The Influence of Atlantis and its Lost People

Sunken Island, Surfaced Legend: The Influence of Atlantis and its Lost People

Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, prosperous and advanced, the legendary island of Atlantis was said to have sunk under the ocean. As the myth depicts, Atlanteans thrived on their island which had filled up the expanse of water between Africa and the Americas, advancing in knowledge and power1 until an earthquake plunged an entire civilization into the depths of the Atlantic.2 As a legend dating back to ancient Greece, retaining connections which spanned even further back to the time of the Flood, the notion of lost Atlantis subtly brought explorers to the coasts of the Atlantic world. As the lure of the unknown brought explorers west, interactions between Europeans and Indigenous Americans urged the question of whether the descendants of the lost civilization still prospered on the other side of the ocean, commonly known as the Mayas.3

The civilization of Atlantis, recorded in a fictional account from Plato’s Timaeus, is described by the Greek philosopher to have lived on an island making up the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, which “there could be crossed, since it had an island before the mouth of the strait which is called, as ye say, the pillars of Herakles.”4 According to Plato, Atlantis was home to a city of wealth and royalty which connected the continents and “all this power gathered itself together, and your country and ours and the whole region within the strait it sought with one single swoop to enslave.”5 With unfortunate luck, the might of Atlantis drowned as it sank, swept to the bottom of the ocean by an earthquake and a flood, believed for centuries to be the Great Flood in the Book of Genesis.6 According to legend retold by Plato, the Atlantic Ocean overtook the mighty civilization of Atlantis, “eat[ing] away the best part of it.”7 Plato’s description gave rise to other interpretations of the legend, as well as the desire to find the lost city and its civilization. In the sixteenth century, most Europeans traversed the Atlantic for settlement, trade, and conquest. Some contemporary writers such as the explorer Francisco Lopez de Gómara and the abbot Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg studied the legend of Atlantis and theorized that it was located in the Americas. During expeditions, Gómara examined the similarities found in mythologies and religions. He noted, for instance, the customs of the Indigenous empires to be “the product of men who shared a common lineage,”8 supposedly as descendants of a once-great Atlantean civilization.

As the Atlantis legend came to be analyzed by scholars over the centuries, the interactions and similarities between religions regarding flood myths created an apparent connection between Plato’s account and Gómara’s deductions. The common assumption emerged that the western and eastern continents were previously interconnected. While traversing the Americas, the missionary Joseph-François Lafitau examined the cultural and religious similarities between the Indigenous myths and those in Europe and concluded that, in addition to Europe, “the ancients knew this part of the world.”9 Indigenous flood myths shared similarities with those in the east, seeming to suggest that Atlantis had been the land believed to bridge the gap between the continents in ancient years.10 One Aztec legend recorded in the Codex of Chimalpopoca refers to a flood brought to earth by gods, as“‘the sky came nearer the water’” and“‘all was lost, and the day Nahui-xochitl, ‘flower,’ destroyed all our flesh.’”11

With the parallels in flood narratives came a connection with Atlantis which neither Europeans nor Indigenous Americans learned from one or the other, but rather the similarities “were derived from an actual knowledge of Atlantis possessed by the people of America.”12 The mythological similarities eventually gave rise to suspicion about the descendants of the Atlanteans, “the Toltecs,” who were believed by Brasseur de Bourbourg to be the Mayas.13 The speculation that the Mayas were descendants of Atlanteans remained just that. As the flood myths in the Americas bore similarities to the legend of Atlantis, exploration came to be influenced by its connection to different cultures, even when separated by the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.