WAS ATLANTIS IN HISPANIOLA? ARGUMENTS IN FAVOUR

Information on Atlantis is available from two works of Plato, the Critias and the Timaeus. In these works Critias provides information he got when he was a child seventy years before, from his grandfather, who obtained it from Dropides, a friend of Solon. Solon's source was an old priest he met in Sais, the Egyptian delta city where a "priest university" was located. The priest told  that the most ancient event Solon himself could recall, namely the flood of Deucalion, was not so ancient. Indeed it was only  the last great catastrophe of a series of several ones, among which three were "great". The greatest  one occurred some 9000 years before their time. At that time   Atlantis, a great power located on an island beyond the columns of Herakles, was in control of other islands beyond and of part of the continent surrounding {\it the true ocean}. Atlantis tried to conquer the whole Mediterranean area, where it was already in control of Africa up to Lybia and of Europe up to Italy.  Atlantis was defeated by a coalition of ancestors of the Egyptians and  the Greeks. Soon after  the war a great catastrophe occurred suddenly, characterized by huge repeated sea waves that devastated the coasts of the Mediterranean area, so much that Egypt could be repopulated only a thousand years after. The catastrophe was attributed to changes in the orbit of some celestial body. Later on people searching for the Atlantis island could not find it, the ocean region where it was located having become "muddy".

Details are also given  on the Atlantis island, both geographical and about the political and economical system (the island was governed by a dynasty of "semigods"). Among the geographical details we cite the following: high mountains, rivers, lakes,  large animals including "elephants", a chain of hills protecting an irrigated plain from the northern winds. Moreover "Atlantis was larger than Africa and Asia combined" and  the size of the irrigated plain was, transforming from the  Egyptian stadia, some "270 by 350 km".

We think that the data in the Platonic text (which are supported by a few independent references in Proclus, Theopompus and Plutarch) are plausible in the following context:

-- The Atlantis civilization developed during the terminal phase of the last great glaciation. It was terminated by a catastrophe, of extraterrestrial origin, which led to the now confirmed fast melting of most ices covering north America (north of a line from Seattle to Washington) and northern Europe; this event is now rather precisely dated at circa 9500 BC, in agreement with the Platonic date.

-- Atlantis was located in the island of Hispaniola, the Caribbean island now divided between Haiti and Santo Domingo. Notice that the local name of Hispaniola before Columbus was {\it Quisqueya}, meaning {\it Mother of Lands}. The islands beyond are then the other Caribbean islands,  the continent beyond is America and the "true ocean" is the Pacific, which during the last Ice Age was almost completely surrounded by land, as related in the Platonic text.

-- The geographical features of Hispaniola correspond quite well to those described by Critias, except for the dimensions  of the island and of the irrigated plain. This disagreement can  be  explained by an easy error in  the oral tradition, or most likely in the memory of Critias, who spent a night trying to remember the details of the story heard from his grandfather. So the size of the Atlantis {\it empire} became the size of the island, while the size of the island, which can be almost exactly inscribed in a rectangle of the given dimensions, became the size of the irrigated plain.

-- The "disappearance" of Atlantis can be explained partly by some modification of its coastal profile when the melting of the ices previously locked on the continents led to the sea level rising some 60 meters, partly by the fact, only recently established, that the Gulf Stream, previously moving towards the Gibraltar straits, changed direction, moving as it does now towards Britain and Scandinavia. This led also probably to the formation or to an enlarged size of the Sargassus sea, to be identified with the Platonic "muddy sea".

A consideration of the topography of Hispaniola suggests that the ruins of the capital city, if not completely destroyed by the catastrophic event (most probably a huge tsunami due to either an oceanic impact of a comet or an Apollo object, or to the tidal effects of a planet passing close to the Earth) lie under thick sediments in the bottom of  Lake Henriquillo,  close to the southern coast of Santo Domingo, near the border with Haiti.