At www.independent.com.mt/articles/2009-07-13/news/could-sardinia-be-the-lo… … this story goes back a couple of years and is apparently dead and buried – so the conference must have been a damp squib. However, I thought it was interesting when you consider that a week or so ago we had a post on the Pantilleria Vecchia Bank between Sicily and Tunisia which may have been dry land in the early Holocene and Late Pleistocene periods. Basically, an Italian journalist wrote a book, Sergio Frau 'The Pillars of Hercules' which claimed to have reinterpreted the account of Plato where Atlantis was located beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Eratosthenes associated the pillars with the Gibraltar region, a narrow opening into the Atlantic Ocean. Frau suggested that the Pillars of Hercules was originally the narrow gap between Sicily and Tunisia, and when it was given that topographical title the straits were narrower than they are today – which I thought was a bit of a coincidence.
If the latter was really the Pillars of Hercules and then Atlantis would be located beyond – somewhere like Sardinia. At this point the theory goes awry as the journalist suggests that a tsunami wave overwhelmed the Late Bronze Age Nuraghic culture. Interesting if true – but you would have to read the book to see the evidence. A tsunami wave more famously overwhelmed the Maltese temple culture – at the end of the Early Bronze Age (around 2300BC). As such, it must have affected Sardinia too – at the same time. However, if you wanted to go back even further, to the mid Holocene, Mediterranean sea levels may have oscillated around 6200BC. Plato's catastrophic ending of Atlantis took place 9000 years prior to his time – which places it at the very beginning of the Holocene (another good location). Frau sought to re-write Plato and turn 9000 years into just 900 years – which pans out to around 1250 – 1200BC (close to the end of the LB age). However, this date only stands if the Greek Dark Age is acceptable. In a revised chronology the Greek Dark Age would be reduced by 2 or 3 hundred years – even 600 years according to some. Frau's 900 years quite literally fritter away.