'Malta is Atlantis'

Documentaries in the USA and Japan have given credibility to the theory of Maltese author Anton Mifsud whose book - 'Echoes of Plato's island' - claims that Malta was Atlantis. From today's Times:

The theory that Malta was Atlantis, proposed by Anton Mifsud four years ago in his book Malta: Echoes Of Plato's Island, has been put forward in documentaries aired by two television giants, National Geographic and TBS-1, Japan's national channel. Both were in Malta last spring to film the footage and carry out interviews on the "Malta is Atlantis" theme. Both incorporated the theme into two documentaries that have been transmitted to millions of viewers in the US and Japan. In Japan alone, an estimated 28 million viewers watched the 90-minute feature on TBS-1.

National Geographic screened its documentary on January 19 and it will be repeated this month, before entering into the list of recurrently transmitted documentaries on the various international documentary channels. Dr Mifsud said that notwithstanding the formidable number of sites identified with Plato's Atlantis, the National Geographic research team only gave serious consideration to three sites - Malta, Santorini and the Bahamas.

He said the director of the National Geographic production team, Simon Mansfield, and his television crew interviewed him and filmed the archaeological sites for the documentary. Adriana Cacciottolo, a Malta Tourism Authority representative from the UK, accompanied the National Geographic team in Malta. Although Thera Santorini has been the favourite "unofficial" site with the established archaeologists, Malta has the edge on it because of its greater antiquity, Dr Mifsud said. Thera, he said, has enjoyed this "archaeological favouritism" since the time that Spyridon Marinatos, the Athens-based Greek professor of archaeology, was excavating the site in a bid to associate it with Plato's lost Atlantis.

Dr Mifsud argues that the Maltese islands have the edge on the other two sites principally on the grounds of chronology. It is only Malta that predates Egypt by 1,000 years and this has been one of the major criteria that have identified the island mass that Plato described as Atlantis. But there are other arguments too. Details furnished by Plato about the culture of Atlantika and the Atlanteans say they built several temples in honour of their gods, their docks were constantly busy building boats and they participated in the cult of the bull, which they ritually sacrificed to their gods in the temples. "The landscape was dotted throughout by hilly country and canals of all shapes and sizes were dug out all over the surface of the land. These characteristics feature significantly in the prehistoric Maltese archaeological record," Dr Mifsud said.

Atlantis - a backgrounder - from answers.com

Ancient mysteries: Malta's Atlantis debate

Malta's temple under the sea - Joseph S Ellul

This BBC story says that Atlantis could just have been a powerful literary device by Plato