The lost city of Atlantis is thought, by some, to be nothing more than myth, part of an allegory written by the Greek philosopher Plato in his works Timaeus and Critias. But one German computer programmer, Michael Hubner, believed the city was real, and that he may have discovered its location.
To do this, Hubner gathered data from Plato’s writings in the form of clues and descriptions of the city – a total of 51 different attributes, according to the New York Post, things like the “presence of elephants” and mountains to the north.
He then took these clues and plugged them into a mapping program, which revealed something intriguing: the location of the city, he found, was most likely inland, on the coastline of Morocco. Or, more precisely, the Souss-Massa plain, which lies about 100 miles south of Marrakesh.
This led him to conclude that Atlantis did not sink into the ocean, but rather was destroyed by a massive tsunami.
Buried In Time
Hubner actually traveled to the Souss-Massa plain, to see the area for himself. Atlantis, of course, was nowhere to be found. But what Hubner did find was a natural depression, a desert basin surrounded by foothills, with a small mound in the center. Plato had described such an area – a circular city enclosed by rings of land and water – as the center of the Atlantean capital.
Unfortunately, archaeologists didn’t have much interest in exploring the area — finding Atlantis, to many, is a fool’s errand — and Hubner himself passed away in 2013. However, this hypothesis is examined in detail in Mark Adams’ book Meet Me In Atlantis, which released just last month.
Is this possible? That Atlantis did exist, but we’ve been looking in all the wrong places?