Atlantis: the sea sunk

Jaime Manuschevich

Come back

Introduction: The myth traditional view

Based on Plato’s phrase, which says that “the Atlantis (…) was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when after wards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean” (Critias, 109), the investigators have assumed that the mythical island got sunk in the sea after a natural disaster. In another paragraph, also from Critias, again he lets make out that this island has not been completely annihilated, as Zeus just wanted “to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve,” (Critias, 121), what is clearly not possible with their total destruction. But, in this dialog, besides from not explaining what is “the sunk”, he also omits how this phenomenon occurred, and why it became unfinished. In the second tale regarding the matter, Timaeus, he clearly states that in fact it sunk, as: “But after wards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your war like men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.” (Timaeus, 25).

This ambiguity respecting the Atlantis end is telling us that these paragraphs were written by different people and that the second editor had no clear idea what really had happened, and therefore, in this second dialog, which is less descriptive and more analytical, even more political intended, the author inferred from the global context from the first story that the isle had sunk and that the event had “occurred in one day and one night”, situation referred in Critias to a military episode supposedly occurred in Greece, which had an untimely outcome as a result of an earthquake. These discrepancies and contradictions between data from both dialogs is clearly adverting us that the chronics are from different authors: Critias is fruit mainly from what was written by Solon, whereas Timaeus is exclusively Plato’s work.

This opens the possibility that the first outline would have been more reliable as what was told by the Egyptians and it would have signaled that they were some aspects that might have disappeared and fields that have remained unchanged, which was very confusing for the interpreter of the Egyptian legend through third parties, that is, Plato, as he himself tells us, received the information from other character, Critias. And undoubtedly this interpretative confusion was transferred to the contradiction between both texts. Now, considering that this hypothesis might be true, what was left and what disappeared?

If the text is read attentively, it gives the impression that what has disappeared by the catastrophe was its civilization, but that the territory remained, isolated by marshes. That is, the relevant part, the civilization, got destroyed, but the territory where it existed remained, although devaluated, may be with ruined cities, without any harvests or foods, without any established social order, with insufficient population to make it work, without their leaders and without their cultural manifestations, essential for its own survival.

Having in view that what disappeared is the civilization, but the territory remained, one can seek a zone near the Egyptians that meets the geographical requirements and the moody conditions signaled by the legend in that remote past. But this reality cannot be so obvious and superficial, because if it was not found immediately by the Greeks it means that it already had important aspect transformations during the Hellenic period, changes that had maintained it masked for everyone till our days.

With this perception that, may be, it is an uncovered reality that it is still present, the first thing that calls your attention is the Sinai Peninsula and part of Israel, which effectively could have been an island if they were connected naturally between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean through the Suez channel, from one part, and if it were a connection between the Dead Sea's and Mediterranean basin, which would permit that this sea could be full and connected with the Eilat or Akaba gulfs. If it were so, this island would be the greatest of the Mediterranean Sea, with an extension that would practically be the double size of Sicily island and three to four times the size of Cyprus or Crete islands.

With this idea, it can be observed that in Israel’s north direction, between Samaria and Galilee zones, there is the Leesrael valley, which is a basin running in its first 4 to 5 kilometers -between Haifa and the Carmel Mount- at the sea level, to flow slowly to the Jordan river basin, located at 200 meters under the sea level. Obviously, if this valley – which agglomerates all requisites for it due to its geographical configuration – would be covered by water, the entire zone would be an island.

The geological theory

This theory is completely confirmed when the geology of the zone is studied. 20 millions of years ago, Africa’s and Europe’s continental plates start to narrow and to compress “the old and wide see, known by historians as Tetis, the mythical wife of Ocean, which run from the Caribbean up to the Himalayas”, (Ryan & Pitman, 1999) with which this zone is being squeezed between the two continental plates, making that the Dead Sea “was there, surrounded by continents from all sides, which only a narrow bottleneck that connected it with the Mediterranean”. (Ryan & Pitman, 1999)

