Final conclusion?

efore answering the question “Was this Atlantis”, we should realize that many people will say NO! There will be many people who have seen a television documentary, read a book, consulted a document, which claims to have found Atlantis, as many scientists before them and others who follow in claiming to have found Atlantis in turn here, there and elsewhere. Because the esteem that many people have in a professor, an archaeologist or a scientist, is generally proportional to the social status that the person holds in society. Myself, as the author of this book, I spent a lot of time examining the different findings, but there are so many that we cannot list them in this book without making it boring. I don't want to offend persons of good reputation, but I think it's appropriate to follow an argument as this industrial Heinrich Schliemann did when he sought the city of Troy. If we consider these three clues found in the Atlantic Ocean as mentioned previously, the words of Plato, then adjust the level of the ocean floor of the North Atlantic, we get a large island in the middle of it, as the image illustrates. It will, on the other hand, not be very easy to find something there. This area is actually a very deep and to go to look for archaeological excavations of a submarine Pompeii is no fun and may become very costly.

It's for this reason that we cannot envisage a comprehensive and systematic sweep of the Mid-Atlantic. To understand the difficulties, it must be remembered that the area to look up, as the picture on the previous page shows, is 1'500 km by 3'000 km, or 450 million hectares. If we have four dives per hectare at least to look, we get one billion eight hundred million dives, each costing up to one hundred thousand Euro! We can remind ourselves the trouble we had to find the Titanic, from which we were fully aware of where it had sunk. It's necessary to imagine the sight of such a deep sea diving gear. There is no daylight down there and the visibility itself is that of a foggy day: twenty meters at most.

This contrasts with an area like the Grand Banks of the Bahamas, to cite an example, where access is very easy for amateurs and professional divers. This area is very popular for scuba diving, because of the clear water and limited depth. It's for this reason that a large quantity of findings were made at this location. Which is normal, the more you try, the more you find.

The reason why we have not yet found something in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, is simply due to the fact that this area is not very accessible for professionals, and completely inaccessible to amateurs. We can therefore conclude that the findings made in this area remain hazardous. These findings are discovered only by those who got across it accidentally by searching for other things and reasons.

But claiming that Atlantis could never been found there because we simply did not look for what was in this place, is going too far. Atlantis is certainly there, just look. Simply lay all the clues end to end to get a picture of Atlantis. We may need to stop assuming things, putting aside national claims and do that what this German industrialist, Heinrich Schliemann, had done in the late 19^th century, seeking the city of Troy, by starting to look there where the Legend says Atlantis should be.

Since the time I study the question of Atlantis, I am frequently asked why there were no more traces and writings on Atlantis.

Let's thus start with the traces, we know from the dialogues of Plato that the events are looking back for at least 12'000 years, then, considering the few traces that remain to this day of the Romans, we should not be expecting to find many things of an era six times longer back in time. The only places that seem to have preserved traces of ancient civilizations, are precisely those areas that have been submerged by the melting ice of the Ice Age, ie the sea less than 130 meters. For traces of Atlantis itself, we must still ask the question: have we really looked at the right place? Because it's easy to understand that we might not find something there where it's not. We should already start looking in the right place. To understand the second reason of so little evidence, simply read the description of the destruction itself. According to Plato all that remains of the island Atlantis, are small islands like the bones of a wasted body. In any case, this kind of sentence says it all. We don't risk to find much.

The second point, (the writing) goes in the same direction as the archaeological findings: the more an event is distant in time, the lesser a paper trail will exist. Regarding the Atlanteans, it seems to have been a society already well advanced at both cultural and technical level. It's therefore not excluded that there have been some of them who knew what would happen. But where to hide all this knowledge? Put yourself in their place! It seems clear that the dialogues of Plato may be incomplete. Either that Plato had not finished, or, more likely, that a part had been destroyed. But yes, each civilization believes that their culture is the best and systematically destroys that what it deems as heretical writings. Replacing it immediately with the history and culture forged to their image. We could as such assist in an indirect way to the destruction of the library of Alexandria by Caesar and the Muslim armies and the destruction of the archives of the Maya by men of Hernán Cortes and his bishop. Then we can bet that some of the dialogues of Plato have also been destroyed in the same way. Then it's well known that Plato was often at odds with his contemporaries, I believe that he failed to be sentenced to death. It's therefore quite conceivable that some of his dialogues have been destroyed, because contrary to the scientific and cultural beliefs of the time. It's maybe a chance that the dialogues that we have today had not been destroyed by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Because at the time, it was enough to say that the Earth was round and revolved around the sun and itself, to reach another world and see your soul purified by fire.

Culture and Population:

We have already seen that there are two different visions of Atlantis, even three if we include the regressions of Mr Bernard and Mr Duboy. There is the official version, “translated” and told by the Egyptian priests to Solon, and the version seen by the people, described by Mr Edgar Cayce in his readings. The version of Plato gives us a vision of a society that has many similarities with the society of Greece and ancient Egypt. By putting these three visions alongside each other, we get an image that looks strangely like ancient Egypt. Then we can assume that we find there a bit of Indian society also. The dialogues of Plato, which were apparently the official versions, show a polytheistic religion, like the Greeks and Egyptians had. The testimony of Mr Bernard and Mr Edgar Cayce also describe us that a part of Atlantean society was clearly monotheistic: this part was composed, according to Mr Cayce, of ancestors of the Jewish people of today. (Reading 1007-3) If we read well some of the readings of Mr Edgar Cayce, we can see that he sometimes talks about that what he calls “things”. Although some of the esoteric milieu wants to see in these things half-animal – half-human beings, as in Greek mythology, a careful examination of the Cayce readings, does not allow us to conclude that this was the case. It seems that these things were indeed humans treated like animals, a sort of lower caste, or a caste of untouchables as in India of today. We don't need to go further down then in the nineteenth century or just before to see that our farmers and workers of that time weren't treated much better.

