But isn’t the story of the lost civilization of Atlantis a myth? The legend of Atlantis finds its origins in works of none other than the great Greek philosopher Plato; Timaeus and Critias. Plato uses Atlantis as an allegory on the hubris of powerful nations whose ambitions to conquer all result in their downfall. In the story Plato details how after Atlantis attacked Athens, the nation fell out of favor with the deities that dropped the city into the Atlantic Ocean in order to punish the rulers for their hubris.
The Atlantis story has had a considerable impact on literature, Thomas Moore’s Utopia a notable mention. The legend also lives on in modern fiction and even pop culture, like the 2018 hit movie Aquaman. Atlantis thus has become a byword for any and all supposed advanced prehistoric lost civilization and the fascination with the legend continues.
But is it a legend? Well some say no. There are been many theories about where Atlantis was—in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Spain, even under what is now Antarctica.
However, the investigation mentioned before claims that geological, zoological, botanical, geographical, climatological, sociological and historical evidence found in Girinagar (a remote region in Bangalore Urban, Kartanaka, India) ‘has all the characteristics’ of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
‘However, the suggestion that this site is Atlantis is still theoretical, a work in progress; therefore we must find physical evidence of this ancestral civilization,’ the investigators do concede before providing theories the claim rests on.
The investigation’s first theory states that while Atlantis story was told by a Greek philosopher, ‘”it is prudent not to search for a site located in the Atlantic Ocean or in the Caribbean Sea, where in fact there was an absence of any Greek presence’” but to Asia as that was the developed world of that time and the place Mediterranean looked to as a source of knowledge.
So should any credence be paid to this theory? To answer this loaded question we turn to this quote by Charles Orser, a curator of history at the New York State Museum in Albany. "Every place you can imagine. Pick a spot on the map, and someone has said that Atlantis was there.”