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Atlantis from a Geographer's Perspective. Dr Ulf Erlingsson locates Atlantis, in Ireland.

He first came up with his hypothesis, in a flash of inspiration, while researching the pre-historic structures of Ale Stenar in Sweden. During the course of his studies he re-read Plato, looking for some details on the ancient geography of Athens. By happy coincidence he registered that the original account of Atlantis corresponded to a map of megalithic monuments that he had encountered. “The idea popped up in my head ‘could it be the megalith culture?’ and I couldn’t let go of the thought without trying to disprove it” says Erlingsson with enthusiasm. With natural curiousity, and using the scientific hypothetic-deductive method, Erlingsson set out to disprove his initial idea. “ I didn’t manage to disprove it. That’s why I wrote the book – he says - actually, I had it lying around for at least a year before I decided to publish it. What eventually made me take the decision to publish it was that when looking at the Internet, what people were saying about Atlantis – people were questioning what scientists were saying. What is the scientific thinking on this continent sinking, and so on. So I felt that someone with some knowledge about it should share it with the public”.

It’s interesting that, despite the hold on the popular imagination that the myth of Atlantis exerts, there is this resistance on the part of the scientific community to examine the story. “if you have this belief in continuous development, then the Atlantis myth would by definition be a violation of what you believe in –suggests Erlingsson -that’s one reason that people off hand presume that it can’t be true, without looking into it. The other reason is that there’s been so much written about this, and if you have 1,000 different theories about something then you know immediately that at least 999 theories must be wrong, so it’s an overwhelming task to get into and go through the various different things that have been written”.

One of the other problems is that quite obviously, Plato was a storyteller. That means that while there are elements of his story that may indeed be true, there are also clearly elements that have been introduced for literary purposes. How does a scientist start sifting through the material, choosing what to use and what not to use for his theory? “When you try to analyse the myth or tradition, you have to see what’s the purpose. Then, in my opinion, you can see in the wording, how the story is told, to what extent the story is based in fact, and to what extent it carries religious or philosophical meaning – responds Erlingsson - If you have something in the story that is fantastic or hard to believe, but is expressed very briefly, that seems to me to express a real historic memory. Then you’ve got something that seems very credible, down to earth, and is explained in incredible detail, unnecessary detail, that I believe is usually invented for the fiction. The reason I believe that is because when people are telling a story, they desperately need to be believed. So they try to push away, or hide, the incredible things. When Plato describes the country of Atlantis, around the city, with ten thousand divisions, and exactly how many weapons, chariots and horses etc. that sounds to me like pure fiction. Also he gives us facts that are just not credible. That they dredged canals 100 feet deep. We wouldn’t even do that today” .

Erlingsson is convinced that his hypothesis is beyond reasonable doubt. The publishing of the book was, needless to say, marked by controversy, with experts being wheeled out to pronounce on the book (often without having read it), but now that the fuss has died down a bit, what does Erlingsson hope for the book and his hypothesis? Does he expect it to be countered by his scientific colleagues? “I hope they try”, he says, with the tone of a man who doesn’t expect to be proven wrong.

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