Dan Snow's History Hit - Atlantis: Deciphering The Truth

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Atlantis is one of the most compelling legends - an advanced, mythical civilisation, wiped out by an unknown phenomenon. The allure of this civilisation, rich in lost knowledge and culture, is obvious. But how do archaeologists separate fact from fiction? How can they be confident about the past, whilst remaining open to new ideas? Flint Dibble, an archaeologist at Cardiff University, joins Dan to talk about Atlantis and how experts should treat new discoveries and evidence.This episode was produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. A lot of people getting in touch on the social medias at the moment and asking about the hit Netflix series presented by the Brit Graham Hancock. It's called Ancient Apocalypse and it's been described as the most dangerous show on the channel. He comes up with some unsubstantiated theories about ancient civilisations. He's incredibly rude about the professionals that work in this field, historians and archaeologists who've devoted their lives to interrogating evidence, becoming area specialists. He has breathed life into conspiracy theories, which, although not obvious to many viewers of the programs, have a long and very dark past. In response to many of the requests, I decided that we would have an episode

of this podcast talking about not his series, but about archaeology itself, about how we can be sure about things, how we should treat new discoveries and developments, and whether archaeologists are in fact gatekeepers, protecting their interpretation of the past and refusing to engage with new evidence. Flint Dibble is an archaeologist at Cardiff University. He's a phenomenal presence on social media. His videos and posts reach many, many people all over the world. His work focuses on ancient Greece, but he's become a vocal and prominent critic of the show Ancient Apocalypse. And I want to get him on the podcast and not go for a debunking session, because many of you won't have watched the TV, but just talk about archaeology in its widest sense.

And how we should think about the gathering of evidence, being certain about the past, being wrong and being open to new ideas. We start by talking about something that seems to loom very large in the work of Hancock and many others. And that is the lost city of Atlantis. What's all that about? Enjoy. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Flint, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

The thing I find interesting is, like I was reading the other day about the KPG boundary, the gigantic impact event that killed... that began as like a crazy theory, right? Well, did it begin as a crazy theory? Maybe it didn't, but it began as a theory outside the mainstream thinking about that period. It's now accepted. What's the difference between that and then maybe believing that Atlantis existed? Like how do we innovate within this space, discover things, and have them accepted? Yeah, I think that's a good question. I mean, obviously, any theory is going to start with a small amount of evidence, and then be tested. And as it's tested, more evidence is

going to come to light that either proves it or disproves it. So when you look at kind of this idea of the extinction of dinosaurs, it started out as a theory, and then more and more it snowballed with evidence that accumulates that proves that that's very likely to the case. If we look at sort of the story of Atlantis, on the other hand, the story's been around for a few thousand years when Plato first wrote it down. And then it's been discussed in books and articles since at least the 19th century with Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis, the Antediluvian Civilization being very popular and bringing it to the forefront. And at the same time, we don't have any real evidence accumulating that proves it. And a whole lot of evidence has accumulated that disproves it. I mean,

we can even go back to thousands of years back to Plato to understand the context in which he wrote down that story that would show that it's not a myth or oral tradition of something that had been sort of transformed and forgotten over time. Talk to me a little bit about Atlantis, because it's just so compelling. I remember as a kid being fascinated by it. It's just a great story, right? It's one of those enduring, wonderful myths like the fall of Troy. It's funny, actually, because the way we think about Atlantis is a modern myth, right? That's really come about since the 19th century. When Plato wrote this down, he wrote it down as kind of a continuation. Everybody's thought of Plato's Republic, where he describes this ideal city state, right? And it's a very political philosophy.

