59 Fun Facts About Atlantis

In which two of Plato's dialogues does the story of Atlantis appear?

Timaeus and Critias open what looks like a planned trilogy, but the Critias breaks off mid-story and no third dialogue is known.

Plato's full Greek name for the land, Atlantis nesos, literally means what?

Island of Atlas: in Plato's tale this Atlas is not the sky-bearing Titan but the island's first king, a son of its divine founder, and the surrounding ocean took his name too.

Plato says the story reached Greece through which famous lawgiver, who heard it from priests in Egypt?

Solon, Plato says, meant to turn the tale into an epic that might have rivalled Homer, but political strife at home left him no time to write it.

According to Plato, Atlantis lay beyond what landmark?

The Pillars of Hercules are the rocks flanking the Strait of Gibraltar, which the hero was said to have set up to mark the farthest limit of his travels and of safe seafaring.

Plato dates the fall of Atlantis to roughly how long before his own time?

9,000 years before the tale was first told would put the war near 9600 BC, deep in the Stone Age, yet Plato's Atlantis has metal-plated walls, chariots and a fleet of triremes.

Plato describes Atlantis as an island larger than which two lands combined?

Libya and Asia meant North Africa and, on a common reading, Asia Minor; beside the ocean around his island, Plato calls the whole Mediterranean only a harbour.

Which god was allotted the island of Atlantis when the deities divided the earth?

Poseidon was the god of earthquakes as well as the sea, so the island Plato gives him is finally destroyed by the very forces he commanded.

Atlantis's divine founder fell in love with the mortal Cleito, who bore him which children?

Five pairs of male twins were born to Cleito, and the god split the island into ten kingdoms so that every son had a realm of his own.

In Plato's tale, the island's god ringed the central hill of Atlantis with three circular what?

Moats: the god cut three rings of sea around the hill to guard the woman he loved, and the Atlanteans later tunnelled through the land between them so ships could sail into the city.

The walls of Atlantis were covered in brass, tin and which legendary precious metal?

Orichalcum, Plato says, was mined on the island and ranked second only to gold in value, yet by his own day it survived as nothing more than a name.

Who led the alliance that defeated the Atlantean empire in Plato's story?

The Athenians first led a Greek alliance and then, deserted by their allies, beat the invaders alone, a victory Plato gives to a city modelled on his ideal state.

How quickly did Atlantis disappear into the sea, according to Plato?

In a single day and night of earthquakes and floods, Plato says, the island sank and the victors' whole army was swallowed by the earth along with it.

What did Plato say the sunken island of Atlantis left behind, making the sea there impassable?

A shoal of mud suited what Greeks of Plato's day believed about the outer ocean, which even their scientists described as shallow because of mud.

Scholars read Plato's Atlantis, a sea empire of the west, as a deliberate contrast to which real land empire of the east?

The Achaemenid Persians had invaded Greece from the east a century before Plato wrote, and his tale may replay that war in reverse, with the invader arriving by sea from the west.

Which philosopher is traditionally said to have joked that the man who invented Atlantis also sank it?

Aristotle is usually credited with the jibe, preserved without his name by a later geographer, which likens Plato to Homer building and then washing away the Greek wall at Troy.

The sixth-century writer Cosmas Indicopleustes cited the Atlantis story in a book arguing that the Earth is what shape?

Flat: Cosmas modelled the world on the box-like tabernacle of Moses, and claimed the Atlantis tale itself was borrowed from Moses.

In Plato's tale, which animals did the kings of Atlantis hunt with only staves and nooses before a sacrifice?

Bulls roamed free in the island's great temple, and the kings cut the captured animal's throat over a column inscribed with their laws before swearing to obey them.

Some scholars think Plato modelled Atlantis's fortifications on which Sicilian city he knew well?

Syracuse was where Plato had tried, and failed, to turn the young tyrant Dionysius II into a philosopher-king, and some scholars see its harbours and walls in his island city.

Which Bronze Age volcano's eruption is often proposed as the catastrophe behind the Atlantis story?

Thera (Santorini) erupted about 3,600 years ago, burying a wealthy island town in ash and leaving the sea-filled crater that ships sail into today.

Whose 1882 book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World is credited with reviving the Atlantis myth?

Ignatius Donnelly, a former Minnesota congressman, claimed every ancient civilisation descended from Atlantis, then wrote another book arguing that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.

Which occultist claimed her 1888 book drew on ancient verses first composed in Atlantis?

Helena Blavatsky said The Secret Doctrine came from the Book of Dzyan, written in a lost tongue called Senzar, yet no scholar of ancient languages has ever found a trace of either.

