Israel was the Atlantis

Come back

Jaime Manuschevich

Introduction: the work hypothesis

To determine with certainty, which one was the territory that constituted the mythical island of Atlantis, has been a challenge investigators have not yet been able to beat. Till now, in general terms, the scientific investigation work has been concentrated in the geographical and geological study of the problem, without any positive results. To discover it we are introducing here a different method: we make a compared analysis between the characteristics of the myth and a specific territory, where not only the territorial physical characteristics of the settlement are analysed, but also their more cultural and anthropological aspects and paleobiological evidence, starting from Plato’s noted date. So, starting from the similarities between myth and reality it has been established which the myth territory was.

The myth tells us that the most relevant aspects of this civilization are the following:

· It was the first food producing society

· It existed around 11.500 years ago

· It had an important maritime development

· It was an island with a specific conformation

· It had a monotheistic religion

· Bull’s ritual sacrifice placed an important religious role

· Their religious centre was a little island

· And all other civilizations in the world emanated from there.

These are the aspects we comparing in an extremely succinct way in the present work, contrasting the myth with the territory what constituted the ancient region of Canaan, today’s Israel and the Sinai. These zones suffered important modifications on results of a climate change, which impeded to identify the region until to now.

The birthplace of agriculture

Until around 1965, the birthplace of agriculture and civilization was assigned in a parallel form to Egypt and Summer. It has been established that the agriculture birthplace has occurred in what is assigned as Increasing Fertile, region that comprehended from Egypt to the Persian Gulf, passing through the Mediterranean, Palestine and Syria, following the course of the Tigris and Euphrates up to Mesopotamia. Typical phrases were “Great rivers are the sap the culture”; in the same form it was posted that “The Nile, the Euphrates, the Tigris and the main rivers of India and China are examples of that. The first organized societies have been formed over there”. (Grinberg, Carl. 1985) These affirmations were based not only on the known cultural evolution of these regions, but in the study of the seeds made by the Russian botanic Nicolae Varvilov circa 1926, exposed in his book Study on the Origin of the Crops. The start of the original seeds’ cultivation – wheat and barley – where located at very distant points from each other, and Varvílov proposed that “Afghanistan and China’s northeast should be considered as the original centres of the wheat cultivation” (Childe, G. 1994) and to “Abyssinia and southeast Asia as the centres of barley cultivation”. (Childe, G. 1994) Childe, without refuting Varvilov’s theory, pointed: “The problems arising from knowing where the cultivation started, and if it was in only one centre or in several ones at the same time, still remains without being resolved”. (Childe, G. 1994) It was established the date of the beginning of this process: “Between 6000 and 3000 B.C., the man learned to profit from the strength of the bull and the wind, invented the plough, the wheel car and the sailing boat, discovered the chemical processes necessary to manage copper mineral and metal physical properties and started to elaborate a precise solar calendar. In this way, he found himself ready for the urban life and had subdued the road to civilization”, (Childe, G. 1994) and added that “we have the scenery of this drama in the form of the semi-arid countries which extend themselves between the Nile and the Ganges”. (Childe, G. 1994)

Nevertheless, this cultural truth started to collapse around 1965, when in Anatolia in Asia Minor important cities or human settlements started to be discovered showing that the agricultural production process was much more archaic. “Now we know that agriculture – cultivation of wild plants and domestication – soar to much older periods than we have thought. In fact, the first signals of what archaeologists call the Neolithic or agrarian revolution start to appear between the 9000 and 8000 B.C. – that is, more than 10.000 years ago”. (Eisler, R. 1990)

But also the focus of the agriculture and civilization original places started to change: “The urban civilization, considered for a long time to be a Mesopotamian invention, has predecessors in such places as Jericho or Catal Hoyuk, in Palestine and Anatolia, which during many years were considered as held up waters”. (Mellaart, J.1975).

At the end of the 60’s, the criteria of the specialists has been widening in a significant way: “It can be said that, at least, there is no more serious doubts that the most ancient centres, agriculture as well as cutlery are located in the southwest Asia; very inside of the euro Asiatic scenery which has seen all the principal man’s initiatives from the start of the Palaeolithic superior times... The emmer wheat and two lines barney ancestors, apparently the first cultivated cereals, have a large distribution, from Palestine to Persia and Afghanistan. The musmon and urial sheep, also Asiatic species, on the other side, appear to have been precursors of the most ancient domestic herds ... From the same southwest of Asia, the seek of the first rural settlements is being tightening. There is no doubt, that they did not exist in the plains of the great valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, where agriculture would become later a plain flourishing activity... such centres has to be seek in the hills region at the length of the extreme oriental Mediterranean, of Palestine and the west of Jordan” (Hawkes, J. 1966)

