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Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology

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Prehistoric cultures have always been a mystery unto themselves. How "civilized" were they and what knowledge was passed on to the earliest civilizations of Egypt and Sumer (and in turn future civilizations like Greece) is debatable.
The purpose of this book is to show that Plato may have been referring to actual events that took place during the end of the last ice age. This is not a book about an Atlantis that was comprabable to 2002 technology. This book is about prehistoric cultures that were widespread throughout Europe that were more advanced than current thought would lead us to believe. How advanced is really the question as this book only refers to the possiblilities while presenting it's case. Anyway the belief is that at the end of the last ice age water levels were much lower, hence cultural meccas were wiped out leaving the lesser cultures to carry the torch, when the water levels began to rise to present day levels. These cultures were the Atlantians and the Greeks who fought, according to the priests of Egypt. There's much more to the story but that's the start of it.
This book is very well written and researched. You certainly get a sense of Miss Settegast opinions but she sticks to the facts when reviewing her case. I have read a dozen or so books on the subject and this is by far the best of the lot. If Plato's story is true (and I believe it was to Plato just because of the Solon reference alone), then this is a vey sound theory. Oh and one more thing.... Anyone who thinks that Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations appeared out of nowhere might have a differnt take after reading this book, especially the section about Catal Huyuk.

Fewer and fewer scholars these days have either the nerve or the temerity to speculate about culture, particularly when such speculations are based upon archaeological data from pre-literate civilizations. Fortunately, Mary Settegast is not one of the more timid sort of scholar, but a brave and insightful visionary who is capable of handling concrete data with the eye of a literary artist. Academics, these days, do not like generalists, for such imaginative individuals are a threat to their so-called specialties; and academics are nothing if not power hungry. They sit guarding their little turf hills like slobbering devils out of a Bosch painting, and anyone who gets too close is likely to come away missing a finger or a two.
But Ms. Settegast doesn't care about such turf wars, for she is one of those rare individuals with enough imagination to see that the trees do in fact make up a forest, and if you don't see the forest as a totality, then you will not gain an understanding of its emergent properties as an ecosystem.
Plato Prehistorian begins, as do all such great tomes, like Frazer's Golden Bough, or Graves's White Goddess or even Hertha von Dechend's Hamlet's Mill, with a question: is it possible that Plato's myth of Atlantis, which takes place in roughly 10,000 bc, is an actual record of a real conflict that took place between two cultures that flourished at about that time in the Mesolithic Mediterannean? Settegast assumes that the answer might be a yes, and that a search for a sunken continent is not so much the issue, as a search for vanished and forgotten cultures. For the war of the Greeks vs. the Atlanteans, Settegast substitutes a mysterious European culture whose tool industries were known as 'tanged' arrowheads and which appear in Paleolithic Europe at just about the time of the decline of Magdalenian culture circa 10,000 bc. Settegast supposes that the Magdalenians--who may have tamed the horse, and may have been seafaring folk--correspond to the horse-riding and Poseidon-worshipping Atlanteans. She traces the possible migration of these Magdalenians in two directions: one going down through Spain to North Africa, where they become the so-called Iberomarusian peoples who may have domesticated the Barbary sheep as early as 18,000 bc, and onward into Egypt at Helwan and up into Palestine; in the other direction, across Europe as the Gravettian culture which may have migrated from Neolithic Greece across the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to mix with the populations of Palestine, where they may have become the Natufians. The appearance of a stone tower at Jericho circa 8500 bc seems to have coincided with the abandonment of Natufian sites and the appearance of a whole panoply of arrowheads indicative of a possible war. In the so-called 'Battling Bowmen" of the Spanish-Levantine rock art, furthermore, she sees a possible commemorative record of such a war that may have been Mediterranean-wide, since rock art from caves at Levanzo and Addaura in Sicily record similar conflicts, as does the art from Ukrainian Kobystan.
But as one reads this surprising and fascinating narrative, the story begins to metamorphose with the dream logic of Finnegans Wake, and becomes an extended meditation on the Neolithic origins of the mythological systems of the Bronze Age High Civilizations. Gradually, the scaffolding of the Atlantean narrative begins to fall away, as a larger, more important narrative emerges in which Settegast flies like a shaman bird from one Neolithic site to the next, identifying this or that peculiarity and idiosyncracy while fathoming the earliest origins of higher, and more well-known mythololgies from the literate civilizations. We find, for instance, that the origins of the Dionysus cult may lie in the leopard boy imagery of Catal Huyuk, or that Demeter and Persephone may have a similar origin in the motif of the Twin Goddess from that village; we ponder the possible origins of the Mithraic mythology in the Shaft of the Dead Man at Lascaux, in which the eviscerated bull which may have been gored by the rhino corresponds to Angra Mainyu's assault on the Primordial Ox at the beginning of creation (it so happens that there is an African tradition that rhinos are linked with the moon and the darkness of the night sky, like Angra Mainyu); or the smith god Hephaestus who may originate out of the obsidian trade and the early metallurgical industries which, with their connections to volcanoes and high temperature furnaces, may have ties with the volcanic linkages of this god; or Athena, the mistress of weaving, who may have an early connection with the imagery of the veiled goddess at Catal Huyuk. As the narrative proceeds, we begin to have the distinct feeling that the mythologies of the later Bronze--and even Iron--Ages have a deep and firmly rooted past in the Neolithic and Paleolithic traditions.
As Thomas Mann, at the start of his magnum opus Joseph and His Brothers wrote: "Very deep is the well of the past. Indeed, should we not call it bottomless?"

I'm currently reading the original (1986/87) edition of this book. First saw it cited in Robert Schoch's "Voices of the Rocks" which I also highly recommend. Mary Settegast has produced a well written, well reasoned, and well documented survey work. She builds a case for the identification of the Magdalenian culture as the historical basis for Plato's Atlantis legend. This is analogous to Schliemann's use of Homer's Trojan war accounts to locate the historical Troy. While not necessarily accurate in certain particulars (conversations between characters etc), each tale is a retelling and preservation of an historical event with many verifiable facts.