[Chapter Seven: Jewish Kingdoms―Israel and the House of David]

Chapter Eight: Adam and Atlas―Eden and the Fall of Atlantis

In the legend, Heracles sailed between the Pillars
to reach the garden of the Hesperides
from which he was to bring back the golden apples.
Many commentators think the garden
is a reference to the Canaries.
We are, in fact, on the ancient gold trail
that came up from Senegal and followed
a sea route along the African coast.
―Gilbert Pillot, The Secret Code of the Odyssey

Having now ventured into the realm where the biblical account contains multiple points of contact with the consensus historical narrative, thus grounding its later end in the historical bedrock that leads inexorably to the rise of Alexander and the dawning of the modern world he so brilliantly, if fleetingly, inaugurated, it is time to turn to the very beginning of the biblical account and its equivalent in the Greek legendary material. Only in Egypt, as we will see shortly, had civilization advanced to the point where we can begin to distinguish the historical context in which this purported first king of what would ultimately become the Jewish nation supposedly lived out his life. That he was later thought to be the first man is understandable. His position at the head of the great biblical genealogical tree fairly begs to be seen as that of the first human either created by the god of the deep or born from the very body of that god's chosen wife or consort. In one version of the Greek account, this first man is Atlas, and along with his nine brothers he rules over a large island called Atlantis.

Now the problem of Atlantis is nowhere nearly as difficult as the authors who have written about it make it out to be. Here we exclude those who obtain their information through psychic trances and flights of imagination that see the so-called lost continent as the prototype of the ideal new-age society. Plato himself used the tale of Atlantis to elaborate some of his own theories on ideal government and city planning, but there is enough hard information in the works of the tutor of Aristotle, when placed alongside other surviving accounts of this ancient kingdom and river valley civilization, to extract its true identity along with that of the biblical version of the same land, called "Eden" by the authors of those ancient works that were later edited and incorporated into the book of Genesis.

The obvious place to begin, in this work of a primarily chronological nature, is the critical question of when, exactly, the events that led to the fall of Atlantis would have occurred. If Solon is correct, as reported by Plato, that the latter's ancestor derived his knowledge from an Egyptian priest, then we may begin to narrow the date of the events described by that priest to the recorded history of Egypt, which has never gone back much farther than the end of the 4th Millennium BC, no earlier than the first few centuries before the year 3000. This immediately destroys any suggestion that Atlantis fell 9000 years before Solon and we can begin to suspect a systematic lengthening of the timeline similar to the one we have already discovered in the biblical account. In this case it would appear, despite the widely held opinion that the priest to whom Solon spoke mistranslated the number of years by a factor of ten, that he actually managed to get the units wrong, for it turns out that the Egyptians used a three-season year, spring, summer, and winter, as I noted in the chapter "The Tarot of the Greeks" in my Origins of the Tarot Deck, so that the relevant figure was 9000 seasons.

Seasons of the Egyptian Year¹

If we are to use our already carefully extracted biblical timeline to identify the true era of Atlantis, we must first determine where this cataclysm fits in the series of catastrophes described, sometimes clearly, often obliquely, in the bible. The reader may consult the following table at this point. This will allow him or her to see the direction in which we are headed in our elucidation of the underlying forces that led to the notion of world ages and regularly repeating global catastrophes, two of which were anciently described in the tales of the destruction of the Atlantic kingdom and the expulsion from Eden. The table contains data from dendrochronology, the initial years of periods of minimum yearly tree growth; biblical events of a decidedly naturalistic nature, i.e., famines, floods, fallout from apparent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, all adjusted for chronological inflation; mythological data, again, those that took a specifically naturalistic form, floods and inundations in particular, where they can be placed with any degree of certainty in a proper chronological context; and theological data where that agrees with the specific system of world ages, catastrophes, and the notion of the return of avatars on a clearly defined schedule.