Finally, in 1996, David Harris, London’s Archaeology Institute (prehistory) director, posted that he did not considered valid those theories of Childe and Varvilov on assuming several independent origins for the agriculture. “For him, data demonstrated that agriculture has been originated in an independent form in very rare cases –possibly two- in the history of Eurasia’ (first in the Near East and later in China). The most ancient has taken place at the end of the tenth millennium B.C. in what Harris called ‘oasis in tectonic dislocated valleys’”. (Ryan, W., Pitman, W. (1999) He located it in the occidental region of the Growing Fertile in a place as Jericho, not far from the Dead Sea. “In some thousand of years, the so called ‘original harvests’ has been extended to the north till Anatolia, and to the east up to Irak and Iran. The domesticated sheeps and goats arrived some hundred of years later from the Taurus and Zagros mounts in Anatolia and Persia”. (Ryan, W., Pitman, W. 1999).

Archaeology show us the first agricultural records

Archaeology signs Jericho as the oldest known city, today located in a very desertic zone sided to the Death Sea empty basin. Circa 11.000 B.C. a Neolithic agricultural people known as natufians lived there. In the near past archaeological remains has been found including sickles in caves that were inhabited (…) together with appropriated tools for a collecting foods economy”. (Childe, G. 1994) These same natufians were settled a little farther north, in Abu Hureyra, in the actual Syria, on the border of the Euphrates River, at the height of the ancient Ugarit. There, Andrew Moore, nominated professor of Oxford’s Queen’s College, in 1971, discovered “the existence of grain storage in some barns excavated in limestone (...) The carbon ages oscillated between 11.000 an 9.500 years B.C. (...) The eating remains reveal that the Natufian culture used sickles made out of deer horns with incrusted flint plates to harvest wheat and barney that grew in natural way. They harvested barney, lentils and wild carob beans and hackberry fruits, plums, pears and figs, and capers”. (Ryan, W., Pitman, W. 1999). This Natufian sedentary mode not only existed in the Euphrates middle valley, “but it also was present in other villages and camps of the Natufian culture of the growing Fertile (Jericho, Tell Aswad, Ain Mallah, Beidha and Mureybet) even more to the south, to the Negev Mountains” (Ryan, W., Pitman, W. 1999).

But the presence of these incipient farmers also exists farther south: “in certain moment, between 13.000 and 10.000 B.C.” (Hancock, G. 1998) Egypt enjoyed of a “period described as ‘of precarious agriculture development’”. (Hancock, G. 1998) “Soon after 13.000 B.C., ending the Palaeolithic era, between the utensils appear millstones and sickles whose shovels are covered by a shining veil (due to the silica of the cut stems adhered to them) (...) it is evident that the millstones are used to prepare edible plants”. (Hoffman, M. 1991) everything seems to indicate that the grains used were the same ones used by the Natufians: “The pollen attached to it suggests that that grain was from barney and, curiously, this big plant which is identified as barney appears suddenly in the profile of the pollen soon before the first settlements were established in that zone”. (Wendorf, F. and Schild, R. 1976) In fact, some investigators consider that this culture “has its centre in Palestine, and is extended also through Egypt, Syria and Lebanon” (Hawkes, J. 1966) and “it has been cited several times because of its transition position between the hunting and the agricultural economy, as is revealed by its material equipment. The Natufian was a real microlithic culture. The microlithic forms comprehend many plates provided with square ends o slightly oblique spine, triangles, an amount of trapezoids and, as the most characteristic of everything, half moons, (or lunettes) that were probably used as arrow’s tips” (Hawkes, J. 1966) There are many other tools which clearly identify this culture: arrow tips with tangs, several bodkin types, pickaxes that may have served to turn the earth around, the famous sickles with handles decorated with carved animals, -“that show at the edge length the silica polish that is produced only, it is said, cutting straw” (Hawkes, J. 1966) - and stone mortars with a cup form.

In Jericho, Kay Kenyon, Director of the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London, in the early 50’s, discovered the remains of this Neolithic people: “the remains of the Natufian culture were found at 30 meters deep. The tiny flint plates spread through the whole place showed a highly precision design, with a sharp edge and a blunt curved border in the form of a half moon, supposedly to be sickle blades. Those of Jericho were exactly the same as the small stoned semi lunar plates previously discovered in Carmel Mount. On bending herself to catch one of the posts of the Natufian cabin, Kenyon saw a point of a harpoon, identical to the ones found in the caves of Carmel Mount. She knew that this tool was characteristic of the Natufian culture”. (Ryan, W., Pitman, W. 1999) These remains were later dated with the help of C-14 circa 10.500 B.C.

