Lost Civilizations [antikvár]

II',.'I .'^if': S";,'.! ^''.''/'v.,--, ' ''I' 'i.i .?'J'c^SiINTRODUCTION: THE BEGINNING OF TIMEIntroductionThe Beginning of TimeAbout three hundred years ago, an Irish bishop claimed to have solved the riddle of the ages when he announced that the first human, Adam, was created on October 22, 4004 B.C. at eight o'clock in the evening. He arrived at this conclusion by analyzing the life spans of people mentioned in the Bible. Given the nature of his inquiry, however, his figures could have been wrong and it wasn't too surprising when his findings were challenged by an English mathematician. According to the revised version, the human experience began a day later at nine o'clock in the morning. Either way, it became an accepted fact in the seventeenth century that the history of humankind didn't extend back in time much more than 5,600 years. In the years since, paleoanthropologists have produced evidence that the ancestors of the species we call Homo sapiens were walking upright as far back as two million years ago and they are certain that modern man appeared on earth between 350,000 and 500,000 years ago. But archaeologists still haven't found evidence of cultures with written histories dating back more than 6,000 years. For now at least, there is no proof that humans capable of creating a civilization as we define it existed before then.AtlantisThere is, however, another country, another continent, to be considered. If the stones are true, there was a highly civilized race living in the island kingdom of Atlantis some 12,000 years ago. This is an idea that has been alternately believed and discredited over the centuries. There exists in the oral tradition of the Vikings references to a mystical island called Atli and a similar reference in ancient Indian writings to the White Island, Attala. When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they found a tribe that claimed its ancestors were from a place they called Atlan. Phoenicians, who had traded with the ancestors of the Spanish, believed the Iberians to be the remnants of a lost tribe that once lived on a huge island they called Antila. Among some ancient Arabic cultures, the island was known as Ad, which could have been the root of the name Adam, whom the Book of Genesis tells us is our oldest ancestor.Believers in the legend of Atlantis base their belief on the dialogues of the Greek philosopher Plato. Writing in about 360 B.C., he re-created a conversation that took place thirty years earlier between hisBuilt on top of Cape Sounionnear the southern edge of the city of athens, this temple (opposite page) honoring the sea godPoseidon was the rrst sightthat greeted ships bringingcargo and passengers through the port of piraeus in the fourth century b.c.