Mark Adams, Meet Me in Atlantis

Somewhere, beneath the sea…

Every clue to the final resting place of the lost city of Atlantis comes from a single, ancient source: the Greek philosopher Plato. And even he heard the story eighth-hand, passed down from a distant ancestor who heard it from an Egyptian priest some 9,000 years after the legendary city purportedly sank beneath the waves.

Moreover, much of Plato's description of Atlantis sounds patently impossible: a Bronze Age city before there were Bronze Age cities, crisscrossed by manmade waterways more than 80 times the volume of the Panama Canal.

So was Atlantis real, or just a literary device invented by Plato to illustrate the fragility of civilization and other political ideas laid down in The Republic? Author Mark Adams spans the globe to answer that question in Meet Me in Atlantis (Dutton, 320 pages, $27.95).

The search for Atlantis is a task shunned by most academics, so Adams grounds his quest by enlisting the aid of Tony O'Connell, a retired working-class Irishman who has compiled perhaps the world's largest online encyclopedia of scientific theories about Atlantis, atlantipedia.ie. O'Connell writes in an evenhanded tone, skeptical but open-minded, favoring no particular theory or location for the lost city.

Next, Adams travels to Minnesota, where a congressman from the Gilded Age did more than anyone since Plato to shape popular conceptions (and misconceptions) about Atlantis. Ignatius Donnelly promulgated the geologically improbable belief that Atlantis sank into the Atlantic. He also credited the lost city with inventing the pyramids, mummification of the dead, and even male circumcision.

With his trademark wit, Adams likens Donnelly's theories to a book he once bought at a yard sale that sought "to prove that Paul McCartney had died at the height of the Beatles' fame and had been secretly replaced by an exact double."

From there, Adams leads his readers on a world tour of plausible sites for the lost city: Tartessos, a trade city now believed buried beneath a swamp in southwestern Spain; the island nation of Malta; Knossos on Crete; Santorini, Greece, a city built around a lake formed by a volcanic eruption; and, perhaps most intriguingly, a circular geological depression near Agadir on the west coast of Morocco. All of these locations roughly fit most of Plato's criteria for the lost city of Atlantis, Adams reasons, but so do dozens of "lost cities" around the Mediterranean, a region scourged throughout history by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.

Ultimately, Adams hedges his bets, concluding that the story of Atlantis is not entirely fact or fiction. Instead, it's a blend of oral tradition, Pythagorean mathematics and documented history in which Plato demonstrated for his readers that "everything else in the universe was worth guessing at, even the universe itself.” 

GO: Mark Adams speaks at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 800-878-7323, on Thursday, March 12. 7:30 pm. Free.

WWeek 2015

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