Even if the race of Neanderthals has disappeared 29'000 years before Christ, the stories of Cayce could suggests us that these “things” might have been belonging to this race. It's obviously very tempting to keep a good worker and obedient race to do the dirty work, that what we leave today voluntarily up to immigrant workers. It's in any case that what could have justified the classification “things”, due to the quite different physical aspect of this race.

We saw earlier that the island Atlantis must still have had a size of at least a thousand by two thousand kilometers. Atlantis then was divided into ten sections, with a organization of state resembling very close a confederation. In addition, Plato's tales, Maya myths and Cayce readings, permit us to estimate the enumeration of the population. These stories don't, unfortunately, allow us to know how the political organization was. The dialogues of Plato describe us a hereditary monarchical autocracy. But if we take into account the habits of the Guanches, supposed survivors of Atlantis, it's possible that some states of Atlantis had, like them, a system of elected leaders, as confirm us the regressions of Mr Duboy et Mr Bernard.

Some characteristics of Atlantis:

• 3 million square kilometers.
• Federation of ten states, including one over-covering the other nine states.
• They politically and militarily controlled the Mediterranean, the Yucatan, the islands of the Gulf of Mexico and possibly other regions.
• Over 64 million inhabitants. (Source Maya!)
• Main city, Poseidon, ± 2'000'000 inhabitants.
• 92% of people living in the countryside.
• 25 million people in the plain of the main state. (60'000 districts of 138 hectares each.)
• An army of militia or conscripts, with 1'260'000 men.
• Two religions, a monotheistic and polytheistic.
• A society very focused knowledge, science and culture.
• They had towards the end of their life a technology superior to our own.
• They knew a source of energy of which we know nothing so far.

What would the landscape of Atlantis? No one would know, unless Atlantis comes back at the surface as Cayce had predicted. But by inspecting the terrain, we can still look here and there for a similar configuration. The region of the main city of Poseidon (or Poséida according to Cayce), with its plain of 350 km by 220 km and his mountains in the north, makes us think of the plain of the River Po in northern Italy. Except that northern Italy, without the boot thus, is two times smaller. But it still gives an impression of the size and configuration of the land.

For agriculture, the fields would probably have been irrigated as the Indians of South America did and as the men of the desert still do, fields surrounded by small canals, where irrigation water flows. It's interesting to note that Valaisans, ie the inhabitants of the Rhone Valley, the Valais in Switzerland, had a similar system, which was still in use at the time that I lived there. They call these channels “Bisses”. There is one which is kept in state for tourism and is worth visiting. This Bisse is called “Bisse de Savièse” and is open to the public. People experiencing vertigo refrain! Another one we can visit hiking, is the “Bisse de Nandaz”.

The rest of the country was quite mountainous, with a huge volcano of over 5'000 meters in the middle of the country. Which makes us think a little of the Japanese islands, which has also this kind of field configuration, with a large volcano in the middle of the country, which is moreover regarded as a sacred mountain. Atlanteans too, seem to have had the notion of sacred mountain, they were in any case having sacrifices at the top of the mountain, where burned eternal a fire.

The configuration of the main city, with the three rings of canals, is not very surprising in itself. We must not forget that all cities had a defense system, some built walls, others a water defense where they used the earth to build a wall between the channel and the citadel. But like all cities, it grows and so it should move outwards its defenses. Most have had filled the old channel, but there are cities that had then converted these defense channels into a seaport. The city of Amsterdam had done so in the past and now we have the famous “Grachten”, which were in the sixteenth and seventeenth century first of all defenses of the city, to become then seaports thereafter. It would probably be the same for the main city of Atlantis. First defenses with a fortress for the kings and priests and then gradually other defenses for the population which came to live in the neighborhood. Then it seems that Atlanteans had not filled the old channels, but had, as the city of Amsterdam would do after them, used them as a seaport.

The main city of Atlantis, which was probably called like his legendary creator, Poseidon, should, if we add up all distances, have had a size of fourteen kilometers, with the administration city, the kings and the central government in the center. Then the wealthy and important people followed by the rest of the people of the city. This type of image of a city would not be too different from European cities today. We can also superimpose the main city of Atlantis, Poseidon, and Paris, to find that Poseidon goes a kilometer beyond the Paris ring road on all sides. We can thus form an idea of the importance of this city, especially if we bear in mind that the city of Paris had in 2004 about two million inhabitants at roughly the same area.

Were the Atlanteans of the same race as us or not? We can not verify this today. But by reading all the myths and even the Bible, Atlanteans may have been a race with a life expectancy much greater than ours. A life expectancy of up to 900 or even 1000 years, which obviously gives them a distinct advantage. With such longevity, they could better focus on education and training and, unlike our today's politicians and businessmen, also plan for the long term. Perhaps this was their vision to be regarded as gods by other less advanced peoples.