracles,

that they demarcate a kind of regional border,

and that Europe and Asia are on the outside of the pillars.

- If the grammar and syntax was correct,

the two Pillars of Heracles both should exist within Africa.

- [Jack] But where?

Known as the father of history,

the Ancient Greek author, Herodotus,

wrote his famous work a generation before Plato.

It was widely known throughout the Greek world

for the travels he'd undertaken all around the Mediterranean

reporting on the kingdoms and people he discovered.

In book four of his history,

he describes the voyage of a Samian ship

that was blown off course,

and made landfall on the Libyan coast at modern Bomba.

They then set sail for Egypt,

but a powerful easterly wind drove them

in the opposite direction,

all the way through the Pillars of Heracles

to a place called Tartessos.

The location of Tartessos has been recently ascribed

to southern Spain.

However, the dictionary of Greek and Roman geography

notes that its location was uncertain among the ancients.

George soon saw the problem in another light.

A long time sailor, he did some quick math and realized

that at the rates of sea travel in Herodotus's era,

the Samian ship's journey to Gibraltar

would've taken somewhere between 20 and 30 days

and involved sailing hundreds of kilometers northward,

completely around Tunisia,

all the time without making landfall.

- It's impossible to have made this journey

in the given time.

Gibraltar could not be the place

where the Pillars of Heracles were.

- [Jack] There was another much more logical location

for the ancient Pillars of Heracles,

the Gulf of Gabes in modern Tunisia.

A journey to the Gulf of Gabes

would've taken only six to 10 days

instead of the 20 or 30 to Gibraltar.

But if the Gulf of Gabes was where the Pillars of Heracles

were in Plato's era,

where was the Atlantic Pelagos that they supposedly led to?

- If every word he's using

has been translated in your mind correctly,

you will find the right way.

- [Jack] While today the linkage to inland Africa

is blocked up,

the Gulf once connected the Mediterranean Sea

to a large series of salt lakes called chotts.

Today, these chotts are only navigable

by the smallest of boats,

and even then, only during Tunisia's annual wet season.

This positioning for the Pillars of Heracles

and the Atlantic Pelagos starts to make sense

if we look back at Plato's statement that "At that time

the there-pelagos was navigable."

Plato seems to be saying that at the time of Atlantis,

the chotts were once a larger sea leading to inland Africa

and deep enough to be sailed by ships,

but that in his own time, the pelagos had silted up.

By contrast, the Roman era location

of the Pillars of Heracles at the Strait of Gibraltar

was never impassable to ships.

That waterway hasn't closed up since the Mediterranean Sea

refilled around 4.8 million years ago.

- Gibraltar could not be the place

where the Pillars of Heracles were.

If you are able to catch this detail,

then you get the picture.

- [Jack] The new picture meant something

startling and important.

The map of the world looked different

in the age of Atlantis.

- Atlantis should be the west part of Africa,

and only there.

- The lost continent of myth

had been hiding in plain sight all along.

How hard was it really to believe that a place

that contained the Atlas Mountains

bordered the Atlantic Ocean

and contained a kingdom

that Herodotus had once called the Atlantes

had been called Atlantis in prehistoric times.

But there's a much bigger problem.

Most of Western Africa today is covered

by lifeless Sahara desert.

So even if the geography seemed to fit,

how could any of the story be true in the first place?

- The text contains the truth.

(calming music)

(dramatic music)

- Today, the Sahara is an inhospitable expanse,

but starting at the dawn of the Holocene,

and down until as recently as 3000 BC,

it was a lush green landscape

supporting an enormous array of animals and fish

hunted by our ancestors.

Today we call this period the Green Sahara.

What did this world actually look like

and was it anything like the world of Plato's myth?

(storm rumbling)

Cyclic changes altered the pattern

of the African monsoon rains,

causing them to intensify and move northward

around 11,000 BC.

These powerful monsoons not only replaced desert

with vegetations and large animals,

they also transformed the few tiny lakes across North Africa

from Clark Kent into Superman.

More than 12,000 lakes have been identified,

likely covering over a million square kilometers

at their maximum extent.

Hyper-arid desert was replaced by savannah

and swiftly inhabited

by prehistoric people who roamed there

for thousands of years.

Archeologists have corroborated the tales told

by ancient rock art with finds of bone fish hooks

and harpoons in the middle of the desert.

Five massive river systems flowed out

from the central mountain ranges of Africa,

linking vast mosaics of tributaries and wetlands.