There has been some limited attempt to edit the results with an eye to extracting the actual temporal cycle of the events described, though this was to a large extent unnecessary due to the relative simplicity and consistency of the chronological system involved. In short, the nominal cycle consists of 600 years, a specifically luni-solar period, divided into 29 equal divisions that approximate 20.69 years. These are grouped almost exclusively into clusters of six, very close to 124 years in total, except that every fifth cycle there is one that consists of only five of these subcycles, or about 104 years in total. Because the overall cycle is always close to 600 years, or one neros period, each subsidiary period also repeats on a 600-year cycle. What caused these events is at present unclear, though we will take a closer look at the possibilities later on. If it weren't for the very real dendrochronological data, it would be truly tempting to take the whole system for an astrological chimera. As it is, the tree-ring data forces us to take this system of floods, famines, and avatars quite seriously, though there is still some small amount of room for human intervention in the natural process. That the ancients ascribed these events to the "gods" is not at all helpful unless we can identify just exactly what, or whom, they were talking about. Though we have already suggested that Atlantis was Eden and, by extension, Atlas was Adam, I will take this opportunity to compare the two tales and to use each of them to fill in some of the gaps in the other account, as well as to use the combined narrative thus obtained to try to determine when and where this event occurred.

Global Cyclical Cataclysms and Their Associated Avatars

Eden and Atlantis

My earliest exposure to the story of Adam and his garden when I was quite young immediately raised a topological question in my mind about a basically geographical detail in the story as it is presented in Genesis. Upon being expelled from Eden, Adam finds his return blocked. "So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life." Now there is something peculiar about this arrangement, for what the text is really saying is that there is only one way to get to the garden, and that it is from the east. Using Ignatius Donnelly's translation of Plato, we have the following description of the location of Atlantis:

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 you call the Columns of Heracles: the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from the islands you might pass through 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 continent.

So the way to Eden is blocked from its eastern side, and Atlantis is only accessible from the east through a relatively narrow channel. Could it be that a pair of cherubim with flaming swords are sufficient to block the way to Eden because they guard that entrance to the Atlantic and that, in fact, they sit upon the so-called Columns of Heracles―the modern Punta Almina in Morocco and Europa Point in Gibraltar, on both of which there are now lighthouses―which serve as boundary markers past which those who once inhabited that land may no longer pass, access having fallen into the hands of some new power? This is only the first of a long series of congruencies between the accounts of the two antediluvian realms that we will now explore.

On the scale of a large city-state, the unit most familiar to Plato and his earliest audience, Eden and Atlantis share a peculiarity that is not immediately obvious to the casual observer, their descriptions having been passed through quite different intellectual filters, one generative and metaphysical, the other civil and utopian. These two expressions of the geographical peculiarity that compounds that previously mentioned anomaly, their limited easterly means of access, involves the place of the liquid element in the layout of this ancient prototypical human habitation. The Garden and the land of Atlantis beyond its central city are pictured above all else as ideal agricultural domains where it is either relatively easy or completely free of human effort to reap the fruits of the climate and the soil. This condition is due, first of all, to its mild weather and, second of all, to an abundant source of water applied, not haphazardly, but in the form of a highly organized irrigation network. In the case of the biblical account, this system is not described directly but is only hinted at.

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there he put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food.... And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became four heads.

Four heads: this terminology has literally boggled the minds of the most erudite and acute scholars to have studied the bible and the history of religion in general, especially because this statement is followed by an identification of the four "heads" that supposedly include the Tigris and the Euphrates and two other rivers in the same part of the world. This peculiar topology is covered by the authors of Hamlet's Mill, where they relate it to certain cosmological beliefs of the ancient world.

Yet taken in the context of Plato's description of Atlantis, the meaning of these words is obvious.