The maritime culture

Plato registers the existence of a coast city or "bigger port”, that “was at 50 stadiums far” from the capital city, from which the channel started and where the greatest bay was located, whose “The entire area was densely crowded with habitations; and the canal and the largest of the harbours were full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts, who, from their numbers, kept up a multitudinous sound of human voices, and din and clatter of all sorts night and day”. (Critias, 117)

From the Mediterranean coast from the actual Israel, to the interior, it is found the city recognized as the oldest in the world, as its construction data is approximate around 10 thousand years B.C.: Jericho. If we observe the position it is located in the Death Sea basin, we will see that it just constitutes a small bay where the city is settled. This fact permits to point out that this location was, sometime in a remote past, the port mentioned in that sea. The city harbour’s characteristic is ratified by the archaeological discoveries that have disturbed the investigators: “An annoying anomaly was the great stone wall discovered by Kay Kenyon in the inferior levels of Jericho; is has been dictated in the tenth millennium, and some experts believed it was erected to defend themselves from the floods”. (Ryan, W., Pitman, W. 1999) Under the light of this evidence, the most probable hypothesis is that it was a stem or a pier to the inner sea. Its construction reflects evident signs of accomplishing a stem function and not a defensive one: “The wall is made out of stone. Has 1,75 m. thickness and in some part still conserves a 3.55 m. height. In one place of the inner parts a tower of more that 8 meters high is erected, which was climbed through an inner ladder”, (Cassin, E.; Bottero, J. and Vercuotter, J. 1971). This watchtower should have accomplished a lighthouse function and was an observation point to the sea, with a protected entry from the storms and rain.

The same way, on studying the region with a critical view, we see that the position of Megiddo – the place where the four kings will meet for the final battle of Armageddon – is strategic to keep the region watched. It plays an essential role in the pass control if one traces a channel at the length of the valley of Leesrael in such a way that unifies the Mediterranean sea with the Death Sea basin – as Plato describes it – as it would be at the half of the road between Haifa, at the foot of the Carmel mount, in the actual coast, and Beit She’an, in the coastal of the inner sea. This promontory, located n the middle of the valley, has been charged with a special meaning in the ancient and more recent history as it is considered a type of door to Israel. As a fact, Salomon, knowing the strategic value of this position to protect his territory, fortified it and renewed its water springs. Archaeological excavations “demonstrate that its design satisfied the three essential features of an old city: the fortified buildings, the doors and the water provisions”. (Cornfeld, G. 1980) The Megiddo water tunnel takes us into “one cave and one water spring located out of the city. People could go, without being seen, to the cave, which was hidden”. (Cornfeld, G. 1980)

But the most solid proof of the importance of this city in a remote past comes from Crete, as on comparing their pottery against this place, one finds that “in Megiddo the most ancient ceramics had no difference with the Cnossos’ Medium and Major Neolithic stratums”, (Pendlebury, J.S.D. 1965) making evident the marine cultural connection with that island circa 6.000 B.C.

Another interesting element that demonstrates that the, platonic myth is talking about these ports and this sea, are the phrases regarding the “Atlantic” Sea, pointed by the Egyptians, which is different to the Atlantic we understand today: “This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable” (Timaeus, 24) and that later “an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean”. (Critias, 108) Clearly, they are there referring to a sea, not a part of it, as many times this paragraph is interpreted. There is no doubt that they are referring to the Dead Sea, because it is the only sea which has dried in the zone in the last 10 thousand years, not being navigable anymore, and that obviously during some moments of the drying process it should have become an insurmountable swamp.

In the same way, the old cities that do not appear in the history, but in the Bible, as the Edom kingdom, of which surely Sela or Petra were part of, were located at the border of the Arava, which was the old bed of the Atlanti`s sea or Dead Sea. The ancient Sodoma, whose settlement has been impossible to establish with clarity, was also on the edge of this sea. The same way, Bersheva, today located in the beginning of the Negev desert, is in a depression at the end of the central mountain range. It could perfectly well have been a port to the Mediterranean when this sea had higher heights than the actual ones. In the northern port of this culture, Ugarit, the same as in Jericho, there are samples of the harbours described by Plato: “The aceramic settlement of Ugarit, in the Mediterranean, was also walled. The wall made of earth and stone was covered in its external part by big stones”, (Cassin, E.; Bottero, J. y Vercuotter, J. 1971) showing the cutwater function it had.

