Comparison Plato's Atlantis - Richat

Geography

Climate and agriculture

Large fauna

Concentric ringed city

Atlantis architecture vs Richat ruins

PART II - WHY THE RICHAT STRUCTURE WAS ATLANTIS

1 - MATCHING PLATO’S DESCRIPTION

In his dialogues, Plato provides us with many clues scattered throughout the text which lend great aid to the identification of the location of the ancient city. Alexander Hübner, a German software developer and Atlantist who sadly passed away in 2013, weeded out these descriptions and details from Plato’s text, and coded them into an algorithm which he called ‘Geographical Hierarchical Constraint Satisfaction’ (Hübner, 2012). He labelled every individual detail stated by Plato, and weighed each one according to their individual relevance, and then used geological and geographical data to calculate which area on earth is most likely to fit the constraints. To achieve this, he divided the surface of the globe up into small squares, and evaluated for each constraint whether it was satisfied by that square area or not. The areas which don’t fit the description are masked, and those which do are highlighted. When applying all the constraints together, he found that the Souss-Massa plain in Morocco fit the constraints to a statistically significant degree. As we shall see, he was very close to the actual location of the historical Atlantis, which was in fact located on the Adrar plateau of Mauritania, some 1000 kilometres or 621 miles south of the Souss-Massa plain. Hübner probably missed the mark because he did not sufficiently take into account the altered geology during the African Human period, which will be discussed shortly, as well as the fact that the process of constraint satisfaction is sometimes quite fuzzy and imprecise.

In his book ‘Atlantis Solved’, David Edward also works with constraint satisfaction, but instead of using the constraints to localise Atlantis on the map, he directly compares them to the Richat structure, to demonstrate that it completely fits the bill (Edward, 2022). I took inspiration from his list of constraints, combined with that of Hübner, rectified the errors and misconceptions in them, supplemented them with some extra details from Plato’s text, and re-organised all of this into the following list, where different related constraints are grouped together.

In order to be faithful to the description from Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias, any location that is considered as a possible site for Atlantis, should be examined according to its satisfaction of the following constraints:

Historical presence of elephants (elephant molars were found) and other large fauna (Critias 115a, 119d)

Geographically related to ancient Libya (=the entire Sahara), Egypt and Tyrrhenia (Critias 24e, 25b)

Located outside the pillars of Hercules (relative to the mediterranean, from the perspective of coast-hugging sailors), opposite and pointing towards ‘Gadeirus’ (Cadiz) (Timaeus 24e, Critias 114b)

Archipelago of “islands” (=Maghreb region and surrounding islands) which “surrounded the true ocean” (=Atlantic ocean) and granted access to a “boundless continent” (=the rest of Africa) (Critias 25a)

Related to the Atlantic ocean and the name Atlas (Timaeus 24e, Critias 114a)

Situated on a landmass which is smooth and oblong, extending 3000 “stades” in one direction but 2000 across the centre inland, rising up sheer from the sea, with a sea to the south and sheltered by plenty of mountains to the north (=Atlas and/or Adrar mountains) (Critias 117e-118b)

Used to be accessible by ship but at the time of Solon (600 BC), the city of was inaccessible by ship because of a shoal of mud (=Arguin mudflats) that was left when the island sank (Timaeus 24e, 25d, Critias 109a)

The city of Atlantis was located on a plain, surrounded by mountains which are low on all sides and descended into a ‘‘sea’’ which existed then, to which the city was connected by a channel (Critias 113c, 115d, 118a)

The bedrock of the city and island are rich in white, black and red stones, and the surrounding region provided mineable mineral resources such as copper, tin, and gold (all of these are still mined in Mauritania)(Critias 114e, 116a-c)

The site of the city must contain geological evidence indicating the presence of fresh and/or salty water (Critias 113d, 115d, 118d)

The centre island of the city must show signs of warm and cold water springs (Critias 113e, 117a)

The city of Atlantis must have a centre island of 5 ‘‘stades’’ in diameter with a hill on it, surrounded by a canal of 1 ‘‘stades’’ in breadth, around which a ring-shaped island of 2 ‘‘stades’’, which was surrounded by yet another canal of 2 ‘‘stades’’, and another ring-shaped island of 3 ‘‘stades’’. Around this was a final canal of 3 ‘‘stades’’ surrounding the whole city, which was encompassed by a circular mound which rested in the middle of a large plain that surrounded it, 50 stades in each direction (Critias 113d-e, 115c-116a, 117b, 117d-e)

The site must also contain evidence for human presence such as rock art, human remains and wooden and stone artefacts from neolithic-bronze age period related to seafaring and warfare, as well as brass, tin, silver and gold, the remains of the foundations of forts (barracks and guard houses), walls and evidence for quarrying activity

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