Greetings,
This reply got very long as I could not sum it up in a few words as others are able to do so well. I must ask your indulgence, and to anyone whom does not wish to wade through such a long winded post just skip ahead and I will not be offended. Thank you in advance.
Cactusjumper wrote
Don Jose,
Yes! The preferred weapons were sticks, stones, teeth and fingernails, along with the occasional loud grunt thrown in for emphasis. Straddling a log with the limbs cut off makes for a very ineffective fighting platform. That assumes the battle progressed beyond the grunting phase.
The sea-battle would end when one side, or both, drowned.
Hmm while I realize that post was addressed to our mutual amigo Don Jose, apparently I have not phrased things in a way that makes sense. Let me try to put it in a straightforward, line by line approach.
The weapons of the day we get from what the Egyptian told Solon, namely
spears and shields. However a wooden club or cudgel is not out of the question, as we can see on ancient coins honoring Herakles, he is depicted as a man of a Stone Age, wearing a lion skin and carrying a wooden club over his shoulder. Shields and spears however were mentioned by Plato and are extremely ancient weapons systems, they need not be of metal to be effective. For that matter, Amerindians were still using stone headed clubs as late as 1890 with good effect, and we do not view them as cave men for they are not.
Herakles with club
Herakles with his child, wearing the Nemean lion skin and carrying his signature club
The ships were
not logs, or perhaps you missed the part about Chrysor quote
"One of these called Chrysor, who is the same with Hephæstus, exercised himself in words, and charms and divinations; and he invented the hook, and the bait, and the fishing-line, and boats of a light construction; he was the first of all men that sailed. "
Chrysor lived before the Titans, and supposedly one of his brothers invented building walls of brick (mud brick strengthened with straw) So your characterization of the Atlantians as a bunch of cave men with sticks floating on logs is just ignoring what the texts say in a facetious attempt to ridicule a late Paleolithic Atlantis.
This Atlantis would probably be built of mud-brick, yet could have had courts and porticos and crypts, as these are supposed to be invented before the time of the Titans. The ancient cities and ziggurats of Mesopotamia (including Babylon) were of mud brick, no one describes them as cave men floating on logs with sticks. They could have boats of light construction fitted with sails, which would serve to transport a land army. Even rafts can be quite effective as transportation just as Columbus encountered in the Caribbean. As Joe has pointed out, the turn of a shovel can overturn the entire structure of written history - for example in 1997 the discovery of an ancient ship off the coast of England;
<extract>
"World's Oldest Ship??
Divers have found timbers they believe to be remains of the world's oldest known ship off Hayling Island near Portsmouth, England. Radiocarbon dated to 6,431 years ago, the timbers were discovered in 30 feet of water by a team led by British sport diver Don Boullivant. "We have been searching the area for quite some time, looking for Roman wrecks," says Boullivant. "When we came across the worked oak timbers, we were certain that we had finally found one. To our great surprise the wood is older by 4,000 years."
If the find is confirmed, the ship will predate the earliest known depictions of boats from predynastic Egypt, which date to the mid-fourth millennium B.C., by more than 1,000 years, and the earliest known Northern European ship by 3,000 years. Until now the oldest vessel from Northern Europe has been a 3,300-year-old, 50-foot-long boat discovered at Dover, England, in 1992." <emphasis in bold by me, from
http://www.archaeology.org/9707/newsbriefs/hayling.html >
The first known vessels date back to the Neolithic Period, about 10,000 years ago, but could not be described as ships. The first navigators began to use animal skins or woven fabrics as sails. Affixed to the top of a pole set upright in a boat, these sails gave early ships range.
<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship>
The earliest seaworthy boats may have been developed as early as 45,000 years ago, according to one hypothesis explaining the habitation of Australia. In the history of whaling, humans began whaling in pre-historic times.
<emphasis mine>
<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_maritime_history#Prehistory >
So let us discard the image of a fleet of floating logs with men straddling them, paddling across the Mediterranean. That sort of closed minded approach only guarantees one cannot see a clear picture.