The story of Atlantis is a dialogue that takes place the day after the Republic. And what they want to do is they've now created this ideal state. They want to see it in action. They want to see how it performs in a war. And the ideal state in that story is Athens, and they want to have it fight some sort of foil, and that's Atlantis. And so it's this kind of political philosophical allegory, and it wasn't actually very popular in the ancient Greek and Roman world. Many of Plato's dialogues were extremely popular and were discussed by other philosophers for a thousand years in the ancient world, but this one was not very, very popular. It did not

become very popular until the discovery of the New World. And then especially in the 19th century, where a number of different people wrote about Atlantis and sort of glommed onto it and created a new kind of myth where it explained prehistory and history, which was nothing that Plato tried to do with the story. And so our fascination with it, it's a very recent thing. It's a very, very recent thing of this kind of fall of a civilization that then transmitted knowledge. That second part's not in Plato. There's no transmission of knowledge. And I think it's important to talk about, you mentioned the 19th century, the kind of racist aspects of that, right? Because these Europeans are

discovering the rest of the world, which was always there, of course, and discovering these incredibly sophisticated civilizations in places like the Americas, Asia. And was this a way of somehow explaining those in European terms? This is the weird bit, right? Yeah. And even from the very beginning of colonization, Atlantis and other Greek myths were used as justification for the Spanish crown, for example, claiming lands. So they used Atlantis and the Hesperides as examples of how the Europeans had rights to this territory to claim it, even though there were already people there, of course, right? And so that's from the very beginning. And then it sort of becomes this fictional idea that Francis Bacon develops in the 17th

century, where he talks about this sort of hidden civilization. And they were the ones that transmit this kind of knowledge. They were the Atlantis that fell, then hid on this island in the Pacific. And then we hit the 19th century, and that idea just takes off, and it becomes no longer portrayed as fiction, but as reality, as an explanation for this fantastic cultural heritage that Europeans were interested in explaining, but they wanted to explain it as sort of not indigenous people, but white people from Atlantis that taught this kind of stuff. So there's this, it steals credit from indigenous people for their own heritage

by portraying that they were taught this by white people from Atlantis that survived the fall of this place. Yeah. I guess, Flint, just thinking about those 18th and 19th century Europeans, the importance of Greece and Rome as this kind of rock bed of European culture, they kind of couldn't bear that the rest of the world didn't have that. They invented this myth that showed the Greeks spreading that European knowledge to these other civilizations. It helped them better explain them, I suppose. Yeah, I think so. I think it helped them put that in a context that they could understand. Remember, at the same time, other myths of nationalism and nation-state building were happening at this time and sort of myths that actually carried forward into actual scholarship as well like this idea of this

connected development of western civilization which is a very sort of focused biased way of looking at complex history and archaeology which focuses of course Europe. And so this as well was a way of putting it in a context that's very European focused and understandable to those Europeans at the expense, of course, of other people elsewhere in the world. Are there examples that you've come across in archaeology of where folklores, funnily enough, I was at Stonehenge the other day, and they were talking about how the myth was that Merlin had brought these stones from Ireland. In fact, it turns out they are actually from Wales. And so there might be something in this kind of traditional telling that's interesting.

And are there examples that you've come across in your long career of where these sort of oral histories, folklore, these things are kind of interesting and worth exploring? Okay, yeah. So before I answer that, though, I do want to clarify that there's no evidence that Atlantis is a folklore or an oral tradition. OK. Just because we have a good sense. And let's let's think about that in the Greek world. I'm an archaeologist that focuses on ancient Greece in particular. And so we obviously have a rich oral tradition, the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey that are describing places that are real in the Bronze Age, places like Mycenae and Troy and stuff like that. And there's a lot that they get right and a lot that they get wrong.

And so we obviously need to pay attention to oral tradition. It's an important piece of evidence, and archaeologists all over the world do. In particular, archaeologists have been critiqued for not paying enough attention to indigenous oral tradition in the Americas and elsewhere. While in the 19th century, of course, archaeologists might have been paying too much attention to indigenous oral tradition in the Americas and elsewhere. While in the 19th century, of course, archaeologists might have been paying too much attention to European folklore, in particular things like the Odyssey and the Iliad. And what we've done is we kind of look through and compare the Iliad and the Odyssey to the archaeological record is that we can see that it is oral. It's not a written telling of events that are locked in time. It actually includes

details from a lot of different periods in time. So they describe, for example, spears and armor, things that archaeologists have excavated and found. And we can compare directly the descriptions of this kind of weaponry to what we have in graves from ancient Greece. And what's really interesting is there's different types of shields and spears described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. And some of them are fairly picture perfect, map on to bronze age weapons from say 1300 BCE. And others map on very well to iron age weapons from several hundred years later. And sometimes what we have written down for us, it'll switch between one type of spear to another type of sphere within one or two lines, from a Bronze Age to an Iron Age. And so it's a mishmash

