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Critias
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The only ancient account of Atlantis, and it breaks off mid-sentence. Plato gives the island's rings of water, its temples and its fall, then simply stops. Read what he wrote and judge for yourself.
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Why we can share it: Project Gutenberg record: 'Copyright Status: Public domain in the USA.' Translator Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893) died 1893; translation published in the 19th century.
Read the story behind it
PlaceAtlantisPlato says a great island empire sank in a single day and night, and then his unfinished dialogue stops mid-sentence just as Zeus starts to speak. No Greek writer before him mentions Atlantis. So was it a warning parable, a memory of a real disaster, or something else? The sources point several ways.EventSolon and the priests of SaisAn aged Egyptian priest told the Athenian lawmaker Solon that Greeks are children with no old men among them. He said the world has been wrecked by fire and flood many times, and Egypt kept the records. Plato is the only source for this meeting. What did the priest say really happened to Phaethon?PlaceDoggerlandWhere the North Sea is now, there was once dry land joining Britain to Europe. Fishermen's nets still bring up Stone Age harpoons and mammoth bones from it. A huge underwater landslide off Norway sent a tsunami across it around 6150 BCE. Doggerland was real, not a legend. How did it vanish?
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