From very ancient times, the coast of this zone registers the existence of an important harbour chain that start just to the north of the Leesrael Valley: Akko, Tyro, Sidon, Gebel or Biblos, Beritho, actual Beirut, between several others. From these ports the first maritime civilization known in the Mediterranean is born: the Phoenicians or peoni or puni, although they called themselves cananeans. This marine people occupied a territory string which goes from the Alejandreta gulf, leaving point of the Megiddo channel, at the foot of the Carmel Mount, and that is extended 120 kilometres to the north. This string has some 20 kilometres width, being located between the Lebanon chain and the sea.

Phoenicians were well known sailors of Semitic origin who traded with Egypt and the mesopotamian cities since very old times. They travelled the Mediterranean from one extreme to the other, forming important colonies in North Africa – Carthage - and Sicily - Palermo- and maintained tight commercial relationship with Tharsis in Spain. “Phoenicians not only were intermediaries between Orient and Occident, but also great colonizers, settling as merchants in very diverse towns”. (Podesta Acosta, L.A. 1946)

From his history, the most surprising phenomenon underlies in their own existence, in their origins, in how, why or where or when this marine skill emerges. The simple answer commonly given is that they had some comparative advantages that permitted them to become sailors: “the geographical location, settled over the sea, the small territory, the relatively poor soil, made the Phoenicians an essentially marine people; and as they are good natural harbours in the coast and abundant wood in the mountains, it was easy for them to construct ships in which the could bark into the sea to make the proper trade and the one of others”. (Podeta Acosta, L.A. 1946) But, without any doubt, the opposite hypothesis is the most probable one: they chose that territory to settle because they were already sailors, after the destruction of the base ports that had made them sailors in the old past – Jericho, Megiddo and Beersheba- as they have established themselves in other places of the Arabic, Red, Mediterranean seas and the Atlantic. To these effects, it is convenient to remember that the Greeks did not transform themselves into sailors spontaneously, but because they inherited it, at least in part, from the Mycenaean and those, at their time, from the Cretans.

The territory

The myth tells us what form this island had: “The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, it selfsurrounded by mountains which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, (...) This part of the island looked towards the south, and was sheltered from the north. The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist, having in them also many wealthy villages of country folk, and rivers, and lakes, and meadows supplying food enough for every animal, wild or tame, and much wood of various sorts, abundant for each and every kind of work. (...) I will now describe the plain, as it was fashioned by nature and by the labours of many generations of kings through long ages. It was for the most part rectangular and oblong, and where falling out of the straightline followed the circular ditch” (Critias, 117-118).

And if we review the form of the region we have determined that formed part of this lost isle, we will see that this is exact.

The island had as north limit the Leesrael’s valley, which prolonged itself to the east till the Jordan basin. From there to the south it is located the mountain range composing the Samaria and Judea regions. “The undulated mounts of Judea and Samaria present a mosaic of rocky summits and fertile valleys, sprinkled of centennial plantations of silvery olive trees. The laddery slopes sprinkled with terraces, already cultivated since remote times, had become natural part of the landscape. The population is concentrated in little urban centres and big towns”. (Facts of Israel, 1998) The east zone which faces the Dead Sea is higher and it gets more closed to the zone of the Leerier valley. The higher points of this mountain range are located in Mount Carmel, with an altitude of 546 meters over the sea level, near Haifa, and the Olives mount, in Jerusalem, with an altitude of 835 meters. West of the central mountain range, which runs as a vertebral column all the north zone of this island, the actual most fertile zone is found, with a form of a plain. Going south earth ends in the Beersheba depression, where Negev desert has its start, extended to the Sinai’s foothill. This zone “is characteristic for its sandy stone low mounts and plains, and abundant gorges and wadis where the winter alluviums frequently provoke floods. Continuing to the south this region gives place to and area of plain and craggy craters and rocky plains, with a drier climate and higher mounts.” (Facts of Israel, 1998) The distance between the south extreme of the Sinai up to the Leerier valley is of approximately 650 kilometres and its maximum width is 300 kilometres between Eilat and the Suez channel, and with a minimum of 80 kilometres in Haifa, width that surely had variations when the Dead Sea still had water. At the end of the Sinai, beyond the straight line of the sea basin of the Dead Sea, a curve is generated into the Suez strait. On reviewing these paragraphs of the myth we found an impressive coincidence, as it makes an exact reference to each of the most particular zones of the region: Samaria and Judea, the valley to the west, the Negev and the Sinai.

The region historical records illustrate us also about the past agricultural activity of Israel, the importance the nowadays deserted Negev and Sinai had around 5.000 years ago, fact which is coherent with the drying process the whole Mediterranean basin has lived in the last thousand of years. Naturally, only some isolated oasis is remaining and man has been forced to apply water rational management programs in order to conserve the region’s productivity, particularly in the north.

