Cultural Evidence
Human Records
Oral History
Before the invention of writing and its coming into general use, history was handed down by word of mouth. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to find monuments, graves, and artifacts that help us to confirm or reject the stories that have reached us. Sykes once commented, "History is a most fascinating detective story, with clues scattered about all over the place, only awaiting patient and unemotional research by the up and coming generations."
Stories of the Deluge are to be found in the Sagas, the Eddas, the Puranas, in the memories of the Algonquins, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayas, and the Toltecs, the Babylonians, the Hebrews, the Egyptians, and the Chinese.
Folklore & Mythology
Sykes published Everyman's Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology (Dent & Sons in London) in 1949 and new editions in 1952 and 1961.
Sykes believed that the study of myths established a link between prehistory and history, and emphasized that all gods were once men. He was happy that the gulf that separated myth, legend, and folklore on the one hand, and historical, archaeological, and anthropological research on the other, had been narrowed considerably over the past century. Sykes once described mythology as "...history seen through the eyes of children or sailors' unwritten history..."
In October 1949 in Atlantis, Sykes wrote Prolegomena To The Study Of Myths, in which Sykes endeavored to relate mythological tales to what is known of the shadowy beginnings of history, in the hope that it would be possible to fit them into that three dimensional jigsaw puzzle that forms our cultural, historical, and religious background. Sykes said, "Myth is the gossamer cloak of folk memory overlaying the bare bones of pre-history."
Creation Myths
Many witnesses have been present and survived the various cosmic disasters of the past and their descendants have seen the creation of new civilizations. Since nobody of the human race was present at the creation, we are unlikely to have any eye witness stories about it. Creation myths are the oldest stories that have come to us.
In the Americas, several of the pre-Columbian races had evolved a form of writing and had produced whole libraries of picture codices telling of the history of the various tribes. Unfortunately, the Spaniards, on their arrival, destroyed every document they could find. The Egyptians left us statues, mural drawings, the famous pyramid texts, and vast quantities of papyri. The myths of Mesopotamia are nearly as old as Egypt, and the tablets of the creation from the Library of King Ashurbanipal are fuller than anything from Egypt. The Renaissance brought to the Western World the treasuries of Greek and Roman myth. The myths of India still need disentangling from the original stories in the two-hundred-and-twenty-thousand lines of the Mahabharata, the ninety-six-thousand lines of the Ramayana, and other large scale epics. The myths of Africa and Australasia have suffered greatly from the well meant intentions of missionaries and educators.
In May 1950 in Atlantis, H.T. Sherlock wrote Folk Memory in which he stated,
"Lambarde, writing his Perambulation of Kent in 1570, records the astonishing fact that a memory was preserved there of the land bridge between England and the Continent... therefore, Folk Memory in Kent, covered a period of about 8000 years in duration... Mankind, it seems, remembered the first way of life... some of the Biblical traditions refer... back to the very beginnings of human life upon the earth."
Cataclysm and Deluge Myths
Hugh Soar made a map depicting where seventy-six different Cataclysm Myths originated around the world: Fire, Flood, Tower, Hot Flood, Hot Air, Myths in which Waters Sink and Waters Rise, and Ark and Mountain Ascent Myths.
In all climes and zones of the earth we find flood myths, both among peoples who knew the sea well and among those who dwell near great rivers, but also among those who live far inland where water may have been rare...The Deluge was a universal event — not a local event. There are well over a thousand accounts of the deluge that have been recorded from all parts of the world. Apart from Greek myths and Bible stories, there are the stories of Berossus. When the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Babylonian cuneiform, and other Near Eastern scripts gave up their secrets, details of the flood catastrophe began to come out.
There are four groups of deluge story: rising waters; falling waters; seismic and cosmic disturbances; and the appearance of a new heavenly body. Survivors described the event as it was witnessed in different parts of the world. All of the stories show considerable resemblance to each other in their main details. The list includes: Genesis and the Bible flood story of Noah; Babylonian legends; Deluge legend in Egypt in which the god Atmu causes the waters of the deep to drown everybody; and the epic tale of Ragnarok, the Norse Twilight of the Gods, an account of vast destruction that overwhelmed the Norse world.