This allowed aquatic species to travel,

including not just fish, but crocodiles and hippopotami.

In 2020, a research team confirmed crocodiles

are still living in a rocky plateau in southern Mauritania,

a place now utterly surrounded by desert.

The waterways of the Green Sahara once extended here

all the way from the Nile River.

For a moment, if we close our eyes,

we can imagine a map of two continents

at the dawn of the Holocene,

a North Africa divided by seas, lakes and rivers

into Libya and Atlantis.

Was this the real world Plato's myth was communicating

a distant memory of in Timaeus and Critias?

It would certainly answer a lot of questions.

Climate facts make George's theory plausible,

but what about the rest of the myth?

Let's see if we can reassemble the pieces

of the Atlantis puzzle.

George's work meant the Atlantis story

could no longer be dismissed as complete fantasy.

If the myth isn't all made up,

then we have our work cut out for us

to determine which elements might be false and which true.

Our tale begins around 9,600 BC,

at the dawn of the Green Sahara period.

It's also roughly the same point

at which modern scientists mark the beginning

of the Holocene epoch,

a geologic time period

that continues down to the present day.

We're told the Atlanteans of this era

initiated a great war spreading eastward across Africa

and conquering everything in their path.

Who were these mysterious Atlanteans?

Herodotus writes an enigmatic phrase in his history

when he speaks of both eastern and western Ethiopians

who dwelled at the extreme ends of the African continent.

Homer too in the Odyssey

writes of "the Ethiopians who dwell split in two,

some who dwell where the sun rises, and some where it sets."

The root of the Ancient Greek "Aethiopia"

comes from "aitho," burn, and "ops," face.

The land of those with darkened faces.

The Ancient Greeks seemed to believe

that there were two major groups

of dark-skinned North African people,

somehow divided by an east-west split.

Were the dark-skinned inhabitants of Mauritania

from Herodotus's era,

the direct descendants of the mythic Atlanteans,

and were these the kind of people

Plato had in mind when he wrote his books?

They just might be a hidden reality

behind these descriptions from Ancient Greek writers.

Current linguistic research suggests the people who spoke

the two major North African language groups

did in fact split some time in the deep past.

They were likely isolated from one another

during a long dry period,

and then reconnected during the Green Sahara.

They differed not only in language,

but in their ways of life,

and so much so that researchers have called them

the Land People and the Water People.

The water people spoke the language group

known as Nilo-Saharan.

The expansion of waterways when the Green Sahara began

led to rapid north and westward outmigration

of these people.

They hunted fish, crocodiles and hippos

using barbed harpoons and bone fish hooks.

The land people, by contrast,

were savannah hunters who used bows and arrows.

They spoke the language family called Niger-Congo,

which seems to have originated

in the region of modern day Mauritania.

They migrated south and eastward across the Sahara

during the wet period.

Evidence of their presence spans Northern Africa.

Climate and human migration might actually support the idea

of an Atlantean people,

but were epic battles like those in the myth

really a feature of the early Holocene?

It's tempting to see the myth

of an aggressive Atlantean empire

that took over North Africa

as based on the expansion of Niger-Congo speaking hunters

in the early Holocene.

The time period was similar

and so was the general direction of movement.

Perhaps the cultural memories of the Nile Valley people

who encountered these intruders

have found their way down to us

in a mythical reconstruction of events.

This is however complete speculation.

While the true origins of the mythical Atlantean war

may be in doubt,

what is not in doubt is that wars were indeed

taking place in Ancient North Africa.

Jebel Sahaba, Northern Sedan,

a prehistoric massacre took place here

between two different cultural groups around 11,000 BC.

In the 1960s, archeologists first uncovered

a large number of skeletons with stone arrowheads

embedded in them.

These attacks may have taken place over months or even years

in a kind of ongoing war.

The closer we get to the early Holocene,

the more evidence accumulates for armed conflict

by large groups.

Cave paintings show teams of archers

confronting one another, attacking or fleeing.

Did a real Atlantean army march east across North Africa

11,600 years ago,

annihilating resistance with barrages of stone-tipped arrows

and seizing territory all the way to the Nile?

Or might the wars of the myth be a projection

from Plato's own time?

(crowds cheering)

Plato was no stranger to violence.

His childhood was spent in the shadow

of the worst civil war in Greek history.

Athens and its allies were engaged in bloody combat

with Sparta and its allies from 431 BC

up until he was six or seven years old.

A brief peace ensued,

but by the time Plato reached adolescence in 415 BC,

war had broken out again.

