Research session · Eye of the Sahara and Atlantis

Session 2: Atlantis in the ancient sources, the Green Sahara and the maps

A review of the Atlantis literature from Herodotus to the Richat claims, the evidence for the Sahara's change from wetland to desert, and the maps of Atlantis and of the ancient accounts of north-west Africa.

Session 228 Oct 2026Literature review0

What it concluded

No ancient writer reviewed here puts Plato's Atlantis in North Africa: those who repeat Plato put it in or under the Atlantic, and the Libyan Atlantes and Atlantians are peoples named after Mount Atlas, Diodorus's from a romance of the second century BC. No map of Atlantis survives from antiquity; the earliest found is Kircher's of 1665, which puts it in the mid-Atlantic. The Richat was wetter within human memory, in the African Humid Period of about 14,800 to 5,500 years ago, and Plato's date falls inside that span; but the dated record shows streams and small lakes, not a sea or a ring lake.

What it left open

Whether any lake or marsh deposits lie in the Richat's ring depressions; none has been reported.
The dates of the arid Younger Dryas interval in the Mauritanian dust record, which the abstract does not give.
Full readings of Nesselrath 2002, Vidal-Naquet 2005, Borchardt 1927 and Herrmann, cited here through reviews and Atlantipedia; Butavand's date.

Questions raised 2

Does any ancient source put Atlantis in North Africa or the Sahara?

QST

Was the Richat a lake or wetland within human memory, and if so when?

QST

Answers proposed 6

No: every ancient writer reviewed here who places Plato's Atlantis puts it in the Atlantic

ANS

None of these.

ANS

None of these.

ANS

Wet but not a ringed lake: streams and small lakes in the African Humid Period, about 14,800 to 5,500 years ago

ANS

Yes: Diodorus's Atlantians of western Libya, by the ocean and Lake Tritonis, are a North African Atlantis

ANS

Yes: around Plato's date of about 9600 BC, rivers filled the Richat's rings with water

ANS

Answers taken up again 1

Atlantis was Plato's invention; the Richat only shares its ringed shape

ANS

Evidence found 21

Across Africa the humid period lasted about 14,800 to 5,500 years ago and ended earlier in the north

EVD

Aristotle is reported to have said Plato invented Atlantis and then sank it, as Homer did the Achaean wall

EVD

By the fifth century BC Herodotus knew inner Libya as waterless and rainless

EVD

Classical scholarship reads Atlantis as Plato's own fiction, the earliest narrative fiction in Greek

EVD

Diodorus took the Atlantians from a mythical romance written two centuries after Plato, and does not link them to…

EVD

Diodorus's Atlantians were a civilised people of western Libya by the ocean, near a marsh lost in an earthquake

EVD

Every later ancient writer reviewed here who repeats Plato puts Atlantis at sea, in the Atlantic

EVD

Herodotus's Atlantes are a Libyan people named after Mount Atlas, with no island and no flood

EVD

In the eastern Sahara the drying was gradual: dust from about 4300 years ago, desert by about 2700

EVD

In wet phases the Sahara's rivers, lakes and inland deltas joined into networks, last active in the early Holocene

EVD

Leaf waxes off the western Sahara put the Green Sahara at about 11,000 to 5000 years ago, with a likely abrupt end

EVD

Off Mauritania, dust fell to a low between about 14,800 and 5,500 years ago, when the Sahara was green with perennial…

EVD

One leaf-wax record starts the Green Sahara about 11,000 years ago, after Plato's date

EVD

Plato presents the story as true history from Egypt, and some ancient readers took it so

EVD

Plato's date falls inside the African Humid Period, and streams were laying down gravels in the Richat across that span

EVD

Plato's rings were belts of sea joined to the ocean by a channel, not a lake fed by rivers

EVD

Proponents tie the catastrophe to the Younger Dryas, which off Mauritania was a dry break in the humid period

EVD

Small diatom lakes stood on a wadi floodplain in the south-east Adrar between 9630 and 7550 radiocarbon years ago

EVD

The Sahara has turned green more than 230 times in 8 million years

EVD

The ancients disagreed where Lake Tritonis was, and most put it in Tunisia or Libya, far from Mauritania

EVD

Those in antiquity who took the story as history also looked for it in the outer sea

EVD

Sources consulted 33

Abrupt onset and termination of the African Humid Period: rapid climate responses to gradual insolation forcing

SRC

Against the Heathen (Adversus Gentes), Book 1

SRC

Albert Herrmann (Atlantipedia tag)

SRC

Ancient watercourses and biogeography of the Sahara explain the peopling of the desert

SRC

Apology

SRC

Atlantida (L'Atlantide)

SRC

Auf dem Wege nach Atlantis

SRC

Climate-Driven Ecosystem Succession in the Sahara: The Past 6000 Years

SRC

Crantor and Posidonius on Atlantis

SRC

Dynamics of Green Sahara Periods and Their Role in Hominin Evolution

SRC

Geography, Book 13, chapter 1, section 36

SRC

Geography, Book 2, chapter 3

SRC

Herodotus. The text of Canon Rawlinson's translation, with the notes abridged, vol. 2 (map: The World according to Herodotus)

SRC

Histories, Book 4, chapters 178–185

SRC

Le lac Tritonis et les noms anciens du chott el Jérid

SRC

Les Atlantes: histoire de l'Atlantis et de l'Atlas primitif, ou Introduction à l'histoire de l'Europe

SRC

Les formations lacustres à diatomées du Tamiga (extrémité sud-est de l'Adrar de Mauritanie)

SRC

Life of Solon

SRC

Mundus subterraneus, in XII libros digestus

SRC

On the Eternity of the World (De aeternitate mundi)

SRC

Paul Borchardt (Atlantipedia tag)

SRC

Plato's Atlantis Story and the Birth of Fiction

SRC

Rainfall regimes of the Green Sahara

SRC

Review: H.-G. Nesselrath, Platon und die Erfindung von Atlantis (Lectio Teubneriana 11, 2002)

SRC

Review: The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato's Myth, by Pierre Vidal-Naquet

SRC

Roman History (Res Gestae), Book 17

SRC

The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato, vol. 1

SRC

The Genre of the Atlantis Story

SRC

The Library of History, Book 3, chapters 49–61

SRC

The Natural History, Book 2, chapter 92: Lands which have been totally changed into seas

SRC

The Natural History, Book 5, chapter 1: The two Mauritanias

SRC

The time-transgressive termination of the African Humid Period

SRC

Various History, Book 3

SRC

Cite it

Mysteries Department. (2026). Session 2: Atlantis in the ancient sources, the Green Sahara and the maps [Research session SES0DCPG24DVVS2]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/SES0DCPG24DVVS2

@misc{mysteriesdept_ses0dcpg24dvvs2,
  title     = {Session 2: Atlantis in the ancient sources, the Green Sahara and the maps},
  author    = {{Mysteries Department}},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Research session, catalog key SES0DCPG24DVVS2},
  url       = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/SES0DCPG24DVVS2}
}