of this kind of different culture over many centuries into one story that's been written down and recorded for us. Just so right. Atlantis is not folklore. Atlantis was a sort of rhetorical or literary device by Plato that was then turned into a kind of strange folklore-y thing, a story in the 19th century. So, okay. And we can easily prove that as well, because we have a good sense of iconography of this kind of oral tradition. We have on Greek painted vases and sculpture, we have tons of mythological representations there, some of which we have textual evidence that supports and others that are unique to iconography. Atlantis, on the other hand, there's nothing except for Plato, right? And so we know it wasn't some sort of story that's very popular and told all the time and shows up in art or otherwise.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about ancient civilizations and how we can be sure what we know about them is true. More coming up. now we can be sure what we know about them is true. More coming up. Did you know that beans were once considered to be an aphrodisiac? Or that cornflakes were invented to have precisely the opposite effect? Join me, Betwixt the Sheeps, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a new podcast from History Hit,

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Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. let's talk about conspiracy theories now yeah and the discussion of the background the context for them is so fascinating this idea that it was essentially a kind of european supremacist idea because i've got friends who have got in touch with me and said this show is great i'm watching on netflix so exciting and i guess they're unaware of the roots, of the kind of dangerous roots. Obviously, it's visually interesting and exciting, and it's kind of stimulating, but you've got to be very careful because once you dig deeper, there's some really profound politics going on there.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, so the show on Netflix, A, I want to say it is visually beautiful. I mean, some of the video footage of the archaeological sites is phenomenal. And the reconstructions of the archaeological sites is also phenomenally well done. The Serpent Mound, for example, just looks beautiful like that. But yeah, the politics behind it and the attacks that pseudo-archaeologists, Atlantis conspiracy theorists, and others make upon real archaeologists, it promotes distrust and expertise. And it also, of course, it links into this longer historiographical tradition of linking Atlantis to sort of Europeans as being responsible for this sort of indigenous material culture and cultural heritage. And that's really dangerous because that steals credit from

indigenous people and it reinforces white supremacy. It's very much, if you read books on this, like the Magicians of the Gods, Graham Hancock's Magicians of the Gods, or Fingerprints of the Gods, he talks about these people that introduced these ideas as being white, right? They're the ones that teach indigenous cultures this. And so does Ignatius Donnelly in 1882. In fact, Hancock specifically cites Donnelly on this and quotes from him. And so Ignatius Donnelly is taking mistranslated codices, Mayan codices, for example, that have been mistranslated to make these points, or he's taking sort of Spanish colonists, you know, early colonists recordings of indigenous mythology. But if you look at the sort of Spanish colonists, you know, early colonists recordings of indigenous mythology. But if you look at the sort of representation of these figures in indigenous iconography, they're never represented as white people, not at all. And so it's very much a European-centric

thing. And even after Ignatius Donnelly, this has been picked up in an even more dangerous way through the sort of Theosophist society and Madame Blavatsky and into the sort of Hyperborean mythology and even the Nazis. Himmler, for example, he was very interested in establishing archaeologists to go around the world to prove the linkages between the Atlantis peoples and the Aryan peoples. And so why does that matter? If you think about it, somebody watches a Netflix documentary or reads a book on this kind of stuff, that's not necessarily overt racism, right? Where it has this implication of white saviors and of indigenous people not being responsible for their heritage. It's not extremely overt racism, But if you start saying, oh, archaeologists are wrong,

historians are wrong, they've been hiding this from us, right? So I want to do my own research into Atlantis. And you go on YouTube, you go on Google, you're going to immediately find much more overt racism, much more overt white supremacy on there. There are several YouTube channels that directly parrot these Nazi ideas of the Aryans being descended from the Atlantis, and they directly promote swastikas and things like that. And so that's one of the problems of losing trust in experts, because if you're going to start doing your own research, this kind of really overt racism is just one step away. It's very problematic stuff, if you see what I mean. It's so interesting, people like Himmler casting around for links to these peoples.