It lasted another 11 years,

during which time Plato himself saw military service

before Athens finally succumbed to a Spartan blockade

and had to surrender.

Some see a parallel between the historical Athens

and the one in the Atlantis myth.

The Peloponnesian War of Plato's childhood

was triggered by a Spartan ally's attack

and the Athenians saw themselves as being on the defensive.

In the Atlantis myth, the Atlanteans begin as the aggressors

and are righteously repulsed by the Athens of 9,600 BC.

The second phase of the Peloponnesian War

saw Athens as the aggressor

when they attacked Syracuse in Sicily by sea.

In the myth, Athens also became the aggressor

when they marched all the way to the gates

of the Atlantean capital city.

The complete destruction

of the Athenian military in the myth

might mirror the total loss

of the Athenian army in the assault on Syracuse

during the second phase of the Peloponnesian War.

(dramatic music)

Was the Atlantean war real, total fabrication,

or a blend of myth, history and cultural memory?

- He's giving this in a Platonic way.

You have to decipher, you have to extract from the text.

- Plato is our only source for Atlantis.

Solely by proving or refuting his story,

can we get to the truth.

Unfortunately, archeological evidence is scarce

and the region as a whole is in general poorly studied.

If we want to know whether story elements

like the vast Atlantean trade networks were real,

we have to look at analogous evidence from other areas

of North Africa and the Mediterranean.

(ship horn blaring)

International trade is

something we consider a hallmark of modern globalization.

The idea that an Atlantean society

was trading across continents more than 11,000 years ago

seems impossible, but it's not.

8,000 year old DNA from an underwater site

off the shore of the UK has generated a strange revelation.

Hunter-gatherers were consuming

two types of domesticated wheat here,

long before anyone in Britain began cultivating grain.

These wheat species have no wild ancestors

in northern Europe.

They weren't grown locally.

They arrived from the Middle East through a trade network

spanning the entire European continent.

Continent-sweeping trade networks existed in the Stone Age,

But what about ancient seafaring?

If an Atlantean army really attacked Europe,

they had to do more than cross lakes and rivers.

They had to cross the open sea itself.

(waves crashing)

Experts often tell us that Egypt

was the world's first great maritime society,

and it's been proclaimed

that massive 60-ton Egyptian vessels from 1800 BC

were the world's oldest seagoing boats.

But according to Plato's story,

both Greek and African seafaring

began at least 8,000 years earlier.

Recent discoveries are beginning to move the needle

in Plato's favor.

Scientists have discovered obsidian tools in central Tunisia

that originated in the sixth millennium BC.

But they come from an island called Pantelleria,

roughly 60 kilometers from the Tunisian coast.

To acquire the obsidian for these tools

means a round trip of over 120 kilometers across open sea,

thousands of years before historians believed

this was possible.

More hard evidence in Greece

from the era of the Atlantis myth

suggests that at least part of Plato's story

is solidly rooted in fact.

Just outside Athens is a site called Schistou Cave,

where people brought offerings from prehistory,

all the way down to Roman times.

Obsidian tools uncovered there

demonstrate that the region has been inhabited

for at least 14,000 years,

corroborating Plato's assertions in the myth.

The shocking thing about this is not the tools themselves

or even the early date, but rather where they came from,

the island of Milos in the center of the Aegean Sea.

Obsidian tools and weapons from Milos

have been recently discovered all around the Aegean.

Their presence tells us that extensive seafaring trade

was taking place in Greece from at least 13,000 BC.

It also means prehistoric Greeks were sailing long distances

more than 3000 years before the events of the Atlantis myth.

So if people were conducting trade this way

15 millennia ago, why haven't we found any of their boats?

In fact, we've begun to.

In 1987, a Nigerian man digging a well

struck a bizarre object

near the village of Dufuna.

When excavated, the strange item revealed itself

to be a 27-foot-long canoe.

Dated to around 6,500 BC, it would've been in use

right in the middle of the Green Sahara period,

less than 50 kilometers from the shores of Lake Mega-Chad.

The Water People who used it were linked to the lake

by huge networks of rivers and wetlands

that filled the region.

Because of its skillful construction,

experts believe the canoe represents a tradition

that had already undergone long development

in the distant past.

Five meters below the surface,

layers of clay protected the Dufuna canoe from decay

in an oxygen-free environment.

Without that clay, it would've deteriorated completely,

and ancient African boat travel

might have remained speculation.

The reason more ancient boats

aren't sitting in museums today

isn't because they didn't exist.

It's simply because they were made of organic materials.