Reviewing the geography of the region it is still possible to detect two important channels: One should have some 25 to 30 kilometres length and the second section made by parts, one of 7 and other of 20, totalising with the depression, a 36 Km. length. This huge engineering work is described by the legend: "And beginning from the sea they bored a canal of three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outer most zone, making a passage from the sea up to this, which became a harbour, and leaving an opening sufficient to enable the largest vessels to find ingress (...) Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from these a was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two zones, the one of water, the other of land, were two stadia". (Critias, 115)

In the same way, through aerial photography it is still possible to see an enormous quantity of these old channels all over the zone, particularly those Edom and Moab kingdoms, so as an 18 km. line in the south zone, going to Eilat, in Arvada, a wadi today, that curiously, in some zones has a 1,8 Km. width, in others 1,2 Km. and a third segment has 500 meters, and others who crosses the south part of the Judea mounts.

Plato tells us in his writings that the total of constructed channel by this first human generation “and was ten thousand stadia in length” (Critias 118), even when it is hard for us to know how much of this enormous amount were natural and how much artificial. But, it is no doubt that it was a gorgeous net.

There is also another very important data in the Sinai. The myth posts that in the island a very appreciated metal was extracted: the oricalcum, metal, which nobody has yet risked to establish as one of the known ones. According to the legend, the atlantics "In the first place, they dug out of the earth what ever was to be found there, solid as well as fusile, and that which is now only a name and was then something more than a name, orichalcum, was dug out of the earth in many parts of the island, being more precious in those days than anything except gold". (Critias, 114)

As archaeology shows us, in the transference process of using metals instead of stone, there is a transition period known as calcolithic, in which the man used “the pure metal, gold or copper, that nature put already ready in his hands”. (Woolley, L. 1966) In the Old World, “we can find abundant proofs of a calcolithic phase (…) during which copper was used with more or less profusion, according to the extent in which, in the different countries, surface deposits were found or it could be obtained through commerce. The total use amount could not have been great, so it was clearly a sanctuary (...) for many small objects, as pins and hairpins, the metal was invaluable and the copper ornaments had an attraction only lower than gold”. (Woolley, L. 1966) The same way, “it was copper what induced the ancient man to make metal experiments and it was with copper how he discovered the miraculous transformation through fire of brilliant colour stones in a melting metal. Before that it has only considered malleable”. (Woolley, L. 1966)

Precisely this valuable metal was extracted in the Sinai, in the Meghara wadi, in Sarabit al Kadim and Khirbet Nahas, and in the Leerier valley, Kestouan, the most ancient deposits of extraction of this metal. Until now, the earliest antique mines detected in the region are 9, so the island possessed 40% of the deposits of the whole Middle East. No doubt, for the characteristics the myth provides regarding this metal, that it was of red colour. This is telling us with absolute clearness that the mysterious oricalcum was copper, one of the first metals used by the man.

Going back to the zone theme, in the coast of the Dead Sea was existed the city of Petra, the old Sela, which today is located on the centre itself of the actual desert, on the dried border of the basin, city that was abandoned almost two thousand years already. There, in this inhospitable desert, east of the dried sea basin, south of the actual Jordan, in the biblical times, was the kingdom of Edom, who was protected by a series of fortresses. “Edom is the first kingdom who has to cross Jordan in its way to the East” (Keller, W. 1960) and to do it, the Hebrews asked permission to its king, telling that “We will not walk through cultivations, nor vineyards, nor will we drink from well water, through the real way we will go without deviating to the left or to the right till we have passed your territory” (Num. 20; 17), text that shows the greenness of the actual desert 3.500 years ago, which is ratified by Nelson Glueck’s studies given to knowledge on his books At the other side of the Jordan (1940) and The Jordan River (1946), where he posts that this deserted territories possibly were object of cultivation. But he also shows us, that this route, bordering the dried sea, was the most usual way from very ancient times, with settlements of very important old cities, disappeared nowadays, remains of an old civilization.

In the northwest extreme of that desert, the archaeology, from Beersheba to the south, show us a very different Negev desert as it is today. “The fortress and the nucleus of the population are related with a chain of minor fortresses which had extended through the Negev to the south, until reaching Kadesh-Bernea... The question that arises is who constructed them? The answer arises with clarity from the excavations and recent studies that coexisted with the occupation in the most ancient period of the Iron Age in a non-fortified city, in Beersheba. The oldest fortress was already in ruins before the erection of the city wall, in monarchy times” (Cornfeld, G. 1980) The Bible indicates us clearly that the Negev was inhabited: “Amelec inhabits the Negev... ” (Num. 13:29) and that “the people who inhabits that land is strong, and the cities are very large and fortified” (num. 13:28). At last, it is important to underline that, “from the Nile until the Sinai mountains a very old horseshoe way. It was the way by which the uncountable columns of workers and slaves came, who already from the year 3000 B.C. extracted the copper and turquoises in the Sinai Mount. More than once, in the lapse of the millenniums, the mines were abandoned, resting forgotten during centuries.” (Keller, W. 1960)

