:: And I'd point out that if inappropriately placed
: mountains disqualify Hissarlik to be Troy, and the
: location of Thera inside rather than outside the
: pillars of Hercules disqualifies it to be Atlantis,
: then a location in the South Pacific--thousands of
: miles from where Plato *or* Homer situated their
: cities, and thousands of years earlier--can hardly be
: more acceptable. :-)
Atlantis is not the only sunken island. I've been very interesting in this topic for... certain reasons I am not at liberty to divulge (ok technically I am, but it would ruin all your fun years down the road).
Anyway, in my research I came across an interesting fact. We all know the story of Atlantis - great civilization, high technology, peace, etc etc, then it sank. Well, reading through Chinese mythology I came across an intersting thing - the Chinese have another myth about an island called Peng-lai in the South China Sea, where the Xian (immortals) lived... which sank into the sea whenever ships would approach it.
Then, I got interested and looked for more sunken islands, and found a Polynesian myth of Hawai'iki, which ran remarkably similar to the Christian creation myth, except that instead of just being cast out of the garden, they were "voted off the island" (I know, bad pun) and cast out to the rest of the world... and their great paradise sunk into the sea.
There are other myths/prophecies involving islands, though not all of them sunken. Aztec mythology holds that their Mongols ancestors came over the land bridge in search of an island in a lake, on which would be a cactus, on which would be a hawk, eating a snake... and they found that in Tenochtitlan and made it their capital, eventually filling in the lake and expanding the island until there was no lake, and hence no island in it. Tenochtitlan is the ruined old city under Mexico City, for those who've never heard of it.
And I think there was something about Titticaca as well, but I can't recall at the moment. Only South Africa seems to be missing its island paradise. The Mediterranean has Atlantis, the Far East has Peng-Lai, the South Pacific has Hawai'iki, North America has Tenochtitlan, and.... god I can't remember what's in South America. Here be dragons, rar.
