[Anotherpundit]

Oh, yes, certainly there was *some* contact, of *some* kind, on *some* level. But to leap from that, to saying there was enough contact for detailed legends to be transmitted through several different cultures and finally reach Plato, well, that's a bit more of leap; especially when there are several other stories and myths in the Republic that are obvious and total fabrications.

I don't have a problem believing that any one of these things happened seperately, but I have a big problem leaping from there to an established relationship between the two -- just because a city sank somewhere at some point in time, doesn't mean Plato based his account of a city sinking on that event. If it was anything at all beyond pure imagination, Plato's atlantis was probably a heavily-embroidered rendering of the sinking of Crete by volcanic eruption.

[spycatcher]

I agree that "Atlantis!" is brought up everytime someone finds something somewhere underwater. And it never looks like Plato's Atlantis.

My point is that we can ignore Plato's lost city account and just consider the possibility that their is a lot more water on earth than there used to be. In that case "Atlantis" would be a generic term for the civilization that used to be but is now lost under the ocean. Could be several cities that used advanced navigation and building design, etc. -- and that may be where the astromony used in building pyramids on both sides of the ocean came from.

So let's not let Plato be our guide to prove or disprove anything at this early point. But why not scientifially pursue the general notion that his story may have stemmed from an oral tradition that was an account of history.