JEAN CHRISTOU speaks to Robert Sarmast who is conviced the answer is yes and is planning to set about proving it this summer
AMERICAN author Robert Sarmast, who penned the controversial Discovery of Atlantis: The Startling Case for the Island of Cyprus, hopes to have an expedition up and running to locate the legendary lost civilisation by early summer.
Sarmast, 38, has been on the island since early February to lay the groundwork for an expedition that he hopes will put Cyprus on the world map and perhaps lead to proof of one of the most controversial myths of all time.
In more than a month on the island, Sarmast has met government and tourism officials, archaeologists, geologists and mythologists. He has also given a series of lectures and, most importantly, managed to locate a local ship with the sonar technology he needs to scour beneath the waves. He has teamed up with local Limassol-based company EDT, which has worked with the American and Israeli governments in the past.
“The way it’s looking right now is that the expedition has a very good chance of happening,” he told the Sunday Mail. “I didn’t anticipate it happening so quickly. This trip was just supposed to be about shaking hands and meeting people and so forth and I thought I would have to come back maybe next year to do the actual expedition but it’s moved along so quickly it looks like it’s going to happen possibly in May or June.
“We have the ship operators and equipment. We have government permission.”
Sarmast said his team was already making arrangements to make a public offering for people who wanted to invest and that this would be announced soon. “This would usually be a million dollar plus operation but it looks like we might be able to do this for £75,000 or less,” said Sarmast.
“It’s just a matter of getting the contracts ready and getting the money together and when I come back, if we can pull it all together – and right now it looks as if we will – this is going to happen in early summer.”
He said the CTO had also been very helpful. “They are sponsoring my trip and I’ve worked with the PIO and they are arranging my travel plans and so forth,” he said.
Sarmast said the expedition would cover the area from Cape Greco to Latakia in Syria. “The area we need to cover is around 100 square miles. It’s a week-long expedition. We will set out from Limassol with preliminary sonar surveys, followed by remote operated vehicles (ROV) that go down and have video cameras and arms.” He said there was one such ROV stationed in Limassol, belonging to a US company that has the capability of going down 6,000 metres.
“Our target area is only 1,500 metres down. Right now, we can actually match Cyprus to the shape of Atlantis before the flood, so if we find the remnants of any building that would pretty much prove it,” he said.
In his book, Sarmast claims to have discovered that Cyprus matches Plato’s famed account of the mythological ancient civilisation in his dialogues with Greek philosophers Timaeus and Critias.
He claims he is able to back up Plato’s descriptions with a scientific survey of the eastern Mediterranean basin, which took place in the 1980s, producing the most accurate data about the topographic structure of the Levantine Basin and the Cyprus Arc. The data was acquired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in 1999 and used, he said, to create the most accurate bathymetric maps of the sea floor stretching between Cyprus and Syria.
Sarmast says we cannot rely solely on Plato’s Critias and Timaeus to find the actual location or determine the size of Atlantis because there are inconsistencies in the text and uncertainties regarding ancient Egyptian and Greek understanding of regional geography. However, he says he does have an unambiguous set of clues concerning many other important features of Atlantis, all of which are explored in the book.
Although there are innumerable theories on Atlantis, most believe the ancient city was probably destroyed in the famous biblical flood, which is also common in the history of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians and South Americans.
Plato describes a series of worldwide floods culminating in the deluge of the Deucalion, dated by Greek historians to the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC. Plato said Atlantis suddenly sank after a violent series of eruptions and a flood, which has led many to theorise that the volcanic Greek island of Thera or Santorini might have been Atlantis.
“One of the problems is the boy who cried wolf. There is a little bit of that phenomenon here,” said Sarmast. “Most people who do a surface read of Plato’s Critias say it was in the Atlantic Ocean. But you have to bear in mind this thing has been passed down for 12,000 years. Right now it’s English. It was Latin before and before that it was Greek and before Greek it was Egyptian, and before that it was something else. The Egyptians said they translated it from an earlier text so if this came from prehistoric man in the near east 12,000 years ago, they couldn’t possibly have known what or where the Atlantic Ocean was. It wasn’t called the Atlantic Ocean. That’s a modern word. You have to read between the lines.”
Sarmast said everybody had a theory on Atlantis.
“The question is which one fits the description,” said Sarmast. “We have a very, very vivid description of what this island looks like. Not a single other theory that came before us has tried to match a real landscape with this very detailed description. Not one. They are all based on loose assumptions with no evidence, no scientific basis, no landscape, no conformity to Plato’s description. Nothing solid. What we have is almost a 100 per cent match with Plato’s descriptions. I’ve extracted 50 clues from Critias and almost every single one of them matches the description. That’s unheard of.”
Sarmast, whose background lies in aerospace engineering and architecture, said that as a child he was obsessed with topics that were not taught at school.
“There is no curriculum that teaches these things. The name they use now for this field is Atlantology and what separates it from established curricula is that it combines several different subjects that don’t usually talk to each other. It has very hard science on the one hand, like geophysics, archaeology and oceanography, and on the other hand you have to know biblical studies, because this is the garden of Eden also, you have to know comparative world mythology and you have to know ancient history, so it’s a very strange field because you have to combine these very different polarised subjects into one field,” he said.
Sarmast said the more he researched the more he started to see that there had to be some factual basis behind the legend of Atlantis.
“It just couldn’t have come out of thin air,” he said, adding that the entire ancient world was obsessed with it.
“Today we think of it as something that is mythical but to the ancient world this was history. The Egyptians gave the story to Solon who then gave it to Plato. They didn’t talk of it as some kind of fable or myth or legend. They said this is history.
“Did this island exist yes or no? We are the first generation in history that has the capability to look under the water and that’s why this is happening right now. No one’s ever been able to do this. Atlantis is the missing link between us as the distant past.”
