Posted on 02/14/2011 6:31:35 PM PST by SunkenCiv
The coastline and landscape of what would become modern Britain began to emerge at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.
What had been a cold, dry tundra on the north-western edge of Europe grew warmer and wetter as the ice caps melted. The Irish Sea, North Sea and the Channel were all dry land, albeit land slowly being submerged as sea levels rose.
But it wasn't until 6,100BC that Britain broke free of mainland Europe for good, during the Mesolithic period -- the Middle Stone Age.
It is thought a landslide in Norway triggered one of the biggest tsunamis ever recorded on Earth, when a landlocked sea in the Norwegian trench burst its banks.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
That was the exact thought behind my first post on this. Oral traditions (I always think of Bill Clinton when I write that) of catastrophic post-glacial flooding would likely have been passed down to the Greeks. But you don't really have to reach nearly that far back to find catastrophic historic events that very likely gave Plato the Atlantis notion.
In 373 BC, a violent earthquake, accompanied by a tsunami, destroyed Helike and Bura, two cities situated on the southern shores of the Gulf of Corinth roughly 150 km west of Athens. Plato was in his mid 50s at the time. Helike was the capital of the Achaean League and revered throughout the ancient world as the cult centre for worship of Poseidon. (Recall that Platos Atlantis was ruled by a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings arose directly from Poseidon, god of sea and of earthquakes).
This was a period when Greece was victimized by numerous large and deadly earthquakes. Earlier, in 426 B.C. an earthquake-caused tsunami had either destroyed or created the island of Atalante (historical accounts differ). Im pretty well convinced that Platos literary/philosophic conception of Atlantis was a fictional cautionary tale based on these historic events and others.
Dont forget the great Spartan earthquake of 464 B.C. that ushered in the Earthquake War between Sparta and Athens. As one writer put it: At the end of a century that had witnessed one of the most violent earthquake storms to have affected the ancient world, ordinary Greeks probably didn't speculate on the origins of the mythical Atlantis; they were too busy surviving its reality.
Continual quakes happened during the Pelopponesian War, including the offshore one which swept away an Athenian fort and garrison, the rocky isle of Atalante, which wasn’t much of an island (the account I’ve seen said it hadn’t previously been occupied). The connection between earthquakes and tsunamis was obviously understood — Poseidon was also the Earthshaker — and even in the Iliad, there are events that are probably related to quakes (a river ran backwards, everyone was fleeing in terror, that kind of thing).
The point is, Plato didn’t write about them, he didn’t write about Thera either (the “super-eruption” there is mythical anyway), and for that matter didn’t write about Ryan and Pitman’s Black Sea Flood. He wrote about a disaster caused by the celestial orbs leaving their accustomed places, the Phaethon story, and about shoal mud outside Gibraltar. He may indeed have made up every last detail, or based it on something recent and local, but I don’t find that explanation compelling.
I do. Different strokes and all that...
Oral traditions (I always think of Bill Clinton when I write that)BTW, I neglected to say LOL on that one. :')
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GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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