Which American psychic predicted that Atlantis would rise from the sea again in the 1960s?

Edgar Cayce, who died in 1945, called the island of Bimini a mountaintop of Atlantis, and a line of stone slabs found there in 1968 is still promoted as its road, though geologists call it beachrock.

Which scientific development of the 1960s made theories of a vast sunken Atlantis wane?

Acceptance of continental drift showed that sea floors spread rather than swallow land, leaving a continent nowhere to sink, an idea mapmaker Abraham Ortelius had floated in 1596 while musing on Atlantis.

The Atlantis resort that opened in 2008 at the tip of a man-made island in the Gulf is in which city?

Dubai's Atlantis The Palm crowns Palm Jumeirah, an island built mostly of sand dredged from the sea floor, so a hotel named for a sunken land stands on ground raised from the sea.

Which drowned land beneath the North Sea, once home to Stone Age hunters, has been proposed as the real Atlantis?

Doggerland joined Britain to mainland Europe until melting ice sheets drowned it, and North Sea fishermen still haul up ancient bones and tools from its plains.

In 2011 a US-led team claimed in a TV documentary to have found Atlantis in which Spanish national park?

Doñana's marshes, the team said, hid a city swamped by a tsunami, but Spanish researchers who had been studying the site since 2005 criticised the claim.

Ulf Erlingsson argued in 2004 that Plato modelled Atlantis, with its central plain open to the sea, on which island?

Ireland was, he said, the only one of the world's 50 largest islands to fit Plato's description, though he called Atlantis itself a utopia that never existed.

Which Atlantic archipelago, often touted as Atlantis, has been an undersea plateau for millions of years?

The Canaries and Madeira have been steadily uplifted, not sunk, over four million years.

Under the ice of which landmass have several writers claimed the ruins of Atlantis lie hidden?

Antarctica drew Atlantis hunters partly because a 1513 Ottoman chart, the Piri Reis map, was said to show its coast free of ice, a reading historians of cartography have disproved.

Which landform in Mauritania, whose concentric rings show clearly from orbit, have some theorists put forward as Atlantis?

The Richat Structure reminds believers of Plato's ringed capital, but geologists say it is a dome of rock worn down by erosion, deep in the Sahara.

Which writer coined the word 'utopia' in a 16th-century work partly inspired by Plato's Atlantis?

Thomas More built the name from Greek words meaning 'nowhere', and placed his perfect island in the newly explored New World.

Despite its title, Francis Bacon's utopia New Atlantis is set on an island in which ocean?

The Pacific Ocean: Bacon's sailors leave Peru for China and Japan, are blown off course and find the island, whose people say the 'great Atlantis' was America, wrecked by a flood.

Which composer wrote the 1943 opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis while an inmate of the Theresienstadt camp?

Viktor Ullmann's opera is believed to have been stopped in rehearsal after the SS saw Hitler in its Emperor; he was killed at Auschwitz in 1944, and the piece was first staged in Amsterdam in 1975.

Manuel de Falla's late cantata was based on L'Atlantida, an 1877 epic in which language?

Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer finished the epic at sea on a voyage home from Cuba; Falla then spent his last 20 years on the cantata and still left it for another composer to complete.

Which French novelist had his heroes walk through the ruins of Atlantis in an 1870 adventure novel?

Jules Verne has Captain Nemo, silenced by his diving helmet, pick up a chalky stone and scrawl the single word ATLANTIS on a rock in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

Which 1960s folk-pop star took a single called Atlantis into the US top ten in 1969?

Donovan's Atlantis went out in America as a B-side, but radio stations preferred it to the A-side and it climbed to number seven.

Who voiced linguist Milo Thatch in Disney's 2001 film Atlantis: The Lost Empire?

Michael J. Fox voiced Milo in a film whose angular look came from Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, brought in by the directors as an artistic consultant.

Which linguist, also the creator of Klingon, built the Atlantean language for Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire?

Marc Okrand gave Atlantean an Indo-European word stock so it could pass for a mother tongue of later languages, and the hero's look was partly sketched from him.

Which DC superhero, alias Arthur Curry, is the son of a lighthouse keeper and the queen of Atlantis?

In DC's telling, Aquaman spent most of his life exiled from Atlantis, unaware of his royal blood, and took the throne only as an adult.

In the TV series Stargate Atlantis, the city of the Ancients is found in which galaxy?

The Pegasus setting was a late change: the creators first planned to have the city found on Earth, then moved it to another galaxy so the spin-off could run alongside Stargate SG-1.

