Atlantis, Which No Serious Historian Thinks Existed, Is Making People Insane On Twitter

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TRAVEL
Atlantis, Which No
Serious Historian
Thinks Existed, Is
Making People Insane on
Twitter
MYTH MEETS REALITY
2 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
Aer a new TV show aired, an archaeologist was

verbally abused by a ﬂood of true believers who are
committed not just to Atlantis but also to white
supremacy and eugenics.
Candida Moss
Updated Sep. 12, 2021 6:33PM ET

Published Sep. 12, 2021 12:05PM ET
Listen to article 18 minutes
T
his summer a new
documentary TV series
premiered on the Discovery
Channel. Hunting Atlantis
follows a pair of experts “on a
quest to solve the greatest archaeological
mystery of all time—the rediscovery of
Atlantis.” There’s just one problem:
there’s not an ancient historian or
archeologist working in the field today
who believes Atlantis was a real historical
city.
Academics and documentary filmmakers

often find themselves at odds, but as
criticism of the show spilled over onto
3 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
social media things turned ugly. A well-

respected archaeologist was verbally
abused by a flood of true believers who
were committed not just to Atlantis, but
also to white supremacy and eugenics.
Hunting Atlantis is co-hosted by Stel

Pavlou and volcanologist Jess Phoenix.
Phoenix is an expert in natural disasters
(specifically volcanic eruptions), who has
spent a great deal of time in the field as a
geologist. In 2018 she even ran for
Congress. Pavlou is a successful TV host,
producer, screenwriter, and bestselling
author: one of his films is a cult classic
and his children’s books have won
awards. The basis for their show is
Pavlou’s argument that the date of
Atlantis’s destruction should be placed at
the beginning of the fifth millennium
BCE.
That the show has something of a

sensational bent is to be expected;
making archeology TV friendly often
involves inflating or sensationalizing
what can otherwise be quite dry material.
There are also certain ancient artifacts
and locations—like the Holy Grail or
Noah’s Ark—that hold the attention of
viewers and will always be evergreens for
4 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
documentary history-telling.
As bioarchaeologist Stephanie Halmhofer

has discussed in an insightful blog post,
everybody loves Atlantis, “thanks to
things like Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost
Empire, DC’s Aquaman, and the popular
television show Stargate: Atlantis.”
People are broadly familiar with it as a
cherished part of their childhood
imagination.
The difference between the Ark and

Atlantis is that while people acknowledge
that there was a cup that Jesus drunk out
of or that the Ark of the Covenant existed,
I don’t know any archeologists who think
Atlantis was a real place. Searching for it,
for most archeologists, is only slightly
more reasonable than hunting for Narnia.
“Greatest archeological mystery” it is not.
Our sources for Atlantis are the

philosophical dialogues of Plato
(specifically the Republic, Timaeus, and
Critias) in which characters in the
fictional dialog have a hypothetical
conversation about the ideal society.
Atlantis, in Plato’s imagination, was a
technologically advanced and
harmonious society that gradually
descended into corruption, disorder, and
5 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
greedy warmongering. It was ultimately

destroyed by a series of earthquakes that
led to the city disappearing into the
ocean.
It was the presentation of Atlantis as an

actual place that drew concern from
archaeologists when the show was first
announced in May 2021. With so much
rigorous archaeological research going
undiscussed and underfunded, there was
a palpable sense of frustration that a
popular channel would air another show
on what experts call pseudoarcheology.
To his credit, when challenged on social

media, Pavlou offered to share what he
described as the “academic” paper on
which the show was based. Having been
volunteered by a colleague, Dr. Flint
Dibble, a Mediterranean archeologist and
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow
at Cardiff University, rose to the
challenge.
Dibble was unimpressed: “I read the

paper carefully, refreshed my own
research on Plato and the archaeology of
Athens in the 5th millennium BCE and
wrote a Twitter thread. This thread
debunked the paper and exposed its
logical faults in some places where
6 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
scholarly research was cited, explored

examples where conclusions were drawn
from uncited statements.”
The scholarly consensus, he told me, is

very clear: Atlantis was not a real place.
After watching the show, Dibble said, he

remained unpersuaded. He was
concerned by the way that the credible
research of legitimate archaeologists was
being used to prop unfounded claims
about Atlantis. If you watch carefully, he
explained, you’ll notice that “scholars
never mention the name ‘Atlantis’ nor
‘Plato’ on air. At no times on air do the
two co-hosts …ask the scholars any
questions about Atlantis or bring it up in
front of them.”
When I corresponded with Pavlou he was

