The Hunt for Atlantis Read Online Free PDF

Critias the Elder, who was told about Atlantis as a child by Solon, and he was told about it by Egyptian priests. So what you have is a game of Chinese whispers—well, Hellenic whispers, I suppose”—Hogarth chuckled at the joke—“where there’s inevitably going to be distortion of the original message, like making a copy of a copy of a copy. Now, one of the areas where inaccuracies are most likely to have been introduced over time is in terms of measurements. I mean, there’s an oddity about Critias, which contains almost all of Plato’s detailed descriptions of Atlantis, that is so obvious nobody ever seems to notice it.”
    “And what would that be?” Hogarth asked.
    “That all the measurements Plato gives of Atlantis are not only neatly rounded off, but are also in Greek units! For example, he says that the plain on which the Atlantean capital stood was three thousand stadia by two thousand. First, that’s one precisely proportioned plain, and second, it’s amazingly convenient that it would match a Greek measurement so exactly—especially considering that it came from an Egyptian source!” Nina found it hard to temper her enthusiasm but tried to rein it back to a more professional level. “Even if the Atlantean civilization used something called a stadium, it’s unlikely it would have been the same size as the Egyptian one—or the larger Greek one.”
    Rothschild pursed her lips sourly. “This is all very interesting,” she said, in a tone suggesting she thought the exact opposite, “but how does this enable you to find Atlantis? Since you don’t know what the actual Atlantean measurements were, and nor does anyone else, I don’t see how any of this helps.”
    Nina took a long, quiet breath before answering. She knew that what she was about to say was the potential weak spot in her theory; if the three academics staring intently at her didn’t accept her reasoning, then it was all over …
    “It’s actually key to my proposal,” she said, with as much confidence as she could muster. “Simply put, if you accept Plato’s measurements—with one stadium being a hundred and eighty-five meters, or just under six hundred and seven feet—then Atlantis was a very large island, at least three hundred and seventy miles long and two hundred and fifty wide. That’s larger than England!” She indicated the map on the screen. “There aren’t many places for something that size to hide, even underwater.”
    “What about Madeira?” asked Hogarth, pointing at the map. The Portuguese island was some four hundred miles off the African coast. “Could that be a location for what was left of the island after it sank?”
    “I considered that at one point. But the topography doesn’t support it. In fact, there’s nowhere in the eastern Atlantic that the island Plato describes could be located.”
    Rothschild snorted triumphantly. Nina gave her as scathing a look as she dared before returning to the map. “But it’s this fact that forms the basis of my theory. Plato said that Atlantis was located in the Atlantic, beyond the Pillars of Heracles—which we know today as the Straits of Gibraltar, at the entrance to the Mediterranean. He also said that, converted to modern measurements, Atlantis was almost four hundred miles long. Since there’s no evidence that would reconcile both those statements, either Atlantis isn’t where he said it was … or his measurements are wrong.”
    Philby nodded silently. Nina still couldn’t judge his mood—but suddenly got the feeling that he had already made his decision, one way or the other. “So,” he said, “where is Atlantis?”
    It was not a question Nina had expected to be asked quite so soon, as she’d planned to reveal the answer with a suitable dramatic flourish at the end of her pre sentation. “Uh, it’s in the Gulf of Cádiz,” she said, a little flustered as she pointed at a spot in the ocean about a hundred miles west of the Straits of Gibraltar.