Flood and disaster myths in conjunction with archaeological and geological evidence for flooding, are phenomena which cannot be dismissed as figments of a disordered imagination.
In April 1949 in Atlantis, H.S. Bellamy wrote The Deluge And Its Causes, in which he stated,
"The myth of the Deluge, or Great Flood, is surely the greatest of all the old wonder tales of mankind... detailed study of the biblical deluge myth, it becomes clear that it contains nothing that is physically improbable or impossible... bears all the traits of a report... of a personal witness... contained in the Book of Genesis... its insistence upon the universality of the deluge... In all climes and zones of the earth we find flood myths, both among peoples who knew the sea well, and among those who dwell near great rivers and were acquainted with their ways, but also among those who live far inland where water may have been rare..."
In October 1949 in Atlantis, C.A. Burland wrote Mexican Deluge Legends in which he stated, "... Codex Rios... in the Vatican... Mexican version of the creation it includes a flood story among the account of the three past and one future destructions of this world". There are pictures in the Temple of the Wall Panels in the ancient city of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, which depict the destruction of the world. An Aztec priest told Hernando Cortez about the flood in Mexico that drowned all humanity and left the world in darkness.
In 1953 May, July, and September issues of Atlantis, Hugh Soar wrote Flood Myths and History, Part I, II & III, in which he stated,
"But they realized that their children and their children's children would take for granted the beauty and the benevolence of the world in which they lived. The lore, the lessons they had learned, had to be passed to posterity, so that following generations could learn of the power of their Gods, and how they had destroyed an iniquitous world. Thus, the tales were handed on. Not as factual accounts, for facts are dry and dusty to those whom they do not concern immediately. The ancients substituted symbols for facts, and embellished their tales with rough theology, and the tales lived... indeed religion is built around these ritual tales."
In December 1960 in Atlantis, Sykes published A Catastrophe Myth From Scandinavia in which he stated,
"... the Eddas... the story of Ragnarok, the Death of the Gods... when the last ice age started, anything up to 25,000 years ago. At that time the ancestors of the Nordic races were established in a cultural community which was well within the area which was later to be covered by sheets of ice... it may have been anywhere in northern Europe... the most interesting to us are the Gylfaginning (in the Prose Edda) ... and the Volupsa (in the Poetic Edda) ...The Wolf and the Serpent, having broken loose, caused untold havoc, particularly the Wolf who swallowed the moon, caused the sun to darken, and sprinkled blood all over the earth. The Serpent loosed the waters on which floated the ship... To the south there was Muspelheim, home of the Fire Giants... where there was a region of intense volcanic activity...To the north there was Niflheim, a place of cold, mist, and darkness... river of ice, in reality a glacier... It is obvious that the story refers to a major cosmic disaster."
In November 1955 in Atlantis, Hugh Soar wrote in The Mystery Of Water,
"Introduction. Many demons representing the sea in its elemental fury, or the rivers in their floods, are supposed as having bodies composed of half fish and half man. These beings, when the superstitions surrounding them are investigated, are found to represent the souls of the drowned, and their appearance in certain lands where extensive flooding is known to have occurred gives rise to the belief that they represent the drowned souls of those folk caught by the great flood that drowned both them and their country. "
Contemporary religion had its beginning in the aftermath of the greatest disaster of all time — the Flood. The Story of the Creation is in the very first pages of the Old Testament.
The story of the Biblical Deluge is in the Book of Genesis and also in the famous Deluge Tablets, now in the British Museum. The Tablets were discovered by George Smith, A.H. Layard, and Hormzud Rassam in 1870 when they were working on the Library of Ashurbanipal (664-626 BC) at Ninevah.
