The tale of an advanced civilization that catastrophically vanished long ago has long been a lure for Atlantis hunters. But archaeologists are blunt: there’s a good reason why we’ll never find it
, or the “island of Atlas,” and the philosopher didn’t intend it to represent the pinnacle of human achievement. Instead, the island civilization was designed as a fictional foil to the real city of Athens. In Plato’s dialogues, Atlantis is presented as a sophisticated state that fell after its hubristic leaders attempted to invade Greece.
At the time, Europeans were grappling with a sea change in their vision of the world, one that was expanding dramatically with increasing contact between Europeans and Indigenous people throughout the Americas and Pacific during the Age of Exploration. presented a unified theory of Atlantis as a lost continent that had been destroyed by the same Great Flood depicted in the Hebrew Bible—and whose technologically advanced, superhuman inhabitants had supposedly gone on to birth modern civilizations worldwide.
“It’s not something that has a historical kernel to it,” says Dibble. Nor does Plato’s fictitious city appear in works of art from Plato’s lifetime, indicating that Atlantis was a product of the philosopher’s imagination and not a widespread public belief.The lack of actual historical evidence underpinning Plato’s parable, however, hasn’t stopped people from continuing their hunt and insisting that archaeologists are hiding evidence of the lost city from the public.
“If you think the study of ancient world is the solving of a riddle, or unraveling the clues of a puzzle, you’re stuck in a fantasy world that was created by pulp fiction writers,” says Anderson. “It’s a fun world to play in, but it’s not actual archaeological research.”
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