Clearly, the claim that the Egyptians

had the earliest seafaring boats in 1800 BC

is simply untrue.

Just how untrue is almost mind-blowing.

Crete is the largest island in Greece,

hundreds of kilometers from the North African coast.

It detached from the mainland around 5 million years ago

and has remained a separate island ever since.

We used to think it was first colonized around 6,500 BC

and was entirely unpopulated before that time.

However, that thinking has changed.

Artifacts were recently discovered,

indicating that the first humans must have arrived

on Crete by sea at least 130,000 years ago.

The deeper we look, the more evidence seems to appear

in support of Plato's assertion

that seafaring isn't a new story.

It's a very old story.

If Greek or Atlantean armies

wanted to cross the Mediterranean Sea by ship in 9,600 BC,

it was possible.

(calming music)

As astonishing as the facts we've unearthed are,

there are some major missing pieces to the Atlantis puzzle.

Not all of Plato's descriptions

seem to represent a realistic portrayal

of ancient West Africa in 9,600 BC.

Let's revisit some of the myth's claims.

We're told of a ringed capital city

nearly 40 kilometers across,

set into a huge pointed island

in the center of the Atlantean continent.

It was filled with glorious buildings and temples,

as well as harbors bustling with trade from all over.

The city's massive stone walls,

over 30 meters wide, and dozens of kilometers long

were supposedly covered in copper, tin,

and a sparkling metal called orichalcum.

The inhabitants of the capital region were farmers

who harvested crops twice a year

with the aid of an enormous irrigation system

comprising thousands of kilometers of canals.

This kingdom, one of 10 that made up the empire,

was said to field an army of over a million men by itself

with a navy of 1200 ships -

greater than any known fleet of the ancient world.

Could all these things have been true in 9,600 BC?

Metallurgy.

The Atlantis myth claims

the empire made widespread use of metal.

The current narrative of ancient African metallurgy

doesn't support Plato's descriptions

of copper, silver, bronze, or gold

being used in large amounts

by early Holocene people in West Africa.

Humanity's use of copper

did begin as early as 10,000 BC in other locations,

but we usually find it only in small tools,

spear tips or jewelry beads.

Plato's descriptions of kilometers-long walls

clad with sheets of tin and copper simply can't be real.

Agriculture.

While semi-domesticated grains from the early Holocene

have been found in Egypt at sites like Nabta Playa,

so far, there's no evidence of farming in Western Africa

until around 3000 BC,

and then only at one isolated site in Morocco.

Irrigation.

Appearing along the Nile for over 5,000 years,

and later used at large scale in Libya by the Garamantes,

irrigation has been found in few other places

across North Africa to date.

Population.

To support the 1.6 million-man army

of just one of the 10 Atlantean kingdoms

would've required a population six times that size,

bordering on 10 million.

Ancient population numbers are being revised upward today,

and the best estimates we have

are between one and 10 million people,

but that's across the entire planet.

Cities.

Athens, Sais, and the ringed capital city of Atlantis

were all supposed to have existed

more than 10,000 years ago according to the myth.

While early cities did exist

in the Middle East during that timeframe,

so far nothing matching Plato's descriptions

has been unearthed.

There's another important concern as well.

Not everyone agrees about the nature

and extent of the waterways

that existed in the Green Sahara period.

It's possible the map of Atlantis

didn't look exactly the way it's been theorized.

Does this mean that the vision

of an ancient African Atlantean city

is nothing more than just a fantasy?

Mysterious stone structures have been found

across the Sahara.

What do these structures mean?

What was their purpose?

Are they burial sites?

Were they places of ritual and sacrifice?

Or the remnants of defensive fortifications?

Were they outposts of a dying Atlantean empire

whose constructs faded into dust long ago?

While they are intriguing,

most of these structures are thought to date

from a few thousand years BC,

and in no way do they resemble

the grand Atlantean city of the myth.

There's good reason not to believe Plato's myth was true,

even if Atlantis was an ancient name for West Africa,

and Green Sahara waterways partitioned it in some way

from the rest of the continent.

Other aspects of the tale are ambiguous,

but there's one major piece of evidence

that's difficult for skeptics to dismiss.

If George was right about the location of Atlantis,

then exactly in the center of the curved continent,

there should be the remains of a ringed capital city

roughly 40 kilometers across.

(dramatic music)

The Richat Structure is a prominent circular feature

in the Adrar plateau in Mauritania.

It developed due to tectonic activity

going back hundreds of millions of years.