The Story of Noah in the Old Testament is an eyewitness account of the Deluge. Stories about the Ark and the resting place on Mount Ararat were current through the whole Middle East for long periods of prehistory; some 2500 years. Apart from Genesis, our first historical source is Berosus, the Chaldean Priest who lived about 475 BC, who gave us our first Babylonian Flood story and the first record of the Ark still resting on the flanks of Mount Ararat. In Egypt in the time of Manetho, there was a large body of written tradition of the Deluge. Nicholas of Damascus, Josephus (famous historian), and Jerome (Egyptian general and statesman under various rulers) all spoke of the Deluge. There were many scholars who verified the existence of the Ark. In the mid 1800's and 1900's, there were many expeditions and sightings around Mount Ararat.
Flood Myths and Legends [.pdf, 1.4 MB]
Greek Mythology
The stories of revolts and wars of Titans, Giants, and Cyclops may be the records of the struggles of the waves of Atlantean refugees to the Mediterranean to establish themselves in what must have seemed to them to be a wild and uncivilized country. When the Greeks arrived in the Mediterranean area, they found that other races had been there before them. They used to refer to their predecessors as the Pelasgians or Sea People. These people had as their culture heroes the Titans, Giants, and Cyclops, and in due course, the Greeks absorbed much of this store of legend into their own.
The series of classical myths known as the Labors Of Hercules referred to the military activities of the first Hellenic settlers on the mainland of Southern Greece. These stories cover the conquest of a large portion of the Greek mainland, and invasions of Crete, Spain, North Africa, and the Canaries in the third and second millennium BC. In the November 1950 issue of Atlantis, Sykes wrote The Labors Of Hercules.
Poseidon's first born son was named Atlas; thus, the whole island and the ocean received the name of Atlantis. Atlas, as far back as records extend, has always been the name of the mountain range of Mauritania or the northwest of Africa. Atlas was King of Tangier, where he built an astronomical observatory sometime before 2300 BC. He taught astronomy to the Heraclidae, as well as Calypso, Kirke, and Medea. The seven daughters of Atlas were named after the Pleiades, the star group on which Atlas was one of the earliest experts.
In 1964, Dr. Harriette Mertz published The Wine Dark Sea (Chicago), describing Homer's return voyage of Odysseus in terms of a trans-Atlantic journey. The book was reviewed in the January 1965 issue of New World Antiquity. In 1967, Mertz published an article in the Anthropological Journal of Canada (Vol. 5:2, 1967) describing Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica as a parallel to the history of the Andean antiplano. In a section of the Argo saga, Sykes managed to match up the journeys of Medea, Odysseus, and Perseus with the last wars of the Heraclidae, the journey of the Tuirenn Brothers, and the two battles of Moytura involving Tuatha, Firbolgs, and Fomors.
In July 1974 in Atlantis, Sykes wrote Bimini: The Temple Of Murias in which he stated, "Dr. H. Mertz... produces reasonable proof from the Odyssey of visits to Bimini by proto-Hellenic seamen, although to my mind the Odyssey is but a collection of travel tales similar to Maeldune, the Sons of Tuirenn, or Sinbad, which have been grouped around one epic figure of the past, a fact which does not make it any less acceptable as evidence."
Serpents in Mythology
The serpent played a prominent part in religions of the world as a symbol of benevolent deities or evil forces. The serpent represented eternity to some ancient peoples. In American Indian mythology and ceremonial practices, the serpent was both good and evil, and some living tribes in the United States still have great respect for the serpent. The art of the Maya in the Yucatan shows that the feathered serpent was important in religion. Sykes was convinced that the Garden of Eden was a memory of the dispute between the serpent worshippers and the High Priest.
In January 1951 in Atlantis, D.R. Bentham wrote The Island Of The Serpent in which he points out the previously unnoticed Atlantean implications from a story translated from the hieratic script of a papyrus roll by Dr. Wallis Budge. The story is of a shipwrecked sailor rescued by the Prince of Punt, a serpent. The sailor spends four months on the island and is then rescued by a ship and brought back to his own homeland.
