While there won’t be unanimous agreement that Atlantis existed until it rises again during this century—and it will— there have certainly been indications that it wasn’t as imaginary as skeptics prefer to believe.
A 1954 issue of Geologic Society of America Bulletin, for example, reporting on the exploration of the summit of the submerged Mid-Atlantic Ridge, reads:
The state of lithification of the limestone suggests that it may have been lithified under subaerial (i.e., above water, on land surface) conditions and that the sea mount (summit) may have been an island within the past 12,000 years.
And then there was a series of satellite photographs shown and described in the March 1996 issue of Discover magazine:
The Midatlantic Ridge snakes down the center of that ocean off Greenland to the latitude of Cape Horn … Under South Africa, the Southwest Indian Ridge shoots into the Indian Ocean like a fizzling rocket, or perhaps like the trail of some giant and cartoonish deep-sea mole.
But maybe the Maya gave the existence of Atlantis all the confirmation it will ever need by considering its demise so historically monumental that, in their most sacred beliefs, it ended a world.
The Aztecs
Another powerful and now extinct civilization of warriors was the Aztec empire, centered in the Valley of Mexico beginning in approximately the twelfth century AD. Their early history wasn’t committed to paper but was passed along from one generation to the next through word of mouth, so there’s no way of tracing their inception with any great accuracy. Legend suggests that the Aztecs came from the island of Aztlan. But
there is speculation about whether or not Aztlan is a place that actually existed; it is as shrouded in myth and mystery as Camelot and, some would say, the lost continent of Atlantis. And further speculation suggests that Aztlan was very real and that it was located in Utah, or perhaps Colorado. If that were proven to be true, it would mean that the Aztecs may have arrived in the Valley of Mexico from what is now the western United States, and the whole notion of undocumented immigrants from south of the border might have to be rethought— they might have a case that they’re descendants of native Americans who are even more entitled to be here than the rest of us. The Aztec Migration Scrolls describe Aztlan as an island in a lake, inhabited by great flocks of herons, with seven temples in the center of the island. Some say the seven caves of Utah’s Antelope Island might confirm its identity as the ancient Aztlan, while others are convinced Aztlan will ultimately be found in or near Florida. But Jesus Jauregui of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, states without equivocation, “Aztlan is a mythical place, not a historical one.” So the debate and occasional search expeditions continue.
What’s not in doubt is that the Aztecs were led into the Valley of Mexico in the fourteenth century by Tenoch, their chieftain. He was subsequently ordered by the war god Huitzilopochtli to take his uncivilized, barbaric people to the refuge of a marshy island in Lake Texcoco, where they were to build a city and honor Huitzilopochtli with human sacrifices, a practice not uncommon among the Aztecs. Tenoch’s city was built under these swampy, difficult conditions, and it was called Tenochtitlan. From those harsh beginnings the Aztec empire took root and thrived until around 1520, when the Spanish conquistadors, led by Cortez, invaded and conquered the Aztecs and virtually every other civilization in their path, destroying every trace of the Aztecs in the process.
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