frustrated with the response from
academics on social media. “At no point
have I ever claimed Atlantis is real,” he
said, “I find it hard to believe [Plato]
invented the whole story… None of [the
research I have done] proves that Atlantis
is real but [it] does suggest there may
have been a real myth buried somewhere
behind Plato’s writing.” Pavlou told me
that he is “agnostic” about the existence
of Atlantis: “Atlantis as Plato wrote it
7 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
certainly doesn’t exist” but there may

have been a myth tied to the memory of
earlier geological events.
There are many reasons that scholars

would dispute this more nuanced claim,
but this is a different kind of argument.
But even so this is not the impression one
gets from watching the show. The series
ends with Pavlou saying that, “It feels like
Atlantis could be right beneath our feet.”
A feeling is not a statement of fact, but
this and many other elements in the show
imply a belief in the historical Atlantis.
When I asked Pavlou why an Atlantis-

agnostic would make a show called
Hunting Atlantis he claimed that he had
originally pitched the series as a myth
busting style show. He wasn’t even
originally supposed to host it, he added.
Over time, and with input from producers
and executives, the series morphed into
something else: a show grounded in his
theories of a preexisting earlier myth. As
someone who has made documentaries
myself, I have to wonder: what parts of
the show stem from the host, which are
the input of the production team, and
what is just slick marketing?
Dibble told me that he asked the hosts
8 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
and producers for a comment about

misrepresenting the research of the
academics interviewed on the show. This
is when things started to get heated,
Pavlou’s wife made some ad hominem
attacks on Dibble that questioned his
credentials and dragged his family into
the fray (Dibble’s father was a famous
archeologist, but in a different period and
field).
Dibble, in turn, contextualized his

objections by exploring the problematic
ways that Atlantis has been utilized
throughout history. By the next day,
Dibble said, both he and Pavlou were
engaged in a full-on Twitterstorm. He
woke up to “hundreds of colleagues and
supporters” defending him to Pavlou and
similar numbers of Atlantis-believers
trying to dispute his claims and insulting
him.
“At one point,” he said, “Robert Sepehr, a

pseudoarchaeologist who has a YouTube
channel called ‘Atlantean Gardens’ and
praises Nazi research, began targeting
colleagues and friends who were tweeting
about the situation.” From archeology to
white supremacists overnight, the bizarre
situation raises the question: how did we
9 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
get here?
For almost two thousand years after

Plato’s death everyone read the story
about Atlantis for what it was: a fictional
account about an ideal city that lost its
way and was being use by Plato as a foil
for his hometown of Athens.
Interest in Atlantis as a real place first

emerged, writes Halmhofer, in the 1500s
when early European explorers wondered
if the indigenous people of Central
America were the descendants of the
Atlanteans. Interest in this theory
continued to build over several centuries
until, in 1882, Ignatius Donnelly
published his highly influential book
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and
inaugurated a new era of study. In it,
Donnelly claimed that Atlantis was the
origin point for human civilization.
Others took up this cause and argued that
the Atlanteans were the ancestors of a
particular group of people: the “Aryan
race.” This, as I imagine you have already
guessed, is where things take a dark turn.
As Halmhofer writes on her blog and

Dibble articulates in one of his Twitter
threads, the “history” of Atlantis has,
since the nineteenth century, been
10 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
interwoven with the study of evolution

and eugenics. Plato ends the Critias with
a discussion of how the divine nature of
the Atlantides was corrupted when it was
mixed with the inferior nature of mere
human beings.
The discussion lends itself well to 19th

and 20th century eugenicist theories of
the races. The Nazi Institute of Atlantis
founded by Himmler aimed to find
evidence for the theory that the Aryan
race was descended from the biologically
divine Atlantides.
To be inescapably clear, racism and

eugenics are not at work in Hunting
Atlantis. On this Pavlou and Dibble are in
agreement. Pavlou told me “There is
nothing about the show, my paper, or the
way I live my life that has any connection
whatsoever.” Dibble agreed “[Pavlou’s]
family fought Nazis in WWII…he seems
like he would be someone fun to have a
beer with, if it wasn't for this show and
the Twitter eruption from it.” Some
worry, though, that white supremacists
might use this show to support their
dangerous claims. Indeed, some already
are.
While many people love reading
11 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
archeological fan fiction in their youth

