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/r/askhistorians schrieb:

Frage:


I just came across this YouTube channel claiming Richat structure as a possible site of Atlantis which is widely regarded as pseudo-history. Can anyone with more idea on ancient Greek history provide more insights on this claim?


edit: bezieht sich auf dieses Video vom gleichen Kanal, also w/e

Antwort (lang)

Sure! Like the entire genre of "Ancient mysteries" documentaries, this video consists of nothing but cherry-picking, appeals to ignorance, misleading claims and deliberate falsehoods. The fact that the presenter refers positively to Graham Hancock should make it abundantly clear that there is no reason to take him seriously. Hancock is a hack who has spent his entire career spewing out transparently nonsensical theories about early human history that are universally panned by all related academic disciplines. Referring the viewer to Hancock for confirmation of the claims you make in your video is a great way to signal that nothing you want to say has any validity whatsoever.
The main aim of a video like this is to persuade the viewer that they are being presented with a compelling case. It doesn't make you believe its premise by stating facts, but by looking like it does. The video uses some obvious tricks: photos and wikipedia pages with things underlined in red, poorly contextualised source citations, constant appeals to the viewer's own ability to draw the desired conclusion ("doesn't this look just like X?"). Arguments are made persuasive by their presentation: you're being shown 2 pictures and told they look similar, which makes you inclined to focus on the similarities and believe the presenter. Emphasis on the allure of solving the mystery is used to make weak arguments sound strong (such as the "fascinating detail" that a statistically high number of twins are currently born in Nigeria - 12,000 years and thousands of kilometers from the supposed location of Atlantis, and therefore utterly irrelevant).
The cherry-picking itself is extremely obvious with even a casual glance at Plato's actual work (Kritias 113b-121c; the presenter never cites chapter or paragraph, and has no idea how to pronounce "Kritias"). The size of the island and its surrounding moats and ring islands is outlined at 115e-116a. There we find that the city-island's diameter is not, in fact, 127 stades, but only 27. We get the remaining 100 stades mentioned in the video by adding the entire area enclosed within the outer ring wall, mentioned in 117e, which runs through the plain and touches the sea. The presenter obviously chose to use the bigger number because it better fits his measurement of the place that he wants you to believe is Atlantis. In his presentation, he makes it appear like the 3 rings of island and moat alone would be 23.5km across; if we believe Plato, the diameter actually ought to be just 5.5km or so. The central island, according to Plato (116a), was only 1km across. This is much, much smaller than the central feature of the Richat Structure.
The presenter cites Plato on the geographical features surrounding Atlantis, but here he carefully omits the numbers, which are given at 118a. Plato claims that the plain around Atlantis was more than 400km wide and stretched 600km inland from the sea. Atlantis itself, meanwhile, was only 50 stadia (some 10km) from the sea. In other words, the mountain range sheltering the plain north of Atlantis is supposed to have been hundreds of kilometers distant from the city, not directly overlooking the site, as they are at the Richat Structure. The mountains of the range were also, according to Plato, "greater in number and size and beauty than any of the mountains known today". Mauretania's highest mountain is 915m tall - less than a third the size of Mt Olympos.
Now, the point here is not to disprove the theory in the video; that is unnecessary, as Atlantis is not a real place, and any theory about its location is a fantasy by definition. The point is to show that the video arrives at its conclusion by carefully choosing what information to present to you, and what to leave out. It bends and stretches information; it gives you bits that make you believe it is well-researched and thorough, while actually misleading you about what its sources say.
This is apparent, for instance, in its claims about rocks and metals. It mentions the passage where Plato says the city was built out of white and red and black rocks (116a-b), because those are easily suggested by some low-definition pictures that may or may not have been made at the Richat Structure. However, it is careful not to mention Plato's claim that the entire ring wall of Atlantis was plated in bronze and tin and "mountain bronze" (an unknown metal: 116b-c), or that the temple of Poseidon was plated in silver and gold, or that entire precincts in the centre of the island were constructed in gold (116c-d), because there are no traces of any of that stuff left. The inevitable deposits caused by the oxydization of vast quantities of metals when submerged are nowhere to be found. Indeed, it is unthinkable that generations of researchers working on the Richat Structure and establishing the nature of its geology and geological formations (which they started doing in the early 20th century; contrary to the video's claim, the structure was discovered long before it was seen from space) would have missed the vast deposits of an entire ancient civilization, if those deposits were ever there.
