The World's Oldest Quest — The Search for Atlantis
Plato described a civilization that vanished due to the wrath of the gods, an account that inspired thousands of years of exploration for a real-world location.
Introduction
The story of Atlantis originates exclusively in two dialogues written by the Athenian philosopher Plato in the mid-fourth century BCE: the Timaeus and the unfinished Critias. In these texts, the character Critias relates a story purportedly transmitted from Egyptian priests to the Athenian statesman Solon, describing a powerful island civilisation located "beyond the Pillars of Heracles" (the Strait of Gibraltar) that waged war against Athens approximately 9,000 years before Solon's time — placing its destruction at roughly 9600 BCE. Atlantis, as described by Plato, was a maritime empire of extraordinary wealth and engineering sophistication that was ultimately destroyed "in a single day and night of misfortune" and sank beneath the sea.