This is it!!!I don’t know if they’ll “find Atlantis,” but if it’s anywhere, it’s off the southern Mediterranean coast of Spain.
One of the many peculiar things about Spain is that the origin of the “Iberos” (Iberians, meaning the tribes that populated southern Spain when the Romans arrived) is unknown. But what is even more unknown is the culture that created the Dama de Elche, a remarkable bust of a female (probably a queen or other important person) that was found in the city of Elche, not on the coast but not very far away from it. Google it.
This is it!!!Tarshish was Crete. Tartessos was probably the same place, but may have become equated with Tarshish by accident.
The so-called Tartessian culture in Iberia didn’t leave a deep imprint, as if it came and went in a generation or two, and no city site has ever been identified. Still, referencing Tartessos in dictionaries will still turn up the unsubstantiated claim that it was in the Guadalquivir valley. Again, there’s zero evidence of that.
The very interesting cultural remains and sites (like that excellent graphic of Dama de Elche, thanks for that) don’t even appear to be that closely related to each other, suggesting a period of settlement by a variety of outsiders, who then had to leave for some reason, were driven out, died off some way, etc.
The Dama de Elche bears closest resemblance to the terracotta masterpieces of the Etruscans, perhaps the artist came from there, or had travelled there and was influenced by it. The Etruscans themselves came from further east, and (even for those who don’t accept that) they were influenced by Ionian Greeks, probably due to trade and having been their neighbors at one time, in Anatolia and the Aegean.