In March 1959 in Atlantis, Zhirov wrote Geographical Symbolism And Atlantis in which he stated,
"A curious figure from the past which falls under this heading is Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Snake, of Mexico. This Toltec, Aztec, God has been named after a nonexistent animal or reptile. It is possible that the name originally meant the 'Man From the Country of the Plumed Snake', and that he came from a land in the eastern or Atlantic Ocean. Some of the Indian tribes in America had a tradition of a Snake Island in this ocean... we note on a map of the land lying underneath the waters that there is a huge snake shaped range of mountains, the Mid Atlantic or Dolphin Ridge, with a cobra like widening for its head just where the Azores are situated..."
In December 1960 in Atlantis, Sykes wrote The Island Of Ka And Its Serpent Ruler in which he stated,
"In the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor, now in the Hermitage Museum at Leningrad, there is included the episode of the Serpent King. The sailor, having washed ashore on a plank of wood when all his one-hundred-and-fifty companions had perished, found himself on an island... the serpent king replied by saying, '... I used to live here with my brethren... And a star fell from heaven and all were destroyed by the fire which came with it...'... in the Arabian Nights in the story of Yamilka the serpent queen, also appears in the book of Stories of the High Priest of Memphis. In the 1001 Nights, she appears twice... The point at issue appears to be that a tradition existed all through the Near east of an all powerful and wise serpent clan of rulers, dating back to remote times, who were in some way connected with catastrophe stories, particularly those of a cosmic nature... at some period in early history there was a ruling dynasty whose totem was the serpent, and which had a reputation, whether deserved or not, for wisdom and knowledge... the Old Testament; the Arabian nights, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata; plus certain of the early Chinese legends."
In Persian mythology, Yima, the Noah of Persia, was warned by the gods of approaching disaster; thus he and his family hid in a cave. On endeavoring to set up his kingdom again, Yima came into conflict with the ruler of a Serpent clan who defeated him in battle.
In Hindustan, the relationship of the serpent with astronomy was extensive. The famous serpent temples of Angkor Vat may show where the serpent dynasty found root after their numerous battles with the Hindus and their predecessors.
There is the Russian story of the Merchant's daughter and serpent gods in the story about Mikhail Potek from the Kiev cycle.
One of the legendary rulers of China was Kua Shih, who had the body of a serpent and the head of a human. During her reign, the Pillars of Heaven were broken and the corners of the earth gave way. Japan had a Serpent God named Yofunenushi.
In August 1975 in Atlantis, Sykes wrote Serpent Worship — The Oldest Religion in which he stated,
"Serpent worship appears to be the oldest organized religious activity in the world... Serpent worship seems to have started somewhere between the hinterland of the five great rivers: Brahmaputra, Irrawaddi, Salween, Mekong, and Yangtze, just south of what had been the Gobi Sea and is now the Gobi Desert... Snake worship spread in all directions, to the East Indies, to India, Persia, the Black Sea, Egypt, Western Europe, Ireland, and even to the Americas. Most of the famous women oracles of the past, ranging from Medea to Medusa, from the Delphic Oracle to that of Cumea, were Snake Priestesses. The High Priestesses of the Temples of Murias, Falias, Gorias, and Finias, were also Snake Priestesses... were the healers of antiquity, they alone knew the secrets of rejuvenation, a point that comes out in practically every story of antiquity whether from Greece, Rome, Egypt, or Israel. Much the same applies to India and Persia... We are reasonably certain that the Serpent Cult was brought to the West by the Megalith Builders... Serpent Worship in America may have come by this or another route..."
In March 1978 in New World Antiquity, Sykes wrote Nagartha and Schamballa — Two Forgotten Kingdoms in which he stated, "Nagartha — sometimes spelt Agartha — was the home of serpent worship, it lay to the south of the Gobi... was recorded in Sinbad (2nd and 3rd Voyages)..."
