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metaldinner t1_ivlihf4 wrote

Reply to comment by Qwez81 in TIL that the "Lost City of Atlantis" was invented by the philosopher Plato, as a fake enemy for Athens that lost favour of the gods and was sunk in to the sea. by PDRugby

plato made it up

just because there are cases of islands 'sinking' or the fact that sea levels change, submerging coastal cities, doesnt change the fact that plato made up the story of atlantis.

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Kittenfabstodes t1_ivlvsoo wrote

Troy was fictional until it was discovered to be a real place.....js

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[deleted] t1_ivt28xq wrote

[deleted]

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Kittenfabstodes t1_ivtkej3 wrote

>we declared everything might have been fictional if we had no physical evidence of it.

Hmmm. Seems strangely familiar.

So what your saying is, if there wasn't physical evidence of it's existence, like Troy or maybe Atlantis, we declared it never existed.

There was no written record about Gobleki Tepe which is probably one of the most important archeological sites in the world and when it was discovered, it changed everything we thought we knew about about man from 12,000 years ago.

All I'm saying is just because we don't have any other written record of Atlantis doesn't mean there weren't written records that didn't survive. It probably didn't exist, but it's not a zero percent chance it didn't exist.

Things like evidence or written records have a tendency being getting lost or being destroyed due to a variety of factors. Plato existed less than 2500 years ago. Gobleki Tepe is 12,000 years old. That's almost 10,000 years in between Gobleki Tepe and Plato. How much has been lost to use since Plato so ask yourself how much has been lost since Gobleki Tepe?

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Jorge5934 t1_ivm9yux wrote

When was Troy fictional?

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Kittenfabstodes t1_ivmiz42 wrote

Before they found it but after it actually existed.

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Jorge5934 t1_ivmjnvb wrote

Ah! So you claim it was thought to be fictional, but I guess they looked for it despite your better judgment? The nerve of these people!

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Qwez81 t1_ivluu1b wrote

Yea but today I learned should reference facts. Prove he made it up? Prove he didn’t?

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sennbat t1_ivlywyb wrote

There is no "proof" when it comes to history - all we have is the balance of evidence. Every decent piece of evidence we have available points to Atlantis (at least the version that became widely known and survived into the modern day) being a piece of fiction created by Plato as a rhetorical advice.

Evidence:

Atlantis appears in Timaeus and Critias, works by Plato, as an allegory and express fiction.

There is no earlier reference to Atlantis we have ever discovered.

All references to Atlantis we are familiar with from the time period after Plato seem to be referring directly back to his work.

Plato making Atlantis up is about as close to a fact as you can get, historically speaking. It is the most likely situation based on what we know, and there's no evidence to the contrary.

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