Atlantis - Solon the wise and could the Minoan culture be Atlantis origin?

Welcome back! Now, what about Solon, the wise sage who is the source according to the text of the account? Plato does use Solon to lend credibility to his story. However, it's a bit ironic as we will note further down in this section. From the start there is an issue with Plato's description of Solon's journey to Egypt. Suppose you are a bit familiar with the account of Solon provided by Herodotus. In that case, you know that Solon travelled to Egypt after providing Athens with its laws. Solon took it upon himself a journey where he travelled as in his own right. This is specified in Histories Book 1 Chapter 29. But Plato has it the other way around. You see, in Timaeus we learn that Solon travelled to Egypt before creating the laws in Athens. In Plato's account, Solon is not yet the scholar he is destined to but is in need of a cure of his ignorance. Plato's Solon even tries to impress the Egyptian priest with some knowledge of genealogy just to be corrected and learn about his own ignorance to the matters. The Solon in Plato differs from other sources but shares many characteristics with another historical person that Herodotus wrote about. In Histories Book 2 Chapter 143 we learn about Herodotus' predecessor, Hecateus of Miletus. However, this is not a flattering account but rather a scathing criticism about the flaws in Hecateus' methods. Plato's Solon seems to share the same journey and characteristics as Herodotus' Hecateus and Solon in Plato have the same methodology as Hecateus in Herodotus. Both characters go to Egypt to find answers to their questions and are more or less described as students when doing this and making fools out of themselves. Something that might or should cause a bit of concern with someone familiar with the corpus of Plato is how the Egyptian priests are portrayed. The way the priests deconstruct the myth was criticized by Plato or Socrates in Phaedo, especially in Chapter 229 where Socrates and Phaedus discuss monsters and how they might look. Plato also writes in Timaeus that the Egyptian priests were reading from the written record, something that Plato in Phaedus again, chapters 274e and 275b, scathingly criticized. He says that writing is not for learning, it's merely for jogging memory and will not create knowledge from themselves. He writes, you provide your students with the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence. So reading about the priest with a deeper understanding of the body of work, the priest almost becomes a symbol for false appearance. So the priest should not be viewed in Plato as an authoritative figure, but hints towards the earlier lessons. Plato doesn't think you can read text to become wise, you need instead to learn through discussion and learning by listening to other people discuss. What we're told here are lessons on how to not learn history according to Plato, and the real lesson is not by learning the details in a text, but learning the meaning of the content of the text. Some of you might sit there wondering, well, all right, so maybe it was not a literal account, but maybe Plato took some inspiration from a real civilization and just changed a few things. I'm not going to say that this is impossible, but so far have this approach had the same luck as those trying to find the actual location of Atlantis. The Greek civilization was quite young, but still they managed to get to an excellent second place after the great amazing Egypt. So Plato would be well aware that there were other civilizations before Greece, and many of them met an end before Greece entered the world scene. But for a civilization to be an inspiration, it must have matched the text to at least some extent. Otherwise we might have to reclassify those hallmark movies based on true events as literal accounts on what happened. Now the civilization most suggested to be the inspiration is the Minoan culture on Crete. On the surface it looks like it could be a match, but as usual it all starts to fall apart. The origin of Atlantis could be the Minoan is not a new claim, but dates back to the early 20th century. In 1900 Sir Arthur Evans started to excavate on the island of Knossos with two fur persons and 32 workers. After just a few months Evans had uncovered a large part of the palace that he referred to be the palace of Minos. The Minoan culture and civilization had been discovered, and it was clear it must have been quite powerful. While the term palace might be a little bit of a misnomer, a more accurate description might be complexes with different workshops, food processing, storage, and religious and civil administration. We could see it as well ancient shopping mall to some extent. But just after a few years after this discovery, an anonymous letter was sent to the British newspaper The Times, which in 1909 published the article with the title The Lost Continent. In the article the anonymous author argues that the recently discovered palaces on Knossos were evidence that the Atlantis story originated with Mediterranean history and that the Minoan culture was in fact Atlantis. This author would turn out to be the historian K. T. Frost, who in 1913 published a paper in the Journal of Hellenic Studies trying to expand on this idea. Fast forward to 1939, a Greek archaeologist named Spyridon Marinatos suggested in an article in the Antiquity that the eruption of the Vulcan Thera could be the cause for the Minoan's destruction. In the past, there had been suggestions that Atlantis' destruction was inspired by the Thera eruption. Marinatos would later combine the Thera eruption with Atlantis in an article that he published in 1950. However, since it was written in Greek, it only got a little spread before being translated and republished in 1969. According to Marinatos, the Minoan culture's demise was tied to Thera's eruption and this collapse would have survived in the Greek mind and would be the origin of the Atlantis story. This is similar to the ideas presented by Louis Figueres in 1872, except that Figueres did not have an actual culture to tie this idea to. The eruption of Thera was so significant that it actually affected the weather across Europe and even as far as California. So this would have been a significant large eruption, maybe or probably similar to Mount Tamboros explosion in 1815. The effect of that eruption led to 1816 being called the year without a summer, creating agricultural distress across the globe. Thera's eruption would undoubtedly have affected the Minoan people, since it occurred between 1639 and 1616 BC, based on datings performed by William Friedrich. We're not exactly sure what year it occurred, but somewhere in between there. The issue is not that it happened, but the Minoan culture actually existed for hundreds of years after. Most scholars today believe that the collapse of the Minoan civilization was around 1320 BCE, and with this in mind it's hard to argue that there's a clean, clean, clear connection between the Atlantis cataclysm and the end of the Minoan civilization. In his book Frauds, Myths and Pseudoscience, Dr. Ken Feder points out that a large chunk of the story must be altered to make the Minoan theory fit the description we find in Plato's script. Feder actually counted all testable archaeological accounts in Plato's writing and compared these to the Minoan culture. He could find six testable claims in Timaeus and 47 in Critias. Of these testable claims, 80% did not match Plato's description and the Minoan archaeological record. Only one is a precise match and it's that the Atlantis and Minoan complexes must have been a marvel to behold. But this is basically pointless in the larger scope of things, as Feder points out. Then some match with a little bit of special pleading, and there's a couple of cases where we just don't know. So with all of this in mind, does it really make sense to ask where Atlantis is located according to Plato's teaching? It does not, and there's no credible evidence that's been presented yet at least. Before we try to answer a question, we should ensure that the question actually makes sense to answer. But we have spent quite some time not dealing with Corsetti's ideas that he presents in his YouTube videos. So let's go ahead and see what we have to offer there, right after these messages.