The old regional monotheism

All poeples of the region had Al, El, Elah, Elohim, Elyum, El-Elyon, En-lil, En-ki, Ilu, Il, Adon, Adonai, Baal, El-Berith, Dan, Melek, Moloch, Hor, Horus, Uru, Ab, Ah, as God, or the more modern forms of Yhave, Jehova or Ala, all these particular words in the diverse semitic languages – God, The One who Is, Highness, Sir, Judge, God of the Alliance, King, Light, Father, Brother- to refer to the Mountain’s Only Being, the Unmentionable. The relationship of all these people with this entity comes from the most ancient antiquity. It is well known by all studiers that in all the Semitic culture exists a profound aversion to mention or give to know the name of God. His name is so sacred, that it can’t be pronounced.

As an example, in the old summer, the En-lil god, whose most approximated translation would be “Sir God”, coming from in, “sir” or “owner” and Il, “god” or simply “he”, in Sumerian, was denominated also “Great Mount”, “High Mountain”. In a poem dedicated to En-lil, found in Nippur, it is posted “ the Ukur stand, sublime sanctuary” is the “home of En-lil, mountain of fertility, Ukur, mansion of lapizlazuli, high Home”, what it makes this name link with the God of the Mountain. Other sample of this common identity of the Only God lovers can be clearly seen in several biblical paragraphs. The first one is the one referred to the common identity recognition between the medianites – who lived in the Sinai and the actual Arabia – and the Hebrews. “According to the tradition, Yahweh reveals for the first time to Moses in the lands of Madian (Exodus 3); Moses was married with a madianitan woman (Ex.2.21-22) and Israel’s legal system was initiated with the help of Jethro, the madianitan priest (Ex.3.13-27)”. (Cornfeld, G. 1980) On the other side, as some historian post, the conquest of Sequim by Josue never occurred, but “we can suppose that the Israelis found in these regions people prejudiced in their favour and that Siquem was pacifically inserted in the Israelis tribe system”. (Cornfeld, G. 1980) Other authors feel this secret, or better, unknown link: “W.F. Albright has said that the madianitans, the kenitans and the Israelis ancestors belonged to the same group or to related groups. B. Mazar (in his book The mountain of God) believes that the kenitians had founded a sanctuary in Arad at the time the Israelis had been installed in Canaan. Being later maintained by the Israelis reflects a tight relationship between both groups.” (Cornfeld, G. 1980)

In the actual dates archaeology is starting to show us physical evidences of this connection. The Italian palaeontologist, Edoardo Borzatti Von Lowenstein, of the University of Florence, states that in his studies of the region there are enough proofs to affirm that during the Calcolithic the man of the region “surrender cult to only one god, which with the time was exscinded in several deities starting with the form it manifests” and that even more, “it was not a matter of a local god, but an authentically faith that extended itself around the whole middle East.” (Borzatti Von Lowenstein, E. 2004)

The ritual sacrifice of the bull

A key ritual aspect of the old religion of Atlantis was the ritual sacrifice of the bull: “Now the order of precedence among them and their mutual relations were regulated by the commands of Poseidon which the law had handed down. These were inscribed by the first kings on a pillar of orichalcum, which was situated in the middle of the island, at the temple” (Critias 119). To keep going forward the commitment between themselves and make the trials they followed a ritual: “There were bulls who had the range of the temple of Poseidon; and the ten kings, being left alone in the temple, after they had offered prayers to the god that they might capture the victim which was acceptable to him, hunted the bulls, without weapons, but with staves and nooses; and the bull which they caught they led up to the pillar and cut its throat over the top of it so that the blood fell upon the sacred inscription. Now on the pillar, besides the laws, there was inscribed an oath invoking mighty curses on the disobedient. When therefore, after slaying the bull in the accustomed manner, they had burnt its limbs, they filled a bowl of wine and cast in a clot of blood for each of them.” (Critias 119-120).

This rite, as Elias Canetti points us, is the muta of the multiplication. “In its beginnings the man thought in its own multiplication without going too apart from other creatures. His multiplication desire is extended to everything surrounding him. The same way he is driven to increase his own herd through an important provision of children, he also want more hunting and more fruits, more herds and wheat, and everything with what he feds up. To prosper and multiply himself it has to be there everything which is needed to his existence”. (Canetti, E. 1982)

This communion rite was not lost with the pass to the agriculture, as the most modern participants “might be peasants worried about their wheat multiplication, their bread of each day: nevertheless they will taste in common and with solemnity the body of an animal, as in the times where they were exclusively hunters”. (Canetti, E. 1982) As Canetti post us, this phenomenon “connected the man with a very determined animal or vegetal... Never an ancestor represents two different animals”, (Canetti, E. 1982) which takes us to the rite of the bull presented by Plato.