Therefore, this zone, known as the Dead Sea plate, was an island that took origin on the lifting of the sea bottom when it was compressed by the Ukrainian and African plates. These plate movements generated the mountainous chain, which runs from the Zagros mounts in Iran till the Pyrenees in Spain. “On the West, they start at the pan Iberian mountain range in Spain and continues through France, Switzerland and Austria, the Chechoslovaquian Carpathians, Slovaquia and Hungary, to descend to the Helenides of Yugoslavia, and Greece, including the Balkans in Bulgaria; then, form the Taurus in Anatolia and reach the Zagros Mount in Iran”, (Ryan and Pitman, 1999) mountainous chain which is like a scar that shows the collision between the two continents, giving at the same time origin to the Mediterranean sea. This isle, then, during some moment of its geological evolution, was surrounded by straits, in plural, as it is noted in the platonic myth, and not in singular, as is common to be said for the straits of Lesrael, of Eilat and Suez. (Figure Nº 1) In the interior of this past flooded valley, product of the hills existent there, between which mount Tabor is found, at 588 m. above sea level, several little islands are formed, which makes coincide this characteristic with a typical phrase of the legend, well used by authors: “the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent”. (Timaeus, 24-25)

The key question is when it stopped to be an island. If this fact occurred in a time scale out of human dimension or it was the other way around, it was near enough as to leave a footprint in the earlier civilizations.

Up going and down going seas

One of the most important facts, which contribute to explain the existence of this island and its disappearance as it was, is the geological verification that the Mediterranean and the Black Sea both had important variations in their water levels.

In 1970, William Ryan, on board of the well known marine explorations vessel Glomar Challenger, realized a series of geological testify samples from the Mediterranean sea floor, that show – in front of the investigators own incredibility – that this sea lived a dry and desertification process of their shores. The sample cores extracted from the bottom, “one by one they added more data, strengthening the hypothesis of a Mediterranean desert of 5 to 7 million years, with lakes that were drying and muddy coasty planes that evaporated under a scorching sun”. (Ryan and Pitman, 1999)

But, later, all of a sudden this same desert became full of seawater. “On the contact point, the path from deserted sand into marine muds had the thickness of a razor blade. The mud in contact with the sand pounded by the winds had been fully deposited in the batial habitat [typical marine floor of over 3000 meters deep]. As these muds are commonly accumulated at an approximately rate of 2 and a half centimeters per each thousand years, the sudden change was too abrupt to have last more than a century” (Ryan and Pitman, 1999). That is to say that in just a little more than a lifetime a desert became a sea floor covered by more than 3000 meters of water. The cause was – according to geologists – the crush between the European and African tectonic plates, which blocked Gibraltar strait, provoking the Mediterranean draining. Then, in a sudden form, “The natural Gibraltar dam must have been destroyed by a cataclysm. The salted water of the Atlantic batial habitat had flooded the Mediterranean desert at a rate equivalent to many thousands of Niagara falls”. (Ryan and Pitman, 1999)

But this phenomenon of a sea that abruptly floods a basin located at a lower level is not unique. The Black Sea lived a similar process. “It was a case of an old sea that got converted in the greatest world’s sweet water lake and that later became a sea again. Their fishes, plankton, crustaceans, mollusks and coast plants resulted affected. Other sweet water adapted creatures substituted those species that previously inhabited a salted water habitat. Later, those sweet water beings disappeared and, in their place, the salted water ones returned”. (Ryan and Pitman, 1999)

But this second change in the Black sea levels did not occurred millions of years ago, but very recently: “the new salted water entry has been occurred between 12.000 and 7.000 years before”. (Ryan and Pitman, 1999)

Then, what is by now significant is that these important changes on the sea levels show us that as well as it was lower, it is not legitimate to ask oneself of the possibility that these marks climbed up to higher levels than the ones we know today?

