264 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
Tenmadurai
One of several “sunken civilizations” described in Hindu scripture, the inun-
dation of Tenmadurai signaled the end of a golden age, just as the destruction of
Atlantis closed the Bronze Age.Te p h i
A name helping to establish the Atlantean identity of the Milesians who occupied
pre-Celtic Ireland. Tephi is a derivative of Tefnut, the divine wife of the Egyptian
Atlas,Shu.Thens
In Thai folk tradition, a people who
fled across the Pacific Ocean from their
sinking kingdom during the ancient
past. All they managed to salvage from
the rising waters was a single column
from their chief temple. It was set it up
at the center of their new city in South-
east Asia, where the Thens blended
Lemurian mysticism and technology
with the native peoples.
(See Lak-Mu-ang)Thera
The ancient Greek name of modern
Santorini, a small Aegean island north
of Crete, synonymous in the minds of
some conventional archaeologists for
Atlantis. They argue that a volcanic
eruption experienced by Thera during
the Middle Bronze Age was garbled in
Plato’s account and subsequently re-
membered, imperfectly, as the fate of
the lost civilization. While a Minoan
settlement was indeed located on Thera, it was too small to exert any significant
cultural, economic, or much less, military influence. Skeptics still sometimes
attempt to use Thera and Crete to explain away Atlantis, but they represent a
dwindling voice shunned even by most mainstream scholars.The column from an unidentified structure at Ilios,
the Trojan capital, represents the same Late
Bronze Age style found in the clean, monumental
architecture of Atlantis. Troy Museum, Cannikale,
Turkey.