Lost city of Atlantis believed found off Spain

[Drale]

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago, in mud flats in southern Spain.

"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.

"It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a professor at the University of Hartford who led an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42072469/ns/technology_and_science-science/

This would be an amazing archaeological find. We have seen that ancient cities thought to be fairytales have been found before IE Troy which was discovered by Heinrich Schliemann.

[Blue_Tires]

1. Is it way down below the ocean?

where I want to be, she may be?

[JackintheGreen]

2. Now I got that scene from Goodfellas in my head n/t

Oh, Billy Batts...

[Blue_Tires]

9. "I want what I gotta get; I got fuckin' mouths to feed..."

[Xithras]

3. What they probably found is Tartessos.

The Tartessan's aren't mythical, and their existence was well documented in the histories of various Mediterranean peoples. Cadiz was actually founded by the Phonecians to act as a trading post with the Tartessans, and was said to be near their city/state. The Tartessans were very wealthy, and supposedly used their metal wealth to build a modern city (by the standards of their day, anyway).

Ancient records claim that the lost city of Tartessos sat on a series of islands surrounding one main island in the middle of an inland bay (like modern Venice, and probably for the same reasons), and that the city "vanished beneath the waters" in some kind of cataclysm (the exact details have been lost, but everything from a massive flood to a tsunami to subsidence after an earthquake to ground compaction on marsh islands have been posited). Archaeologists have suspected for decades that the "inland bay" was actually the marshlands north of Cadiz, filled in by several thousand years of sedimentation.

Given the similar histories, it's position near the Strait of Gibraltar, the description of its construction, and the way it was lost beneath the water, there has long been a suspicion that Tartessos may have been one of the core inspirations behind the legend of Atlantis, but there's no way to prove it.

[JackintheGreen]

4. Besides, everybody already knows

that "Atlantis," the nadir of ancient civilization, was a Tamil continent between Malagasy and the Indian subcontinent. The sangams tell us so.

[Xithras]

5. Your post illustrates the thing that irks me the most about this claim.

By all accounts, it sounds like they have found Tartessos, which would be a huge and important find. We know that the Tartessans were an important people in the development of early Mediterranean culture, but they vanished early on and we know very little about them today. What we do know is very interesting. Unlike the rest of the seafaring civilizations in the Mediterranean, the Tartessans were Celtic and had a social and government structure based on Celtic laws. We also know that the Tartessans created the very first written Celtic language, and that their language actually endured long after their civilization vanished (Tartessan was spoken all the way up until the Romans took over). We have found works of art that rival anything the Greeks created, and there are stories claiming that they fielded great navies capable of engaging the Greeks and Phonecians in even warfare.

Finding Tartessos would be wonderful from a historical and archaeological standpoint, but these people have turned it into a joke by claiming that they found "Atlantis" instead.

[RebelOne]

6. Either way, whether it be Tartessos or Atlantis,

it would still be a great archaeological discovery.

[asjr]

7. That has to be at least the 8th time that

city has been found.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. U.S.-led research team "finally locates" something a German found 7 years ago

Dr Rainer Kuehne thinks the "island" of Atlantis simply referred to a region of the southern Spanish coast destroyed by a flood between 800 BC and 500 BC.

The research has been reported as an ongoing project in the online edition of the journal Antiquity.

Satellite photos of a salt marsh region known as Marisma de Hinojos near the city of Cadiz show two rectangular structures in the mud and parts of concentric rings that may once have surrounded them
...
The identification of the site with Atlantis was first proposed by Werner Wickboldt, a lecturer and Atlantis enthusiast who spotted the rectangles and concentric rings by studying photographs from across the Mediterranean for signs of the city described by Plato.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3766863.stm

http://www.beepworld.de/members62/rainerkuehne/

Marisma de Hinojos is in the Doñana National Park, not "Doña Ana". National Geographic and MSNBC can't even get the name of the place right. Fuck them. They steal someone's else's idea, claim it as their own, 7 years late, and are so culturally ignorant they can't even get the name of the place right.

That's quite apart from whether there is anything to this at all, archaeologically. Ethically, National Geographic is now in the shitter.