Nation gods found too decadent and plunged under the sea

THE first accounts of Atlantis appear in Timaeus and Critias, two dialogues by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.

According to these, the island was described to the Athenian statesman Solon by an Egyptian priest, who claimed that Atlantis was larger than Asia Minor and Libya combined.

He maintained that the nation had conquered all the Mediterranean peoples except the Athenians.

According to Plato, Atlantis had "soil the best in the world, an abundance of water, and in the heaven above an excellently attempered climate".

Its people were so blessed that few were compelled to do physical work.

But they also became so decadent that the gods decided to destroy them and a great catastrophe plunged Atlantis under the waves.

Plato described a series of worldwide floods culminating in the deluge of the Deucalion, dated by Greek historians to the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC.

Theories abound as to why the city disappeared, from Atlantis being hit by a cataclysmic natural disaster to Greek mythology, which describes the civilisation as being so corrupted by greed and power that it was destroyed by the gods.

Most believers agree the ancient civilisation was probably destroyed in the biblical flood of about 9,000 BC.

Sceptics believe Atlantis was a figment of Plato’s imagination. The first modern attempt to prove Atlantis had existed was made in the 19th century by Ignatius Donnelly, an Irish American congressman.

He believed it had once been in the mid-Atlantic because Plato had said that it was "beyond the Pillars of Hercules", long assumed to mean the Straits of Gibraltar.

Some oceanographers in the 20th century theorised that Atlantis was once a Greek island in the Aegean Sea.

Some associated it with the Greek island, Thira, or Thera which geologists say experienced a massive volcanic eruption in about 1640 BC.

Other scholars have variously identified the island with Crete, the Canary Islands, the Scandinavian peninsula and the Americas.

This summer Rainer Kuhne, a German scientist working with satellite images of what appear to be man-made features buried in mud off the southern coast of Spain, concluded that he may have found Atlantis.