Mention of a city that had suddenly vanished into the sea comes from Plato. He called that sunken city Atlantis and many efforts have been made to locate it in the millennia since.
Speculation about possible sites for the ‘Lost City of Atlantis’ have ranged all over the Mediterranean and even into the Atlantic. The volcanic island of Santorini, for instance, is often mentioned as a potential candidate.
However, a new discovery just off the Greek mainland has marine archaeologists abuzz with excitement.
- The sunken ruins are located off the coast of the Southern Peloponnesus in a protected bay.
Ruins from a sunken city were discovered 40 years ago but only recently explored. What the joint Anglo-Greek team of scientists have found is truly astonishing. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/16/lost-greek-city-atlantis-myth
Known as Pavlopetri, the sunken settlement dates back some 5,000 years to the time of Homer’s heroes and in terms of size and wealth of detail is unprecedented, experts say.
“There is now no doubt that this is the oldest submerged town in the world,” said Dr Jon Henderson, associate professor of underwater archaeology at the University of Nottingham. “It has remains dating from 2800 to 1200 BC, long before the glory days of classical Greece. There are older sunken sites in the world but none can be considered to be planned towns such as this, which is why it is unique.”
- Scientists explore underwater ruins of a sunken city off the Greek coast.
Because this city was undisturbed and not reoccupied these ruins may yield new insights into Mycenaean society, the culture that dominated Greece during the Homeric Age.
So far the exploration has revealed a world of buildings, courtyards, main streets, rock-cut tombs and religious structures. In addition, the seabed was replete with thousands of shards of pottery.
“We found ceramics dating back to the end of the stone age, which suggested that the settlement was occupied some 5,000 years ago, at least 1,200 years earlier than originally thought,” said Henderson, who co-directed the underwater survey.
“Our investigations also revealed over 9,000 square meters of new buildings. But what really took us by surprise was the discovery of a possible megaron, a monumental structure with a large rectangular hall, which also suggests that the town had been used by an elite, and automatically raised the status of the settlement.”
This site dates back to the time of Troy, when Achilles, Agamemnon and Odysseus are said to have walked the earth and performed heroic deeds. We have much to learn about the society and culture of that ancient time and this new discovery will contribute to our understanding of the everyday life of those living in Homeric Greece.
More than any other underwater site so far, the find offers potential insights into the workings of Mycenaean society.
“It is significant because as a submerged site it was never reoccupied,” said Elias Spondylis, who co-directed the survey as the head of Greece’s underwater antiquities department. “As such it represents a frozen moment of the past.”
The tale of Atlantis has often been dismissed as some kind of fairy tale, a nice story but not necessarily true. Now it looks like there really might have been a sunken city that gave rise to the story recounted by Plato.
Once upon a time, the sagas of Iliad and the Odyssey were dismissed as mere myths with no basis in historical events. Since then the ruins of Troy have been excavated and identified in modern Turkey. Other Mycenaean sites around the Mediterranean have also been explored. The findings from these excavations tend to confirm the Homeric accounts of a world that existed in the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean around Greece.
Now it looks like Plato’s tale about the lost city of Atlantis is being confirmed.
No longer can these stories be regarded as mere myths with no historical basis but rather a retelling of ancient events that had been handed down via oral history for generations before they were written down.
It is the first time a sunken city has been found in Greece that predates the time that Plato wrote his allegorical tale of the sunken continent of Atlantis.
“Atlantis was a myth but it is a myth that keeps underwater exploration going,” said Sakellariou. “Less than 1% of the world’s ocean floors have ever been surveyed. This is an extraordinary find but there is still a lot more down there that has to be found.”
Who knows what the next discovery will tell us about the ancient past?