Today, it appears as concentric rings,

a circular structure unique on our planet.

Because of its roughly 40 kilometer size

and relative flatness,

it cannot be seen from land in its entirety.

Freshwater fossils confirm the general area

was once home to significant amounts of water.

In the early Holocene,

the Richat might have been a fisherman's paradise.

Scientists who examined the site in the 1970s

discovered huge amounts of stone tools in the sediments

of the ringed valleys.

Was this the lost capital city of Atlantis?

George took one more step most people might not.

- So I took the plane, went there with my instruments

and measured all these formations

that were referred to in the Platonic text.

- [Jack] A professional engineer,

George traveled to the Richat in 2008

with a small team of locals and took GPS measurements,

along with readings from altimeters.

His results matched exceptionally well

with the shape he had derived analytically

from Plato's texts.

- Could you think that I could be calm after that discovery?

- George's new translation finally illuminated

certain vague nuances that were proven out on location.

There is not one outer ring, but two.

One of the rings is a twin ring,

another small ring encloses the central sacred aisle.

Furthermore, there is a canal

parallel to an original natural waterway.

It connects to the sea with a flow that is synitetrito,

involving harbors facing one another.

There is also an oddly placed

nine and a half kilometer canal along the next inner ring,

and thus the picture we get of the city looks like this.

If the resemblance of the Richat structure

to Plato's geography is just a coincidence,

it is a remarkable coincidence.

But there was no prize awarded to George Sarantitis,

or Ticker-tape parade.

Instead, one person after another

cashed in on his years of research

without really understanding it.

Many of them made outlandish suggestions,

stating that ocean levels

were hundreds of meters higher in the Holocene,

claiming that continent-sweeping floods purged North Africa,

or worse.

It seems unlikely

that any of these fringe theorists speak Ancient Greek.

- You have to prove according to the Platonic text

where Atlantis is.

- In Plato's writings, a philosopher is one

who seeks the truth and develops a true understanding

of the subject at hand.

A sophist by contrast, might hold a true opinion,

but they lack any real knowledge of what underpins it.

It ought to be clear by now to which category

George belongs versus his imitators.

- Believe me, it was a very difficult task.

(calming music)

- At last we come to a final question.

Atlantis was supposed to have sunk into the sea,

disappearing in a single day and night.

I'm here at Mount Lycabettus in Athens,

277 meters above sea level.

Even if every single ice sheet on the entire planet melted,

the rising oceans would not even come close

to where I'm sitting right now.

- This misunderstanding has been created

because of two characteristic words

which exist in the Platonic text.

One word is the word "thisa,"

and the other is "izomani."

Thisa was wrongly translated to "submerged,"

but when you have poeticoetio,

a special condition

where the energy of a verb returns to the subject,

then this verb has different meaning,

and the meaning actually is "covered."

So we are talking about two totally different meanings.

"Sank" - wrong translation,

or it's steady and was covered by the sea.

The actual meaning of izomani

is that it was settled

and not inundated.

It's definitely impossible to have a flooded continent.

The rhombic island was also not flooded.

But what was flooded is the capital city of Atlantis.

- Plato never wrote that an island or a continent sank.

Instead, the destruction of Atlantis

would've gone something like this.

First, a huge earthquake in the region

of the rhombic island.

Second, an influx of water from an adjacent inland sea.

This may have been combined with liquefaction

of water-saturated land on the rhombic island,

causing a landslide.

Either of these could have caused a localized tsunami.

Third, after the liquefaction,

loose clay stopped up the drainage

of excess water from the ringed capital city.

It alone was flooded as a consequence.

Lastly, as the Green Sahara monsoons continued,

runoff arrived and kept the Richat Structure full of water.

Allegedly it was still swamped around 600 BC

when the Egyptian priest told Solon the story.

I met with Oregon State University earthquake expert

Dr. Scott Ashford,

to see if George's description was possible.

- Is there any way that a tsunami could sink a continent?

The answer is no.

The amount of energy that is generated in the earthquake

and then the amount of energy

that it carries in that tsunami

is nothing compared to what it would take

to sink a continent.

But are there ways that an earthquake and a tsunami

could destroy a city, remove a city,

make it look like it's been wiped off the face of the earth?

- [Jack] Mauritania isn't known

for strong seismic activity in recent decades,

but smaller earthquakes do tend to cluster around a region

to the north of the rhombic island.

- Can we get a big earthquake in an area

that where we don't normally have earthquakes?

And certainly the Pacific Northwest is a great example.

