Plato’s Critias says he heard the story of Atlantis from his grandfather, who had heard it from the Athenian statesman Solon (300 years before Plato’s time), who had learned it from an Egyptian priest, who said it had happened 9,000 years before that. Though considered authoritative in his homeland, few outside of Sweden found Rudbeck’s arguments convincing. Later, by way of divine punishment, the island was beset by earthquakes and floods, and sank into a muddy sea.ĭid you know? In 1679 the Swedish scientist Olaus Rudbeck published "Atland," a four-volume work in which he attempted to prove that Sweden was the original site of Atlantis and that all human languages were descended from Swedish. Their armies eventually conquered Africa as far as Egypt and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Etruscan Italy) before being driven back by an Athenian-led alliance. As the Atlanteans grew powerful, their ethics declined. Its culture was advanced and it had a constitution suspiciously similar to the one outlined in Plato’s “Republic.” It was protected by the god Poseidon, who made his son Atlas king and namesake of the island and the ocean that surrounded it. Plato (through the character Critias in his dialogues) describes Atlantis as an island larger than Libya and Asia Minor put together, located in the Atlantic just beyond the Pillars of Hercules-generally assumed to mean the Strait of Gibraltar.
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