Chandri MacLeod (chandri) wrote,
Chandri MacLeod
chandri

Okay, kids. (And by "kids" I mean geologists and mythologists.)

Here's a question for all you rock and myth-buffs. I won't elaborate too much, because it will be confusing, but: Plato says Atlantis sank in approx. 9500 BC. As this is inconvenient to the founding origin-myth for my Paxverse, I have decided that Plato heard about it second or third-hand, and then twisted the story for his political ends (not something Plato never did, after all). I have decided that he got the story from an Atlantean survivor, or that he got it from someone else who did - as there were very few of these people (talking Paxverse here, now) and as the few who escaped were either more or less sworn to secrecy, it's not insane to assume that few people would have heard of Atlantis at all except for being aware of the flood that would have been caused when a giant frickin' island sunk into the Atlantic ocean (and in this case I'm taking the classic "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" line in terms of location, that is, out to sea somewhere beyond Spain and Morocco).

Now. For Plato to have been able to twist the story it has to have happened adequately before Plato's active literary career for there to be no one around to protest (either in his early life or within a few generations before he was born). This is easily enough managed, because there are lots of floods one can tag as having been caused by the sinking of a huge island. The problem? There are too many bloody floods. So I ask you, Internets; what would be an appropriate big flood (even something as minor as a tsunami - it just has to have been significant enough for someone along the Atlantic to have written it down. Plato wrote Timaeus and Critias, the first written mention of Atlantis, in 360 BC. So I need a flood that happened within a couple hundred years before 360 BC. If you can think of more than one, hell, list 'em all! I'm just tired of reading about corrupted memory myths of the biblical flood today. Perhaps tomorrow.
Tags: atlantis, my people, mythology, paxverse, webby
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