For that matter, even our historians allow that many innovations appeared in this period, quote
During the Upper Paleolithic, further inventions were made, such as the net (c. 22,000 or 29,000 BP)[25] bolas,[35] the spear thrower (c.30,000 BP), the bow and arrow (c. 25,000 or 30,000 BP)[2][36] and the oldest example of ceramic art, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice (c. 29,000–25,000 BP).[2] Early dogs were domesticated, sometime between 30,000 BP and 14,000 BP, presumably to aid in hunting.[37] <snip> Archeological evidence from the Dordogne region of France demonstrates that members of the European early Upper Paleolithic culture known as the Aurignacian used calendars (c. 30,000 BP).
By the end of the Paleolithic era, about 10,000 BP people began to settle down into permanent locations, and began to rely on agriculture for sustenance in many locations. Much evidence exists that humans took part in long-distance trade between bands for rare commodities (such as ochre, which was often used for religious purposes such as ritual[44][45]) and raw materials, as early as 120,000 years ago
Some sources claim that most Middle and Upper Paleolithic societies were possibly fundamentally egalitarian[2][30][17][42][42] and may have rarely or never engaged in organized violence between groups (i.e. war).
<Note this agrees with Plato about the Atlantians being at first a viruous society that became warlike and aggressive>
The existence of anthropomorphic images and half-human, half-animal images in the Upper Paleolithic period may further indicate that Upper Paleolithic humans were the first people to believe in a pantheon of gods or supernatural beings,[82] <perhaps a shamanistic system?>
This period that Plato places Atlantis in, is coincidentally when mankind is producing works of art (paintings, carved sculptings) and even music. The population of man underwent an 'explosion' possibly due to the invention of agriculture. A culture of cattle herding people were living on the grassy plains dotted with lakes we now know as the Sahara desert; men in the harsh northern islands of Scotland were making a living by fishing and hunting sea mammals, living in homes build of stone about 480 square feet. Far up in the arctic, on the Seward peninsula the people of the city of Ipiutak were living in a city with broad streets, hunting migratory herds of caribou and storing meat for the lean times. Hunters were stalking wooly mammoths on a grassy plain where Dogger Bank is in the North Sea today.
Clearly not all men were living in caves and clubbing their mates, or paddling out in the sea on logs. Neither were all men living in cities, supported by herds of semi-wild cattle and pigs, or even rudimentary farming of primitive grains and fruits like figs. To the more primitive people, those living in cities would seem far advanced, and yet were there some natural calamity, the primitive hunter gatherers would be much more likely to survive - just as we find described in Plato.
The population of humans underwent an explosion of numbers in the late Paleolithic, the very time of Plato's Atlantis
<one example in support,
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~mstiner/pdf/Stiner_etal1999.pdf,
another very complex
http://www.anthro.utah.edu/~rogers/pubs/Rogers-E-49-608.pdf>
- One study points out that the human population increased over 100 fold in a relatively short time! An interesting article on the possibility that Atlantis practiced agriculture, here
http://www.atlantisquest.com/Agriculture.html
Perhaps it might be beneficial for us both to re-read Plato on Atlantis? The account is not so far-fetched if you examine it. One point in that post at the top however is not far from the truth about sea battles in ancient times, or right up to modern era for that matter; the heaviest casualties came from drowning when ships sank. The casualties inflicted by the missile weapons as well as ship-to-ship boarding even as late as the Byzantine era, were a minority compared with loss from sinkings and drownings.
This topic has always interested me as it does so many others, but I don't see any route to changing opinions by argument since the evidence is lacking. Until someone finds the ruins of an Atlantis that fits the embellished one of Plato, the case can never be proven, and since Plato did embellish and we do not know to what degree, it is not possible to identify any ruins of Atlantis were we to be standing on them. I believe that the traces of Atlantis are right there before us, in the mysterious "wheel ruts" seen on Malta and elsewhere, the equally enigmatic megalithic structures of the British Isles, France and the Iberian peninsula, the ruins of Catal Huyuk and Jericho, and the aetherial herding culture of the Sahara;
not that these ARE Atlantis but they were co-eval with it.
Good luck and good hunting to you all, I hope you find the treasures that you seek.
Oroblanco
Straddling a log with the limbs cut off makes for a very ineffective fighting platform. That assumes the battle progressed beyond the grunting phase.
