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A Saharan Atlantis?
One of the many theories regarding the location of Atlantis has it as part of a Saharan kingdom before the area was consumed by desert.The certain fact is that most of the
Sahara was once a fertile and flourishing land covered in forests and flowing with rivers. It’s people tended bountiful crops and grazed cattle in peace and security. Yet abruptly this idyllic world
comes to a sudden halt and the whole area is overwhelmed by the Sahara desert.
The Atlantioi.
But could his kingdom be Atlantis? Some believe it is. They point to the fact that bordering areas such as Morocco have Atlantean place names such as the Atlas mountains and
Herodotus spoke of a resident tribe of people there known as the Atlantioi.
Dry land.
In his book The Mystery of Atlantis author Charles Berlitz makes the following comments on this theory: “Other intriguing theories suggest that Atlantis never sank at
all - that it is still on dry land and all we have to do is dig for it.”
Important theory
One important ‘dry land’ theory is based on climatic changes in North Africa. Says Berlitz: “Cave paintings 10,000 years old in the Tassili Mountains of Algeria and the
connected Accasus chain of Libya depict a pleasant, populated, fertile land of rivers and forests teeming with all kinds of African animals once present but now vanished from an area as barren, at the
present day, as the surface of the moon.
Amazing world.
“Besides the indications of a complete climatic change suggested by the cave paintings we see in their execution resemblance's to those of prehistoric Europe, bearing
witness to a developed culture and a long preparatory period of artistic development as indicated by the use of perspective and freeness of form.”
Inland Sea
The presence of now-vanished game and a former large population fits in with the gradually accepted theory that where there is now desert large inland rivers and
forests once existed and even inland seas. Remnants of these water courses still flow under the desert and the desert tribes still conserve the memory of more fertile lands. The gradual drying up
of present day North Africa as well as the subsidence of much of the coast are the basis of other French theories predicating that both Tunisia and Algeria possessed an inland sea, opening to the
Mediterranean and also connecting with the inner Sahara Sea.
Links to yet more topics of interest.
Click here to read about the vanished kingdom of Tartessos?
Click here to read about the vanished island of Antillia
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