I will now describe the plain, which had been cultivated during many ages by many generations of kings. It was rectangular, and for the most part straight and oblong; and what it wanted of the straight line followed the line of the circular ditch. The depth and width and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that such a work, in addition to so many other works, could hardly have been wrought by the hand of man. But I must say what I have heard. It was excavated to the depth of a hundred feet, and its breadth was a stadium everywhere; it was carried round the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stadia in length. It received the streams which came down from the mountains, and winding round the plain, and touching the city at various points, was there let off into the sea. From above, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut in the plain, and again let off into the ditch, toward the sea; these canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the fruits of the earth in ships, cutting transverse passages from one canal into another, and to the city.

Atlantis was clearly irrigated on an extensive, one might say massive, scale. Eden's river became four, no less of an enormous undertaking when it came to applied hydrodynamics.

A third point of intersection between our two primary sources on the antediluvian kingdom is the matter of its ten kings. In the biblical version, they rule consecutively, though there is no overt reference to the fact that they were kings and not simply patriarchs. In Plato's account, they rule over different parts of the island. It would appear that the biblical account is correct in this regard, for Plato's tale contains the only list (with the exception of the daughters of Atlas) in which the ten kings do not follow one another in linear sequence (I have appended a preliminary table of the various examples of these king-lists). In fact, if we identify the Atlantean ruler Diaprepes with Deucalion, the Greek equivalent of Noah―the circumstances of the lives of the two men are even more closely allied than the events currently under discussion―then the fall of Atlantis must be identical with the flood of Deucalion, an event which took place, according to Georgius Cedrenus, 248 years after that of Ogyges. Cedrenus, purportedly a monk, wrote a history of the world to the year 1057.

Comparison of Antediluvian King-Lists¹⁴

It is Solon's mention of Phoroneus, the Greek Adam, and Deucalion that leads his informant among the Egyptian priesthood to launch into the following exposition concerning the limited historical memory of the Greek people.

O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children.... In mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you the reason of this: there have been, and there will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes. There is a story which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Phaëthon, the son of Helios ... burnt up all that was upon the earth.... Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time: when this happens, those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the sea-shore; and from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing savior, saves and delivers us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, among you herdsmen and shepherds on the mountain are survivors, whereas those of you who live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea; but in this country neither at that time nor at any other does the water come from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below, for which reason the things preserved here are said to be the oldest.... And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed ... has been written down of old, and is preserved in our temples; whereas you and other nations are just being provided with letters ...; and then, at the usual period, the stream from heaven descends like a pestilence, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education ... and know nothing of what happened in ancient times.... As for those genealogies of yours which you have recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children; for, in the first place, you remember one deluge only, whereas there were many of them.

Perhaps if Solon had mentioned the flood of Ogyges that occurred during the lifetime of Phoroneus, the Egyptian priest might not have been quite so overarchingly arrogant (or perhaps not), for this similarity of chronological contexts constitutes a fourth alignment between the two legendary systems. Both refer to a catastrophic event that occurs prior to a later, greater catastrophe of wider extent and level of destruction. Furthermore, both occur during the lifetime of the "first man." Adam was 65 at the time of the expulsion from Eden, and the Greek legends tell us that Phoroneus was still alive during the flood of Ogyges.

A fifth identity that presents itself for the reader's consideration is the creator or father of the first man. In Plato's version, Atlas was the son of Poseidon, the god of the sea. In the local Greek version, Phoroneus was the son of Inachus, the river god. According to de Moor, the Phoenician version of Yahweh was Yam, again, a sea god. The identification of Yahweh himself with the sea is not quite so obvious, but it is hinted at fairly blatantly. We need only look at the means by which he begins his creation of the world.

Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. And God said: 'Let there be light.' ... And God said: 'Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.' And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.... And God said: 'Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.' ... And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas.

Yahweh was an extension of Yah or Yahu, perhaps through an assimilation with the Sumerian creator goddess Hawwah (Yah+Hawwah=Yahawwah). Yah replaced El at Ebla during the 3rd Millennium BC and appears to be a Semitic variation of Ea, the later Akkadian version of the Sumerian Enki, again, the god of water among other things. We will have more to say about Yahweh, or IAHUEH, in the next chapter.