This is, of course, where the video gets into some amazing tomfoolery. It asks the viewer to believe that a formation which has been proven geologically to be 100 million years old was in fact given some of its 100-million-year-old features by an unbelievably quick geological process that took place in the course of the last 11,600 years, which is supposedly the actual age of the site. A lot hinges on Atlantis being from the exact period of c. 9,600 BC. Now, I really don't want to debate science with an online video that sets itself the mission to prove scientists wrong by citing the work of Graham Hancock. What I can tell you as an ancient historian is that the number of 11,600 years is completely and utterly meaningless.
The presenter arrives at this number by noting that Solon, the purported source of the story, visited Egypt c.600 BC and heard that the fall of Atlantis happened about 9000 years earlier (Plato, Timaios 23e). In this source, the number 9000 is reached by adding the Greeks' 1000 years since the birth of the first men to the Egyptians' 8000 years of civilization. Apart from the questionable math involved, it is perfectly easy to establish that the Egyptians could have had no sense of their own history prior to the 4th millennium BC, when the Nile Valley was first settled. So where is the knowledge of the remaining 4000+ years coming from?
The fact is that many ancient civilizations claimed to know history down to the time of creation, but they demonstrably actually didn't. The further back you go, the more their stories devolve into listing generations of supernaturally long-lived kings whose reigns all covered neatly round numbers of years. The figure of 8000 years of Egyptian history no doubt reflects or parodies such a tradition. It does not reflect actual knowledge about the past. At best, it is the result of a desire of contemporary Egyptians to claim such antiquity, with no actual way to back it up. So, apart from the fact that we have zero evidence for a civilization ruling most of Western Africa and Europe before the rise of any of the known ancient civilizations, we also know that the date of c. 9600 BC is totally spurious. Even if we believe there is a core of truth in the story, the date given by Plato could be off by thousands of years.
Indeed, even the story Plato tells, that the story of Atlantis was passed down by Solon to the ancestors of Kritias (Kritias113a-b), is wholly unbelievable. Solon's poetry was renowned in Antiquity, and many authors cite lines or whole stanzas, which is how some of his work still survives. Yet at no point can Plato produce even a word of Solonic poetry to substantiate his story. His Kritias presents it as if Solon wrote his record down in a prose history, which was something no Greek had ever done at the time Solon was alive. If this was a genuine tradition relayed by Kritias to Plato, there is no doubt that it would have come with some excellent lines of Solonic verse. Instead, Plato simply connected Solon's name as a travelling sage to the story that supposedly originated "from the Egyptians", known to the Greeks as the oldest and wisest of peoples. This is the most blatant way in which a story could made to sound authoritative to a learned Greek audience, making it all the more likely that it wasn't. Even if the Egyptians actually did tell some kind of story about a lost continent, it is extremely unlikely to have come to Plato through Solon and Kritias, as he claims. It is also extremely unlikely that Herodotos, who went to Egypt and talked to the priests there, wouldn't have said something about it in his long ehtnography of Egypt as the oldest of the world's civilizations. This all points to the obvious reality that the entire story of Atlantis was made up, but it also makes clear that any theory trying to use Plato's words to get at "the truth" is building its cities on quicksand.
In sum, the entire theory is flawed on the macro and micro level; it plays fast and loose with sources and empirical observation; it backs up outrageous and unnecessary claims with pseudoscience and sophistry; it actively misleads the viewer into believing its premise, instead of openly presenting the facts of the case. There is no chance at all that the Richat Structure is Atlantis, even if we assumed for the sake of argument that Atlantis really existed.
I hope that answers your question!