and some become archaeologists because
of it, pseudoarcheology is not always
harmless. We find ourselves in a difficult
position. Where are the boundaries
between pseudoarcheology, slick
soundbites, and minority opinions? Do
good production values always mean bad
or exaggerated archeology? And, is every
writer, TV host, or academic responsible
for the potential misreading or misuse of
our arguments?
None of us begrudge children who love

comics about Atlantis or expect to receive
a letter from Hogwarts, but does the
blurring of the line between minority
opinion and scientific facts harm cultural
and scientific literacy in wider society?
Can we afford confusion in a society
already plagued by a lack of trust in
expertise and information accuracy?
Academic concerns about how ancient

history can be used by white supremacists
are far from unique; the poster child for
this issue is the wildly successful show
Ancient Aliens. Here the problem is even
more acute because crediting aliens for
human ingenuity involves erasing the
contributions and work of historically
12 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
excluded groups. In this series, a team of

commentators–most famously the meme-
able Georgio Tsoukalos—analyze ancient
artifacts and suggest that they were built
by or refer to extraterrestrials.
For several years Dr. David Anderson at

Radford University has criticized the
show and called for a retraction of some
of its claims. Anderson told me that many
of the claims made in the show are based
on troubling older work. As an example,
he mentioned the sarcophagus lid of the
Maya ruler of Pacal. In 1968 international
best-selling author, theme-park founder,
and convicted white collar criminal Erich
von Däniken—whose book Chariots of the
Gods pioneered the ‘Ancient Aliens’
theories—claimed that the image was an
astronaut blasting off in a spaceship.
A recent tweet by Tsoukalos rehearses

this interpretation. “The basic issue”, said
Anderson, “is [that] these claims don't
even begin to ask where or when Pacal's
sarcophagus was found and what it might
have meant to the Maya, they simply
squint at a confusing image from a
foreign culture and say it kind of looks
like a rocket ship.
When we compare this image to other
13 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
pieces of Maya art we find that it is full of

symbols that are widely known and
repeated.” There’s no mystery here: the
lid “depicts a Maya ruler falling from this
world to the underworld at the moment
of his death.” The artifacts are taken out
of their original context, people are asked
“what does this look like to you?” and an
alien genealogy is offered with no regard
for ancient interpretations or contexts.
Then there’s the “helicopter” found in the

temple of the Egyptian Pharoah Seti I at
Abydos. Ancient Aliens suggests that a
strange looking hieroglyph is a helicopter
or flying saucer but traditional archeology
identifies it as a re-carved inscription in
which one name had replaced another. It
might look strange but this, said
Anderson, is just because the paint has
been chipped away. The roots of many of
von Däniken’s theories about Ancient
Aliens are actually pop culture. The
theory that aliens built the pyramids, for
example, first shows up in the 1898
science fiction novel, Edison’s Conquest
of Mars. In a forthcoming article,
Anderson shows that von Däniken was
pipped to the post by science fiction
writers who had already hypothesized
that ancient people would have confused
14 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
aliens with gods.
To say that the theories that underpin

Ancient Aliens have been rejected is to
understate the case. In the foreword to a
book debunking von Däniken’s claims
Carl Sagan wrote: “That writing as
careless as von Däniken's, whose
principal thesis is that our ancestors were
dummies, should be so popular is a sober
commentary on the credulousness and
despair of our times. I also hope for the
continuing popularity of books like
Chariots of the Gods? in high school and
college logic courses, as object lessons in
sloppy thinking.”
The troubling part of this kind of pop

entertainment isn’t so much that it’s
wrong (though that is incredibly
frustrating to academics), but rather that
it erodes the accomplishments and
ingenuity of ancient peoples. As
University of Iowa historian Sarah Bond
has written, it is not a coincidence that
these peoples are almost universally non-
white and non-European (the lone
European outlier, of course, is
Stonehenge). The racist assumption that
indigenous peoples weren’t intelligent or
“evolved” enough to build the Native
15 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
American earthen mounds in the eastern

half of the United States or the Great
Zimbabwe in Africa fed early twentieth
century archeology and public policy. In
fact, said Anderson, “when President
Andrew Jackson called for the removal of
Native Americans to Oklahoma, a call
that led to the ‘Trail of Tears,’ he did so
[by] invoking the lost white race of
Mound Builders.” Bad archeology has
violent real-world consequences.
This is not to say, as professor and

