Atlantis Rising: Secrets Decoded on Channel 5
I first encountered the “AtlantisThera theory” while rifling Donovan’s surprisingly archaeo-friendly bookshelves exactly 50 years ago. His yacht was then sailing near Thera (Santorini), in the very waters described by classicist JV Luce in my find: The End of Atlantis: New Light on an Old Legend
(Thames & Hudson 1969). I suppose the mystically inclined songwriter was interested in Plato’s lost civilisation.
But if I imagined that the case for Santorini, such as it was, was then closed, it seems I was wrong. If the legendary city-state recalled by Egyptian scribes and recounted by Plato indeed had any specific historical reality in Minoan Thera or its catastrophic volcanic end, this was challenged by
Atlantis Rising: Secrets Decoded (National Geographic 2017, Channel 5 June 2019).
I am no fan of “in search of the lost…” or “Secrets of…” tv
archaeology tropes. But this clearly wellfunded 93 minute “special” documentary did carry some credentials. I thought I would give it a chance.
Some of us might fondly remember Simcha Jacobovici, the presenter/ director of Atlantis Rising, as the erudite if somewhat mischievous Biblical scholar filmmaker, the eponymous Naked Archaeologist (Vision tv, History International 2005–10). Hollywood director James Cameron, of cinema blockbusters from Terminator and Titanic to Aliens and Avatar, acted as Jacobovici’s executive producer and sounding board.
Lending the Atlantis documentary a little extra credibility, Cameron’s solo dive seven miles into the Pacific Mariana Trench in his Deepsea Challenger submersible broke world records. He is no armchair oceanographer. But perhaps the rationally minded Cameron could have been more than an armchair (possibly deckchair?) producer, literally phoning in his contribution from the set of
Avatar sequels 2–4 and oceans away from the divers and Atlantean aficionados on (his?) supposedly state-of-the-art marine-lab yacht.
The team criss-crossed the
Mediterranean and into the Atlantic in search of Atlantis, taking in what was claimed as Biblical Jonah’s Iron Age Tarshish, Bronze Age to medieval Nuragic Sardinia, Maltese Neolithic megaliths, Chalcolithic structures in southern Spain and submerged Bronze Age “stone anchors” in the seas around the Pillars of Hercules/ Straits of Gibraltar. Thera/Santorini was instantly dismissed, as Jacobovici became increasingly excited and conspiratorial. Alarm bells rang.
Thus, by the end of the show Atlantean citizens had colonised the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic and, said Jacobovici, Jewish menorahs were actually “an evolution of the Atlantean symbol of concentric circles”. Any more or less round prehistoric structure with interlocking chambers anywhere, became “Atlantean architecture as described by Plato”.
As one of the research team helpfully suggests, “Your imagination kind of starts to help a bit… It’s easy to start to imagine things.” Archaeologists realise this. Perhaps Jacobovici and Cameron should have left an enigma alone. For as Plato wrote:
“Zeus the god of gods… wanting to inflict punishment on them that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the centre of the world, beholds all created things. And when he called them together, he spake as follows…” Luce, the translator, then notes, “At this point the [ie Plato’s] unfinished Critias breaks off.”
Undaunted by any of this, in his song Atlantis (1969) Donovan helpfully provides, “Way down below the ocean where I wanna be, she may be. My antediluvian baby yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
A footnote for historians of tv archaeology. Our much- missed Mick Aston told me he first met archaeo-curious student Tony Robinson while delivering his lecture on
Minoan Akrotiri at Thera.