The Atlantis Paradise Island resort, opened in 1998 with its Royal Towers, is in which country?

The Bahamas resort began when Sol Kerzner, the South African hotelier behind Sun City, bought the ageing Paradise Island hotel in 1994 and rebuilt it as Atlantis.

Space Shuttle Atlantis took its name from which kind of vessel, rather than straight from Plato's island?

A research sailing ship: RV Atlantis was Woods Hole's first research vessel, retired in 1966, and its name lives on in the ship that now carries the deep-diving submersible Alvin.

Space Shuttle Atlantis flew the Shuttle programme's final mission in 2011 to which destination?

The ISS was also the crew's lifeboat: with no second shuttle left to rescue them, only four astronauts flew, and a stranded crew would have come home in Russian Soyuz capsules.

Which drowned kingdom in Tolkien's legendarium did the author call his own version of the Atlantis legend?

Númenor's people sail against the gods in search of immortality and are swallowed by the sea, after which the Elves call the lost land Atalantë, 'the Downfallen'.

Which Star Trek actor voiced the ageing King of Atlantis in Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire?

Leonard Nimoy's king speaks a language devised for the film by the same linguist who had created Klingon for Star Trek.

Which Greek city, swallowed by the sea after an earthquake in 373 BC, may have inspired Atlantis's fate?

Helike was drowned by an earthquake and tidal wave when Plato was in his fifties, and its ruins were found again only in 2001, buried under a silted-up lagoon.

Which actor, later a star of Dallas, played the web-handed hero of the 1977 TV series Man from Atlantis?

Patrick Duffy's amnesiac hero could breathe underwater, but the costly series was cancelled after 13 episodes, freeing him to become Bobby Ewing the following year.

Which film hero stars in a classic 1992 adventure game subtitled The Fate of Atlantis?

Indiana Jones must beat Nazi agents to Atlantis on the eve of the Second World War, and the player chooses whether he does it by wits, by fists or as a team with a partner.

Which 2022 Marvel film renamed Namor's undersea kingdom, Atlantis in the comics, as Talokan?

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever named Namor's realm after Tlalocan, a paradise of Aztec myth, and modelled its people on the ancient Maya instead of the Greeks' legend.

Diodorus Siculus placed the Atlanteans in North Africa and had them go to war with whom?

The Amazons, led by Queen Myrina, razed one Atlantean city so savagely that the rest surrendered, after which she befriended them and founded a new city in its place.

The Nordic-supermen version of Atlantis popular in German ariosophy lent its name to which group?

Guido von List and others spread the idea around 1900, drawing on Bailly's 'Hyperborea'.

Which rock star voiced the ruler of Atlantis in the 2007 SpongeBob SquarePants special Atlantis SquarePantis?

David Bowie voiced Lord Royal Highness, ruler of an Atlantis whose greatest treasure, for SpongeBob and Patrick at least, is the World's Oldest Bubble.

Plato says Atlantis conquered Europe as far as Tyrrhenia, the Italian homeland of which ancient people?

The Etruscans were Tyrrhenians to the Greeks, a name that survives in the Tyrrhenian Sea off Italy's west coast, and in Plato's tale their land marks how far into Europe Atlantis reached.

The 17th-century scholar Olof Rudbeck argued in his four-volume treatise Atland that Atlantis was really which country?

Sweden was, Rudbeck argued, the cradle of civilisation, and he claimed that Swedish was the original language from which Latin and Hebrew had grown.

NASA's retired shuttle Atlantis is now displayed, tilted as if in orbit, at which site?

Kennedy Space Center kept Atlantis at its old launch site, mounted at an angle of 43.21 degrees with its payload bay doors open, while its sister orbiters went to museums in Virginia, Los Angeles and New York.

Historian Adolf Schulten identified Atlantis with which lost Iberian city?

Tartessos was a byword for silver and metal wealth among ancient writers, and Schulten went looking for the city itself in the 1920s without ever finding it.

The original Atlantis story breaks off mid-sentence just as which god is about to pronounce the island's punishment?

Zeus summons the gods to chasten the Atlanteans for their greed, and the text stops just as he begins to speak, so his sentence is never heard.

Which author, famous for a fictional detective, wrote The Maracot Deep, a novel about explorers finding Atlantis on the seabed?

Arthur Conan Doyle ran it as a serial in The Strand Magazine from 1927: his explorers sink to the Atlantic floor and are rescued by the last survivors of the drowned city.

Which animals does Plato single out as living in great numbers on Atlantis?

Elephants: Plato explains that the land had food enough for every kind of beast, even the one that is 'the largest and most voracious of all'.