Location of the Garden

The key question that has perplexed those who have previously dealt with either the biblical primordial human habitation or with the legend transmitted by the Egyptians to the Greeks of a lost civilization somewhere west of the Straits of Gibraltar has been its exact location. Ultimately, even their general locales have seemed to recede as the investigators have ardently followed the available clues. This is not surprising, staring, as they have been, through the haze of bad translations and editors with an axe or two to grind. From the point of view of the Greeks, Atlantis was clearly to the west, beyond the limits of Mediterranean Europe.

Now there is a second major source on the history of Atlantis, though, on the face of it, he is peripheral and secondary in nature. This perception is due to the overvaluation normally given to Plato's account, with all of its philosophical and idealistic preconceptions. The source, of course, is Diodorus Siculus, or rather his source, Dionysius "Scytobrachion" of Alexandria, where presumably he had access to the Library. Diodorus transmits from Dionysius, at least superficially, an entirely different tale. In his geographical and historical survey of the ancient world, Diodorus eventually gets to Libya, i.e., the area of North Africa west of the Nile Valley. It seems that at the far western end of Libya was a nation ruled by women known to the Greeks and their successors as Amazons. These Amazons inhabited the city of Chersonesus (or Cherronesus) on an island in Lake Tritonis (or Marsh Tritonis) in that region currently known as Tunisia, the seaward district of which later became the capital of the Carthaginian maritime empire. Thus, in the eyes of Andrew Collins in his Gateway to Atlantis, Carthage was the vector by which stories of Atlantis reached the Hellenistic world. In this regard, as it says in The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, "a wide-spread rabbinical legend identifies the land of the Amazons with Carthage ..., or with Africa ..., in both instances agreeing with classical tradition."

According to Diodorus, these Amazons under Queen Myrina embarked upon a wave of conquests that rapidly brought them into conflict with the tribes of the Atlantioi (or Atlantians [sic]) based at Cernê, an island on the Tropic of Cancer just off the African coast in what is now the much disputed country of Western Sahara, formerly the Spanish Sahara. After bringing these tribes under their sway, the Amazons went on to conquer the land of the Gorgons, another nation of female warriors, according to Livio Stecchini in an unpublished article entitled "The Voyage of Hanno," the people in whose Fulani language the word gork means "man." Stecchini identifies Hanno's island of the Gorgades with São Tomé on the Equator. The Amazons then concluded a treaty with the Egyptians under Horus before attacking and defeating the Arabians and subduing Syria. Now Horus, the son of Isis, was one of the predynastic "gods" whom Manetho has ruling Egypt before Menes united the north and the south under the double crown. Horus had a brother Typhon, who appears in the accompanying table, who is sometimes known as Set or Seth, so that we now have our first, admittedly weak, link between the Hebrew timeline at this early age and that of the Egyptians, for Seth was the third son of Adam, the final member of another of those apparently artificially constructed trinities mentioned by Godfrey Higgins. By the best astronomical evidence, this war of the Amazons was roughly synchronous with the great war in India described in the Mahabharata in which Krishna was a participant, the latter dying in the year that began the Kali Yuga, 3102 BC.

The actual alignment of the Hebrew and Egyptian chronologies is based on the identification of the tree-ring minimum of 3195 with the flood of Ogyges, and the identification of the flood of Deucalion and Noah with a hypothetical event 246 years later, the latter figure based on an even division of the period between the tree-ring event of 3195 and that of 2354. This is a mere two years different from the figure given by Cedrenus, who placed it at 248 years after Ogyges. The date of 2949 for the Deluge was then aligned with the biblical timeline adjusted for the artificial expansion we had noticed earlier. Hence, Noah was born in the year 2999 BC, became king in 2981, and experienced the Deluge at Thebes in his 50th year.

