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"A few years ago there were discovered in Sicily the remains of a dead elephant - it was a very dead elephant, it passed away thousands of years ago in a cave near Syracuse... The bones were those of a very small elephant, not a young one, but a fully grown dwarf and... they were found in a bed of semi-solidified red sand, the kind that's blown over from Africa... It is believed that as one of the great ice-ages swept South from Europe, the animals fled before it in search of better weather... flee is perhaps the wrong word, it was a slow drift lasting many centuries. When the movement began Italy and Sicily were both part of a continuous land-bridge connecting Europe with Africa, and it was across this bridge that the animals moved... Then at some unknown date there came a tremendous cataclysm. The oceans swept in through the newly formed straits of Gibraltar, and formed the Mediterranean out of a land basin or several smaller inland seas. Italy and Sicily were both cut off from Africa, and on them were left the elephants that had lingered on their way South..." (quoted from Atlantis - a journal of research, vol. 14, no. 5, August 1961, pp.93-4.)

Several of the Sicilian sites contain puzzles in the form of two species, Hippopotamus pentlandi and Palaeoloxodon mnaidriensis, which were not thought to have been native to the island. But if not native, then these creatures would have had to be transported from Malta, Crete, Cyprus, Greece or northern Italy in order to deposit their bones where they were found. On Malta itself, one site excavated in the nineteenth century produced the bones of elephants, lizards, giant birds, turtles and a species of enormous dormouse, all now extinct. These skeletons were intermingled with huge stone blocks and boulders. The smashed and shattered bones clearly indicated they had died violently... Limestone caves on Crete are also packed with the jumbled bones of Pleistocene animals... Essentially the same situation has arisen with the archaeological exploration of Corsica, Sardinia and the Balearics..." (Herbie Brennan, The Atlantis Enigma, Piatkus, 1999, p.95.)

"The massive megaliths on Malta, in Britain, in France and many other countries stand today as tokens of an engineering tradition that stretches back into the depths of prehistory. It was a tradition inherited by our earliest civilisations, nowhere seen more clearly than in Egypt." (Ibid., pp.28-9.)

Malta's above-featured and older-than-Noah's-ark under-the-sea 'temple' may yet prove to be the largest known prehistoric complex structure on planet Earth. Its present submarine location results from Noah's Flood, as amateur archæologist Joseph S. Ellul first explained in 1988 in his important study Malta's Prediluvian Culture at the Stone-Age Temples with special reference to Ħaġar Qim, Għar Dalam, Cart-ruts, Il-Misqa, il-Maqluba and Creation (Malta: Printwell, 1988). Copies of an updated 1994 German translation of this book, Die Steinzeittempel Maltas und ihre Vorsintflutliche Kultur mit besonderem bezug zu Ħaġar Qim, Għar Dalam, Cart-ruts, Il-Misqa, Il-Maqluba & Schöpfung can still be obtained from the author at his home address: Ħaġar Qim House, 49 St. Catherine Street, ZURRIEQ ZRQ 1083, Malta.

Although many still imagine that Santorini in the eastern Mediterranean is all that now remains of Plato's island, while others, including archaeologist Dora Katsonopoulou, believe his tale about Atlantis is simply a myth inspired by the destruction by earthquake in 373 B.C. of the Greek mainland city of Helike, the remains of which she has now begun to excavate, Joseph S. Ellul is not by any means the first investigator to have associated Malta with Atlantis (op. cit., pp. 7 & 12). In 1923 R. M. Gattefosse noted in his La Verité sur l'Atlantide (Lyon) that many of Malta's ancient remains are "Atlantean" in character, and, as Egerton Sykes remarks in Chapter Two of his own The "lost Atlantis" of G. I. Bryant (published in Atlantis - a journal of research, vol. 7, no.1, November 1953, pp. 3-14): "if 'Cyclopean' be the same as 'Atlantean', then he is right."

As N. T. Zhirov expressed it a few years later (in Part 1 of his "Odysseus, the Argonauts, and Atlantis" in Atlantis - a journal of research, vol. 11, no.6, September-October 1958, pp. 113-4):

"Odysseus' Ithaca was not a large island... It is most probable that this island was Malta, which has remarkable megalithic ruins of temples and palaces. The culture of the ancient Malteans has some similarity with the culture of Minoan Crete. Some archaeologists affirm that the antiquity of the megalithic ruins and enigmatic tracks, excavated into the rocks, goes back to the 5th millennium B.C. (cf. K. K. Doberer, "Zum Problem der vorgeschichtlicher Fels - Schienenstrange auf Malta" in Urania (DDR) 16, pp. 396-7, 1953). If this is so, Malta was an early centre of civilization in the Mediterranean, older than Egypt, and was the important link in the chain of ancient insular cultures: Atlantis, Tartessos, Baleares, Pantelleria, Malta, Crete.

It is of interest that the pseudo-Plutarch's story (probably of Phoenician-Carthagean origin) about three Atlantis islands employed some astronomical data of the 4th millennium B.C. If it is correct, this story is bound up with this oldest insular culture of the Mediterranean."

Notwithstanding current widespread anthropological, cultural-religious and socio-political interest in the Celtic tradition, it has long been known that although Britain owes much to the Celts, its present character depends even more radically on so called 'Iberian' elements that date back to Stone-Age times. Indeed, the later Celts appear to have embodied several Iberian traditions as fundamental features of their own cultural heritage. Since present thinking associates these canoe-using Iberians, whom Cicero called the 'Children of Proserpine', with the Mediterranean and, more specifically, with north-west Africa and the Cult of the Cabiri, their even earlier residence in what are now the Maltese islands cannot be excluded.

