“... in a single day and night of misfortune, the island of Atlantis disappeared into the depths of the sea.” -Plato, 360 B.C.
The secrets of Atlantis have been a topic of fascination for quite some time. The premise of a mysterious underwater island existing has attracted filmmakers and content creators like flies to honey. Many movies (Aquaman, Atlantis: The Lost Continent), TV shows (Stargate Atlantis), video games (Tomb Raider) and books (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) are built around the theme of Atlantis.
In reality, Atlantis is said to be a fictional island described in Plato’s works Timaeus and Critias about 2400 years ago. Scholars and historians consider Atlantis as one of Plato’s parables, and this point of view is supported by the simple and unarguable fact that Plato often narrated fictitious stories.
The founders of Atlantis were said to be half-god and half-human. Atlantis was a paradisal civilization and a great naval power. The island was a haven of precious metals as well as diverse wildlife.
The leading contender for the real Atlantis is the Minoan settlement on the island of Thera, in the Aegean Sea. Sadly, Thera was a volcano. And sometime around 1600 B.C., it erupted spectacularly, blasting much of the island to smithereens. A few ridges of land survived — now called the islands of Santorini — but most of Thera fell beneath the sea, including the great Minoan towns. It’s distinctly possible that centuries later, the ancient Greeks vaguely remembered the disaster of Thera and the arrogant Minoans, and this eventually led to the birth of the Atlantis myth.
Malta has also been considered a possible location for Atlantis, owing to its unique location lying between the eastern and western Mediterranean Sea. Moreover, it is the location of ancient man-made architecture, which for many past and present researchers makes it a contender of being Atlantis.
Some geologists have proposed the theory that Atlantis was actually the city-state of Troy. Despite there being a whole number of theories and suggestions about the reality of Atlantis, one fact remains true about the fabled city - it remains lost.
Atlantis, when seen from a moral point of view, seems to be a warning from Plato to the Greeks about the fatalities of political ambition. It is a story about spiritual people who resided in a utopian civilization; however, they eventually became morally corrupt. Seeing the way the people had drifted from the right path, the gods were furious, and as a consequence delivered earthquakes that caused Atlantis to forever sink beneath the sea.
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