Atlantean

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Thu, 8 Jan 2004 11:31:54 -0500,
> "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...> wrote:
>
>
>>On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 08:04:34AM -0800, Gary Shannon wrote:
>>
>>>Intersting thought.  Has anyone ever tried to pass off
>>>a conlang as "the real and true language of ancient
>>>Atlantis?"
>>
>>You mean, other than Marc Okrand's Atlantean (created for
>>the wretched Disney movie)? :)
>
>
> Actually, my Hesperic family is a candidate for the language
> of ancient Atlantis.  My personal opinion about the Atlantis myth
> is that Atlantis was an ancient civilization that existed on the
> British Isles prior to the arrival of the Celts.  It is the same
> people who surface in Celtic and Germanic mythology as "Elves",
> and Hesperic is their language.  Of course, I don't claim that
> Hesperic is indeed what was spoken in Britain back then, it is
> just my speculative fancy about what that language *could* have
> been like.
The best theory of Atlantis I've seen is this one:
<http://www.laketech.com/AD_LC.HTML>

| In a sense, Atlantis actually existed, and was indeed destroyed by
| the sea in a cataclysmic event, very plausibly lasting a day and a
| night. Plato's account was wrong in several essential ways, but
| was derived from correct, if garbled, historical accounts. Plato's
| writings embodied the now lost words of Solon, a Greek ruler who
| visited Egypt circa 590 BC. Plato's account of Atlantis was thus a
| retelling of the story of Solon, who in turn told the stories that
| he had heard during his trip to Egypt.
|
| In Egypt, Solon heard of the ancient land of Keftiu, a
| island-nation named for holding one of the four pillars that
| supported the Egyptian sky. Keftiu was, according to the Egyptians,
| an advanced civilization that was the gateway to and ruler of all of
| the lands to the far west of Egypt. Keftiu traded in ivory, copper,
| and cloth. Keftiu supported hosts of ships and controlled commerce
| far beyond the Egyptians domain. By Egyptian record, Keftiu was
| destroyed by the seas in an apocalypse. Solon carried this story to
| Greece, and passed it to his son and grandson.
|
| Plato recorded and embellished the story from Solon's grandson
| Critias the younger, translating the land of the pillars which held
| the sky (Keftiu) into the land of the titan Atlas. Keftiu-Atlantis
| was Egypt's gateway to the "western" lands (Greece, Libya, and
| beyond), and was the home of a civilization that held dominion over
| the surronding lands. But Plato mistook the location of Atlantis:
| Atlantis was not west of the Mediterranean, but was merely west of
| Egypt. Yet Plato preserved enough detail about the land of Atlantis
| that its identification is now unmistakeable. Plato never realized
| that the land of Atlantis was already familiar to him: Atlantis was
| the land of the Minoan culture, namely ancient Crete. The Minoan
| culture spread its dominion throughout the nearby islands of the
| Aegean, more than 1500 years BC.

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