This may be the real Atlantis! Ancient history is a pretty blank slate in terms of real evidence. This may add weight to one ancient story of our past. Judge for yourself.
The map above is from 1669 and made by Athanasius Kircher from the work titled "Mundus Subterraneus". As I mentioned in a previous TIL post, maps were often pointing south, instead of north.
Maps were also often designed in a way that accentuated the focal point as larger to emphasize features. as a result, the surrounding geography was smaller and disproportionate to the actual layout in reality. There is no huge island, because there wasn't. The map accentuates the features for us to see where it is.
As shown below compared to the first image of google maps, this one has been reformatted to match Kircher's emphasis of the central island:
Google maps shows a very similar shape, and positioned in the same way as Kircher's.
This could simply be coincidence of shapes. But recall, that in earlier times, a lot of the freshwater was locked into glaciers, which have since melted and caused the water level to rise. There is evidence around the world of former civilizations that are now submerged. The google map submerged island matches the shape, and could have been a real land island thousands of years ago. Atlantis is another tale of some place being lost to the sea, as I covered in a previous post about submerged ancient civilizations.
The past has much we don't know about... it's a time forgotten and we can't know much from those times other than the archaeological data we find.
There are other claims of finding Atlantis, like off the coast of Bahrain. But none show an actual island mass that correlates with past historical accounts, such as Plato's, and Kircker's map. Other locations like Bahrain don't match Plato's and Kircher's depiction of Atlantis, they are mostly submerged former civilizations.
@krnel
2016-11-18, 6:30pm