The evidences of higher sea levels

Studying the Mediterranean coasts, the first thing which brings your attention is the presence of a set of salted marshes in a series of low lands in the North African coast, in the actual Syria, in Turkey and in Italy. In the north of Africa, south of the Atlas Mountain, west of the Gabes gulf, between Tripoli and Tunisia cities, there is a zone named the Grand Oriental Erg, covered with great salted marshes, with higher salt levels than usual. In the same way, in the higher parts of the Atlas mountains, there are proofs of the existence, through primitive art, of important human settlements dated circa 8.000 B.C., drawings that even show us that these higher zones possessed an equatorial African flora and fauna, which indicates that there were much higher humidity levels that the present ones. On the other side, on the mounts, the wadis or dried water riverbeds run to the southeast, to the Grand Oriental Erg and there, strangely, there is no trail at all of water courses who could receive this liquid and canalize it into the sea. In the same manner, when one observes into Libya, one will see that the coast zone has also salted marshes between the Gabes gulf and the gulf of Sirte, and it will be seen that Cirenaica presents the same phenomenons as the Grand Oriental Erg, with extensive salted marshes, except from the higher zone located at the east coast of Bengasi, which would have been an isle, as it should have been at higher levels than the rest of the plain and other near Egypt sectors, which, apparently were also islands, even one of a greater size as the one we are indicating here as the island of Libya.

The archeological investigations present strange cultural phenomenons or, at least, contradictory ones. By one part, in these actual savannas, human presence is detected only from the middle of the sixth millennium, without any previous appearance of agriculture, even theoretically the territory was fertile for that activity, because “from around 12.000 years till about some 7.500 years, the northern half of Africa was much more humid as it is today” (Iliffe, J, 1998); in the same way, “differently from what usually happens in other places of the world, the archeological remains suggest that the raising of domestic cattle preceded the agriculture” (Iliffe, J, 1998), productive processes which took a start “around the VI millennium B.C.” (Iliffe, J. 1998). Finally, this migration did not come from where we know that there were previous human settlements, namely the west, but from the east. This can be proven by the type of animals they introduced in the zone: “domesticated sheep and goat cattle of southeast Asian origin, which constituted the base of Cirenaica’s economy” (Iliffe, J, 1998).

The only reasonable explanation of these phenomenons is that this zone was covered by the Mediterranean waters, and from the East a colonization started, extending itself through the recently dried savannas, colonies which could not get immediately adapted to the agricultural production affected by the lands salinity problem, which forced the new inhabitants to live mainly from the cattle raising and already known food production. Jumping by the moment the Egyptian delta, following to the north, in Syria, we found ourselves with the low valley located behind Latakia, which is connected with the Mediterranean and which shows presence of salty marshes, in the same way as the backyard valley of Antakya in Turkey.

In Italy, in the valley which runs from Venice to the west, at the bottom of it, in the Tanaro valley, at the Piedmont, more than 200 kilometers from the Adriatic coast, the geology professor of the Turin University, Carlo Sturani, in 1972, found proofs that at some time that zone was occupied by the sea: “In a hundred meters reef, Sturani could observe a previous sea, not very deep, that has been dried... All of a sudden, in the lapse of two millimeters of rock, it was converted in a deep sea again”. (Ryan and Pitman, 1999) The investigators attention was centered on the speed of the process; nevertheless, till not long ago, there has been put no attention to the fact that this zone was once covered by the sea, thus confirming the idea of a different Mediterranean Sea level compared to the actual one.

On the other side, all data indicates that Dead Sea drying is still an actual process, who would tell us that that the Leesrael Valley occlusion could not have happened during very old times, as its evaporation process goes at a rather accelerated rhythm. “The Dead Sea’s natural recession rhythm has been accelerated the last years, due to its high evaporation rate (1,6 m. yearly)”. (Israel facts, 1998) If we consider that the Mediterranean sea level could have descended 7.600 years ago, based on the datation established by Ryan and Pitman for the catastrophe that inundated the Black sea, actually located 400 meters under the sea level, it only needed to drop at an average of 5 centimeters per year from that date, which represents only the 3,12% of the present evaporation level, to obtain the actual level. To become dried at the actual rate it would have taken only 250 years.

Finally, when Crete’s litic settlements are analyzed, it becomes apparent that practically all the oldest inhabited places are at an important sea distance, except seven – from a total of 35 – that are at a high level, as J.D.S. Pendlebury point us: “with the exception of Potisteria, Gavdhos, Amnisos, Dia, Komo, Mallia and Sfungara, all the villages are located at a far one or more hour from the sea” (Pendlebury, J.D.S. 1965), facts that confirm the existence of higher that the Mediterranean levels.

