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    Atlantis Lake Tritonis and Pharos PDF

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    1) Robert Graves took interest in Atlantis between 1953-1967, first writing about it in 1953 and returning to the topic in 1955 and 1967. 2) Graves argued that the story Plato's dialogues was a conflation of a flood in western Libya and ruins of harbor works on the island of Pharos in Egypt. 3) Graves believed the harbor ruins on Pharos, which evidence suggests was once larger, could have inspired Plato's description of a sunken island civilization.

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    Atlantis Lake Tritonis and Pharos PDF

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    1) Robert Graves took interest in Atlantis between 1953-1967, first writing about it in 1953 and returning to the topic in 1955 and 1967. 2) Graves argued that the story Plato's dialogues was a conflation of a flood in western Libya and ruins of harbor works on the island of Pharos in Egypt. 3) Graves believed the harbor ruins on Pharos, which evidence suggests was once larger, could have inspired Plato's description of a sunken island civilization.

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    1) Robert Graves took interest in Atlantis between 1953-1967, first writing about it in 1953 and returning to the topic in 1955 and 1967. 2) Graves argued that the story Plato's dialogues was a conflation of a flood in western Libya and ruins of harbor works on the island of Pharos in Egypt. 3) Graves believed the harbor ruins on Pharos, which evidence suggests was once larger, could have inspired Plato's description of a sunken island civilization.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    46 views3 pages

    Atlantis Lake Tritonis and Pharos PDF

    Uploaded by

    ian
    1) Robert Graves took interest in Atlantis between 1953-1967, first writing about it in 1953 and returning to the topic in 1955 and 1967. 2) Graves argued that the story Plato's dialogues was a conflation of a flood in western Libya and ruins of harbor works on the island of Pharos in Egypt. 3) Graves believed the harbor ruins on Pharos, which evidence suggests was once larger, could have inspired Plato's description of a sunken island civilization.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 3

    Atlantis, Lake Tritonis and Pharos

    Oliver D. Smith

    Abstract: The following note looks at Robert Graves’s casual


    writings about Atlantis, 1953-1967, foregrounding areas of
    difference with classical scholars and suggesting sources of
    influence.

    Keywords: Atlantis, Greek myths, Plato, ancient Egypt

    Among the many classical subjects in which Robert Graves took an


    interest during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the topic of Atlantis
    showed particular sticking power. Graves first wrote about it in
    ‘What Happened to Atlantis’ (1953), devoted several paragraphs
    to it in 1955 in The Greek Myths, and returned to it again fourteen
    years later in ‘The Lost Atlantis’ (1967).
    The tale of Atlantis enters Western Literature in Plato’s dialogues
    Timaeus and Critias c. 355 BCE. Plato claims Solon the Athenian
    lawmaker and poet visited Saïs, Egypt and heard a tale of a sunken
    island civilisation named Atlantis from temple priests. He began to
    adapt the tale into a poem, which he never completed. Nevertheless,
    the details were passed on by word of mouth to Dropides, Solon’s
    relative and friend.1 In ‘What Happened to Atlantis?’ and The Greek
    Myths, Graves argues that what the Saitic priests told to Solon was
    a tale woven together of a flood in western Libya at Lake Tritonis,
    during the third millennium BCE, and the ‘harbour works […] on
    the island of Pharos’.2
    In the fourth century BCE, Pharos was connected to the mainland
    of Egypt by the Hepastadion, a 1200-meter-long causeway. In 1916,
    the French engineer Gaston Jondet discovered evidence of a
    submerged harbour adjacent to Pharos, suggesting the island was
    once larger.3 Jondet dated this harbour to the time of Ramesses II
    (thirteenth-century BCE). Graves proposed that the ruins of Jondet’s
    216 Oliver D. Smith

    harbour could have been basis for the sunken island civilisation
    described by Plato. In this etymology, Graves may have been
    influenced by Spyridon Marinatos an archaeologist whose paper
    in Cretica Chronica (1950) also argued that Saitic priests had
    conflated separate events.4 But Graves disregarded Marinatos’s
    theory that linked Atlantis to the volcanic destruction of the island
    Thera (What Happened, p. 74).
    More than a decade after The Greek Myths, Graves returned to
    the subject in ‘The Lost Atlantis’ (1967), disputing an Aegean
    location for the lost island.5 In the 1960s, the notion that Thera
    (Crete) was Atlantis became current among laypersons and was
    supported by Angelos Galanopoulos, a seismologist whose work
    (largely based on Marinatos) was familiar to Graves (Crane Bag,
    pp. 69-70). While Graves rejected the Aegean location, he speculated
    that the harbour on Pharos may have been built by the seafaring
    Minoans (Greek Myths, p. 142), and thus served as the source for
    the descriptions of Minoan Crete that coloured Plato’s description
    (p. 143). He also sourced Plato’s account of Atlantis’s mountainous
    coastline to the coastline of Crete, which he claims the Egyptians
    had amalgamated into the story, although noting, ‘they would have
    gained knowledge of it only through hearsay’ for of their fear of
    water travel (p. 144).

    Oliver D. Smith is an independent researcher from England with


    a background in classics. He studied B. A. Classical Civilisation at
    University of Roehampton and PG Cert Classical Studies at Open
    University.

    NOTES

    1
    See Plato, Timaeus, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. by W. R. M.
    Lamb, 12 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William
    Heinemann Ltd. 1925), IX, 20e and 21c-d.
    Notes 217

    2
    Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (London: Penguin,
    1955), p. 142; seealso Robert Graves, ‘What Happened to
    Atlantis’, Atlantic (October 1953), 71-74.
    3
    Gaston Jondet, Les ports submergés de l’ancienne île de
    Pharos, Mémoires présentés à l’Institut Égyptien et publiés
    sous les auspices de Sa Hautesse Hussein Kamel, Sultan
    d’Égypte (Cairo: l’Institut Égyptien,1916), IX.
    4
    Spyridon Marinatos, ‘On the Atlantis Legend’,
    Cretica Chronica, 4(1950), 195-213.
    5
    Graves republished the essay two years later in The Crane
    Bag. RobertGraves, ‘The Lost Atlantis’, in The Crane Bag
    and Other Disputed Subjects(London: Cassell, 1969), pp.
    68-74.

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