A: Aalu to Aztlan 47
apart by the operation of convection currents in the mantle of our planet. The
resultant tear in the ocean bottom is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a seismic zone of
volcanic and magmatic activity extending like a narrow scar from the Arctic Circle
to the Antarctic. The geologic violence of the Ridge combined with rising sea
levels to eventually reduce the Atlantic island’s dry-land area.
About 1.5 million years ago, early man (Homo erectus mauritanicus, or
Atlanthropis mauritanicus) pursued animal herds across slim land bridges leading
from the western shores of North Africa onto the Atlantic island. These earliest
inhabitants found a natural environment of abundant game, extraordinarily fertile
volcanic soil with numerous freshwater springs, rich fishing, and a year-round
temperate climate. Such uniquely superior conditions combined to stimulate
human evolutionary growth toward the appearance of modern or Cro-Magnon man.
With increases in population fostered by the nurturing Atlantean environment,
social cooperation gradually developed to produce the earliest communities—
small alliances of families for mutual assistance. These communities continued to
expand, and in their growth, they became complex. The greater the number of
individuals involved, the greater the number and variety of needs became, as well
as technological innovations created by those needs, until a populous society of
arts, letters, sciences, and religious and political hierarchies eventually emerged.
The island of Atlas was, therefore, the birthplace of modern man and home of his
first civilization.
Time frames are very controversial among Atlantologists, and this issue is
addressed in the text that follows. Conservative investigators tend to regard
Atlantean civilization as having come into its own sometime after 4000 B.C. By the
end of that millennium, the Atlanteans were mining copper in the Upper Peninsula
of North America; establishing a sacred calendar in Middle America; building
megalithic structures such as New Grange in Ireland, Stonehenge in Britain, and
Hal Tarxian at Malta; as well as founding the first dynasties in Egypt and
Mesopotamia’s earliest city-states.
The island of Atlas was named after its chief mountain, a dormant volcano.
The chief city and imperial capital was Atlantis, arranged in alternating rings of
land and water interconnected by canals. High walls decorated with gleaming
sheets of polished copper alloys and precious stones, featuring regularly spaced
watchtowers, encircled the outer perimeter, which was separated from Mt. Atlas
on the north by a broad, fair plain. The inner rings were occupied by a spacious
racetrack, for popular events of all kinds; military headquarters and training
fields; a bureaucracy; the aristocracy; and the royal family, who resided in a
palace near the Temple of Poseidon, at the very center of the city. This temple
was the most sacred site in Atlantis—the place where holy tradition claimed
that the sea-god Poseidon mated with a mortal woman, Kleito, one of the native
inhabitants, to produce five sets of male twins. These sons became the first
Atlantean kings, from whom the various colonies of the Empire derived their
names. The first of these was Atlas, earliest ruler of the island in the new order
established by Poseidon.