Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and Sarah and I. As usual, we're talking about books today and I had read The Lost City of z over the summer, which if you haven't picked it up, is amazing. It's all about the search in the Amazon for a what may or may not be a mythical city. I'm not going to tell you the answer, something we might actually want a podcast on in the future, but it got us talking about how the search for lost or mythical cities sometimes unearthed a lot of real stuff and we actually do some real exploring. And one of the best examples we thought of for this is the Golden City of El Dorado. The streets were supposed to be page in gold, and obviously all the gold hungry explorers went looking for it and consequently mapped a lot of South America. And another one was the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, which was supposed to have castles in the air, and in the hunt for this, explorers mapped a lot of the southwestern United States. And it's not true that space is the only unexplored frontier really, because according to Noah, of the underwater realm is still unexplored. So all you adventurers out there and get out your scoopa equipment. So today we're going to talk about another lost city, Atlantis. Yeah, that that no effect probably should have glued you in. So Atlantis starts back with Plato. He's the first real primary source we have for any of this, and he started on what was supposed to be a trilogy of dialogues. Book one was Timaeus. He did half of his second book, Critius, and he never did book three. And all the dialogues talk about the creation of world, the nature of man, and they also mentioned Atlantis and Atlantis. The story of it starts with Poseidon, the god of the ocean, who was given the island of Atlantis when the Greek gods divvied up everything, and he fell in love with a mortal woman of Clito, and they had ten kids, five sets of twin boys. And he remakes the island that he's given for her, surrounding it with moats, and it's just the ideal utopian land, right, And it's very circular in design. There's an island in the middle, there's a moat, there's a strip of land in a circle, another moat, another strip of land in a circle, and then more water, and no one could get to the island because of course there weren't ships at the time, so it was cut off from everything else. But over time he gave the best part of this land to his oldest son, Atlas, and it grew to be an incredibly prosperous place. They had bridges and canals and connected it to the outside world again, and Um just built it up, so it was this splendid city with castles and um everything you could imagine horse tracks randomly or a sign of a really great city, so Um be assured Atlantis had them. But like with so many great civilizations, it became greedy and corrupt, and the Atlanteans began fighting wars and enslaving the people they conquered, and they even went after the great city state of Athens. And they finally got their come upance when an earthquake swallowed them in UH nine thousand, six hundred BC, which in my notes after that I wrote, bam, so that's the end. That's what happened. So that's the story. Yeah, that's the story. And to me it sounds like a nice story about a civilization that has become too corrupt and too violent, which, uh, from Plato's perspective, that's a pretty good warning for the city of Athens. Watch out, Athenians. Maybe we're also coming too combative or too money driven. Um. But not everyone saw it as this allegory or myth. Right, some of his own students that he was telling this truth like Cranter, although Aristotle, Plato's most famous student, said he who invented Atlantis, also destroyed it trying to say, you know, come on, this is a story. So so most people at the time accepted it as a myth, as a story that Plato had created, a lesson, if you will. But as time went on, people started to get more interested in this myth and trying to interpret it is fact and hunt for the loscity of Atlantis and the idea that there was a huge continent that was past the Pillars of Hercules, which is the modern day Straits of Gibraltar, which is where Plato placed Atlantis, was pretty unlikely. As we got sophisticated or more sophisticated ocean mapping technology in the twentieth century and learning how the plates worked, and yeah, there there probably wasn't going to be this enormous continent under the Atlantic Ocean, and but that hasn't stopped lots of people from placing Atlantis pretty much anywhere in the world. We have. Recent candidates have been the Caribbean, South America, Antarctica, Ireland, French Polynesia, the Canaries, the Azores, Tunisia, West Africa, Sweden, Iceland, and Spain. So basically anywhere. I'm sure there are other ones, do you Basically, yeah, anywhere you can think of Atlantis. But my favorite connection with Atlantis is the fascination the Nazis had with it, which is completely insane. And it starts with a Swedish guy named Olaf Redback who said he had found Atlantis in Sweden, of all places, which of course has nothing to do with anything that Plato wrote Pillars of Hercules. Yeah, not so much. He said that the biblical Jaffe came to Sweden after the Great Flood and then gave birth to Atlas, which perhaps you remember's son, No, it's someone else's, according to Redback, and he came up with lots of rationalizations whenever