This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on I Heart radio. Filmmaker and author Jack Kelly and director of the Atlantis puzzle is with us. And we're talking about newly retranslated Greek texts from Plato that suggest Atlantis may never have sunk beneath the ocean at all, but instead vanished beneath time, climate change, and most importantly, centuries of mistranslation. Jack, you were explaining sort of how this story came down to Plato of Atlantis and these three individuals sitting around trying to do regale Socrates about Atlantis. So. Just carry on. What did they tell Socrates about this this empire, this bloodthirsty empire, I think you call them, that actually attacked Athens and much of the Greek world. Centuries before. Right. So this is this is a mysterious, mysterious story. And when we get we end the Tamea story, which is most of the text is this kind of philosophical text about the origin and nature of the universe and how human beings came to be in it and so forth. And you say, well, what's that have to do with Atlantis? So then that book ends and boom, now here we are in the book called Critias, and this is where the character Critias comes back. He's jogged his memory and he's got this story to tell that he heard long ago. And the origin of the story about this sort of prehistoric war that took place around 9600 B.C. between the hostile Atlantean Empire and the good guys, you know, the sort of proto Athenian people and this Greek coalition that pushed these bad guys back and drove them all the way back to their capital city where there was a terrible battle and the gods became angered. And in a single day and night, Atlantis was struck, the capital city was struck by earthquakes and floods. And not only was it destroyed, but the Athenian army that had gone there to try and defeat these bad guys was also destroyed, lost in the earthquakes, swallowed up by the earth. So this story and all its sort of elaborate, you know, descriptions and so forth in this book, Critias, is notable for two reasons. One, it supposedly came down to these characters sitting around there through Critias' ancestors, through Solon. Well, how did Solon hear about it? And Solon, well, he was a Athenian statesman around 600 B.C. But after he set up the Athenian government, he took off for a sort of a sabbatical for about 10 years. And one of the places he went to was the Temple of Scythe in the Egyptian Nile Delta. Now, this was a real place. And at that time period, there was a lot of exchange between the Egyptians and the Greeks. And so around maybe 593 B.C., Solon went there to the Temple of Scythe. And he starts talking with these priests there who are very educated and knowledgeable about the distant past. And so he starts kind of talking to them about what the Greeks version of the ancient past was. And he goes back farther and farther and farther and look at inevitably at a certain point, history starts to blend into myth and he tells them, you know, well, we have these flood myths going all the way back to the great flood of Decalion. And that's sort of what we know. And the Egyptians, these Egyptian priests in this massive temple there, the Nile Delta, they just kind of laugh at him. And he's like, well, what are you guys laughing at? They said, well, you Greeks are always children. You don't really understand. You've lost all awareness of yourselves and you don't even understand your own past. And Solon says, well, what are you talking about? And he said, well, first of all, there wasn't just one great flood, but at least, you know, three multiple great floods. And there were other great destructive events. And we Egyptians, we know about all this stuff because we got it written down here in our temples. And you Greeks, every time there's a big disaster or a famine or a flood or, you know, comet striking the earth, your society gets totally obliterated. You get knocked back to the Stone Age and you have to sort of start over from scratch. You've totally lost all memory of your own culture. And in fact, I'm going to tell you a story that shows that this is true. You don't even know about your own ancestors from 9000 years ago who once defeated the Atlanteans. So then the priest goes on to kind of tell the Atlantean War story. Now, the other notable thing about this book, Critias, is that it's unfinished, right? The book kind of cuts off maybe about a third of the way through it. It's much shorter than Tumas. So just as you're starting to really get to like the action and the war of the Atlanteans versus the Greeks, and how did this happen in 9600 BC, what happened? Well, the story is just sort of cuts off, it ends mid-sentence. So for for hundreds of thousands of years, a lot of people had assumed that Plato either lost interest in the story or that he became ill and died before he could finish it. Or, you know, maybe even that there there was a finished version of it somewhere out there. But it just, you know, the manuscript had been kind of destroyed by by time and the elements. And it was just lost to us as many, many, you know, works of ancient authors have been destroyed by time. So that's that's kind of the that's kind of the the set off. OK, so let's talk about again, getting back to George Serentides and this linguistic misunderstanding that has relegated the Atlantis story not only to the realm of fantasy, but has left lead people on these wild goose chases. Some people believe Atlantis is under the ocean near Bermuda. Some people you mentioned the Azars, Azores, rather the Azores believe it's there. Others believe it's somewhere else. What was this linguistic under misunderstanding that led people astray? Right. So Richard, this is this was the crux. This is what hooked me into Serentides's ideas and said to me that this was worthy of spending years making a documentary and writing a book to get get this story out to the world. So Serentides was a huge Plato fan. He was an engineer by training. He'd studied ancient Greek and university and high school and so forth. He was perplexed by the fact that Plato who was such a master of logic and such a philosopher. So why is this guy spending time telling stories and myths and specifically why why did he write this Atlantis story in the first place? So he started digging into it and he started going back and reading through modern English and Greek translations of the ancient texts. And because he also read ancient Greek, he was looking at them side by side. And it is, you know, the first thing he noticed was when you get to the part about what where was Atlantis and the story says, well, you had to cross this body of water. If you were going to Atlantis from Greece