Whatever happened to this project??
New Atlantis Cyprus will be the talk of the world for the next 500 years.
JUST as Cyprus was discovering it might be lying on top of rich off-shore oil and gas reserves and thinking of how to bring them up, it suddenly learnt that its waters could be hiding a completely different kind of fabulous wealth.
“The whole world is going to shift to this island. It will be the greatest archaeological discovery in history. It will change religion, it will change politics, science. The ramifications are almost endless. Cyprus will be the talk of the world for the next 500 years.”
These are the words of Robert Sarmast, the man who claims to have located the lost mythological city of Atlantis on the seabed surrounding Cyprus and has now come here to start looking for it. “Right below Larnaca was a fresh water lake; just from Ayia Napa begins the western edge of the Atlantis plain, which goes all the way to the coast of Syria. The acropolis of the lost city is situated exactly seven miles off Cyprus,” Sarmast told The Cyprus Weekly in an interview shortly after his first arrival on the island that looks set to dominate his whole life.
WHOLE CITY
He said the lost city lay only 1,000 metres below water and reaching it would not be all that difficult, noting that the “Titanic” was discovered 2,500 m down. But what does he expect to find if and when he got there?
“A lot of megalithic structures, temples, bridges, tunnels and canals and a lot of artefacts; there is a whole city down there.”
One can be more precise relying on Plato’s ‘Critias,’ which, together with the ancient Greek philosopher’s other work ‘Timeaus’, both written in 5th century BC, are the only sources for the existence of the lost city.
Describing the innermost temple of Atlantis, where Poseidon fathered King Atlas and his nine princely siblings with the mortal Cleito, Timaeus told Socrates that it was of huge proportions, covered with silver on the outside, while the interior was made of ivory, wrought with gold, silver and orichalcum.
WINGED HORSES
It was filled with golden statues, by far the most impressive one being that of God Poseidon himself standing in a chariot with a charioteer and six winged horses. The golden sculpture was so tall that Poseidon’s head touched the roof of the temple and it was surrounded by a hundred Nereids riding on dolphins.
“And around the temple on the outside were placed statutes of gold of all the descendants of the ten kings and of their wives.”
This small sample from the long and detailed 2,500-year old description of Atlantis is jaw-dropping enough, but gold and silver alone does not seem to account for Sarmast’s infatuation with Atlantis.
The 38-year-old American, of Iranian origin, described his keen interest in the subject as a spiritual quest and declared his belief that ancient Atlantis was the source of all modern civilisation and the true Garden of Eden.
But what are his chances of discovering Atlantis in Cyprus and proving wrong all the others who have placed the submerged city in various parts of the Atlantic ocean, in Venezuela, in Greenland, in Great Britain, in Thera/Santorini, or even Troy?
Unlike all other Atlantologists, Sarmast has made use of digital technology to reconstruct a map of the lost city or continent, based on Plato’s description and found that Cyprus and its seabed match almost exactly the geographical features given in Critias.
PILLARS OF HERCULES
His theory is as simple as it is breathtaking. According to the data he collected in his ten-year research, the Mediterranean Sea, in its historical course of millions of years, occasionally dried up and became a basin of lakes and lagoons.
This happened whenever the movement of the Euarasian and African teutonic plates caused the Gibraltar Straits - known in antiquity as the Pillars of Hercules - to shut and become a natural dam, separating the Atlantic ocean from the Mediterranean.
A reverse movement of the plates would again cause the Atlantic to rush in and flood the Mediterranean. It appears that the civilisation of Atlantis developed during one of the dry intervals of the Mediterranean in the eastern corner, where Cyprus was situated in the midst of a lake with much lower water level than today. It was also connected to the Syrian coast at the point of present-day Lattakia by a narrow isthmus.
The Atlanteans spread their culture and influence eastwards but they became a threat to the Athenians and the Egyptians. The former found themselves fighting alone against the mighty race but just as they were winning, the Gibraltar Straits moved apart again. The Egyptian priests described the terrible outcome to the Athenian lawgiver Solon when he visited them in around 600BC:
“There occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men, in a body, sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis, in like manner, disappeared into the depths of the sea.”
Cypriots will have a chance to see what the disappearance of Atlantis was like in a computer simulation of the flood worked out by Sarmast and his associates, which will be presented to the public in Nicosia sometime next week.
“The Mediterranean then was almost like an empty basin 3-4 miles below the level of the Atlantic. When the straits moved apart, the water falls created were1,000 times larger than those of Niagara, flooding the basin at a speed of 400 miles an hour and destroying everything,” Sarmast said.
Atlantis was covered completely by the water although it had one of the highest mountains in the world. The island rose again during new geological upheavals, but not high enough to reveal the lost city that it once was.
The theory, of course, throws up quite a few debatable questions centring mostly around dates. The last drying up of the Mediterranean, according to a ground-breaking 1980 survey by scientists Kenneth Hall and Walter Pitman, is estimated to have occurred 5 million years ago when there were no people around to witness it.
But Sarmast says that according to Plato the Egyptian priests recorded the Atlantis story from a language older that their own 10,000 years earlier. The only writing which is known to be older than hieroglyphics is the cuneiform used by the Sumerians. So one is compelled to logically infer that those who first recorded the destruction of Atlantis had actually witnessed it.
In this case, Sarmast notes, Hall and Pitman were right in their findings but got the chronology wrong. He also pointed out that it only took 1,000-4,000 years of evaporation to turn the closed Mediterranean into a quasi-desert.
SONAR DATA
There is, however, another snag to the dating exercise: Athens, which defeated Atlantis, appeared on the scene during the 2nd millennium BC, which is a long shot from the 10th millennium suggested by the Egyptian priests.
Sarmast’s comment here is that the Athenian element might have got into the Atlantis story by way of embellishment, since it was passed to Plato from Solon after the latter’s visit to Egypt.
It would require too much space to go into all the details of Sarmast’s theory and especially how he arrived at it by using Russian sonar oceanographic data lying forgotten in the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration in Colorado.
The quest for Atlantis in Cyprus has so far cost him a love relationship and half a million dollars, but he is determined to press ahead. Interestingly, his initial funding came from Michael Wisenbraker’s Heritage Standard Inc, which engages in oil and gas exploration, but that was long before Cyprus’ off-shore reserves were heard of.
During his 2-3 week stay in Cyprus, Robert Sarmast will also be presenting the book he wrote about the “Discovery of Atlantis” at the Solonion Bookshop.
He hopes that he will provoke enough interest in his venture for financial sponsors to come forward and help in salvaging the lost Atlantis from the realm of mythology and make it an astounding reality.
Discovery of Atlantis website
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