And it really reminds me as you're talking, whether as many civilizations, many groups of people, we kind of try and connect a link, you know, whether it's people in Western Europe connect to themselves with the Aeneid, you know, the myth or Joseph of Arimathea coming to Glastonbury is one that the most in the Middle Ages here in the UK, you know, and you look at, I guess, Mormonism in the States, or you look at people of Islam saying that they are descended from Ishmael, the son of Abraham. It's almost like you want to plug in somehow to this epic past that you think is going to boost your pedigree somehow, improve your lineage. Yeah, I think that's a very old idea.

You can look back even thousands of years to, you know, Greek statesmen claiming descent from Greek deities, right? And so we want to show our lineage, but the reality of it is all of our lineages are extremely complex. We're all related to one another, you know, fairly closely, just to go back a few thousand years. And I mean, worldwide. And so we all have sort of diverse, nuanced lineages, both historically and genetically and ethnically. And so, yeah, we want a simple answer. Okay, I want a simple answer now.

So the argument that you guys in the academy, you archaeologists and academics, you're all protecting your turf. And what happens? You talk me through from Flynn, opposite my house, as listeners to this podcast, will be very bored of me telling them. There's evidence for one of the first boat building, if not the oldest boat building sites on earth, a Mesolithic, worked wood, dug out canoes effectively in an era of much lower sea levels. And we've dived on a place called Boldner Cliff. And it's a really interesting, it helps to retell the story of the Stone Age. And what is the correct response to a new piece of evidence? So this

worked wood coming out, this evidence of boat building, do you Flint Dibble go, that's lame, it's going to cost me my funding. You're all scam artists. Like talk me through your approach when you read a paper, when someone comes up with a kind of interesting new revolutionary idea like that. Well, I mean, it happens all the time. Every single paper that we publish is, at least should be, something new, right? I mean, obviously, scholars, it's publish or perish. So we're oftentimes casting some of the same ideas in a new light or testing it with new evidence. But that's what we all read. We're reading new ideas all the time. And I mean, we're always rewriting history is something that I like to say, because we not only discover new stuff with new excavations, we also have new methods.

We have new methods from ancient DNA to isotope analysis that looks at mobility and diet in the past. And these kind of new methods and new discoveries and new things, they help us put together the past. It's not threatening at all. And to be honest, it's like that in any scientific or humanities field. There are new questions that people are asking. They are constantly updating what we say about the linguistic evidence for the English language to physics and astronomy and biology as we discover and question things in a different way. That's what we should be doing. That is vibrant scholarship. It's not threatening at all. And there are examples, presumably in your own

career, when the stuff you were taught as an undergraduate has now been turned on its head. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I study ancient animals in Greece. And so when I first started my PhD, for example, everybody thought that after the end of the Bronze Age, there's this, some people call it a collapse of civilization, some people call it a dark age, but certainly things become less complex at that time. There's no more monuments or iconography or writing, or at least not as much. And people thought it became a pastoral society. And that's actually what I first set out to look at. And now I'm actually writing tons of articles that are saying, no, they're eating a lot less animal protein, a lot less meat and cheese at this time. And it's a much more impoverished society. It's not pastoralism, but it's sedentary still. And so, you know, I'm helping overturn these ideas

as well, these paradigms, let's say, of what we think. We all believe that the internet was very democratic in the 1990s. It's so exciting. We can all do our own research. We don't have to believe the man anymore, and it will undermine authoritarian states. It is empowering when we can all just go to an archive now. We don't have to pay and have a grant. It's all digitized. It's exciting. And yet, it can also mean that people are free to kind of cherry pick and people without training, of which I am one, can cherry pick and use sources in a haphazard way? Where are we at the moment on the advantage and disadvantage of this new era that we're in? I mean, I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages personally. I think seeing the

museums and archives, excavations, different historical records being available online is a good thing. I think that having open access to scholarship is a good thing, and I do a lot of outreach on social media, and people respond. And so there's a lot of people that are very grateful for this. They do their own research. They're very interested in the past, and they're interested in reading scholars. Obviously, there's the negative aspect to this as people twist and cherry-pick ideas into popular, very popular narratives. This show on Netflix is one of the top shows in the world right now, it seems like. That's obviously dangerous, and we live in a period of rising conspiracy theories. But at the same time, what that also means is that scholars like me, we can