The fact that the Mediterranean sea level was higher some few thousands of years ago, and that this event could have been saw and registered by the human being, is clearly noted in the legend, as it says the following regarding Greece: “the Egyptian priests said what is not only probable but manifestly true, that the boundaries were in those days fixed by the Isthmus, and that in the direction of the continent they extended as far as the heights of Cithaeron and Parnes; the boundary line came down in the direction of the sea, having the district of Oropus on the right, and with the river Asopus as the limit on the left.”, (Critias, 110) fact that is only possible if the sea lowers its level. But they did not only see the sea level dropping. They probably were also witnesses of the catastrophe that provoked the flooding of the Euxinus lake: “. In the first place the Acropolis was not as now. (112) For the fact is that a single night of excessive rain washed away the earth and laid bare the rock; at the same time there were earthquakes, and then occurred the extraordinary inundation, which was the third before the great destruction of Deucalion. (...) Where the Acropolis now is there was a fountain, which was choked by the earthquake, and has left only the few small streams which still exist in the vicinity, but in those days the fountain gave an abundant supply of water for all and of suitable temperature in summer and in winter.” (Critias, 111-112)

The strange Egyptian cultural phenomenon

But one of the most interesting matters, which contribute to fundament the different sea level of the Mediterranean, is found on the delta of the Nile and on some still not resolved complexities of the Egyptian civilization.

Mediterranean drying some millions of years ago made important modifications on the Nile course: “As the Mediterranean was drying, the Nile was cutting a deep valley in order to adjust its slope as it was sinking in the coast. When finally a flood made the Mediterranean get refilled with water again, and the sea level got restored to the previous level, the throat became drown, and the mouth turned into an estuary. (Ryan and Pitman, 1999) Nevertheless, that does not explain the delta formation. The only reasonable explanation is that effectively the Mediterranean level was at an upper height than the actual one, the Nile flowing into the sea in the plain of Gizeh. Then, when the sea abruptly descended, in a very recently period, the river found that the ancient course was a plain covered by the alluvial residues of million of years and, therefore, dispersed its course in several branches, forming the actual delta.

This recent event explains also a particular expression of the Egyptian civilization, namely the historical division between the High and Low Egypt, phenomenon that marked this civilization for several thousand of years, not having tilled now a plausible explanation. Between ancient Egyptians existed, from the very beginning of its civilization, a clear differentiation between the high lands, named desheret (reds), and the delta ones, kemet (blacks), theoretically because this is the color of the alluvial lands charged with organic components accumulated in the marine floor. This phenomenon is also expressed in the hieroglyphic representing the delta: “a human head which arises from the symbolic plant of the Delta”; (Drioton, E., Vandier, J., 1964) that is, new human and vegetal life.

This cultural difference between north and south was due to the fact that, in some specific moment of the Neolithic era, in the recently Delta emerged from the sea, two cultural expressions met, one who has been expanding itself from the south since some millenniums already, the badarian or amratian culture – and another, of new colonizers, -the gerzeen culture – which started to expand from the north, when the delta could be colonized. Both cultural expressions, at the end of a process whose complexity we still do not know, ended unifying themselves at the beginning of the historical era, into the recent gerzeen culture or semainien culture.

On the other side, it explains the great difficulty to found archeological remains in this zone of the delta, because in fact there are none, as this area was under the sea, hypothesis confirmed by archeology: “Till present times, Neolithic culture, in what Low Egypt is concerned, is known only by the Meadi deposit, located between Cairo and Heluan, and the one in Heliopolis, recently discovered, that are dated from the period immediately before to the history”. (Drioton, E., Vandier, J., 1964) This phenomenon is explained up to now in the following way: “The Nile suffered a refill phase and its mud covered little by little all the low lands, in such a way that the Neolithic deposits that should be located over the layers near the Nile, became covered by thick layers of alluvial soil, and are scares the ones that could have been explored. Those last belong most of all to the final of the Neolithic and they clearly prove that since then it exist in Egypt two civilization focal points, one in the north and other one in the south”. (Cassin, E., Bottero, J., Vercoutter, Jean; 1971) Without any doubt, behind these words, there is a checking of the phenomenon, but the explanation is rather week, because filling a bay as the one conformed by the Nile takes enormous time and, on the other hand, if this had been so, the river would not had been forced to open a new course and divide itself in many branches as it did. It simply would have followed its very old riverbed. The phenomenon of the filling of the estuary left seven million of years ago when the Nile retreated to Assuan, happened effectively, but under the water and lasted several millions of years.

