by Marcus Skiles

Created on: August 28, 2009

"Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. These histories tell of a mighty power that rose out of the Atlantic Ocean, an island larger than both Libya and Asia Minor combined, an island known as Atlantis. Then there occurred portentous earthquakes and floods, and one grievous day and night befell them, when the entire island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea and vanished." The Greek philosopher Plato wrote these words in his Socratic dialogue titled Timaeus, a supposed historical account of ancient happenings. Plato held this story to be pure fact, claiming that the story was passed to him through his descendants, one of whom was a great friend of an Egyptian priest that took the story from ancient temple records. He also doubted that any trace of the lost island would ever be found. "The ocean at that spot," he wrote," has now become impassable and unsearchable." This may be true, but the question remains-did Atlantis really exist? And if so, where did it go?

The legend of Atlantis is a most interesting one. Evidence of highly advanced civilizations has been linked to the lost continent, and if it did exist then it possessed technologies not to be seen again until the twentieth century. Then again, there has been evidence that clearly disproves many of these arguments. For example, in 1841 the French scholar T. Henri Martin pointed out that the geography of Europe, Asia, and Africa showed no signs of a cataclysmic event that would have destroyed Atlantis if it were indeed where Plato said it was. With this statement, Atlantis would have been discarded as pure myth if it were not for the efforts of one man, Ignatius Loyola Donnelly. Donnelly once held a seat in the United States Congress for two terms, until political turmoil lost him his bid for reelection. He became a voracious reader, and while reading Jules Verne's novel Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, he became fascinated with the lost continent of Atlantis. He found mountains of evidence to support the existence of the island, and eventually published a book simply titled Atlantis. Some of his evidence came from incredibly reliable sources. For example, a German botanist named Otto Kuntze had written that domesticated plants of Asia and the Americas were of the same species, most notably the banana, which required a long period of dedicated and intelligent cultivation. Donnelly concluded that the banana had been domesticated in Atlantis, and then shipped

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