Atlantis

Atlantis was a city or island, or possibly a former empire, that is responsible for the word "Gorlois," root of the word "Gargoyle," and for the Praying Gargoyle.

Atlantis was destroyed around 9386 B.C.E.

Real-World Background

Atlantis first appeared in two dialogues written by the Greek philosopher Plato around 355 B.C., "Timaios" and "Kritias". According to these dialogues, the great Athenian statesman Solon, during a visit to Egypt in the 6th century B.C., learned from the priests there that nine thousand years before, the Athenians had defeated the armies of Atlantis, a mighty island kingdom lying in the Atlantic Ocean, larger than Asia Minor and North Africa combined, which had planned to conquer the known world. Afterwards, Atlantis was destroyed by a mighty earthquake, so that nothing remains of it except for some muddy shoals.

While most of Plato's early readers (including his student, Aristotle) believed Atlantis to be purely fictional, many people from the 19th century on have argued that Atlantis was real (one of the earliest of these was Ignatius Donnelly, whose "Atlantis: the Antediluvian World" was published in 1882). Some have taken Plato's description of Atlantis as a sunken continent in the Atlantic literally; others have suggested that it was based on a more recent historical event (the volcanic explosion of Thira in the 2nd millennium B.C. is a popular candidate) that Plato exaggerated, while some have argued that Plato invented the story (if with inspiration from earlier legends).

See also

• Atlantis at Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia