Brief answer: no.
Longer answer: some people have said - notably Ignatius Donnelly and a lot of people following him - that the deluge sinking Atlantis was the real story of which the Flood of Noah is just a bad version. But the problem with this view is the stories can be related as one being true and another being a bad version of same event - while they can also be read as both being fairly true accounts of different events.
If Atlantis Sinking is the same event as Noah's Flood one of the versions must be bad, and I have no doubt that in that case it is the Atlantis one which is bad. I mean, Gladstone could go off on a rant against the Pope basically because Pius IX had been saying "one must obey God more than men" a few times over in the Syllabus of errors, and that man (capable of accusing Rome of threateneing with slavery of conscience!) could write to Donnelly and tell him he agreed with him! Spiritually speaking that is not a recommendation at all.
However, should Atlantis ever be found, we would then be able to rule out Atlantis Sinking was a bad version of Noah's Flood. We would not be able to establish Noah's Flood was a bad version of Atlantis Sinking. Because we would not be able to rule out the following scenarios:
- 1) Atlantis Sinking happened before the Flood of Noah. Perhaps at the death of Methuselah, which according to Septuagint was 17 years before the Flood of Noah (his name meant something like "his death shall bring judgement", but that would also otherwise be true since 17 years of a lapse between his death and the Flood are not too much). In that case there would not be any meaning to talk about an Atlantean race at all, since if any Atlantean at all survived the following Deluge it was on the Boat called Arc, and thus all men descend from Atlanteans - or if no Atlanteans were on the Arc, no men descend from Atlanteans. In that case also the giants and other men who would not believe Noah were extra stupid in not believing the Flood as they had had a foretaste of it when receving refugees from Atlantis.
- 2) Atlantis Sinking was part of the Flood of Noah. In that case too either all or no men are Atlanteans. Even if only one of Noah's daughters in law was from Atlantis (this applies to previous one as well), not only would her sons with one of Noah's sons be Atlantean origin, but also a few of Noah's grandsons through the other sons as well, through her daughters.
- 3) Atlantis Sinking happened after the Flood. God had promised Noah never again to wipe out the whole Earth with water, but Atlantis Sinking was not the whole earth. Precisely as if Ireland would sink (St Patrick obtained a promise this would happen 7 years before the World ends, so as to spare the Irish the Tribulation) this would also not be in any way contrary to God's promise to Noah. In this case, Atlantis could have left racial particularities where survivors landed. But there would be nothing especially salvific in belonging to such a race, and nothing especially spiritual about it, unless it were in a culture that remembered the disaster and tried to repent from the pride that was provoking such a secondary deluge. It could however have been of merely technological importance or civilisational, but in such a role I prefer the Sinear remnants of post-Babel civilisation.
I am sure Noah's Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah's Fire and Brimstone were not the only disasters of a punitive kind. In Bretagne the Catholics record the Island of Ys - sunk like a "very small Atlantis." In Austria or rather Tyrolia (up to 1918 that counted - including what is now Alto Adige to Italian administration - as a possession of the Habsburgs separate from Austria properly speaking) a city vanished under snow and ice which is called Tanneneh ... precisely because of pride and of arrogance to the poor.
Let us now suppose Atlantis did not exist. So far people have been searching but little has been found. Not nothing, but not sufficient to absolutely establish Atlantis either. How did the story then originate?
According to Athenians gossiping when Plato may have heard it - I just heard this charming theory or guess of Plato hearing it as a boy when Socrates was not his "master" as Jesus of the Twelve but rather simply houseteacher - it had been told by Solon a generation or two earlier by an Egyptian priest.
And where did the Egyptian priest get his story from? A long series of Egyptian priests confiding this secret only to very chosen initiates up to the day when a simple Greek called Solon was finally found worthy? Not ... so ... fast. That kind of information road is precisely very prone to interpolations. Or even downright inventions. If all previous steps of a tradition were secret, who can check out if it has been faithfully followed? Michael Heiser has said the Sumerian tablets were in fact very variable about the very same myths (not just period after period but even between different temples at same period, depending no dbout on which divinity one wanted to flatter) ... I have no reason to believe Egyptian ones were more uniform and scrupulously faithful to established and handed down truth.
Solon was told the Atlantis story with a certain twist. Atlanteans tried to invade the rest of the world. Athens stood in the way and actually stopped them. Then Atlantis sunk and Athenians sunk too, and today's Athenians (up to Solon's day that is) are Barbarians who know nothing about it ...
Sure, the last twist to this reminds me of how the Nine Muses talked to a shepherd named Hesiod. Like intimidating in an insulting way just to make him feel they knew better than he. And that fits extremely well with them starting off by singing hymns among others to "Kronos of the crooked mind", i e to Satan, I have very little doubt. Same attitude taken by the Egyptian priest to Solon. Same attitude taken by Hindoos and Blavatskians and Freemasons today to anyone they like to initiate. Not really something that raises my confidence.
It nearly puts me off as much as when I learned the descriptions of Vimana's as things able to fly and to be manned by men were not at all from Mahabharata but from a text "channelled" to one Hindoo in about 1920. As much confidence as one South African archaeologist getting sessions in his channelling with "Enki himself" ... or Cayce. Much as I like Atlantis lore, I am simply not a willing dupe to that kind of sources. Vade retro Satanas!
But the Atlantis story has another characteristic as told to Solon. The Egyptian priest set "prehistoric Athens" (Athens before the current memory of Athenians) in a role against Atlantis that Athens would soon have for real against Persia at Salamis and Marathon and Sparta against Persia at Thermopylae. He may very simply have been resenting the Persian overlordship over Egypt and trying to get Greek help against Persia. And the Ptolemys up to Cleopatra were the ultimate answer.
To return to its relation of similarity to the Flood of Noah, I have a kind of gut feeling that certain civilisations were very willing to forget the Flood very quickly and if not able to do it totally, of minimising the Flood. Reducing it in one Egyptian case to the deluge of only Atlantis - and in one Hindoo case (Mahabharata and Puranas) to the deluge of one sole city predicted by Krishna. This is why I am certainly interested if submarine archaeologists get something West of the Azores (and East of America) that looks like a city, but I am not exactly holding my breath for it.
China, India (with its Buddhist outposts in Tibet), Egypt are the ones prone to Flood denialism. Or Flood minimalising. They share a characteristic with Sumeria or Sinear which was too close to the Arc for that kind of thing (though they shortened the Deluge very much): extremely much longer ages than Biblical chronology. Nearly all other Paganisms have rather a shorter chronology. Greece and Rome, Norse Mythology, Irish starting with Partholan just before the Flood, and for that matter, Hindoo myths like Mahabharata rather than Hindoo dry chronologies tend to be at a date just before the Flood, Japanese mythology leaves out the creation of the world and starts with the creation of Japan, not so much earlier than Christ ...
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
Sunday
20-X-2013
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