Lost Civilisations

Every search for Atlantis starts from the same two dialogues by Plato, Timaeus and Critias, in which Egyptian priests tell Solon of an island beyond the Pillars of Hercules that sank into the sea. Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis of 1882 traced all civilisation back to it, and later writers added Lemuria and Mu, proposed lost continents of the Pacific. The case most often made for a real Atlantis ties Plato’s story to the eruption of Thera, which devastated Minoan Crete; other readers take it as Plato’s parable about a power undone by its own ambition.

The finds are as strange as the legends: Knossos held storerooms, drains and clay tablets in a script that took scholars fifty years to read.

The shelf holds the classical sources in translation, the speculative classics and the books written to answer them, histories of archaeology, and accounts of the great digs. Excavations at Knossos began under Arthur Evans in 1900 and uncovered the palace of a Bronze Age civilisation that Evans named Minoan, after the legendary King Minos.