COMPANION TO ATLANTIS AND OTHER MYSTERY LANDS,by Ronan Coghlan
XIPHOS BOOKS 2009, ISBN 978-0-9544936-9-1
There have been more books on Atlantis than you can shake a stick at. So what’s different about this one? Well, aside from being written by noted scholar, Fortean and antiquarian Ronan Coghlan; it is an A to Z of not just all things Atlantean but of all lost geography: lost cities, lost islands, lost continents. It’s all here: Hyperborea, lemuria, Mu, Shambhala and many others. Some of the most interesting are not the huge continents but small islands or island chains that seem to have vanished. The Aurora Islands in the South Atlantic, for example, were last observed in 1856; the Nimrod Islands near the tip of South America were last seen in 1828; and Pepys Island, which vanished in 1684. Pheng-Lai was supposedly a mysterious island of Chinese legend visited over 2000 years ago that may have been Hawaii.
As for Atlantis itself people have thought that it was just about anywhere from Ireland to Africa. Some say it was a city on an island in a lake rather than a continent in the ocean. One such spot is the wonderfully named Poopoo Lake in Bolivia.
People who have written about, hunted for or studied Atlantis and other lost locations are listed from Madam Blavatsky to Otto Muck. There are also lists of the animals and plants that supposedly flourished on Atlantis.
Ronan supports a very feasible idea that most of the lost continents can be traced back to the scientifically well attested sinking of ancient Sundaland (no, not the place were Geordie Dave lives; the land mass that once linked the Indonesian Islands together. It was quite swiftly broken into island chains in three successive inundations 14 000, 11 000 and 8 500 years ago. DNA evidence shows that the inhabitants spread out widely, ranging from Turkey to the Eastern Pacific. They may have even been the ancestors of the Sumerians. Linguistic evidence also points to the idea that the Sundaland people were ancestral to the Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic peoples. All in all it sounds like a plausible root to the worldwide legends of ‘lost continents’. RF
There have been more books on Atlantis than you can shake a stick at. So what’s different about this one? Well, aside from being written by noted scholar, Fortean and antiquarian Ronan Coghlan; it is an A to Z of not just all things Atlantean but of all lost geography: lost cities, lost islands, lost continents. It’s all here: Hyperborea, lemuria, Mu, Shambhala and many others. Some of the most interesting are not the huge continents but small islands or island chains that seem to have vanished. The Aurora Islands in the South Atlantic, for example, were last observed in 1856; the Nimrod Islands near the tip of South America were last seen in 1828; and Pepys Island, which vanished in 1684. Pheng-Lai was supposedly a mysterious island of Chinese legend visited over 2000 years ago that may have been Hawaii.
As for Atlantis itself people have thought that it was just about anywhere from Ireland to Africa. Some say it was a city on an island in a lake rather than a continent in the ocean. One such spot is the wonderfully named Poopoo Lake in Bolivia.
People who have written about, hunted for or studied Atlantis and other lost locations are listed from Madam Blavatsky to Otto Muck. There are also lists of the animals and plants that supposedly flourished on Atlantis.
Ronan supports a very feasible idea that most of the lost continents can be traced back to the scientifically well attested sinking of ancient Sundaland (no, not the place were Geordie Dave lives; the land mass that once linked the Indonesian Islands together. It was quite swiftly broken into island chains in three successive inundations 14 000, 11 000 and 8 500 years ago. DNA evidence shows that the inhabitants spread out widely, ranging from Turkey to the Eastern Pacific. They may have even been the ancestors of the Sumerians. Linguistic evidence also points to the idea that the Sundaland people were ancestral to the Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic peoples. All in all it sounds like a plausible root to the worldwide legends of ‘lost continents’. RF
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Companion-Atlantis-Other-Mystery-Lands/dp/0954493699/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252400844&sr=1-1
An interesting proposition, but at odds with Plato's account? I have an alternative theory based on Ice-age geophysics, that places Atlantis in the Azores and also explains its demise. A better fit geographically, this location has until now defied explaining a 2 kilometer drop in the ocean floor. If you are interested, you might like to visit
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