Atlantis: a grain of truth behind the fiction?
In search of Atlantis: A site off the coast of Egypt?
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    The peoples who conceived the innovations of the end of the Ice Age were roughly grouped near the eastern tip of the Fertile Crescent, thus a most likely candidate to bring civilization to Egypt should first be sought among them (the Natufians, for example).

    There could have been some sort of communication among them, but it is possible that they developed their new habits independently, driven essentially by comparable climatic change happening in geographically similar regions. In any case, an even more local solution could be envisaged for bringing civilization to Egypt: somebody occupying the ancient Nile delta, which was then rather larger than today. Anyone living there (perhaps aware of Near Eastern inventions) would have been driven southbound by the subsequent sea level rise and pushed to occupy the land of today’s Egypt.

    In fact, in Egypt the tide of the ancient technological inventions actually flowed from north to south (Kuper and Kröpelin 2006). Kuper and Kröpelin catalogued hundreds of radiocarbon-dated Egyptian sites and grouped them geographically. Their physical distribution shows a striking correlation between the onset of the desertification and the gathering of the tribes along the Nile, which resulted in the birth of the pre-dynastic Egyptian kingdoms. In short, their location provides a climatic cause for the formation of the primeval ‘kingdoms’ along the course of the river. However, it cannot say much about the initial settlements in the delta and on the coast, because of lack of data on those areas.

    On the other hand, the overall geographical pattern of the findings is evident: over time: new technologies spread from north to south, implying that the source of these innovations was in the delta or on the coast. Unfortunately, in these two regions the number of finds becomes increasingly rare stretching back in time: there are no finds at all from before eight thousand years ago.

    This absence can be explained by recalling, firstly, that the ancient coastline is today offshore (sites should be searched for underwater, which has not been done yet) and noting two other aspects:
a) The structure of today’s Nile delta is not the same as eleven thousand years ago: many branches of the river have changed position.
b) Usually in the Nile delta, archaeologists avoid excavating layers deeper than those corresponding to about 7,000 years ago, because they get flooded almost immediately. Although in principle it is technically possible to dry these, the cost and effort required, combined with the abundance of finds in the higher layers, often persuade searchers to stick with the younger and more accessible layers.

    In practice, the absence of older sites along today’s coast and in the Nile delta should not be ascribed to the lack of ancient occupation, but, more probably, to the insufficient search for sites (Rapisarda 2015). In other words, although along the course of the river the archaeological timeline of the pre-dynastic kingdoms is not in question, the geographical distribution of the dated finds suggests that the coast and the Nile delta should have been inhabited much earlier.[10]

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[10] For a brief summary of what the ancient Egyptians thought about their antiquity see Rapisarda (2015).


Posted September 1st, 2016; last modified July 1st, 2018.

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