Ancient Aliens voice-of-reason Robert
Cargill, has pointed out that everyone
who believes in ancient alien theory is
racist. The problem is structural and
systemic, but in some cases, the racism is
shockingly straightforward. Museum
curator Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews has
gathered choice quotes from various
archeologists including a von Däniken
‘question’ that went: “was the black race a
failure and did the extraterrestrials
change the genetic code by gene surgery
and then programme a white or yellow
race? [sic]”
As modern archeologists have debunked

the racist assumptions that everything of
value was built by white people, the
16 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
conspiracy theories have just shifted

target. The aliens-theorists are the heirs
to this lineage. Anderson told me,
“Ancient Alien authors started picking up
the same examples of temples and
monuments that European Colonialists
imagined being built by lost white races
but instead imagined that that they were
built by extraterrestrials.”
The same assumptions of indigenous

incompetence are at the heart of alien
mythologies, yet with 196 episodes and
sixteen seasons under its belt the Ancient
Aliens juggernaut continues apace.
Looking at Hunting Atlantis, perhaps the

lingering question here is, what and who
is excluded by the Atlantis myth? Why do
we search for this fictional utopia? Is our
collective fascination with and search for
Atlantis a form of escapism? Bond, who
has tweeted one example of cultural
erasure involving Atlantis, said to me,
“People would rather focus on it than the
mess we live in now. But ignoring science
is what got us into this mess in the first
place.”
Does the search for a perfect city prevent

us from fixing our own social problems in
the present? If it does then perhaps part
17 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
of
the
blames
lies
withABOUT CONTACT TIPS JOBS ADVERTISE HELP PRIVACY CODE OF ETHICS & STANDARDS DIVERSITY TERMS & CONDITIONS
us, COPYRIGHT & TRADEMARK SITEMAP COUPONS
the © 2021 The Daily Beast Company LLC
viewing
public?
Only
time
will
tell
but,
in
the
meantime,
the
mythic
status
of
Atlantis
has
been
settled
by
unlikely
authority:
IMDB.com
categorizes
18 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM
the
show
as
fantasy.
19 of 19 9/13/2021, 1:28 PM

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Atlantis, Which No Serious Historian Thinks Existed, Is Making People ... https://www.thedailybeast.com/atlantis-which-no-serious-historian-think...

Aer a new TV show aired, an archaeologist was

Updated Sep. 12, 2021 6:33PM ET

Listen to article 18 minutes

Academics and documentary filmmakers

social media things turned ugly. A well-

Hunting Atlantis is co-hosted by Stel

That the show has something of a

As bioarchaeologist Stephanie Halmhofer

The difference between the Ark and

Our sources for Atlantis are the

greedy warmongering. It was ultimately

It was the presentation of Atlantis as an

To his credit, when challenged on social

Dibble was unimpressed: “I read the

scholarly research was cited, explored

The scholarly consensus, he told me, is

After watching the show, Dibble said, he

When I corresponded with Pavlou he was

certainly doesn’t exist” but there may

There are many reasons that scholars

When I asked Pavlou why an Atlantis-

Dibble told me that he asked the hosts

and producers for a comment about

Dibble, in turn, contextualized his

“At one point,” he said, “Robert Sepehr, a

For almost two thousand years after

Interest in Atlantis as a real place first

As Halmhofer writes on her blog and

interwoven with the study of evolution

The discussion lends itself well to 19th

To be inescapably clear, racism and

While many people love reading

archeological fan fiction in their youth

None of us begrudge children who love

Academic concerns about how ancient

excluded groups. In this series, a team of

For several years Dr. David Anderson at

A recent tweet by Tsoukalos rehearses

When we compare this image to other

pieces of Maya art we find that it is full of

Then there’s the “helicopter” found in the

aliens with gods.

To say that the theories that underpin

The troubling part of this kind of pop

American earthen mounds in the eastern

This is not to say, as professor and

As modern archeologists have debunked

conspiracy theories have just shifted

The same assumptions of indigenous

Looking at Hunting Atlantis, perhaps the

Does the search for a perfect city prevent

us, COPYRIGHT & TRADEMARK SITEMAP COUPONS

the © 2021 The Daily Beast Company LLC

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