Ninja Wolves and Atlantis

               coin of Chersonos, Thrace

Somebody calling themself "NinjaWolfHybrid" sent a comment to a recent post on this blog:

"Paul, I thought of a straightforward way one could prove if Atlantis was at Richat. If you might help, please reach out                  [email- redacted]"

They don't have much of an internet presence, a dormant blog from 2010, some posts on forums for fantasy board games, photos showing he once had a cute girlfriend, he seems to make a lot of gaming figur3es by 3-d printing, has a few posts on gaming on Reddit, that kind of thing. But since he asked for help, I decided to reply:

"Hi, how can I help you? What's your idea?

Just for the record, there is no way on earth the Richat structure was “Atlantis” (which in any case I am 100% sure never existed). The whole attraction of Atlantis is that there is a story that has so many details, people ask “how can this all be made up? There is so much detail”. Yet the only way they can make it “work” is by ignoring about >75% of the very specific information given [because they can’t make it fit]. There is a fundamental illogicality there.

This is exactly the case with Richat. Plato says EXACTLY where the ISLAND was (and what is there now/was there in his time). Only by ignoring that can you make it 1600km to the SW of there in the middle of a desert (“but maybe he did not really mean what he EXPLICITLY wrote, but … perhaps …. the meaning of those words is something quite different” – ancient Greek does not work like that)

I see you build fantasy worlds. Many of them I think have a lot of detail. Of course anyone can make anything up with as much detail as their imagination can supply. Atlantis is precisely that, an Iron Age fantasy world imagined as set in the heroic Bronze Age.

That is not a “closed mind”, that is looking into something very carefully and making deductions from the evidence as as a whole as well as specifically. Not at all the same thing.

With best wishes.
Paul Barford

Sadly, this is the reply I got (capitalisation original):

" I will tell you if you can substantiate this claim you made in your original dismissal: "Plato says EXACTLY where the ISLAND was."
- [first name redacted] "

So, despite what I wrote, exactly that. Seems to me, reading between the lines, we have somebody who's happy to ignore Pindar being quoted by Strabo, ignores Herodotus and "feels" that those "Pillars of Hercules" mentioned by Plato (a near contempory of Herodotus) were in fact somewhere else than where the contemporary ancient sources quite clearly (unequivocally) place them. And "anyway" (they'll go one to say), the Greek term Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος "does not MEAN it was an island". It has become fashionable in the "alternative-pasts" milieu to point out that it could have meant a body of land, big or small, largely surrounded by water.

However the Greek term for peninsula [χερσόνησος] already existed in Plato's time and was widely used to refer to.... peninsulae. The term is a compound word derived from khersos ("dry land") and nēsos ("island"), literally meaning "island connected to the mainland". It was current at the time of the Greek colonisation, so we have a number of settlements specifically called "Chersonesos".

Chersonesos Taurica (Crimea): A prominent ancient Greek colony in SW Crimea near modern Sevastopol, founded in the 6th century BCE.
Thracian Chersonese (Gallipoli): The ancient name for the Gallipoli Peninsula in modern Turkey.
Chersonesos (Crete): An ancient city on the north coast of Crete, which served as the harbour for the city of Lyktos.

I can't say I took too kindly to this nonsense: 

What? You gave the impression you were asking for help and I offered it.
I now see that instead you wanted to start an argument. I am at work here. With respect, please go and play amateur-semantic cherry-picking games somewhere else.
Paul Barford

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