Social Sciences, Anthropology

The Atlantis Syndrome

Name: The Atlantis Syndrome
Author: Paul Jordan
ISBN: 9780750925976

by Paul Jordan

Write a review

Synopsis

Atlantis: fact or fiction? Simply an invention, or an idea with some truth in it about our distant past? Has there ever been a superior civilization, lost to conventional archaeology, to which the rest of the world's cultures somehow owe their own origins? Spurred by the recent output of publications, television programmes and websites that encourage belief in the Atlantis idea, in this book a respected mainstream archaeological writer takes on the theories of the 'alternative archaeologists'.
The Atlantis Syndrome explores the whole concept of Atlantis from Plato's first references to it around 360 BC, when the story started life as a moral tale with strong reference to the sorry state of Plato's home city of Athens in a materialistic age. After the close of classical times, Atlantis was largely forgotten until the Renaissance, when, with the dawn of the great age of exploration, it became a way of interpreting new discoveries around the world, especially in the Americas.
The Atlantis idea has exercised its strange fascination ever since. All the theories of alternative archaeology, however diverse, continue to circle round the central idea of a lost ancient supercivilization of surpassing wisdom and prowess, whose survivors scattered themselves like seeds of enlightenment around the world after some prodigious catastrophe. Mysterious ancient texts in vanished languages, lost tribes, underwater roads and temples, cities buried beneath the Antarctic ice, sacred geometries all around the world, star maps in pyramid fields and flight paths of the 'gods': all these notions relate back to the Atlantis idea and are critically reviewed, author by author, in this book, to build up a diagnosis of the 'Atlantis Syndrome' of beliefs and attitudes so passionately maintained in many quarters in the face of orthodox archaeology and science. And, finally, if it turns out that Atlantis never existed after all and the entire set of theories associated with it cannot be sustained then we have the opportunity to find out in this book what might really have happened in the long course of human evolution and prehistory.