Ancient History And Lost Myths Of Atlantis
by Rebecca Blakeney
With so many stories surrounding the lost continent of Atlantis, how many are myths and how many may be based on facts?
The enigma of Atlantis
There are many unsolved mysteries about human history, many puzzling questions about our pasts that no one has been able to answer. There are many theories, but no one can really be certain as to which ones are true.
I was recently watching a few documentaries on one such mystery: the lost continent of Atlantis.
There are so many questions surrounding this mystery and so many theories.
Did Atlantis really exist? If so, who were its inhabitants? Where did they come from? Did they really have more advanced technologies than we do today? Were they the one’s who first taught our ancestors to read and write, or how to build huge monuments whose purposes are lost to us today?
If Atlantis did really exist, how was it destroyed? What happened to its inhabitants?
These are only a few of the questions surrounding this enigma.
Some people believe that Atlantis never existed. That it is just a story, a myth and nothing more. There are others who believe that aliens descended from outer space onto Atlantis. That they were like gods, with supernatural powers and great knowledge of advanced technologies from other worlds.
There are even theories that these alien gods created the Earth. Some people believe that they were not aliens, but fallen angels instead.
Another theory suggests that the Atlantians were people who had methods of reading and writing before the rest of the world. It has been thought that perhaps these Atlantians traveled to different places around the globe, teaching others how to communicate through symbols, paintings and other markings.
It has also been theorized that they taught us long ago how to build enormous structures made from huge chunks of stone, like the Pyramids or Stonehenge, things that they should not have had the technology to create back then, according to our history books.
Some believe that these massive things were used for astrological purposes, like some sort of star-map or calendar, or perhaps for other reasons that we do not understand.
Some say that the Atlantians introduced farming to the world, teaching our ancestors to grow their own crops instead of gathering all of their food from wild sources.
Why do these people believe that it might have been the Atlantians who taught us all these things?
When we look back at history, it seems that places around the world developed these abilities, reading, writing, farming and building enormous monuments, roughly at the same time (relatively speaking). Places at opposite sides of the world that could not have had any contact with each other all suddenly began doing these new things. How? Did they come up with the same ideas all at once, or did someone come along and teach them?
Of course there are many people who debunk these theories.
In one of the documentaries I watched, a man explained that the methods of writing around the world were very different from each other. He said that the symbols used from one place to another were not the same.
He mentioned that there were even an ancient people, the Incas, who used knots on a string as a method of communication. He said that the different knots were specifically placed on the string to convey a message and people could actually read them!
His point was that if Atlantians really existed, why wouldn’t they just teach our ancestors the same method of writing? Why all these different ones?
I find the whole idea of Atlantis very intriguing, though I do not know what I believe about it or if it ever existed.
I must admit, it would be far more interesting if Atlantis did exist, but that’s my romantic archaeology-loving side talking more than my scientific-archaeology side.
I hope to someday learn more about the evidence backing these theories of its existence and those of its non-existence.
I would also love to hear of what you think of this puzzling mystery.
Thanks for reading, Rebecca.
(editor’s note: Rebecca Blakeney lives in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is a Grade 8 student at Cabot High in Neil’s Harbour and was the winner of Cape Breton’s regional spelling bee in 2007.)
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