The forces of Myrina went on to peacefully subdue the Cilicians north of Syria in Anatolia, conquered the nearby peoples of the Taurus Mountains, then defeated the Phrygians and others as far west as the Caïcus River. She founded a city named after herself and then others after her commanders, Cymê, Pitana, and Prienê. Indicating her possession of a substantial fleet of ships, she took many of the islands of the Aegean including Lesbos and Samothrace, then ran afoul of the Scythians under Sipylus and the Thracians under Mopsus. Diodorus continues:

In these times ... Mopsus the Thracian, who had been exiled by Lycurgus, the king of the Thracians, invaded the land of the Amazons with an army composed of fellow-exiles, and with Mopsus on the campaign was also Sipylus the Scythian, who had likewise been exiled from that part of Scythia which borders upon Thrace. There was a pitched battle, Sipylus and Mopsus gained the upper hand, and Myrina, the queen of the Amazons, and the larger part of the rest of her army were slain. In the course of the years, as the Thracians continued to be victorious in their battles, the surviving Amazons finally withdrew again into Libya.

The Amazons were finally extinguished by an earthquake that destroyed those parts of their lake near the Mediterranean.

All this sounds suspiciously like Plato's tale of Atlantis. The philosopher describes their war of conquest and later the final defeat of these "Atlanteans," confusing Thrace in what is now northeastern Greece and European Turkey with Athens.

Now in the island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire, which had rule over the whole island and several others, as well as over parts of the continent; and, besides these, they subjected the parts of Libya within the Columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. The vast power thus gathered into one, endeavored to subdue at one blow our country and yours, and the whole of the land which was within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shown forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind; for she was the first 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 subjected, and freely liberated all the others who dwelt within the limits of Heracles.

So we have to ask ourselves, what could have been the source of the transposition of the deeds of the Amazons with those of the Atlanteans? Fortunately, the answer to this question is rather obvious.

It turns out that Atlas, the first ruler of Atlantis according to Plato, had seven daughters. As Andrew Collins points out, their story is found in the work of a Greek historian named Hellanicus, who wrote a book called Atlantis. As Collins remarks: "Despite its compelling title, this Atlantis had nothing whatsoever to do with the Atlantis of Plato's dialogues. Here it denoted only the 'daughters of Atlas' " Well, isn't that interesting? Here we have a term for those daughters of Atlas usually referred to as the Atlantides that we can easily juxtapose with our just concluded account of the Amazons and their strangely Atlantean-like adventures around the Mediterranean and we can begin to see that Plato must have confused the Atlantides, the daughters of Atlas who procreated with "the most renowned heroes and gods," and the Atlantioi or Atlantes whom they conquered. Neither is this the only way these two geographical areas were related, for, as Livio Stecchini tells us in another unpublished article, "The Sahara":

The geographical features indicate that there was a time in which the great volcanic massif of the Ahaggar in the middle of the Sahara was the center of a great [hydrographic] system. It divided the watershed of the Mediterranean from that of the gulf of Guinea. The course of the two great wadi, now completely dry, indicates that a river (Wadi Igharghar) went from the Ahaggar to Chott el-Jerid or Lake Triton of the Greeks and another river (Wadi Tafanasset) went to the river Niger. "Touching each other at their sources, they established a line of communication by water between the tropical countries and the Mediterranean." I will show that the Greek myth of the Argonauts concerns navigation along these rivers.

Amazingly enough, a representation of this hydrological system survives in the form of the Piri Re'is map of 1513, though, not surprisingly, no one seems to have noticed it.