The bull has been considered a sacred animal in all the Middle East religions. In Egypt, it was the sacrifice of the Aphis ox; in the Elam’s religion, “there is no absence of mixed beings, as the bull with human head”; (Cid, C. and Riu, M. 1978). The Canaanites did bow down under a minor god represented by a bull; in the Sumerian Acadian culture, Anu, the father, “was sometimes symbolically represented by the horn tiara put right over the throne”. (Cid, C. and Riu, M. 1978) Wolley, on excavating the principal Ziggurat of Ur, called by the modern inhabitants of the zone “the steps mountain” or Tell-al-Muqqallar, found that “the deep cut in the big brick tables allow us to see where the beasts were sacrificed as an holocaust offering. The food for the sacrificial banquet was prepared in the hearths located in the kitchen of the temples.” (Keller, W. 1960)

Within Hebrews, from which we have exact literature from their old rites, the bull sacrifice is also present in practically identical form as the Atlantic rite. The Bible tells us: “And Moses wrote all the words from Yahweh, and waking up in the morning he erected an altar at the foot of the mount, and twelve columns, according to the twelve tribes of Israel 5 And he sent youngsters from the sons of Israel, who offered holocausts and calves to Yahweh as peace sacrifices. 6 Moses took half of the blood, and put it in mugs and spread the other half of the blood over the altar. 7” (Ex., 25)

The Jewish rite of the Ginger Heifer is also clarifying in this respect. “One of the most difficult references of the priest source is the rite of the Ginger Heifer (Num. 19.2-10) used to prepare ‘the impurity water, for the sin elimination’ (verse 9).” (Cornfeld, G. 1980)

All these records tell us a determinant direction: el ancestor –under the focus Canetti indicates us- of the protosemitics is the bull, and this bull is also the ancestor animal from the Atlantics. And it was extended to all originary civilizations. This rite was conserved through millenniums and it mutated till our days in the Judaic form of the multiplication ceremony of the Shabbat, in the communion of the bread and wine, in the Christian mass, and in “the holocaust of the lamb of God”.

The region presence of the bos primigenius or wild uro in the past, was extended through the whole north of Africa and the Near East, ratifying once more that this beast was the ancestor animal in the terms defined by Canetti, of the Semitic people, probably being the animal that provided the basic sustain during the hunting collecting phase of these people, transferred later to the food production phase, muting the meat for the bread and the blood for the wine, once it was invented, transmutation who is still conserved in the Christian rite.

Jerusalem, the house of God

“Ariel, city of David, Sion, Mount of God: Jerusalem. Is an earthy little town in a mount worth this soundly appellatives? Link earth with the sky, say the observants” (Idinopulos, T.,1996). The accepted origin of this large city remounts to its conquest by king David, 3.000 years ago. But this place is not a holy land since that time, as since some thousands of years before David, it was already considered as a sacred place by the Jewish people. In the summit of one of its heights, the Moria Mount, Abraham had been disposed to make the maximum sacrifice to his Only God, giving his primogenic son as victim and offer. As the history tell us, also there, in front of the Jesafat valley, the older sons were immolated to Moloch, the Phoenician god. Then, this same Jacob – or Israel - will put the name Bet El to this place, “home of God”. Before, this place had been the altar of an unknown god named Salem, venerated by the old Canaanites and also known by the name El-Elyon, the “Highest God”. The Phoenicians “adopted the custom of nailing in the floor (...) stones or trails (bethels) to which they offered rituals” (Podesta, L.A. 1946) to an Adon or Ba’al (Sir). All this indicates that “its existence remounts to the prehistory, very probably edified in the Stone Age. This affirmation is endorsed by the multiple stone tools found in Emek Refaim and in the slopes of Har Hatsofim, (mount Scopus). It is supposed that it is the same city of Shalem of Malkitsedek, who went out to the encounter of patriarch Abraham with bread and wine when he returned from his fight with Kerdorloamer and his coalition” (Elnecave, N. 1946). It is also mentioned in the Tell El-Amarna files as Urusalim.