At the same time, it explains why agriculture what introduced lately in the delta, same as in Cirenaica, being this zone one of the most fertile lands of the Nile basin, as archeology says. Investigators upon the subject state the following: “the own delta as a fertile agricultural land, was formed probably only after 6500 B.C.” (Life, J, 1998) and that “till 5000 A.C. there were no settlements of food producers in the Faye depression, just west of the Low Nile and in Marimba”. (Life, J, 1998) It also elucidates why this region has not been colonized coming from the south, but from the west: “it is possible, as a result, that the Delta could have been populated from the West by people already well known in food production”; (Life, J, 1998) that is, by the first Cirenaica colonizers that returned on their foot. On the other side, in Faye, concrete data is presented, showing higher water levels: “The Faye depression is located west of the Nile, at some distance south of the delta; it contains an extensive lake, but, in the fifth millennium B.C. the water was 55 meters higher than it is today”. (Arquees, J., 1966)

To end with Egypt, if one goes through the coast, we will find us with Suez, which still has the presence of “sour lakes” and salted marshes in the zone unconnected with the sea, which is another material proof that there was a natural connection between both seas till a rather recently period.

The inexplicable desertification of northern Africa

The African coast of the Mediterranean was some thousands of years ago a zone with very different humidity levels compared to the ones we find today. “In the Sahara they were high lands with rather frequent rains. Even the egypcian occidental desert, well known for his aridity, disposed from some pasture areas; and the water of the Turkara Lake, in the Riff valley in the oriental Africa, reached a level up to circa 85 meters above the one it has today”. (Iliffe, J, 1998)

Vegetation and animal life were totally different to what we know nowadays. In the Tassili mounts, in the Big Atlas, the rock art shows us fauna with giraffes, ñus, zebras, elephants, hippopotamus and camels, and even fishes. In this zone climate “should have been more benign than the most part of Europe – notes Moritz Hoernes- (...) this has been proved with discoveries of fossil animals characteristic of humid climates and also by the footsteps of dried basins of rivers which crossed the zone. In the entire northern region –Atlas, Libya, Egypt and continuing into Palestine- it flourished the capsien civilization, [from Gafsa, ancient Capsa, south from Tunisia]. In the Atlas southern slope a curious rock art of naturalist style was developed in open land rocks”. (Grinberg, C., 1985) This rock art show us that the Sahara desert was quite different: “Today Gat is a desert who was once covered by vegetation: great lakes, tanks, ponds and papyri bristled swamps alternated with tropical woods and green covered steppes, with two meters high herbs. The Sahara was crossed by many rivers and tributaries from which only their basins left, dried nowadays”. (Grinberg, C., 1985) Their rock art makes evident the presence of “abundant drawings of rhinoceros, deers, gazelles, oysters and giraffes”. (Grinberg, C., 1985)

Vegetal life was, same as the animal, of a great variety. “Modern archeologists have even studied the prehistoric pollen of those regions, of Mediterranean flora at the time, pines, cypresses, olives, lime trees, birches, green holm oaks, where the fishers and hunters lived”. (Grinberg, C., 1985)

The classical explanation to the drying of the Sahara desert, the whole north of Africa and Israel is the following: “The ice fusion of the last glacial period was the beginning of life for Europe; on the other side, it was the death for the major part of North Africa. Their inhabitants migrated and only a few reduced groups remained at the insurmountable Tibesti or in the Hoggar. They kept a precarious existence and lost contact with the rest of the inhabited world till the desert remained in a permanent and terrible loneliness”, (Grinberg, C., 1985) The conspicuous archeologist Gordon Childe maintains the following on the subject: “during the period in which the economy producer of foods was established a climate crisis occurred, affecting in an adverse form exactly that zone of arid subtropical countries (...) The fusion of the ice plates in Europe and the contraction over them or counter cyclones, implied a change of direction into the north, on the normal direction of the depressions, producers of Atlantic rain. The storms that humidified the north of Africa and Arabia did deviate into Europe. In its place the drying started.” (Childe, G. 1994)