The surviving part of the Piri Re'is map shows the eastern coast of North and South America, part of what Charles Hapgood thought was Antarctica without ice (the period when Antarctica was free of ice ended 6000 years ago), Spain, and a major portion of West Africa. At the eastern end of the African portion of the map is an island surrounded by a river that flows off in all four of the cardinal directions. The northern and southern branches of this river appear to intersect the headwaters of various rivers that flow westward into the Atlantic Ocean. In his reconstruction, Hapgood places this island on the Tropic of Cancer, making it fairly clear that this is that Ahaggar (or Hoggar) of myth and literature that is now part of southern Algeria, though it has been obviously (and fortunately) offset to the west, so that its existence must have been known from ancient legend and not from the Age of Exploration. Here, finally, is a graphic representation of that aqueous aerie where Poseidon fathered Atlas and where Yahweh breathed life into the ceramic form of Adam on the river that became four heads and whose entrance was from the east after the front door directly from the Mediterranean had been destroyed by a natural cataclysm. Here also is that larger "continent" whose rulers controlled a territory "as large as Libya [Africa] and Asia combined" because, in fact, it consisted of large portions of Africa and Asia combined. Compare the above description of the conquests of Myrina.

Garden of Atlas, ca 3200 BC (including some modern details)

What we must ask ourselves at this juncture is whether there is any evidence beyond the purely mythological and legendary that describes the state of North Africa in the period before the rise of Egyptian dynastic civilization that indicates the presence of a civilization that can be, by any stretch of the imagination, identified with those legendary elements of prehistory that have been preserved for us by Plato and more realistically by Diodorus. We turn first to Abdallah Laroui's History of the Maghrib:

The increasingly frequent discoveries, beginning in the thirties, of cave paintings which tend to prove that at least certain parts of the Sahara were relatively green in a not too distant epoch (thousands rather than tens of thousands of years ago) obliged certain students, despite radical disagreement as to how the Saharan scraffiti and paintings should be interpreted, to recognize that there has been a decrease in humidity.

Velikovsky develops this theme, going beyond Laroui's tentative suggestion of limited habitation of what is now a vast desert and extending the period of discovery by almost a century, in Earth in Upheaval:

What is now the desert of Sahara was an open grassland or steppe in early days. Drawings on rock of herds of cattle, made by early dwellers in this region, were discovered by Barth in 1850. Since then many more drawings have been found. The animals depicted no longer inhabit these regions, and many are generally extinct. It is asserted that the Sahara once had a large human population that lived in vast green forests and on fat pasture lands. Neolithic implements, vessels and weapons made of polished stone, were found close to the drawings. Such drawings and implements were discovered in the eastern as well as the western Sahara. Men lived in these "densely populated" (Flint) regions and cattle pastured where today enormous expanses of sand stretch for thousands of miles.

How long ago was it that conditions in the Sahara were suitable for human occupation? Movers, the noted Orientalist of the last [19th] century, author of a large work on the Phoenicians, decided that the drawings in the Sahara were the work of the Phoenicians. It was likewise observed that on the drawings discovered by Barth the cattle wore discs between their horns, just as in Egyptian drawings. Also, the Egyptian god Set was found pictured on the rocks. And there are rock paintings of war chariots drawn by horses "in an area where these animals could not survive two days without extraordinary precautions."

We will deal with the cosmological Set in the next chapter. For now, it should be noted that according to the current reconstruction, Set or Seth was king of Lower Egypt from 3185 to 3154 BC, and the Fire of Phaeton and the beginning of the earliest phase of the desiccation of the Sahara occurred in or slightly after the year 2949, the same year as the Flood of Deucalion and the Deluge, and the final submergence of the Amazon capital in North Africa.