Who were the Serpent Clan? Sykes started tackling this question in the early 1960's, in the December 1960 issue of Atlantis in an article called Who Were The Serpent Clan? Practically the only thing that is certain is that they were not serpents. It is assumed that they were a pre-deluge race of humans having the serpent as their totem (much as the snake of Asclepius became the insignia of the medical profession today). Whether they were contemporary with the Atlantean culture or whether they formed part of it is still an open question.
One-Hundred-And-Fifty Classical References
There are a few hundred classical references to Atlantis and over six-hundred flood stories of different races that refer to the submergence of Atlantis. During the renaissance of classical study, the idea for seeking the remains of Atlantis inspired many explorers, including Columbus. To the ears of mankind in the Middle Ages, there existed a place where one reached a state of happiness — an earthly paradise. Learned men studied in different languages; poured for long years over old papyri; studied tables of signs and figures; traveled far; and consulted the astrologers and priests, who stored all the written matter on the universe and its problems.
The Maya, Aztecs, Gauls, Carthaginians, and Basques, all record tales of land masses that mysteriously sank and cataclysmically disappeared. As late as 400 AD, Marcelino, a Roman historian, wrote that the educated people of Alexandria talked about the destruction of Atlantis as if it were fact.
Sykes once stated,
"Our investigations would have been greatly helped had more of the classical references to Atlantis survived to the present day, instead of a scant 150, mostly at second or third hand, and confined to short sentences. The destruction of the great libraries of antiquity by invading armies has left us with one first class classical source and that is Plato, and even there his most important manuscript breaks off in the middle of a phrase..."
Greek literature prior to Plato, during the 5th and 6th centuries BC, is extremely meager. Plato treated Atlantis in detail from the historical and scientific viewpoint.
In February 1947, Sykes published Atlantis Research Center Classical References to Atlantis, Bulletin No.7 in Rome. The list of one-hundred-and-forty-nine authors and their writings and the dates written (when known), was compiled while Sykes was on war service in Iran, Egypt, and Italy. It brought up to date the Bibliography of Atlantis issued by the Gattefosse brothers and Roux in Lyons, France in 1926.
Atlantis Research Center Classical References to Atlantis [.pdf, 5.3 MB]
Plato
In BC 348 when Plato gave to the world the first coherent story of the fall of Atlantis in his Timaeus and Critias dialogues, his audience was composed of people to whom the western ocean was a mystery and all of the mainland north of the Carpathians was nearly a closed book. As a result, interest in Atlantis was closely related to the widening field of exploration. Plato repeatedly stressed that his story of Atlantis was not invented, but true.
In the Timaeus, Plato related through the mouth of Critias, the story of how when Solon, while visiting Sais in 569 BC, boasted about the heroes of early Greek mythology, the Egyptian eldest priest told him bluntly that Greek culture was adolescent; having no real roots in the past. The priest told him that before the great flood, the then inhabitants of Athens were engaged in war with the inhabitants of an island in the Atlantic; an island that was larger than Libya and Asia put together. Both warring armies were drowned in the deluge of 9600 BC and the continent of Atlantis sank beneath the waves.
The Critias gave further details about the Kingdom of Atlantis that lay beyond the Pillars of Heracles/Hercules or Straits of Gibraltar, but unfortunately, the dialogue broke off abruptly at a most crucial point in its description of the Atlantean civilization. Plato's death intervened.
According to Plato, Egyptian priests kept written records of the lost continent on the walls of a temple at Sais. Plato was reportedly shown the famous Siriadic Columns in Egypt, on which the story of the past had been inscribed. Plato paid for the trip to the College of the Priests at Sais, by transporting a cargo of edible oils with him.
In the May 1950 issue of Atlantis, in Some Remarks On Critias, Edmund Kiss pointed out that the wording of a Critias quotation from a German text of Otto Apelt in the Philos Library, Leipzig, 1922, suggested that the Egyptians must have had factual knowledge of astronomy in their archives. The following statement in Critias was made by an Egyptian priest, "Often and in many ways has mankind suffered destruction and will again be destroyed, mainly through fire and water... This sounds like a myth, but the true kernel of it is the altered courses of the bodies moving around the Earth."