his didn't make sense. For example, swee and is nowhere near the straits of Gibraltar. Well, perhaps that was a mistranslation then, and some of his research was picked up by a theosophist named Helena Blavatsky, who expounded on some of his stuff and added some more of her own. I was excited to see her name in Katie's outline because she popped up in an article I wrote a few years ago about karma and secularizing. Yeah, she's actually considered responsible for secularizing karma in the West. So it's not just a religious thing. It's something that can be in a pop song, right that we used someone incorrectly all the time. But this particular religion became popular when the Third Reich decided that Christianity had too much of a Jewish influence and maybe people should find some other religion to take a part in. And her idea was that when Atlanta sank because some of the elite priests escaped from the city and they went to Shambala, a mythical place in the Himalayas, and the Arians, a completely new race, learned from the Atlanteans all of their wisdom, which she said involved things like inventing airplanes and explosives, although I'd like to add the Theosophists also said there was an entire sunken continent named MoU. So perhaps they're the most reliable, and they were waiting for the Aquarian Age, a time of enlightenment and brotherhood. So it makes me want to see the Age of Aquarius. But I'm not gonna. We're gonna, We're gonna avoid that. So, of course, who likes this arian stuff. That would be the Nazis, especially Heinrich Himmler, who believed in all sorts of weird stuff, like glacial cosmogeny, which was the idea that the whole universe was a conflict between fire and ice basically since the dawn of time. It's kind of James Taylor esque, it is. I'm sorry, I don't want to compare him to the Knox. It's not what I was trying to hear. But he was in charge as part of the s S, as part of the National Heritage Institute, and so he had access to all sorts of scientists, scholars, and archaeologists who he sent out on missions to find Atlantis. He's we know for sure. He sent people to Tibet to look for this place in Shambala where perhaps the Atlanteans might have given their wisdom to the Arians. And that's a common theme in people who believe there was an Atlantis that uh, they passed on their wisdom to the great ancient civilizations. A lot of people have a hard time or I don't know if it's a lot some people have a hard time accepting that, uh, the megaliths in Great Britain were built, you know, just people were inspired to build them and think that maybe the people of Atlantis taught them how pyramids. That's another a popular example. Anything like that is saying, well, it's too advanced for the people at that time to and it must have been part of the super race. Anything that's too impressive. The Atlanteans must have helped out. Yeah, they didn't believe that particular Tibetan city that they went to could have been formed by the people who lived there, which is insulting. But another Himler associate named Edmund Kiss decided that it was in the Andes, and another one came up with some idea of polar shift in runs coming from the Atlanteans, and then Otto Huff decided it was in the Canary Islands. But this wasn't even about history. And that's the thing about Atlantis. People read what they want to into it, and for the Nazis and especially Himmler, it was a way to figure out the racial superiority, giving the pseudo scientific reason or pseudo historical reason as to why Atlantis was so great and so was the Arian race. Yeah. One of the one of the theories that's a little more accepted than than those the Aliens and teaching ancient civilizations is that Atlantis was increte. Uh. The accomplished Minoan civilization there collapsed in the middle of the second millennium bc UM, probably from a volcanic eruption that was on the era which is the modern santorini Um, So that that theory has holds a little more weight for some people than the more off the wall ideas as the aliens, which I seriously think that's my favorite one, and the idea goes that they accidentally blew themselves up with a nuclear bomb. It's another and more or lesson about the dangers of technology, but a little bit different, or the one that they were behind the cro magnan and cave paintings. Well, a lot of these potential Atlantis locale sound not very hospitable Antarctica especially. I'd say, um, there's one in particular that might be the Atlantis you would most want to visit should it be true, or even if there's not, an Atlanthara and I are happy to go and explore this to our fullest abilities. And that's a Bimini in the Bahamas. Edgar Casey, who was a clairvoyant psychic, he would go into trances and read fortunes and predict things. He had a vision that Atlantis was located from the Gulf of Mexico to Gibraltar, so at least we have the pillars of Hercules in there, unlike the Sweden theory. But it was destroyed in a final catastrophic event circa ten thousand BC, which again puts it about where Plato said or earlier, right, yeah, a lot earlier. Yeah, But he founded an Association for Research and Enlightenment, and that group today has focused their efforts on the Biminy Island chain Uh. They go on dives and search for traces of Atlantis, and they actually believed that bminy Uh were mountaintops in Atlantis they were really high