More recently, again in his article "The Sahara," Livio Stecchini introduces us to the work of Henri Lhote:

Our knowledge of the ancient Sahara was revolutionized by the publication, in 1957, of the results of Henri Lhote’s investigations of the rock paintings of the central Sahara. These paintings indicate that there was a time when chariots drawn by horses crossed the Sahara from the Mediterranean coast to the river Niger. This indicates that the process of desiccation of the Sahara had reached a point in which transportation by river was no longer possible from the Great Chotts to the Ahaggar and from there to the Niger, but the land could still support horses. One principle used by Lhote in dating this chariot route is the fact that the horses are portrayed on the rock painting according to style conventions that occur in Mycenaean art. Lhote assumes that the Mycenaeans, like the Greeks who followed them, had colonized Cyrenaica and that from there had advanced into the Sahara area. There can be no doubt that the chariot route reached the Ahaggar from the Mediterranean; Lhote assumes that from there it went south to the Niger at Gao. To the north of the Ahaggar the route went through the present oasis of Ghat. In order to be conservative Lhote marks the route as going directly from Ghat to the Mediterranean at Tripoli; but in so doing he does not prove consistent, since he had indicated that the route must have come into contact with Mycenaean civilization at Cyrenaica. In fact rock paintings of horses are found also in the present oasis of Fezzan, which indicates that the chariot route must have gone from Ghat to the Fezzan and from there to Cyrenaica through the present oasis of Jalo. In substance the chariot route must coincide with the trade route described by Herodotus, a route that Lhote recognizes as going from Cyrenaica to the Ahaggar through the oases of Jalo, the Fezzan, and Ghat. It can be assumed that this chariot route must have existed up to roughly 1000 B.C.

De Prorok (1935) concurs: "I was after the old caravan routes of the Phoenicians, and even earlier people, for caravans had been crossing the desert before Dido landed at Carthage [814 BC] and stretched the bull's hide."

Lhote published his Découverte des Fresques du Tassil in 1958, followed by the English translation, The Search for the Tassili Frescos, in 1959:

The aquatic character of the predominant fauna indicates surroundings which were damp and the existence of numerous rivers in full flood. Such rivers, taking their rise in great mountain masses such as the Hoggar, the Tassili and the Adrar of the Iforas, constituted a vast hydrographic system linked up with the Niger, with lake Chad and with those great lakes whose shrunken remnants are to be seen in the chotts of the Tunisian south. It is still quite possible to plot out the courses of these streams. Indeed, I have flown in an aeroplane from the Hoggar and was able to follow the length of one of the fossil rivers clearly recognizable from its white furrow scoring the sands. By keeping to this course I reached, without any difficulty, the Niger near the town of Gao.

Again, de Prorok (1929) concurs:

One thing, however, is of supreme importance―a thing I have noted at many African centres: here, in the chotts of Algeria, in Tunisia, in the Libyan desert, at Siwa, and in the Djouf, there is a distinct and definite trace of the receding tide. The desert was not always so lacking in water as it now seems to be. The water-level has steadily lowered, and with each decline there is a new or changed civilization. The Stone Age, with the foyers of primitive men, is to be found on the highest level. The palæolithic, succeeded by the neolithic, gives way, at a lower level when the water has subsided, to the Græco-Phoenician and to the Romano-Byzantine, and, at the present level, to the Arab.

Lhote further asserts that the Romans of the 1st century AD penetrated as far as the Niger River by chariot. Later, he notes the origin of the modern theory of Atlantis in the Hoggar:

Benoit's novel [Atlantida] aroused the imagination of a German geologist, one Borchardt, who situated Atlantis in the region of the Tunisian chotts and in the Hoggar.

He specifically denies that he has discovered Atlantis: "During the last few years prehistorical research has made much progress and this confirms, furthermore, that the Atlantic and Moroccan coasts of Africa have been stable since at least the beginning of the Quaternary Period," then proceeds to resurrect Plato's tired old story and the misinterpretation that the philosopher placed it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1929 Byron de Prorok, the explorer and archeologist, had written in Mysterious Sahara: "Geologists and zoologists are of the opinion that a great land disappeared beneath the sea off the coast of Mauretania and Rio Del Oro," whereas Lhote's actual statements about the Sahara tend to confirm our own placement of the empire of the Amazons derived mainly from Stecchini and Diodorus:

Thus, no doubt, the Hoggar received the name Atlas which, later on, was by other authors used to designate what we today call the Atlas range (in Berber Deren) of Morocco. It is also evident that the word 'Atlantes' (derived from Atlas) was completely unknown to those peoples whom the Greeks so called.

