Atlantean Migration Period

My take on AlternateHistory.com's Atlantis challenge. It's somewhat pedestrian compared to the more creative interpretations of the challenge, but hopefully it combines enough plausibility with sufficient Ancient Aliens-ish connections to be interesting. As with my last MotF entry I ran out of time to do all the extras I wanted, such as a box-out of *Atlantis with the individual confederate kingdoms and cities depicted.

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Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end.

This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; 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 which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbor, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.

Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavored to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind.

She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars.

But afterwards 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 in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

Plato, Timaeus and Critias

One of the things that struck me reading Plato's description is that the chief feature of it is not the island but World War 0.5; the attempted conquest of the entire known world by a mysterious sea power. That connected in my mind to the Bronze Age Collapse and the enigmatic Sea Peoples (I later learned conspiracists have made the same connection) and set about creating an atlas (heh) type map depicting the furthest extent of Atlantean control, prior to being pushed back by Hellenic and Egyptian forces.

In my imagining, the invasion (or rather, mass settlement with military force) happens because Atlantis is sinking; the waves of migration and conquest destablise the delicate web of trade in the Mediterranean in the 18th and 19th centuries BC, leading to the Collapse. The Atlanteans are recorded in Egyptian records as the Sherden (literally means 'sea people' - in reality identified with, variously, Anatolian, Syrian, Philistines, Sardinia, or Etruscans).

Atlantis here was gradually flooded over a period of around 300 years (from 1465BC), with a final sequence of devasting earthquakes from 1175 to 1165 finally sinking the island, together with the remaining infrastructure supporting the invasion. Around 1.3 million Atlanteans were left in the Mediterranean and were gradually integrated (with a lot of bad feeling) into the societies they had tried to conquer, leaving behind lots of loan-words (the derivation of which is listed by our linguists today as 'unknown') and flood myths.

I was then left with the difficulty of identifying the Atlanteans with a present-day civilisation; after umming and ahing about Semites I opted to go with the Berbers, in whose language 'Atla' means 'mountain' (supplying an interesting suggestion for the derivation of 'Italia'), and who would be the obvious candidates to have settled Atlantis in the first place, around 3000BC. A slight anachronism - 'Amazigh' (which I have tweaked into 'Atamazegh' to furnish a fictional root for both 'Atlantis' and 'Amazon') derives from 'i-Mazigh-en', or 'freemen', and wasn't employed until long after this time period.

The Atlanteans used weapons of arsenical bronze; their signature weapon was a wide, triangular-shaped thrusting sword called the farissa (which became the Berber Flyssa). They were noted for their characteristic helms, which bore two horns; officers having a solar disk of polished bronze between the horns. Their religion initially centred on the worship of a female embodiment of nature, however, her sun-god consort Wanaka gradually became more prominent until he became the primary deity of Atlantean civilisation. Wanaka eventually became Poseidon, whose name in Greek derives from 'Earth-shaker' ('Enosichthon'); his cult in Greece arose as a movement of 'penitent' Atlanteans and was quickly adopted by jubilant Hellenes.

A few Atlanteans made their way to the 'whole of the opposite continent that surrounded the true ocean', enslaving the Mexica, who knew them as the Azteca Chicomoztoca. The stories of the Azteca Chicomoztoca's origins gradually became transferred to their slave people, who, after gradually absorbing their masters, vaguely remembered a homeland called Aztlan.

The last substantial descendent population of Atlantis was the Guanches of the Canary Islands, albeit they are descendents of a group who attempted to return to Atlantis 200 years after the Fall. Guatimac is the last surviving idol of Wanaka; the broadly T or cross-shaped shape of Wanaka's idols influenced Adyghe's Tha which became the Norse Thor.

The Atlantean homelands were below sea level until around the first century BC, when an earthquake raised the Azores (which were Atlantis's mountain tops) above sea level. Joshua Vander Berg's (IOTL almost certainly hallucinated or fabricated) horse statue, which still exists but is overgrown, was the last seen relic of Atlantean civilisation.