ground, and that the world's oceans were a lot lower. And he claimed that there was a record hall on Bimony, Uh that was identical to one under the Sphinx, which just sounds like a really tangential connection. Um, and this housed all of the ancient records of Atlantis. But it's interesting how that so many of them seemed to try to tie together, all these cultures that have nothing in common, Like they couldn't have sprouted up independently of one another. They must have come from that one original source. One civilization basically gave everyone the blueprints for advanced civilization. And of course it must have been Atlantis. But you said something cool that was a little bit more recent. Yeah, just earlier this year, Google Earth launched a new underwater search tool, and so, like people do on Google Earth, they start looking around, and um, folks started noticing a grid like pattern off the western coast of Africa, which of course is another suspected Atlantis site. I mean, what isn't and uh? The product manager of Ocean in Google Earth debunked the rumors and said that the lines were quote artificial data remnants left by sonar equipped boats collecting data from the ocean floor. That's kind of a lot of technical jargon for me. But um, as far as he knew, the research from those boats, or the research that those boats were conducting, was not Atlantis related at all. It does look cool though. I saw a picture of it. It looks kind of like an underwater street grid. Well, and if you're looking for that kind of thing, that would be a good place to start. But you also had a really good quote that you told me earlier. Yeah, and this is why people aren't going to give up searching for Atlantis. Richard Ellis, who is the author of Imagining Atlantis, wrote that Atlantis lives on in people's minds largely because you cannot prove it doesn't exist. You can't search every inch of the ocean bottom, and so the hope remains alive and the promise of finding treasures in sunken palaces. It's like that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You're going to continue looking, except under all of the world's oceans, which is a little harder to find perhaps. But let us know what you think about Atlantis and what your ideas are. Because I talked to a couple of people who actually thought that Sarah was a plausible explanation, So email us at has three podcast at how stuff works dot com, and if you're into conspiracy theories and Nazis and all that, you should check out our newest podcast, Stuff They Don't Want You to Know on iTunes. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the stuff you missed in history Class blog on the how stuff works dot com home page.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and Sarah and I. As usual, we're talking about books today and I had read The Lost City of z over the summer, which if you haven't picked it up, is amazing. It's all about the search in the Amazon for a what may or may not be a mythical city. I'm not going to tell you the answer, something we might actually want a podcast on in the future, but it got us talking about how the search for lost or mythical cities sometimes unearthed a lot of real stuff and we actually do some real exploring. And one of the best examples we thought of for this is the Golden City of El Dorado. The streets were supposed to be page in gold, and obviously all the gold hungry explorers went looking for it and consequently mapped a lot of South America. And another one was the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, which was supposed to have castles in the air, and in the hunt for this, explorers mapped a lot of the southwestern United States. And it's not true that space is the only unexplored frontier really, because according to Noah, of the underwater realm is still unexplored. So all you adventurers out there and get out your scoopa equipment. So today we're going to talk about another lost city, Atlantis. Yeah, that that no effect probably should have glued you in. So Atlantis starts back with Plato. He's the first real primary source we have for any of this, and he started on what was supposed to be a trilogy of dialogues. Book one was Timaeus. He did half of his second book, Critius, and he never did book three. And all the dialogues talk about the creation of world, the nature of man, and they also mentioned Atlantis and Atlantis. The story of it starts with Poseidon, the god of the ocean, who was given the island of Atlantis when the Greek gods divvied up everything, and he fell in love with a mortal woman of Clito, and they had ten kids, five sets of twin boys. And he remakes the island that he's given for her, surrounding it with moats, and it's just the ideal utopian land, right, And it's very circular in design. There's an island in the middle, there's a moat, there's a strip of land in a circle, another moat, another strip of land in a circle, and then more water, and no one could get to the island because of course there weren't ships at the time, so it was cut off from everything else. But over time he gave the best part of this land to his oldest son, Atlas, and it grew to be an incredibly prosperous place. They had bridges and canals and connected it to the outside world again, and Um just built it up, so it was this splendid city with castles and um everything you could imagine horse tracks randomly