We get these great earthquakes every 300, 400, or 500 years.

Sometimes there's a thousand years

between these great earthquakes.

- [Jack] The deadliest earthquake in recorded history

was likely Shaanxi China in 1556,

where an area 520 miles across was completely destroyed

and an estimated 830,000 people were killed.

- An earthquake in Japan last decade

caused thousands of landslides

just because it happened to take place

during the rainy season.

If you were to walk on liquefaction, it would look,

it would be like quick sand,

and you'd just sink right into it.

The sand loses all its strength.

The slope will fail, will cause a landslide.

In the Hawaiian islands,

part of one of the islands slid away,

caused a tsunami that affected the the nearby islands.

- [Jack] If the adjacent sea was struck by an earthquake,

or if a huge landslide plunged into the rings of water

around the Atlantean capital city,

it would've created a powerful tsunami,

one of the deadliest natural disasters on earth.

- If you have a landslide that falls into a small sea

or a big lake, it causes a wave,

and that wave hits a nearby town,

certainly that can wash away some of the smaller structures,

depends how big it is.

So this huge machine behind me is our tsunami wave basin,

and there are paddles along the back

that are computer-controlled

and allow us to generate almost any kind of wave.

We've actually had a scale model of some cities

and we look at what is the effect of a tsunami on this town.

(machine whirring)

(waves crashing)

- It gives you that feeling of what a real disaster

would've looked like.

- Yeah.

(waves crashing)

- That's a tsunami.

How do these natural disasters interact?

A tsunami or landslide,

it carries all the debris along with it.

I've seen the sand almost look like toothpaste

filling up all the drainage canals.

As the water dissipates,

it's gonna leave your drainage system filled with dirt.

If you have flooding after that,

there's nowhere for the water to go.

Plato - the way that he describes different events

has truth as far as what we observe today.

Flooding, earthquakes, liquefaction, landslides,

any of those could have destroyed the settlement,

making the town unviable.

While there may be some damage, they also may not be able

to continue their commerce, and the town still dies.

- Ever since George's ideas became known,

adventurers have gone to the Mauritanian desert,

looking for the remains of a lost city.

In 2020, satellite images

allowed for the discovery of hundreds of stone ruins

in the Richat area.

These ruins, however remain undated,

and even if found to originate close to 9,600 BC,

they are a far cry from the massive city

described in the myth.

Mighty palaces, irrigation systems,

temples, gymnasiums, boat houses cut in stone,

and city walls, dozens of kilometers long.

Here, in the details of the city,

perhaps we are encountering some of Plato's untruths.

Today, we tend to associate great civilizations

with Titanic works of architecture,

as did the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks.

But the construction of large temples,

fortifications and palaces

only makes sense if a large population

is dwelling in a single area for an extended period of time.

What if our ancestors didn't?

The Mongolian Empire was the largest contiguous land empire

in human history,

conquering everyone they found in their path.

Living on the move, they weren't prolific builders.

They were a free-ranging nomadic population

that still maintained a few permanent

or semi-permanent settlements.

This pattern was almost universal in the early Holocene.

Temporary camps and seasonal movement

were the default way of life.

In fact, the nomadic lifestyle dominated North Africa

all the way until colonialism arrived.

Some, like the Tuareg,

maintained their traditional ways

up to the early 20th century.

Maybe the idea of the Atlantean capital

sprang from later people,

the Egyptians and Greeks.

They might have imposed their own cultural assumptions

about architecture onto the story of the Atlantean empire,

dreaming up an enormous capital city

where in fact only hunter-gatherer villages

and fishing encampments once existed.

Whoever discovered bits of such ruins

and stone tools around the Richat

might have inferred

that they were tiny remnants of an epic city

that met its destruction long in the past.

With certain embellishments,

perhaps the myth of Atlantis does record the last vestiges

of a great ancient African empire.

But there must be dozens of ways

the story could have come down to us.

Was it made up by ancient Mauritanians

to explain a puzzling geographic feature

and found its way to Egypt over time via trade caravans?

Was the Atlantean culture completely fabricated

or was its description

by the Egyptian priest true in some respects

and not in others?

Was the story based on a real cultural memory

of Niger-Congo hunters attacking Nile Valley civilization

at the dawn of the Holocene?

Was it enhanced with reports of ruins

at a far-off ringed landmark?

Did the priests of Sais

invent certain dramatic aspects as allegory?

Or did Solon, Critias, or Plato himself?

At each step along the way,

changes might have been made, facts confused,

or elements invented.