Desertification causes

Nevertheless, the new theories regarding climatic crisis problem and the drying were directly related with the humidity levels available in the diverse environments and they do not follow any significant relationship with the temperatures. They tell, at the same time, that precisely when the thaw happens the environment humidity levels grow and vice versa, when the glaciers grow, the deserts grow, being they cold or warm, because the ices retain the environment humidity and the sea levels drop. On the first steps of this discovery, Charles MacLaren, Scottish geologist, presented the problem in 1842 to the American Journal of Science magazine. In essence, his theory consisted in that “each advance and retreat of the continental ices could be measured in the advance and retreat of the cost line of the whole world”. (Ryan and Pitman, 1999) Using this theory, he noted that if “the summits of the Jurassic Alps would have been covered with an inhospitable white cap of one and a half kilometer thick (...) the ice formation would have meant a variation of 100 meters in the sea level” (Ryan and Pitman, 1999).

This theory could not have been proved till hundred years later when W. Broecker discovered, in the 50’s, “in the Institute of Nuclear Studies of the Chicago University the utilization of Carbon –14 for the datation of organic materials. Now the coast age could be datated, to establish glaciations dates and their thaws”, (Ryan and Pitman, 1999) even the restrictions this component has, which is up to 50.000 years.

Combining both knowledges, and with the direct support of Broecker, this phenomenon was confirmed in 1969 starting from discoveries made by Jiri Kukla, member of the geological Institute of the Science Academy of Checoslovaquia. Kukla had studied in Brno, capital of Moravia, a zone of “caves occupied by the paleolitical hunters 20.000 to 40.000 years ago. The sensational sequence of almost 50 meters thick, of several soil cycles, on the west wall of the quarry of the Red Hill, supposed an extraordinary opportunity to examine a geological continuous register of the glacial era. Each climate cycle, from the warmest to the coldest one, did manifest with the sequence of soils in which it kept reflected the change of a humid cadicifolium forest to arid and icy tundra.”. (Ryan and Pitman, 1999)

The conclusion of this study was categorical: “Ices, in first place, that frequently had advanced into the south of Scandinavia through the whole Europe, had unfailingly gone together with the appearance of huge but not permanent deserts in Russia and Ukraine, extending them tills the southeast of Europe and even the Black Sea banks. In second place the pass from cold to warm has been abrupt in all and each one of the cycles, lasting maybe just some amount of centuries (...) When it went from warm to cold the change was always gradual (...) The third surprise was that the last cold period has been occurred only 10.000 years ago, much later than the most of the ices had been retreated. Nevertheless, this brief cold return would have been the driest of all of them”. (Ryan and Pitman, 1999) Each of these cycles was totally coincident with “the saw tooth schemes on the sediments of the deep sea floors and the same periodicity”, (Ryan and Pitman, 1999) schemes based on analysis made at the Broecker’s ships laboratories, work that has been doing since the 50’s.

In summary, deserts increase when the ices increase. “Broecker and his fellows have just got to know that the climates during glacial periods had been of a great dryness and that the deserts and the steppes had covered Eurasia to the south of their extensive regions covered by the ices.” (Ryan and Pitman, 1999) In summary, the temperature increase does not relate significantly with the desertification phenomenon.

Being that so, returning to the desertification that starts in the north of Africa and Palestine –process that is released just in the period of the glacial reductions – from the VI millennium, which was “an era of terrible dryness documented in the occidental desert” (Iliffe, J, 1998) and that it had “another arid interval approximately between 5500 and 4500 B.C.”, (Iliffe, J, 1998) we found ourselves in front of a very strange paradox: the north of Africa dries when the glaciers in the northern region drop, when the effect provoked should be exactly the inverse.