In the August 1949 issue of Atlantis, Leslie Young wrote Platonic Miscellany. Plato was quite clear that the catastrophe was universal, and there is a similar cosmic myth in the pages of Herodotus, when he narrated the genealogical dynasties of the Egyptian kings, which stretched to a period of over 11,000 years. He stated that Egypt was immune to the terrestrial and cosmic cataclysms that occurred. Readers of Plato's Dialogues have often expressed their regret that he did not enumerate the causes of the periodic catastrophes that had engulfed mankind. The Egyptian priest of the Dialogues may have told us when he stated, "... Now this has the form of a myth but really signifies a deviation from their courses 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."" The Egyptian priests knew the courses of the heavenly bodies around the Earth from many thousands of years of observations. It was also possible that the American continent was known to the Egyptians of 9500 BC and to prehistoric Athens.
In the July 1954 issue of Atlantis, Sykes wrote Lost Atlantis. Chapter 5,in which he mentioned Solon's narrative which made reference to orichalcum, "... mineral or metal and orichalcum was then dug out of the ground in many parts of the island, and excepting gold was regarded as the most valuable of metals among the men of those days." Orichalcum disappeared with the destruction of Atlantis.
In June 1965, John Warrington published a new translation of Timaeus by Plato (Everyman Library no. 493, Dent's, London; Duttons, New York). According to his book review in the May 1965 issue of Atlantis, Sykes was delighted to read Warrington's fresh and vigorous translation of the Atlantis story as received by Solon and recorded by Critias. The High Priest at the time of Solon was named Psonchis, and Solon himself wrote a poem on Atlantis that he called Atlantikos.
Manetho
In the November 1966 issue of Atlantis, Sykes wrote The Writings Of Manetho. Manetho, High Priest in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphos from 287 to 247 BC, was the only Egyptian who had studied the writing of the hieroglyphs sufficiently well to understand them. Smith, in his three-volume Classical Dictionary, pointed out that the name Manetho was originally Manethoth. Manetho stated that the information in his Dynasties, now only known to us through quotations from Eusebius and Josephus, had been copied from the inscriptions engraved in the sacred script on the Siriadic Columns set up by Thoth, and copied by Agathodaemon for placing in the penetralia of the Temples of Egypt. It is obvious that Manetho had access to sources of information now lost, as the accuracy of his king lists has shown. No copies have been discovered in the important Egyptian religious centers of Heliopolis, Sais, and Sebennytos. Sais, home of the Temple of Neith visited by both Solon and Plato, came into its own as a center of learning in the 26th Dynasty from 663 to 525 BC.
Scholars are still uncertain as to what the Siriadic Columns actually were, but from the name, they were associated with Syria. Their relationship with the two Great Pyramids of Giza may indicate that the arrival of Thoth in Egypt coincided with the date of their being built. In January 1967 in Atlantis, Sykes wrote The Lost Histories Of Thoth.
Oera Linda Boek
The Oera Linda Boek is an extremely ancient manuscript in a very ancient Frisian dialect, which has been copied and recopied over many thousands of years. In the November 1979 issue of New World Antiquity, Sykes wrote The Oera Linda Boek.
"All that summer, the sun had been hid behind clouds, as though it would not look on the Earth," reads a passage in the Frisian Oera Linda Boek, "In the midst of the stillness the Earth began to tremble as if she were dying. The mountains vomited fire and flames. Some sank into the bosom of the Earth, and in other places, mountains rose up out of the plain. Aldland, called by the seafaring people Atlan, disappeared, and the wild waters rose so high over hill and valley that everything was buried, and others who had escaped the fire were drowned in the water..."
Popul Vuh
Brasseur de Bourbourg, in the preface to his Popul Vuh, describes the burning by Bishop Zumaguerra in 1691 of a quantity of Quiche manuscripts including one by Votan the Third entitled Proof that I am a Snake. There are plenty of editions of the Popul Vuh, including those by Max Muller, Moreley, and Lewis Spence.