There's simply no way to know the truth with 100% certainty.

But what if we're asking the wrong questions?

Plato's intent with the myth of Atlantis

might have had nothing at all to do with

where it supposedly was or who lived there.

It might have had everything to do

with how we understand our distant human past

and how we think in the present.

The Atlantis myth has had people

chasing lost continents for millennia,

and yet most of us have failed to ask

why Plato cared so much about this particular ancient tale.

The fundamental theme appears to be

the destruction of Atlantis

due to hubris and moral corruption.

But the story isn't about the loss of just one civilization.

It takes an Egyptian priest with a temple full of records

to make the Greeks realize

that they have completely lost their own past.

Is this myth more about Atlantis or the ancient Athenians?

In Plato's era,

the Greeks knew a legendary people had preceded them

and had possessed writing that was later lost,

along with all the history it represented.

In fact, Greece had writing from at least 1850 BC.

One script we know of, Linear B, lasted centuries,

but it all vanished when the great palaces

of the Mycenaeans were destroyed in the 12th century BC.

For hundreds of years afterward, the Greeks were illiterate

before writing was reinvented.

This same theme of civilizational destruction

and cultural loss was also present in Plato's own time.

Not only did he experience decades of war himself,

but two generations before he was born,

Athens was utterly destroyed by an invading Persian army.

Nearly everything was lost,

and yet even when the most sacred temples

were sacked and burned, the core myths of Greek culture,

the Iliad and the Odyssey lived on.

Plato realized that myth might be the most durable way

of preserving knowledge and wisdom across time.

(dramatic music)

Atlantis, a story of destruction,

simultaneously acts as a tool for cultural preservation.

Functioning as an ancient time capsule,

this myth allows us to ponder the same questions

he posed to his students more than 2000 years ago.

How can we know ourselves as a culture

if we have forgotten our past?

How do we know what is true

if we have no records of what happened?

How do we preserve the continuity of civilization,

knowing that disasters will strike

and that everything can be so easily lost?

We shouldn't be surprised

that Plato's myth is something very different

from what we might expect.

A profound teaching device in the form of a puzzle.

- Do not underestimate any detail.

It's a very high scientific document,

and you can use it to teach either a child

or an initiate.

- A modern puzzle has a single solution or answer,

but the Atlantis myth presents an entirely

different kind of puzzle.

A multi-layered apparatus,

designed for improving your thinking, yourself

and how you see the world,

a world where everything is richly connected.

Plato's best students knew all the writings

and historical events we've covered: the Odyssey, the Iliad,

Herodotus's history,

the Persian wars and the Peloponnesian War.

Given the keen minds of this audience,

Plato could freely play with a vast array of ideas.

If you look hard, you may begin to notice

certain connections and double meanings.

The size of the Atlantean military

recalls Greek estimates of the army that destroyed Athens

in the Persian war.

The sequence of the Atlantean war echoes the flow

of the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta

that shook Greece to its foundation

just as it began to recover from fending off the Persians.

Or perhaps you'll see how Plato requires you

to bend your thinking when he writes

that the length of Atlantis

is longer than Libya and Asia together.

This distance is only definable

if we realize that the phrase

is nearly word for word from Herodotus

when he describes the length of Europe.

And this length doesn't fit Atlantis

unless we curve it into an arc

to follow the shape of the continent.

Moving away from thinking in a straight line

is powerfully emblematic of the approach it takes

to reach the hidden meaning in Plato's myth.

This becomes most apparent

in the journey from familiar waters

into the unknown lands of Atlantis.

To get to Atlantis, one first had to pass

the Pillars of Heracles,

but the word Plato used for the pillars, stela,

didn't mean a structural column

or natural formation like the Rock of Gibraltar.

A stela was a commemorative stone plaque,

something demarcating the edge of Greek expansion,

the limits of what was known.

When you pass by this marker,

you enter an enormous uncertain territory

that you must navigate completely on your own.

It is exactly this territory that Plato wants us to seek.

To succeed there, you'll have to look past easy answers,

leaving linear thinking behind.

And you'll only find your way

by grappling with conflicting information

and complexities at the same time.

Perhaps Atlantis signifies

that while the knowledge of the moment

may crumble and fade with time,

we will always need to discern between true and false.

And even if we'll never reach a perfect ultimate truth,

there is still virtue in taking a step closer to it

if we can.

In today's world of fake news,

Plato's challenge couldn't be more necessary or timelier.

