Mysteries of the history
Reception
The monster of the Log Ness
Strange stones
The first genocide ?
Pascuan faces
Absorbed city
Alarming statues

Inspiring mystery of the science fiction, history of a civilization disappeared in a cataclysm pointing out the myth from the flood, Atlantis is perhaps most enthralling of the enigmas of the History. Alarming also : because real or fictitious, this history recalls us that even the most advanced civilizations can abruptly disappear forever...
All starts with Plato. Towards 335 before J.C.. In Timée, it makes tell by Critias a history which it holds of a remote ancestor having known wise Solon. In Egypt, Solon would have met a priest who would have revealed the existence to him, 9000 years earlier, of an island : Atlantis. Located beyond the Pillars of Hercules (i.e. of Gibraltar), broader than the north of Africa and minor Asia joined together, it would be the exit of the sea Atlantique. According to the priest, Atlantis was glorious people and conqueror who would have conquered the Mediterranean, then were pushed back by the Greeks, before being absorbed by earthquakes and cataclysms watery.
Then in Critias, Plato into known as more on Atlantis : after the creation of the world, Poseidon would have received Atlantis. Having had two wire with a mortal, it divided Atlantis. One of the two wire, Atlas, became king and it created with its advisers perfect happiness, sharing work and increasing the richnesses. The capital of Atlantis was the old palate of Poseidon. The citadel, a circle of a diameter of five kilometers, was a succession of concentric rings of ground and sea. In the medium of the silver city, ivory and gold, were the temple of Poseidon furnished with a gold statue, so big that it touched the vault. Work being unfinished, one will hardly know any more...
Atlantis is the first known Utopia : praising the merits of the declining greek empire, one does not know if it is real or, like Aristote says it, invented by Plato.
Of the Middle Ages, nobody any more thinks of Atlantis. It is the Rebirth which renews the interest : the philosophers base themselves on the work of Plato to study happiness, certain authors see in America the Platonic island.
Research of Atlantis never succeeded. Because we have no idea of the place where it can be : many sees it under the Atlantic. Others, faithful to Plato, locate it in the Straits of Gibraltar. For the Greeks, it acts of the island of Santorin, to 110 km of Crete : at the time of Plato, Crete is with its apogee and the island is circular. Moreover, Crete is the enemy one of Athens and practical the worship of the bull like the Telamones. In 1470 before J C, the volcano of Santorin explodes, causing earthquakes, rains of ashes, and ten height meters waves, destroying the island. Lastly, the most original assumptions, like that of the writer Pierre Benoit, place Atlantis in African desert...
A city or mountains ?Bounce in November 2004 : the American architect Robert Sarmast studied with the sonar sea-beds between Cyprus and Syria. Do the images (see opposite) show hills (the Acropolis ?) surrounded of three kilometers length walls. According to him, these structures with 1600 meters under water are too right to be natural. It is based especially on the fact that preceding statements in the area showed that it had been with the free air. An earthquake would have then opened Gibraltar, causing the flood of the Mediterranean by the ocean. But there are skeptics. Among them, the physicist Christian Huebscher. It already studied this sector and according to him, the hills are only some 100 000 year old volcanos.
That Plato took as a starting point an oral tradition or that he very invented, a thing is sure : it bequeathed us a great political allegory.