What Is a Lost Land? Sunken Places and Why People Keep Looking

The account of Atlantis appears in two dialogues by Plato and nowhere earlier, describing a powerful island state beyond the strait at the western end of the Mediterranean that attacked the Mediterranean world, was defeated by Athens and was destroyed in a day and a night. The story is presented as ancient history received through a chain of sources, and it functions within the dialogues as a device for discussing the ideal state and the dangers of power, with the defeated aggressor serving as a foil and the victorious Athens as an illustration of the constitution being argued for. Scholars of ancient philosophy overwhelmingly read it as invention in the service of the argument, noting that it fits the philosophical purpose precisely, that no earlier source mentions it, and that Plato used invented narratives elsewhere for the same purpose.

Lost land accounts are widespread and several plausible sources feed them:

• •Real inundation, since sea level rose substantially after the last glaciation and drowned large areas that were inhabited
• •Local catastrophes including tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic destruction, which are remembered and elaborated
• •Coastal erosion and subsidence, which visibly remove land within living memory in some places
• •Abandoned settlements whose ruins are visible offshore or underwater, which invite explanation
• •The narrative appeal of a golden age destroyed by its own hubris, which is a moral shape independent of any event
• •Transmission and borrowing, since the best-known account has been absorbed into traditions that had no such story

Efforts to locate the invented island have produced a substantial literature and a recognisable pattern. Proposed locations have included essentially every part of the world, with the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Caribbean, Antarctica and the North Sea all argued for, and the geographic range alone indicates that the identification is being driven by the searcher rather than by the evidence. The Minoan civilisation and the volcanic destruction of Thera are the most substantial connection proposed, since a real advanced maritime culture was genuinely damaged by a real eruption, though the details do not match Plato's account and the dates are wrong by a large margin. Nineteenth-century writers added an elaborate mythology of their own, and some of those additions, including claims about a lost race, were taken up by racist and occult movements whose influence persists.

The durability of the search despite the absence of evidence has explanations worth stating. A lost civilisation is an unfalsifiable hypothesis in practice, since failure to find it can always be attributed to looking in the wrong place, which means no result counts against it. The idea offers a golden age, which is emotionally appealing and recurs in many forms. It permits attributing achievements to a vanished source, which has been used to deny that documented civilisations built their own monuments and is where the racist applications enter, since the claim is made most persistently about non-European achievements. It has commercial value, since books and documentaries on the subject sell. And it borrows the vocabulary of investigation while rejecting its methods, which allows the appearance of enquiry without exposure to evidence.

Actual submerged landscapes exist in quantity and are more interesting than the invented one. Sea level rose by over a hundred metres after the last glacial maximum, drowning an area of habitable land larger than several continents combined, and the landscape now beneath the North Sea was occupied by people whose tools are recovered by fishing boats and whose terrain has been mapped in detail from seismic survey data collected for oil exploration. Comparable submerged landscapes exist off many coasts. Underwater archaeology has recovered settlements, harbours and cities lost to subsidence and earthquake, including substantial urban sites off Egypt and in the Mediterranean. Those places were not advanced beyond their time and did not sink in a day, and the work reconstructing them is a genuine field producing results while the search for an invented island produces none.

The best-known lost land appears only in two of Plato's dialogues, fits their philosophical argument precisely and has no earlier source, and specialists read it as invention. Real inundation after the last glaciation drowned an enormous area, and real submerged landscapes and cities are recovered by archaeology. The proposed locations for the invented one span the entire planet, which is itself the answer.