or a sign of a really great city, so Um be assured Atlantis had them. But like with so many great civilizations, it became greedy and corrupt, and the Atlanteans began fighting wars and enslaving the people they conquered, and they even went after the great city state of Athens. And they finally got their come upance when an earthquake swallowed them in UH nine thousand, six hundred BC, which in my notes after that I wrote, bam, so that's the end. That's what happened. So that's the story. Yeah, that's the story. And to me it sounds like a nice story about a civilization that has become too corrupt and too violent, which, uh, from Plato's perspective, that's a pretty good warning for the city of Athens. Watch out, Athenians. Maybe we're also coming too combative or too money driven. Um. But not everyone saw it as this allegory or myth. Right, some of his own students that he was telling this truth like Cranter, although Aristotle, Plato's most famous student, said he who invented Atlantis, also destroyed it trying to say, you know, come on, this is a story. So so most people at the time accepted it as a myth, as a story that Plato had created, a lesson, if you will. But as time went on, people started to get more interested in this myth and trying to interpret it is fact and hunt for the loscity of Atlantis and the idea that there was a huge continent that was past the Pillars of Hercules, which is the modern day Straits of Gibraltar, which is where Plato placed Atlantis, was pretty unlikely. As we got sophisticated or more sophisticated ocean mapping technology in the twentieth century and learning how the plates worked, and yeah, there there probably wasn't going to be this enormous continent under the Atlantic Ocean, and but that hasn't stopped lots of people from placing Atlantis pretty much anywhere in the world. We have. Recent candidates have been the Caribbean, South America, Antarctica, Ireland, French Polynesia, the Canaries, the Azores, Tunisia, West Africa, Sweden, Iceland, and Spain. So basically anywhere. I'm sure there are other ones, do you Basically, yeah, anywhere you can think of Atlantis. But my favorite connection with Atlantis is the fascination the Nazis had with it, which is completely insane. And it starts with a Swedish guy named Olaf Redback who said he had found Atlantis in Sweden, of all places, which of course has nothing to do with anything that Plato wrote Pillars of Hercules. Yeah, not so much. He said that the biblical Jaffe came to Sweden after the Great Flood and then gave birth to Atlas, which perhaps you remember's son, No, it's someone else's, according to Redback, and he came up with lots of rationalizations whenever his didn't make sense. For example, swee and is nowhere near the straits of Gibraltar. Well, perhaps that was a mistranslation then, and some of his research was picked up by a theosophist named Helena Blavatsky, who expounded on some of his stuff and added some more of her own. I was excited to see her name in Katie's outline because she popped up in an article I wrote a few years ago about karma and secularizing. Yeah, she's actually considered responsible for secularizing karma in the West. So it's not just a religious thing. It's something that can be in a pop song, right that we used someone incorrectly all the time. But this particular religion became popular when the Third Reich decided that Christianity had too much of a Jewish influence and maybe people should find some other religion to take a part in. And her idea was that when Atlanta sank because some of the elite priests escaped from the city and they went to Shambala, a mythical place in the Himalayas, and the Arians, a completely new race, learned from the Atlanteans all of their wisdom, which she said involved things like inventing airplanes and explosives, although I'd like to add the Theosophists also said there was an entire sunken continent named MoU. So perhaps they're the most reliable, and they were waiting for the Aquarian Age, a time of enlightenment and brotherhood. So it makes me want to see the Age of Aquarius. But I'm not gonna. We're gonna, We're gonna avoid that. So, of course, who likes this arian stuff. That would be the Nazis, especially Heinrich Himmler, who believed in all sorts of weird stuff, like glacial cosmogeny, which was the idea that the whole universe was a conflict between fire and ice basically since the dawn of time. It's kind of James Taylor esque, it is. I'm sorry, I don't want to compare him to the Knox. It's not what I was trying to hear. But he was in charge as part of the s S, as part of the National Heritage Institute, and so he had access to all sorts of scientists, scholars, and archaeologists who he sent out on missions to find Atlantis. He's we know for sure. He sent people to Tibet to look for this place in Shambala where perhaps the Atlanteans might have given their wisdom to the Arians. And that's a common theme in people who believe there was an Atlantis that uh, they passed on their wisdom to the great ancient civilizations. A lot of people have a hard time or I don't know if it's a lot some people have a hard time accepting that, uh, the megaliths in Great Britain were built, you know, just people were inspired to build them and think that maybe the people of Atlantis taught them how pyramids. That's another a popular example. Anything like that is saying, well, it's too advanced for the people at that time to and it must have been part of the super race. Anything that's too impressive. The Atlanteans must have helped out. Yeah, they didn't believe that particular Tibetan city that they went to could have been formed by the people who lived there, which is insulting. But another Himler associate named Edmund Kiss decided that it was in the Andes, and another one came up with some idea of polar shift in runs coming from the Atlanteans, and then Otto Huff decided it was in the Canary Islands. But this wasn't even about history. And that's the thing about Atlantis. People read what they want to into it, and for the Nazis and especially Himmler, it was a way to figure out the racial superiority, giving the pseudo scientific reason or pseudo historical reason as to why Atlantis was so great and so was the Arian race. Yeah. One of the one of the theories that's a little more accepted than than those the Aliens and teaching ancient civilizations is that Atlantis was increte. Uh. The accomplished Minoan civilization there collapsed in the middle of the second millennium bc UM, probably from a volcanic eruption that was on the era which is the modern santorini Um, So that that theory has holds a little more weight for some people than the more off the wall ideas as the aliens, which I seriously think that's my favorite one, and the idea goes that they accidentally blew themselves up with a nuclear bomb. It's another and more or lesson about the dangers of technology, but a little bit different, or the one that they were behind the cro magnan and cave paintings. Well, a lot of these potential Atlantis locale sound not very hospitable Antarctica especially. I'd say, um, there's one in particular that might be the Atlantis you would most want to visit should it be true, or even if there's not, an Atlanthara and I are happy to go and explore this to our fullest abilities. And that's a Bimini in the Bahamas. Edgar Casey, who was a clairvoyant psychic, he would go into trances and read fortunes and predict things. He had a vision that Atlantis was located from the Gulf of Mexico to Gibraltar, so at least we have the pillars of Hercules in there, unlike the Sweden theory. But it was destroyed in a final catastrophic event circa ten thousand BC, which again puts it about where Plato said or earlier, right, yeah, a lot earlier. Yeah, But he founded an Association for Research and Enlightenment, and that group today has focused their efforts on the Biminy Island chain Uh. They go on dives and search for traces of Atlantis, and they actually believed that bminy Uh were mountaintops in Atlantis they were really high ground, and that the world's oceans were a lot lower. And he claimed that there was a record hall on Bimony, Uh that was identical to one under the Sphinx, which just sounds like a really tangential connection. Um, and this housed all of the ancient records of Atlantis. But it's interesting how that so many of them seemed to try to tie together, all these cultures that have nothing in common, Like they couldn't have sprouted up independently of one another. They must have come from that one original source. One civilization basically gave everyone the blueprints for advanced civilization. And of course it must have been Atlantis. But you said something cool that was a little bit more recent. Yeah, just earlier this year, Google Earth launched a new underwater search tool, and so, like people do on Google Earth, they start looking around, and um, folks started noticing a grid like pattern off the western coast of Africa, which of course is another suspected Atlantis site. I mean, what isn't and uh? The product manager of Ocean in Google Earth debunked the rumors and said that the lines were quote artificial data remnants left by sonar equipped boats collecting data from the ocean floor. That's kind of a lot of technical jargon for me. But um, as far as he knew, the research from those boats, or the research that those boats were conducting, was not Atlantis related at all. It does look cool though. I saw a picture of it. It looks kind of like an underwater street grid. Well, and if you're looking for that kind of thing, that would be a good place to start. But you also had a really good quote that you told me earlier. Yeah, and this is why people aren't going to give up searching for Atlantis. Richard Ellis, who is the author of Imagining Atlantis, wrote that Atlantis lives on in people's minds largely because you cannot prove it doesn't exist. You can't search every inch of the ocean bottom, and so the hope remains alive and the promise of finding treasures in sunken palaces. It's like that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You're going to continue looking, except under all of the world's oceans, which is a little harder to find perhaps. But let us know what you think about Atlantis and what your ideas are. Because I talked to a couple of people who actually thought that Sarah was a plausible explanation, So email us at has three podcast at how stuff works dot com, and if you're into conspiracy theories and Nazis and all that, you should check out our newest podcast, Stuff They Don't Want You to Know on iTunes. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the stuff you missed in history Class blog on the how stuff works dot com home page.