called the Atlantic Pelagos. Well, that was translated as Atlantic Ocean. So all the old translations from the 1800s. By the way, these were the translations Ignatius Donnelly would have used in crafting his theories about the Azores. They all say, well, you know, you had to go out past the pillars of Hercules and cross the Atlantic Ocean and it was somewhere out there. But they also say a lot of other weird contradictory stuff that doesn't make any sense if you were going to cross the Atlantic Ocean, like in their era, in the other words, in the era of the story being told around 600 BC, the Atlantic Pelagos had silted up. Well, you and I both know the Atlantic Ocean has not silted up any time in the last, you know, you know, however many hundred millions of years. So what what you're left with is this puzzle and Cerenitidus, it just dawned on him. This isn't this isn't the right translation. Pelagos is a word that's still used in modern Greek to refer to bodies of water like the Aegean Sea or the Ionian Sea or, you know, maybe the Adriatic. These are seas that are partially enclosed by land, have islands in them and so forth. They're not oceans. And the Greeks had a different word for ocean. It was oceanos, which from which we obviously get ocean. And to them, you know, oceanos, the ocean was the body of water that extended all the way around Europe, Asia and Africa, which was that was the world that they knew at that time. So you're left with this head scratcher, which is OK, Atlantic Pelagos. You could just picture these ancient sort of guys a couple hundred years ago and at Oxford and so forth, scratching their scratching their heads and sort of saying, you know, I say, Chauncey, have you ever heard of an Atlantic Pelagos? You know, no, I have not. And it must have meant the Atlantic Ocean. But I write a little chap, you know, carry on. So what these guys translating the story didn't have the advantage of is we have a modern understanding of climate science, where we understand the climate has changed. And so these guys basically just made this assumption. Hey, I've never heard of an Atlantic Pelagos sea, ocean, you know, potato, potato. I guess he meant the Atlantic Ocean because that was the only body of water named Atlantic that they knew about. Well, what Serentetus realized is, hey, Plato's a very specific linguist, right? He uses the word Okeanos in other books he's written. If he meant to say ocean, he would have said it, but he didn't. So he meant something specific with those words. And, you know, I like to give the examples that the ancient Greeks had several different words for bodies of water that we just call sea, like the Mediterranean was a thalassa. That's what that meant. The what we call the Black Sea today. They called the Eucseneos Pontos, which meant a brackish sea that was friendly to strangers. Right. It's very specific, right? That what that body of water is. So I think it's the equivalent of somebody conflating the Hudson River, the Hudson Bay and, you know, Hudson's Pond or something like that. Right. So the. So the idea is the ocean was it was mistranslated. People thought Pallagos meant ocean, the Atlantic Ocean. So they were looking beyond the the Pillars of Hercules, which is Gibraltar, right? That's and see, that's the other key piece of the puzzle, Richard, is today. That's what the what the Pillars of Hercules refer to. And that all started around the time that the Romans conquered the entire Mediterranean. And that's where the Pillars of Hercules kind of became fixed there. But this is the other astonishing thing is when Sarantius went back and did some research and anybody can go out and, by the way, corroborate this, you go back to different ancient authors of the ancient Greek era and the Pillars of Hercules appear in multiple different places around the Mediterranean. There is even a Roman author, Tacitus, who said there were Pillars of Hercules up in the North Sea at the mouth of some river. So what does this mean? It must mean something different than just a single fixed fixed place. And so maybe this had a more symbolic meaning. Now you have to get into some more of the nuance and without going into too much of the detail. Essentially, Sarantius used the grammar of the story, the specific words and an awareness of what those words meant at that time in history, right? But what the connotation of the word was, right? And I give the example, I mean, you know, the word gay means something very different in the 21st century than it meant in the 19th century. There's lots of examples of this. So he actually took the trouble to go back, look at the connotation of all the words Plato was using for his geography and came up with an astonishing conclusion. And that conclusion was this, the Atlantic Ocean had nothing to do with it. To get to Atlantis from Greece, you had to cross the Mediterranean and then pass through the mouth of an outlet of a river that entered the Mediterranean. You had to enter a sea called the Atlantic Pelagos. And from there you could access sort of the interior of the Atlantic continent. And through doing all this research, he could only sort of pin this to one place. And he said, this has to be part of North Africa. There's no other explanation geographically that makes any sense. And through a series of logical deductions, so forth, he kind of came up with a schematic of what Atlantis, the continent looked like. And lo and behold, you know, this is where the moment came for me of superimposing that on sort of Northwest Africa. And the fit is astonishing. What was, so we're talking about the Sahara, correct? Yes, the whole sort of Northwestern part of modern Africa. Right, right. What was the Sahara like? We're talking 10,000, 12,000 years ago. What was it like back then? Well, that's the other remarkable piece of this puzzle is you'd say, well, you know, today the Sahara Desert is this kind of enormous wasteland. And, you know, the myth describes all this lush greenery and waterways and all these different massive lakes and seas and rivers and so forth. So even if Sarantitas was sort of right about the schematics and the directions of the grammar, well, how could any of the story possibly have any truth to it? Right. So what you're talking about is this notion of climate change. And I know that's a very popular buzzword these days, but I think it's hard to impress in our minds just how drastic natural climate change could be. And there's something when you go back eight, nine, 10,000 BC, the time, the era, the Atlantis story, we call this period the Green Sahara. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at 1am Eastern and go to coast2coastam.com for more.
