Synopsis
A historian's investigation that may have solved one of humankind's greatest and most enduring mysteries: the location of the "Lost City" of Atlantis. More than 2,350 years ago Plato wrote of the fabulous island empire of Atlantis, which ruled the ocean as well as parts of the "opposite continent" - what we know today as the Americas - until the single "terrible day and night" that destroyed it in a storm of earthquakes and floods. For two millennia the fate of Atlantis has fascinated historians, philosophers, and explorers who have debated its reality and searched in vain for a kingdom shrouded in myth and legend. And now, after years of travel and research, Andrew Collins has gathered convincing evidence that may establish not only that Atlantis did indeed exist but also that remnants of it survive today. Collins's journey into the past follows the clues left by Plato, and they take him far beyond Crete and the Mediterranean, where scholars in recent times have located Atlantis. So do mummies in Egypt, Roman wreckage in the West Atlantic, the African features of great stone heads in Mexico, and the explosion of a comet 10,500 years ago. Collins's final destination will shock the experts and amaze all readers. "Acclaimed historian provides for the first time a clear argument for the civilization's existence and a pointer to its location." - The Express; "Probably the most substantial and well researched book on Atlantis since Ignatius Donnelly." - Colin Wilson, Daily Mail.
Reviews
Proceeding from the adage that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Collins navigates through the ancient and medieval references to Atlantis, of which not an iota of indisputable archaeological evidence has ever surfaced. He restrains credulousness in the text with conditional constructions and never imperatively claims that any particular detail proves Atlantis existed. Read the book on Collins' terms, and he proves an engaging conductor of an exegetical tour of Plato's writings about a civilization on an island in the Western Ocean that colonized bits of Europe but vanished when a natural catastrophe befell its homeland. Collins discounts the proposition that the 1500 B.C. eruption of Thera, which coincided with the decline of Minoan civilization, underlies the Atlantis story. Instead, he fields a blizzard of propositions; these, in a nutshell, propose that a Phoenician colony in Iberia might have had transoceanic contact with the Olmec and other Meso-American civilizations. Accept the what-if-ness of Collins' views, and his book may enamor imaginations sparked by the legend of lost Atlantis. Gilbert Taylor
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