: : : . . . Discovering Plato's Atlantis . . . : : :

Based on the table on p. 7 of this study, the existence of Atlantis can be dated to the period between 3300 B.C. and 1800 B.C. This was the period when the Sumerian and the Indus Valley civilisations existed. Egyptian narration about Atlantis developed from Mesopotamian sources. The model used by Plato for the island of Atlantis was the Sumerian island of Dilmun portrayed in the Sumerian myth Enki and Ninhursanga, written in old Sumerian in 278 lines on a large, six-column tablet from the Old Babylonian period. The tablet is kept in the Pennsylvanian Museum in Philadelphia. Its first detailed translation was published by S.N. Kramer in 1945 under the title Supplementary Study No. 1 of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. It was translated by many others later. In spite of this, the full wording of the tablet has not been successfully deciphered yet, with some lines being completely not understandable. Sumerians, called sag-gi6 "black heads" in Sumerian and Shumeru in Akkadian, is a traditional name for people of unknown origin who were coming to southern Mesopotamia from the 4th millennium B.C., settling mostly along the Euphrates River, approximately from Kish across the area of the present Bagdad as far as to the marshes at the Persian Gulf (Ki -en - gi, ma - da in Sumerian).77) Sumerian myths and legends recorded on Sumerian tablets later appeared in written documents of other civilisations including Egypt, and also in the Bible. Although a wealth of information on the Sumerians is available now, science is still facing the essential "Sumerian problem" in an attempt to disclose the origin, race and language pertinence of the Sumerians. From anthropological point of view, Sumerian people combine the long-skulled and short-skulled types.90) At present, it is speculated that the Sumerians language was possibly related with the Dravidian languages in India. The only safely known fact is that Sumerian did not belong to the Semitic family of languages, though it was strongly influenced by these languages, particularly by Akkadian. Sumerian gods were anthropomorphic, men and women. As early as in the 3rd millennium B.C., the names of Akkadian and Sumerian gods started to merge, regardless of the former rules about gods. This means that the pantheon of gods, the beginnings of which reach to the 3rd millennium B.C., was full of paradoxes and repetitions.92) Some of the Sumerian gods, and later also Babylonian gods, were mortal. These included, for example, Damuzi, Gugalana, Geshtinnana and the primary Babylonian gods Tiamat a Apsu and their advisor Mummu. Two principal theological systems were formed in Sumer, intermingling and sometimes opposing each other. Religion of settled farmers whose crop depended on soil inundation, was chthonic in its essence and developed into a system guided by the theological school of the priests from Eridu. It was based on a cult of the master god Enki, "Lord of the Land", identified with the Babylonian god of nature and fresh waters Ea.94) The Eridu-based chthonic cosmology was later extended by the theological ideas of the Akkadians and Babylonians, which was markedly demonstrated in the Old Babylonian epos on creation "Enuma elish". The second theology, based in Nippur, developed from religious traditions of herdsmen and showed a more prominent cosmic inflence. The master god for the herdsmen was Enlil, "Lord of the Air" and the god of Nippur. 95) Enlil, Enki and the god of the heaven An represented the foremost trinity of gods. Goddess Ninhursanga - the "Lady of the Mountains" - was placed the fourth, sometimes even the third - before Enki, in the lists of the principal divine beings. 96) Sumerian god Enki (Lord of the Land), Ea in Akkadian and Aos in Greek, governed the subterranean freshwater ocean of Abzu, the waters, the wisdom and the magic. In the Eridu-based tradition, Enki was also considered the creator of man, the protector of the civilisation, craftsmen and farmers. Enki also administered divine forces "me". His father's name was An and his mother was Namu, the divine mother of the sky and the land, a personification of the original ocean. The principal cultural centre for Enki was Eridu, where he was said to dwell in the temple of E - Abzu (house Abzu). As for his position in the Sumerian pantheon of gods, Enki can be obviously paralleled with the Greek god Poseidon. Both of them were ranked among the triads of supreme gods in their pantheons. Both of them were considered the monarchs of the ocean, the rulers of fresh waters and moisture in rivers, springs and wells, and the providers of crops derived from these sources. The name Enki means "Lord of the Land" in Sumerian. Poseidon has the basic syllable "da" in his name, which suggests a connection with Demeter, the goddess of fertile land, thus also his once close links with the land. Even if the syllable "da" in the Poseidon's name was not the shortest form of Demeter in the sense of the land, his attribute Gaiaochos or "Husband of the Land" would give the same judgement on him.97) Besides the trident, the symbols of Poseidon also included a bull, a ram and later a horse. The ram was closely associated with the Poseidon's birth itself: he was hidden by his mother Rhea in front of Kron in a herd of sheep near the spring called Arné (Sheep spring). Before the coming of horse to the Mediterranean region, Poseidon was first dedicated a bull as the sacrificial beast by the Greeks. The symbols of Enki included a mythological beast of goat-fish and a horned hat, sometimes bearing as many as seven pairs of bull's horns. The horned hat may be derived from the horns of wild cattle (Bos primigenius), which remained a special species in the Middle East even after the domestication of cattle.100) Enki was sometimes called "wild bull from Eridu" by the black heads themselves, as stated in the Sumerian composition "The lament for Uruk". His other symbols included a curved stick terminated with a stylized head of a ram.101) Some parallels can be traced also between the acts of Enki and Poseidon. Poseidon provided the land with moisture thus permitting the land to produce plants. He saved Thessaly from flooding as he made way to the Peneius River to the sea with his trident.102) In parallel, Enki provided the floodings of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and appointed the god of agriculture in the Sumerian myth "Enki and the Order of the World" and saved the mankind from a flood in the Akkadian myth on Atrahasis. Ninhursanga (dnin-hur-sag "Lady of the Mountains") was the empress of the northeastern and eastern highlands where the "Holy Hillock" (du6-ku) was located. Ninhursanga was considered not only the "mother of gods" but also the "mother of all children" divine or human by the Sumerian monarchs who derived their origin from her.103) In the Sumerian tradition, she was called Ninmah (distinguished lady) before she was renamed for Ninhursanga by her son Nintura. She is also identical with goddess Damgalnunna (great wife of the distinguished one) and goddess Nintu (Lady of the Delivery). Distinction between the individual goddesses is made only later but in the myth Enki and Ninhursanga, for example, the goddess is also referred to as Nintu and Ninsikila. Ninhursanga, or Damgalnunna, the wife of Enki/Ea and the mother of Marduk in the Sumerian-Akkadian mythology, also called "Queen Apsu"104), was most probably the descendant of the killed gods Apsu and she-dragon Tiamat according to the Old Babylonian tradition. It can be well speculated that her original name was Ki ("Land") and that she was considered the wife of An. Hence, the two of them became the parents to all gods.105) An and Ki themselves were considered the offsprings of goddess Nammu (representing groundwaters). 106) With no evidence in hand, J. van Dijk (1970, 450) boldly suggested that she-dragon Tiamat could be identical with mother Nammu in the Sumerian cosmology because Nammu also gave birth (illegally?) to a number of gods.107) Based on older Sumerian-Akkadian tradition, Nammu gave birth to An (heaven) and Ki (land). Similarly, the Old Babylonian epos "Enuma elish", stemming from older traditions of Eridu-based cosmology, says that Marduk the son of Ea victoriously defeated she-dragon Tiamat and tore it apart, creating the heaven from one half and the land (Ki) from the other part. Tiamat, much like Sumerian Nammu, gave birth to the heaven and land and, of course, to a number of other divine creatures including - with reference to older Sumerian theology - goddess Ninhursanga, originally worshipped as Ki.