In these circumstances it is easy to see how theories based on the words 'Atlas' and 'Atlantes' could lead to a legend of 'Atlantis'. A cardinal error was to invoke the authority of Herodotus for the situating of 'Atlantis' in Morocco, since, as we have seen, the text of the Greek historian is clear enough. He puts his 'Atlas' in the interior of Libya and not farther to the west.

Descendants of the Atlantes

Herodotus placed the Atlantes of his day in the Atlas Mountains, i.e., the Hoggar. As Lhote says, "the Tuareg may be regarded as the descendants of those 'Atlantes' who were the contemporaries of the Father of History." This is a critical identification, though Lhote doesn't seem to realize it, for the social structure of the Tuareg, the now generally peaceable native inhabitants of the Hoggar who wander the desert and had bloody encounters with the French Foreign Legion not long ago, is rather peculiar and hearkens back to the Amazons more than it does to the Atlanteans. It is to Count Francis Byron Khun de Prorok (writing under the shorter Count Byron de Prorok), apparently the archaeologist whom Lhote dismisses simply as an "American millionaire," and his In Quest of Lost Worlds of 1935 that we must turn for a description of this peculiar social structure.

Our first hint from de Prorok of what is to come appears after his expedition finds their prepositioned supplies at Meniet south of In Salah looted:

Chapuis, however, was by no means beaten. We collected all the water we had, and filled up one of the cars, when he took us about fifteen miles off the trail, into the region of the Moudir, where great precipices form a wall of rock, believed by the Tuaregs to be the fortress of the Amazons, ruled by a white goddess: the old fable of Atlantis.

Upon reaching Tamenrasset, the expedition meets with the Sultan of the Tuareg and obtains an invitation to visit their camp at Attakor, which they do for two weeks:

The ceremonial approach ended and we were presented to the Queen and her ladies-in-waiting with a pomp and ceremony that would not have disgraced a European court. Here were the real masters of the land! I was astonished to discover the matriarchate still potent in the world .... The women, with their clear, open faces, were worthy of their dignity; they were open, frank, really beautiful; obviously noble both of inheritance and character....

It was a country upside-down. The men, as I have said, were painted and veiled. The women were not. Inheritance is by the maternal line. The councils are really dominated by the women. The sultan is only the nominal ruler, chosen by the tribes for leadership in war, actually only a representative of the Queen. The name of the family is taken from the mother. She is supreme in councils of war, and the women accompany their men on the great trails, riding side by side, taunting the weak and the cowards, spurring them to their greatest bravery.

From Mysterious Sahara:

This position of power and influence is a direct hold-over from antiquity, for since earliest time women have held an exalted position among the Libyan civilizations. At Carthage they worshiped the strange and terrible divinity called Tanit, to whom countless children were offered up in dreadful sacrifice. Even the name "Libyan" comes from a female deity called "Libya." Queen Tin Hinan was a historic personage―the Eve of the Sahara―from whom all the noble Tuaregs claim descent. The Goddess Athena, and the famed Amazon of mythology probably originated in Africa, and it is said that Helen of Troy disappeared "into the heart of Libya." The last of the Amazons still engage in warfare and to this day handle the affairs of state.

Hence we have the Tuareg―the descendants of the Atlantes, the tribe conquered by the Amazons―ruled by women in peace and in war. Those women, though no longer the absolute rulers of the Greek legends, still wield an astonishing amount of power made even more amazing in a land where the women of the north continue to be subjugated by the male practitioners of the religion of Mohammed.

[Chapter Nine: Seth and Typhon—Identifying the Agent of Destruction]

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