speak out against it, and we can be covered in newspapers, on podcasts, and we can get our voices out there to the public as well in ways that we couldn't in the past. And so that's, I think, a good thing to have things available. And I am all for public engagement with history and archaeology, community excavations. I think that people are invested in their past and in what we do, and that's a good thing overall. But you think, I feel like I'm in the 17th century now, but you think like the word authority matters. Does the authority of a title, of an institution, of a reputable publisher, would you encourage people to pay attention to those things? I think I would encourage people to pay attention to experts that have devoted their

lives to this and have training in this because they have a clear understanding of the context in which these pieces of evidence were formed. Oftentimes, conspiracy theories come from decontextualizing pieces of evidence. And so to understand the context, I think it's important to pay attention to scholars. That said, I think there's a great number of public historians that are not, you know, classically trained scholars or academics, and they also pay very close attention to context. And I see that as fine too. I don't think it needs to come from a university press to be worth paying attention to. But at the same time, I mean, I think that if you have most experts forming a consensus, it's like this with medicine. You have to pay attention to experts when it comes to medicine.

Same thing with history. But I don't think they're the only people to pay attention to, if you see what I mean. I'm so interested in conspiracy theories. You've mentioned a couple times. Let's finish up there, if you like. And it feels to me this is very similar to whether it's the voting at the moment, whether it's the COVID response. Conspiracy theories, I think they're very attractive to people. You mentioned context often, because they're so simple and they're attractive. I sometimes think even people on the left, they almost want Rupert Murdoch to be in charge, right? They almost want this guy because then someone's in charge of this absolute show that we're in, right? Then someone maybe could turn off the taps on carbon. If the truth is that Rupert Murdoch is just like a scared old man who

doesn't quite know what's going on either and just chases a candidate around that he thinks might achieve some outcome in the future for him, then that's a bit scary, right? It means that everyone's confused and in this kind of fun house and we don't really know where we're going. And I guess that's true of history too and archaeology is that the truth is super complex and difficult and challenging. And it's nicer to believe that there was this civilization that covered the world and everyone knew everything. And all we need to do is kind of rediscover that and everything will be fine. I think simple narratives are very attractive. They're easy to understand. They're easy to turn into a quick slogan or soundbite. After all, we live in a world of soundbites. That's what

the media wants. That's what people want. It's something that people can sort of easily grasp. But of course, yeah, when you look at the world around you, it's obviously much more complex. And history that we're creating right now is the accumulation of billions of people's decisions and what billions of people say and do every day. And it's the same thing in the past. Maybe it wasn't billions of people a few hundred years ago, but millions of people. It's the accumulation of all that we all do. It also, I think there's this idea, I don't know if you remember when Barack Obama finished his presidency and he gave a speech, he talked about sort of the arc of history, as if there's some direction that human history is

taking. And as a historian, that strikes me as not true. Thinking that the future is already written as if there's some progress that we're all moving towards that's inevitable, that's not true at all. That's a very simple way of thinking about what we do as if everything's inevitable. It's teleological to look at history in that way, as if it's all building up in the sort of linear or an arc towards what we have in front of us right now. It's a very simplistic way of looking at things. And so if we look at that, we deprive ourselves of our own agency to understand the impact we have on the world around us and the future. And we deprive our ancestors of their own agency as well by making things too simple. Boom. That's how even-handed we are on this podcast. We're slagging off Barack Obama. There you go. Hey, look at us. That's brave. That's what expertise-handed we are on this podcast. We're slagging off Barack Obama. There you go. Hey, look at us. That's brave.

That's what expertise is all about, folks. We don't take any prisoners here. Flint Dibble, thank you very much for coming on and just really issuing a clarion call for what you do and that of your fellow professionals. And it's very special indeed to have you on saying this all. Tell us how, you've mentioned your social media. How can people stay in touch with you and get involved in what you do? Yeah, thank you very much, Dan, for having me. I'm on Twitter with my name Flint Dibble.

And I have a few YouTube videos, I'd like to make more, but that's also Flint Dibble. And I've just migrated to Mastodon as well. We'll see what happens with that. But that's also Flint Dibble. Well, thanks so much for coming on, buddy. Yeah, thank you very much i appreciate it