Homer
At the height of the exploratory period, about 3500 BC, there existed a sailor's guide to the Atlantic, a collection of various early voyagers that was used by most sea captains. At the time of Homer, the lost work entitled The Periplus of Odysseus, which gave a list of ports of call on both sides of the Atlantic, was only a legend. Homer knew very little of the geography of the ocean; thus, his Odyssey is full of geographical contradictions. This implies that the work of Homer was made up based on information supplied by many earlier travelers, of whom Odysseus was one. The routes taken were not fully understood. The same remarks apply to Medea and the Voyage of the Argo; to the journeys of the Tuirenn Brothers and Loki; and later Irish seamen, Bran, Maeldune, and O'Corra. When one goes through these early travel stories, one must remember that no two writers give the same names to the same sites.
In May 1978 in Atlantis, in The Lost Periplus Of Odysseus, Sykes announced his intention to prepare a revised edition of the Periplus, covering the East Coast of North and Central America, the West Coasts of Europe and Africa, the Arctic Seas, the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas, and the Atlantic Islands.
Dionysius of Miletus
The December 15, 1961 issue of Paris Jour published an article to the effect that Dionysius of Mitylene's (Dionysius of Miletus) Voyage to Atlantis, written in 550 BC, had been discovered among the papers of Pierre Benoit (author of Atlantide in 1920). Benoit referred to the manuscript, which described a meteor strike, on page 143 of the first edition of Atlantide. The manuscript had at one time been in possession of Etienne Felix Berlioux, the author of numerous books on the prehistory of North Africa written between 1874 and 1907, which included Morocco and the Atlanteans published by the Academy of Lyons. The manuscript was stated to confirm that the Tourages were descendants of the Atlanteans. The manuscript was privately sold in Paris in the mid 1960's. It is possible that Berlioux gave the papyrus to Benoit on his death, or it could have come to Benoit through one of the Gattefosse brothers.
Edrise
According to Sykes' Three Atlantean News Items in the March 1979 issue of New World Antiquity, there is a manuscript on the subject of a meteor strike, attributed to Edrise, the historian in AD 1396 (not Idrisi the geographer). Unfortunately, the manuscript was lost somewhere in Cambridge University since 1817, when it arrived there along with the papers of the famous archaeologist, J.L. Burkchardt, after his death in Cairo. Back to section top.
Lost Literature
Sykes stated in Atlantis in 1967, "We can only hope that in the, literally, hundreds of tons of unsorted and untranslated documents lying in the cellars of every religious, or formerly religious, organization between Cairo and Samarkand, copies of these much wanted texts will some day turn up." The loss of literature was a sore spot for Sykes as discussed in the March 1965 issue of New World Antiquity in The Unavailability Of Source Material.
In July 1979 in New World Antiquity, in Some Neglected Early Sources, Sykes commented on the fact that apart from myth and legend, archaeologists and historians also discarded a whole series of sources of written material — the records of the Artificer Clans. The Artificer Clans became the Gnostics over the centuries. In the early AD 1200's, some of their knowledge passed to the Knights Templar (AD 1120 - 1312), and the last fraternity to have had any real knowledge of the mysteries of the past was that of the Rosicrucians. On the scientific side, the inheritors were the Alchemists, the inventors of modern chemistry, and the Astrologers, the founders of modern astronomy. The Artificer Clans had contacts with the Megalith Builders and originated to the east of Kolchis, then spread throughout the Middle East, the Near East, and the Mediterranean, and ended up as Gnostic sects, of whom the last were the Albigenses, the Bogomils, and the Cathars. They left many important records of the past, such as the Orphic Argonaut, and made one of the most important inventions in the history of navigation — the Cup Compass. Most of the great scientists of the Classical era were members of one or more of the Clans, ranging from Archimedes to Pythagoras.
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