The only apparently valid explanation till now is the loss of the Mediterranean water levels. And this drying affected in a more relevant way to those zones more retired from other points with higher humidity levels, such as the Atlantic or even the same Black sea, particularly Algeria and Libya, located in its centrum and blocked by the Atlas mounts, in benefit of the European zone of the Mediterranean, which kept nearer to the new fountain of humidity. This phenomenon would also explain the drying of Crete and Cyprus islands.

New scientific data about the sea levels

Starting year 2000 new scientific data has been generated strengthening the idea that the seas have had important variations. Today science can prove it. A work made in Colombia, called “Quaternary Variations of the Sea Level and its implications in the Coast Menaces of the Colombian Caribbean”, in 1997, concludes that the sea had 2 or 3 more meters height that the actual one, only 2400 years back.

Another search -“Past messages written in the sand”, of April 2002, made by Lic. Diego Montalti, Dr. Moshe Inbar, Prof. Diego Gómez Izquierdo and Mr. Jorge Lusky, members of the Haifa University and the Argentinean Antarctic Institute, says that "the global height of the sea reached its actual value 5.000-6.000 years ago" (Montalti, D., Inbar, M., Gómez, D., Lusky, J., 2002) and that “during a lapse of about 2.000 years (between 8.400 and 6.400 B.C.) a considerable drop of the sea level occurred, estimated in about 25 m.”, (Montalti, D., Inbar, M., Gómez, D., Lusky, J., 2002). Such period is fully coincident with the great drought detected in the North Africa region.

On the other side, Kurt Lambeck and J. Chappell, note that in Angerman, in the last 9000 years, the water level descended 200 meters. Even this study shows that there are other associated phenomenons, because the level alterations are not homogenous, everything tells us that the recent variations of the sea levels are an evident fact.

Conclusions

· The first conclusion is that all data indicate that the sea levels suffered from a relative important drop in the last thousands of years.

· The second conclusion is that this sea levels variation provoked the Middle East and North Africa regions’ desertification.

· The third conclusion is that North Africa’s desertification affected in a very important way the region’s cultural evolution.

· The fourth conclusion is that the sea fall could have been surrounded with cataclysms, which might have provoked the destruction of the first human civilization, which had its center in the isle that conforms the actual Israel and Sinai regions.

· The fifth conclusion is that the traditional interpretation of the Atlantis sunk, generated from the phrase “when after wards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean” (Critias, 109), is wrong.

· The sixth and last conclusion is that the correct interpretation of the phrase consists in posting that the sea was what got sunk, event which generated the drying of the Dead Sea, upon closing its connections either with the Mediterranean Sea as well as with the Red sea, swamping the region for a period not yet determined.

References

Ryan, W., Pitman, W. (1999). El Diluvio Universal Madrid, Editorial Debate S.A. (pp. 119-143)

Iliffe, J. (1998) África, Historia de un continente, Barcelona, Cambridge University Press (pp. 25-26)

Hechos de Israel, (1998) Ahva Press, Jerusalem, (p. 7).

Pendlebury, J.S.D. (1965) Arqueología de Creta, Ciudad de México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, (p. 54).

Drioton, E., Vandier, J., (1964), Historia de Egipto, Buenos Aires, Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires (pp. 28-112).

Hawkes, J., (1966) Historia de la Humanidad, volume I, Prehistoria. Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamérica. (pp. 285).

Grinberg, C., (1985). Historia Universal, Santiago de Chile, Editorial Ercilla S.A. (pp. 15-52)

Childe, G. (1994). Los Orígenes de la civilización. Santiago de Chile, Fondo de Cultura Económica Chile S.A. (pp. 98).

Martinez, N., Roberson, K. (1997) Variaciones Cuaternarias del Nivel del Mar y sus implicaciones en las amenazas litorales en el Caribe colombino. Bogota, IDEAM. (pp. 3-13)

Montalti, D., Inbar, M., Gómez, D., Lusky, J. (2002) Mensajes del pasado escritos en la arena. Novedades website de la DIRECCION NACIONAL DEL ANTARTICO INSTITUTO ANTARTICO ARGENTINO. (www.dna.gov.ar)

Lambeck, K.,Chappell, J. (2001) Sea Level Change Through the Last Glacial Cycle SCIENCE magazine, Vol. 292. (pp. 679-686)