Ever since Plato created the legend of the lost island of Atlantis, it has maintained a uniquely strong grip on the human imagination. For two and a half millennia, the story of the city and its catastrophic downfall has inspired people--from Francis Bacon to Jules Verne to Jacques Cousteau--to speculate on the island's origins, nature, and location, and sometimes even to search for its physical remains. It has endured as a part of the mythology of many different cultures, yet there is no indisputable evidence, let alone proof, that Atlantis ever existed. What, then, accounts for its seemingly inexhaustible appeal? Richard Ellis plunges into this rich topic, investigating the roots of the legend and following its various manifestations into the present. He begins with the story's origins. Did it arise from a common prehistorical myth? Was it a historical remnant of a lost city of pre-Columbians or ancient Egyptians? Was Atlantis an extraterrestrial colony? Ellis sifts through the "scientific" evidence marshaled to "prove" these theories, and describes the mystical and spiritual significance that has accrued to them over the centuries. He goes on to explore the possibility that the fable of Atlantis was inspired by a conflation of the high culture of Minoan Crete with the destruction wrought on the Aegean world by the cataclysmic eruption, around 1500 b.c., of the volcanic island of Thera (or Santorini). A fascinating historical and archaeological detective story, Imagining Atlantis is a valuable addition to the literature on this essential aspect of our mythohistory.

Traces the legend of Atlantis from the original stories found in the works of Plato to the latest scientific debates and discoveries, and argues that the threat of global warming may lead modern society to the same fate.

The late author Arysio Santos was a highly regarded climatologist, geologist, and nuclear physicist. He was also a scholar of history, folklore, languages, and the occult. In this groundbreaking study of Atlantis, he draws on all these disciplines, as well as ancient maps, Plato’s dialogues, and folkloric narratives, to provide the most compelling case yet of the disappearance of an entire civilization. Professor Santos demonstrates that Plato’s dating of Atlantis’s disappearance in 11,600 BP (before present) precisely corresponds to the catastrophic end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, as well as a historic flood event of cataclysmic proportions. The rising of the sea level by nearly 500 feet, he argues, submerged continent-sized lands—including Atlantis, which he connects with the biblical Garden of Eden. Provocative chapters cover such topics as the continent’s appearance in ancient maps, Indonesia as the true site of Eden, American interpretations of Atlantis, the four rivers of paradise, and more, giving a clear form to the ghostly outline of this fabled land.

Many new and fruitful avenues of investigation open up when scholars consider forgery as a creative act rather than a crime. We invited authors to contribute work without imposing any restrictions beyond a willingness to consider new approaches to the subject of ancient fakes, forgeries, and questions of authenticity. The result is this volume, in which our aim is to display some of the many possibilities available to scholarship. The exposure of fraud and the pursuit of truth may still be valid scholarly goals, but they implicitly demand that we confront the status of any text as a focal point for matters of belief and conviction. Recent approaches to forgery have begun to ask new questions, some intended purely for the sake of debate: Ought we to consider any author to have some inherent authenticity that precludes the possibility of a forger's successful parody? If every fake text has a real context, what can be learned about the cultural circumstances which give rise to forgeries? If every real text can potentially engender a parallel history of fakes, what can this alternative narrative teach us? What epistemological prejudices can lead us to swear a fake is genuine, or dismiss the real thing as inauthentic? Following Splendide Mendax and Animo Decipiendi?, this is the latest installment of an ongoing inquiry, conducted by scholars in numerous countries, into how the ancient world - its literature and culture, its history and art - appears when viewed through the lens of fakes and forgeries, sincerities and authenticities, genuine signatures and pseudepigrapha. How does scholarship tell the truth if evidence doesn't? But fabula docet: The falsum does not simply make the great, annoying stone before the door of the truth (otherwise this here would really be a "council of antiquarians and paleographers"). The falsum makes a delicate, fine tissue. It allows the verum to shine through, in nuances and reliefs that were less noticeable without its counterpart, really tied at the head. And, treated differentiated, it becomes even itself perlucidum, shines out with "hidden values."

Explores the story of Atlantis from many theoretical perspectives and the presence of Atlantis in art and literature

A readable account of the history of natural disasters throughout history.

The untold story of a fascinating Renaissance man on an adventurous hunt for a lost civilization—an epic quest through castles, courts, mythologies, and the spectacular world of the imagination. What do Zeus, Apollo, and the gods of Mount Olympus have in common with Odin, Thor, and the gods of Valhalla? What do these, in turn, have to do with the shades of Hades, the pharaohs of Egypt, and the glories of fabled Atlantis? In 1679, Olof Rudbeck stunned the world with the answer: They could all be traced to an ancient lost civilization that once thrived in the far north of Rudbeck’s native Sweden. He would spend the last thirty years of his life hunting for the evidence that would prove this extraordinary theory. Chasing down clues to that lost golden age, Rudbeck combined the reasoning of Sherlock Holmes with the daring of Indiana Jones. He excavated what he thought was the acropolis of Atlantis, retraced the journeys of classical heroes, opened countless burial mounds, and consulted rich collections of manuscripts and artifacts. He eventually published his findings in a 2,500-page tome titled Atlantica, a remarkable work replete with heroic quests, exotic lands, and fabulous creatures. Three hundred years later, the story of Rudbeck’s adventures appears in English for the first time. It is a thrilling narrative of discovery as well as a cautionary tale about the dangerous dance of genius and madness.

The story of Atlantis, the so-called lost continent, has intrigued people of all walks of life ever since the Greek philosopher Plato wrote about in the fourth century B.C. This volume begins with Plato's original telling of the legend, then explains how early modern scholars rediscovered it and considers the many places around the world that have been proposed as the site of Atlantis. Finally, the book presents a detailed examination of the most widely accepted theory -- that the legend was based on the destruction of the Greek island of Thera by the largest natural catastrophe in recorded history.

This title represents pioneering research into an important but under-researched current. The three sections in the book are devoted to the Theosophical Society, Theosophically influenced religious currents, and the interaction between Theosophy and surrounding culture.

The Bible's grand narrative about Israel's Exodus from Egypt is central to Biblical religion, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim identity and the formation of the academic disciplines studying the ancient Near East. It has also been a pervasive theme in artistic and popular imagination. Israel's Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective is a pioneering work surveying this tradition in unprecedented breadth, combining archaeological discovery, quantitative methodology and close literary reading. Archaeologists, Egyptologists, Biblical Scholars, Computer Scientists, Geoscientists and other experts contribute their diverse approaches in a novel, transdisciplinary consideration of ancient topography, Egyptian and Near Eastern parallels to the Exodus story, the historicity of the Exodus, the interface of the Exodus question with archaeological fieldwork on emergent Israel, the formation of biblical literature, and the cultural memory of the Exodus in ancient Israel and beyond. This edited volume contains research presented at the groundbreaking symposium "Out of Egypt: Israel’s Exodus Between Text and Memory, History and Imagination" held in 2013 at the Qualcomm Institute of the University of California, San Diego. The combination of 44 contributions by an international group of scholars from diverse disciplines makes this the first such transdisciplinary study of ancient text and history. In the original conference and with this new volume, revolutionary media, such as a 3D immersive virtual reality environment, impart innovative, Exodus-based research to a wider audience. Out of archaeology, ancient texts, science and technology emerge an up-to-date picture of the Exodus for the 21st Century and a new standard for collaborative research.