The Hunt for Atlantis Read Online Free PDF Page B

“I think.”
    “You think?” sneered Rothschild. “I hope you have more to back up that statement than mere guesswork.”
    “If you’ll let me explain my reasoning, Professor Rothschild,” said Nina with forced politeness, “I’ll show you how I reached that conclusion. The central premise of my theory is that Plato was right, and that Atlantis did actually exist. What he got wrong was the measurements.”
    “Rather than the location?” asked Hogarth. “You’re ruling out any of the modern theories that maintain Atlantis was actually Santorini, off Crete, and the supposed Atlantean civilization was really Minoan?”
    “Definitely. For one thing, the ancient Greeks knew about the Minoans already. Also, the time scales don’t match. The volcanic eruption that destroyed Santorini was about nine hundred years before Solon’s time, but the fall of Atlantis was nine thousand years before.”
    “The ‘power of ten’ error by Solon has been widely accepted as a way to connect the Minoans with the Atlantis myth,” Rothschild pointed out.
    “The Egyptian symbols for one hundred and one thousand are totally different,” Nina told her. “You’d have to be blind or a complete idiot to confuse them. Besides, Plato explicitly states in Timaeus that Atlantis was in the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean. Plato was a pretty smart guy; I’m guessing he could tell east from west. I believe that in the process of the story being passed from the Atlanteans themselves to the ancient Egyptians, then from the Egyptian priests of almost nine thousand years later to Solon, then from Solon to Plato over several generations of Critias’s family … the measurements got messed up.”
    Philby raised an eyebrow. “Messed up?”
    “Okay, maybe that’s not the most scientific way I could have put it, but it gets the point across. Even though the names were the same—feet, stadia and so on—the different civilizations used different units of measurement. Each time the story went from one place to another, and the numbers were rounded off, and even exaggerated to show just how incredible this lost civilization really was, the error grew. My assumption here is that whatever unit the Atlanteans used that was translated as a stadium, it was considerably smaller than the Hellenic unit.”
    “That’s quite an assumption,” said Rothschild.
    “I have logical reasoning to back it up,” she said. “Critias gives various measurements of Atlantis, but the most important ones relate to the citadel on the island at the center of the Atlantean capital’s system of circular canals.”
    “The site of the temples of Poseidon and Cleito,” noted Philby, rubbing his mustache.
    “Yes. Plato said the island was five stadia in diameter. If we use the Greek system, that’s slightly over half a mile wide. Now, if an Atlantean stadium is smaller, it can’t be too much smaller, because Critias says there’s a lot to fit on to that island. Poseidon’s temple was the biggest, a stadium long, but there were other temples as well, palaces, bathhouses … That’s almost as packed as Manhattan!”
    “So how big—or rather, how small—did you deduce an Atlantean stadium to be?” Hogarth asked.
    “The smallest I think it could be would be two thirds the size of the Greek unit,” explained Nina. “About four hundred feet. That would make the citadel over a third of a mile across, which when you scale down Poseidon’s temple as well leaves just about enough room to fit everything in.”
    Hogarth made some calculations on a piece of notepaper. “By that measurement, the island would be, let’s see …”
    Nina instantly did the mathematics in her head. “It would be two hundred and forty miles long, and over a hundred and sixty wide.”
    Hogarth scribbled away for a few seconds to reach the same result. “Hmm. That wouldn’t just be in the Gulf of Cádiz … it would be the Gulf of Cádiz.”
    “But you have to take into account the