From very old ages, in Jerusalem there has been a cult to the water and a technological management for its storage and distribution. “From the beginnings of history, the inhabitants of the region have learned to storage that liquid and have created methods to avoid its evaporation. In spite of its turbulent history, Jerusalem was never without water: its springs, wells or tanks excavated by the man were always adequate”. (Margalit, S. 1985) The water channelling was also a very advanced technique developed by the ancient jerosolimitans: “The springs of the Gihon, -the oldest fountain in Jerusalem- flow into the Kedron. Valley. Its waters come from the neighbourhood’s western slopes, where there is abundant rain and it falls intermittently by pressure effect, when the conducts are full”. (Margalit, S. 1985) The construction of the old city as well as the modern city has been done with the famous stone of Jerusalem, known for its golden white tone, which is extracted from the same rocky soil where the city is settled. In the ancient times black onyx was extracted from its deeps.

All these records match exactly with the first cult place of the mythic Atlantic society and with its location, in a hill at the centre of the city. There is also plain matching with the material used for its construction -“a type of white stone, other black and a red third one.” from where it was extracted -“from under the central island”-. In what water treatment is referred there is also a full match: “they installed tanks, some to the open ceiling, other roofed”; an irrigating system was established to the Kedron valley, which matches with the following paragraph: “From the running water, a part was deviated to the little forest of Poseidon where grew all sort of high trees of a wonderful beauty because of the soil excellence”; the same way it coincides with the description of the channelling: “the rest run through the aqueducts”. At last, until a very recently past, several of the water slopes than flourished in different cisterns, were in fact hot thermal waters, which matches with the following line:... “They had springs, one of cold water and other of hot water”.

In relation to the period of its first settlement as a city, evidences have started to appear of the much older age as it has been recognized till now, as they have been done recently –1999- new archaeological discoveries showing the presence of stone blocks very well worked, at 30 meters deep and some 500 meters north from the settlement that was the ancient temple of Salomon, archaeological remains which were datated around the tenth millennium B.C. by means of the carbon 14.

There is data regarding the insular characteristic of the city: when aerial or high altitude photographs are observed, it is seen with absolute clarity that the city is actually located over a set of mountains, which create the different valleys of the city, but they also indicate that to the north, in the actual Ramallah direction, a depression is generated, with rapidly falls under the sea level. In the same way, in Jerusalem two zones of hills or mountain range unite - Samaria to the north and Judea to the south. There, the Moria mount and its neighbour the Sion mount, with more than 700 meters actually over the sea level, are the highest hills of the southern zone, being the Olives mount and the Scopus, from the other hills string, the highest from the northeast zone, over the 800 m. All this data, on the basis of a higher water level near the deglaciations period, tell us clearly that they were zones covered by the sea, which would actually mean that the actual hill should have been small islands, in one of which the nucleus of the old civilization was settled, in the Moria mount, where now is the Old City of Jerusalem is settled. From an archaeological point of view, very old human settlements have been found –of around 20.000 years - just in the slopes of these hills, over the 300 meters, and not in the bottom of the valleys, which would be the logical if one would like to use the river courses, phenomenon we already stated in the island of Crete.

This corresponds absolutely with the legend description of this capital. “The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia. All this including the zones and the bridge, which was the sixth part of a stadium in width, they surrounded by a stone wall on every side, placing towers and gates on the bridges where the sea passed in. (...) Leaving the palace and passing out across the three harbours, you came to a wall which began at the sea and went allround: this was everywhere distant fifty stadia from the largest zone or harbour (…) (Critias, 116) also gardens and places of exercise, some for men, and others for horses in both of the two islands formed by the zones” (Critias, 117), another island that could be the Sion mount, which was later attached to the Moria mount, amplifying the Old City that way.

The expansion of agriculture

Since the sixth millennium, starting from a formally unspecified place, but with coincident geographical coordinates with this point, the agriculture expansion process takes effect “into until then marginal territories, as those of the alluvial Mesopotamian, Transcaucasian and Transcaspian plains, by one side, and into the south east Europe, by the other”. (Mellaart, J. 1975) This expansive process surpassed the sea, as it took contact with Crete and Cyprus islands, and in each expansive process “the newcomers brought with themselves a very advanced Neolithic economy”. (Mellaart, J. 1975)

Conclusions

The first conclusion is that there was agriculture in the zone of Canaan, in the exact period established by Plato.

The second conclusion posts that from that territory emerged the first known marine civilizations.

The third conclusion is that it exist an enormous similarity between the described by the myth and the geographical characteristics of the zone in study.

In the region it was the birthplace of the monotheism, matching the platonic description.

In the whole region the bull’s ritual sacrifice was a well-extended practice, matching also plainly with the platonic rite.

Food production and their associated civilization did extend from this point to the rest of the Middle East region, matching with the platonic affirmation that the Atlantic culture was the birthplace of the human civilization.

The final and clear conclusion of this compared analysis of the antecedents is that the mythical island could only be the old land of Canaan.

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