Customer Reviews

The Last Atlantis Book You'll Ever Have to Read!: The Atlantis-Mexico-India

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I didn't think such ignorance could still be written. His Eurocentric bias is clearly apparent; when the only role a person of hue plays in this book, is that of a slave toted around the earth and seas. He calls Esteban of the lost cities of Cibola half African half Moor. To try and insinuate they are not from the same stock. Excuse me but his name was Esteban the "MOOR". CANAANITES were children of HAM, they are Hamites. Phoenicians are descendants of Canaanites. But this author knowingly tries to invert truth but it can't be done with the worthless scholarship and pittiful arrogance of this book. At one point he asks in his book Are we diffusionists racist? The answer is no the diffusionists are not racists but you are!! The nerve to even mention the late great Barry Fell in your foolish arguments. "This is the last Atlantis book you should ever read" lol A total waste of money!!

Atlantis as a prehistoric, global maritime colonial trade empire has merit. Worth purchasing. Other noble reads include: Golden Thread of Time and Brotherhood of the Sun.

Matlock has reached new depths of implausibility here. His claim to have 'proved' his case is grotesquely exaggerated, to say the least. Once again he places much emphasis on linguistic 'evidence'. However, it is seriously misleading for him to be identified as a 'professional linguist', as he is in 'About the Author'. He IS a keen language-learner, and he has apparently studied the rudiments of linguistics; but he displays no genuine understanding of the subject, still less awareness that his methods are (for good reasons) 200 years out of date and rejected by all modern historical linguists. Almost all of his specific linguistic claims are absurd and no one should be tempted to accept them. To exemplify the problems from Chapter 1 (available on the site):

(a) As in his previous works, Matlock relies repeatedly upon isolated & unsystematic superficial similarities of vocabulary items (and at times even of very short affixes or single phonemes) in attempting to establish etymologies which would demonstrate his diffusionist claims about ancient links between the languages & cultures of India (and other Old World areas) and the Americas. But it was demonstrated over a century ago that such methods are wholly unreliable, and in the last decade the relevant statistical arguments have been developed in detail. Matlock's methods are now rightly confined to the amateur fringe.

(b) He is not even consistent here, offering rival etymologies for, eg, <coatl>, without acknowledging that it cannot be that BOTH etymologies are correct.

(c) His claims on these fronts contradict: (i) many standard (and often KNOWN) etymologies (eg, those of English <saint>, the ending <-an> as in <American>, the Greek word <autokhthon> [which is <auto-> + <khthon>, contrary to his analysis], the name of the Mexican city Vera Cruz, etc), most of which he which he seems not to have checked even with a view to disputing them; and (ii) vast amounts of well-established information about the relationships between languages. His central claim that Sanskrit is the 'father of most world-class languages' (whatever 'world-class' means here) is clearly refuted by vast bodies of evidence.

(d) He ignores the structural aspects of the languages which he compares, which are crucial in this context.

(e) His linguistic terminology is popular and non-standard, with no indication that this is a concession to non-specialist readers (and no reference to more accurate discussion elsewhere).

(f) He makes many claims about poorly-documented periods of early history without presenting any references or worthwhile evidence.

(g) He treats mediaeval and ancient texts - including even Plato's fable of Atlantis itself and indeed Hindu myths and legends - as if they were clearly historically reliable.

(h) He glibly identifies items mentioned in such sources with known entities (eg, 'Plato said that Atlantis lay just beyond a group of smaller islands which are our present day Antilles or West Indies.').

(i) He often misinterprets technical sources, eg, the recent discussions of problems in Mayan history which he quotes. These are dramatic enough for Mayanists and other Mesoamericanists but involve specific issues and relatively late dates, not diffusionist theories about the ultimate origins of Mesoamerican cultures.

(j) He cites other fringe claims rejected by most experts (eg, claims about accurate world maps on Phoenician coins; Lal's ideas about language relationships) as if they were accepted as valid.

(k) He often treats very old & theoretically outdated sources such as Pococke as if they were reliable.

(l) He makes some false statements, eg, that the Americas are larger than Africa and Asia combined, that Plutarch wrote in the year 2 CE, etc.

In addition, the book is loosely and incoherently written. Overall, it cannot be taken seriously.