Von Thera nach Atlantis

The Atlantis narrative has a fictional character. Nevertheless, it offers numerous insights into real conditions and events of the past, which have been preserved as memory patterns in the cultural memory of the Greeks and have shaped ideas and concepts in antiquity in the form of myths. Plato presents us with a cross-section of the mythically embellished memories of a long-gone era. While it is laborious to follow the uncritical attempts to approach Atlantis and the speculative localization efforts, this book separates more than a dozen theories regarding the location of Atlantis from the chaff. Instead, this book conducts an interdisciplinary evaluation that integrates the fields of cultural history, civilization studies, archaeology, historical linguistics, textual criticism, philosophy, and volcanological-geological sciences, illuminating the entire spectrum of the Atlantis theme complex for the first time. It is quite evident that Plato hides a moral message in his Atlantis myth. This was all the more credible for the people of that time because it was embedded in cultural memories of a long-past but "global" catastrophe for the Bronze Age Mediterranean world, a sunken world. In light of the irrefutable fact of the Thera catastrophe, present-day Santorini, it seems far-fetched to consider any other basis for Plato's myth. Thera is clearly the lid that fits the pot of Atlantis better than any other.