Free Atlantis and the Silver City by Peter Daughtrey

one and the same.”
    The Greeks knew of an island in the far west known as Erythraea, the name deriving from the color of the setting sun. The quote is crucial, as it not only refers to Atlantis itself but clearly positions it outside the Mediterranean.
    Among other examples, Cedric draws attention to something noted in 1946 by the Cambridge scholar and explorer Harold T. Wilkins. 33 On column 8 of the great hall of the temple of Rameses at Karnak in Egypt was displayed a text referring to “the loss of a drowned continent in the Western Ocean.” The Egyptians identified the Western Ocean with the Atlantic.
    My developing theory that Plato was referring to a now-sunken portion of southwest Iberia was massively reinforced. There was, though, still one substantial question mark. Plato referred specifically to an island, and a huge one at that.
    Or did he?

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Was Atlantis a Huge Island?
    H ollywood blockbusters and common knowledge all hold that Atlantis was a mystical, mythical island. Dozens of historians have taken the same view. But what if everyone was wrong? I had to forensically re-examine exactly what Plato wrote.
    According to the translation from his Dialogues, there was an island in front of the straits, and it was huge: larger than Libya and Asia combined. This island had rule over a great empire that included other islands in the open sea and parts of the continent on the other side of the ocean. It also held sway inside the straits as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia. It disappeared under the sea in a day and night, after a period of violent earthquakes and floods (clues 4–8 and 15).
    Ever since I had considered including Atlantis in my hypothesis, this island business had niggled away at the back of my mind. So far, I had unearthed no evidence to prove that a large island starting immediately outside the Straits of Gibraltar had ever existed, although there had once been a scattering of small islands. Indeed, if this large island was anything like the size Plato appeared to indicate, it would hardly have fit in between Portugal and America—and certainly not between southwest Iberia and the north coast of Africa. Many researchers had come to the conclusionthat either Solon or Plato was simply confused about the size. With so many other clues pointing to southwest Iberia—the one about Cádiz, for example—it is not surprising that so many people have been baffled.
    I discovered that the English translations had not been made from the original, and some were from translations already made into Latin. Could there have been errors? I soon ascertained that in recent years, scholars had indeed begun to question the standard English text—on several important points.
    The key to answering the island conundrum revolves around the original Greek word used by Plato to describe what Atlantis was.
    That word was nesos .
    The first English translation assumed nesos meant “island.” In recent decades, it has been pointed out that, at the time Plato used it, nesos had three alternative interpretations. The standard reference work for ancient Greek, The Greek Lexicon by Liddell and Scott, for example, gives three distinctly different meanings:
One was “island”; another, “the mouth of a river with mud shoals.”
Critically, the third meaning was “peninsula.” 34
    There does not seem to be any reason why “island” was the preferred initial translation, but all subsequent translators have followed suit—despite other specific facts given by Plato that do not justify its use.
    For instance, he only ever mentioned one coast—the south. In clue 23 he explains there was a vast productive plain facing the sea and expands on that in clues 84 to 88, intimating that it faced south with a high coast overlooking the sea. It was sheltered to the north by mountains “celebrated for their number, size and beauty.” Significantly, no reference was made to the north, east, or west coasts. If an island was being