The myth of Atlantis in that sense

holds a greater truth than all our scientific theories

and archeological digs.

- I was looking for Plato and found Atlantis.

The other guys are looking for Atlantis and forgot Plato.

- [Jack] Plato invited his students into a hidden way

of engaging with the puzzle he'd created,

where cultural continuity

and the individual's journey toward wisdom come together

and in an extraordinary way.

The timeless way of the initiate.

This way of thought is perhaps best illustrated

in trying to answer one of the most stubborn enigmas

of this entire story,

the fact that the Atlantis myth has no ending.

- You realize that you might have in front of you

a puzzle to solve.

Do not underestimate the text.

- Critias appears unfinished,

as if Plato was writing it one day,

put his pen down mid-sentence

and never got around to completing the story.

Or maybe he did finish it

and the manuscript was partially destroyed by time,

leaving us with only a fragment.

These are the official explanations,

but let's take a closer look.

The cut-off end of Critias takes place

in a conference of the Gods,

where Zeus addresses the subject of the Atlanteans.

Zeus, realizing that the chosen race

was behaving despicably,

wishing to punish them, called to council all the gods,

and on having assembled them said... Said what?

Knowing what you know now,

doesn't the idea that Plato

simply left off mid-sentence

seem just a little suspicious to you?

To get to the bottom of this enigma,

we need to think like one of Plato's initiates.

(calming music)

Plato challenges you not to memorize what he says,

but to think for yourself.

As we met to discuss his work for the last time,

George demonstrated the depth of his own thinking,

revealing a connection between Plato's Atlantis

and Homer's Odyssey that no one had ever realized before.

Critias has always been considered unfinished,

leaving us to conjecture about the full extent

of the Atlantis story we have lost.

But George has strong evidence

the mid-sentence ending was intentional

and that scholars have misread it for centuries.

When Zeus calls together all the gods

to make his cutoff speech at the end of Critias,

we're presented with a scene

identical to one that takes place

right on the first page of the Odyssey.

Only Poseidon is missing

from the conference of the Gods in the Odyssey, and why?

Poseidon had gone to visit the Ethiopians worlds away

to receive an offering, bulls and rams by the hundred.

He's busy enjoying an animal sacrifice in Africa,

much like the one

Plato has the Atlantean kings perform in Critias.

Poseidon is the patron God of Atlantis,

and a traditional rival to Athena, Goddess of Athens.

He was also God of the Sea and of earthquakes,

which together destroyed the Atlantean capital city.

The matching conferences of the gods called by Zeus,

the links to Africa and Poseidon's special role there.

The parallel animal sacrifices.

These connections between Critias and the Odyssey

seem too obvious not to have been deliberate.

Where is Plato leading us?

- Plato is forcing you to find out the right piece,

which is missing.

Make a crosscheck between the Atlantis story

and the Odyssey story.

Decide by yourself, what could be the end of the story?

- Look at how the Atlantis story ends seemingly mid-sentence

and now here's Zeus,

speaking at an identical gathering of the Gods

on page one of the Odyssey.

Zeus, realizing that the chosen race

was behaving despicably,

wishing to punish them, called to council all the gods,

and on having assembled them said,

"Oh alas, how mortals put the blame on the gods.

"They declare that from us stem their misfortunes,

"while it is often they themselves

"who with their bad deeds fall into grief

"beyond what's written."

It doesn't cut off part way

because Plato was too lazy to finish it.

He did it on purpose.

It redirects you back to the beginning of the Odyssey.

- And what is the story of the Odyssey?

- A man who left the civilization that he knows

and has to go on this long, circuitous journey.

He has to suffer and struggle mightily

just to get back to the point where he started from.

- Welcome Jack, to the realm of Plato's initiates.

- Thanks, George.

This is Plato's meta-lesson

about the continuity of human civilization.

If we do not fight against corruption in our society

and ourselves,

and if we do not plan ahead for periods of disaster,

we will wind up reduced to ignorance,

losing all the great blessings we enjoy,

and it will be a long, circuitous,

and tortured Odyssey to get back to where we began.

"It's certainly possible that things are that way,

"but it is also possible that they are not,

"so you must investigate them courageously and thoroughly

"and not accept anything easily.

"You are still young and in your prime after all.

"Then, after you've investigated them,

"if you happen to discover the truth,

"you can share it with me."

(upbeat music)

- I think we can learn not to ignore the myths, right,

and I think, you know, all the time we're finding

what we thought was a myth,

now we find actually is a reality.

(upbeat music)

(calming music)

(calming music)