"The hypothesis of a Maltese origin of Odysseus' Ithaca explains much", Zhirov concludes, "and even the voyage of one day from the Scheria to Ithaca... If Scheria is identical with the Tartessos, it is possible that the hurricane might throw the ship of Odysseus from the Tartessos (Scheria) across the Strait of Gibraltar to Malta in one day. Herodotus relates an analogous case with Samoan Kolaios."

Joseph Ellul's own interpretation of the biblical account of Noah's Flood identifies the latter's proximate cause as the collapse of a previously existing mountainous land-bridge that connected what is now South-East Spain with North Africa.

In that context, Chapter Four of The "lost Atlantis" of G. I. Bryant makes interesting reading: "The earliest historical date to be found for Cadiz is 1170 B.C., but it must have existed as a port of call for infinitely earlier mariners if it was indeed originally an Atlantean city. And as it was at first built on the eastern shore of the original island facing what then existed of Europe and Africa, probably joined where we now find the Straits of Gibraltar, we are forced to the conclusion that when earthquakes and other convulsions occurred, large tracts of land disappeared in the neighbourhood of Gades, or the capital of Eumelos, so that this city was completely lost..." ( Atlantis - a journal of research, vol.7, no.3, March 1954, p.51.)

Anton & Simon Mifsud, Chris Agius Sultana & Charles Savona Ventura are the co-authors of both the 2000 A.D. 1st edition and the 2001 only very slightly revised 2nd edition of Malta - Echoes of Plato's Island published by the Prehistoric Society of Malta 1999 (ISBN 99932-15-01-5). Although the first edition of this 86-pages glossy covered, annotated, incompletely indexed but fairly well illustrated paperback in A4-size format carries a July 2000 date, Dr. Anton Mifsud has stated that "the theme of Plato's Island was first published as a Powerpoint presentation" by himself "to the 6th Mediterranean Medical Congress attending the Mediterranean Conference Challenges for the New Millennium at the Westin Dragonara at St Julians, Malta" in September 2000, and that the book's publication came later. Certainly, it did not go on sale at Sapienzas bookshop in Valletta until mid-October that year and, although this edition was said to have been "sold out" in a matter of weeks, at least 2 copies of it were still being offered for sale at another shop in the same street as recently as mid-November 2001.

An outline summary of the book's main argument was first published in The Malta Independent for 6 November 2000. The work itself falls somewhat short of the high standard set by both Anton & Simon Mifsud's Dossier Malta - Evidence for the Magdalenian (Malta: Proprint Company, 1997) and Anton Mifsud & Charles Savona Ventura's edition of Facets of Maltese Prehistory (Prehistoric Society of Malta 1999, 1999), to the last named of which Anthony J. Frendo contributed an important Bernard J. F. Lonergan-inspired article on "Archaeology, Epistemology, and the Earliest Phase of Maltese Prehistory" which, I believe, implies that Stephen Brincat's date of 3756 BC (quoted on page 1), though accurate as it stands, is unnecessarily recent. The earlier of Paul I. Micallef's two likely dates for the inauguration of the lower 'temple' at Mnajdra is, moreover, greatly to be preferred).

In Echoes of Plato's Island:

• (1) No reference at all is made to nor, seemingly, any heed taken of the contents of A. J. Frendo's above-mentioned article.
• (2) Reference is made to the 1925 1st edition of Vere Gordon Childe's The Dawn of European Civilization, which is, however, wrongly named as being the "6th", without any attention being given to the notably different contents of the real 5th and 6th editions of that important work, even though the latter is still in print - and yet some commentators have found in both of these more recent editions an explanation for the relative neglect of Professor Childe's work by other academic authors in our own day.
• (3) Joseph S. Ellul's Letter about some "Unwritten Details on the History of Malta", which was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday on 19 January 1997, is mistakenly alleged to have appeared in The Sunday Times of Malta.
• (4) Endnote number 224 and the paragraph on pages 42 & 44 to which it relates contain inaccuracies. When D. Borg interviewed Joseph Ellul on Maltese television about these matters, the latter clarified that Doctor Hubert Zeitlmair would not have known anything about the under-the-sea "temple" unless Zechariah Sitchin had earlier brought it to his attention, and that Sitchin in turn had earlier still, on the occasion of his own first and so far only visit to the Maltese archipelago in June 1999, obtained his own information about it directly from Ellul in the course of a visit to the latter's home in Zurrieq in June 1999, when an electronic copy of the relevant portion of a 1945-47 high-altitude photo-map clearly showing the whereabouts of at least one near-Malta under-the-sea "temple" had already been continually and freely available since the middle of February 1997, i.e. for well over 4 months, for any interested Internet users to see and, if they wished, download and study for themselves.
• Zeitlmair's reported claim that this or any similar high-altitude photograph was or, indeed, could have been taken "in 1935" is quite manifestly absurd. The photo-map doesn't show either Gozo or Comino but it does portray the whole of both Filfla and Malta, and it is noteworthy (i) that it does not feature the floating-dock which, until it was damaged during World-War-II, used to be moored off Corradina, (ii) that the whole of the now almost entirely demolished Qrendi airstrip is clearly visible, (iii) that the main runway at Luqa International Airport comprises two quite separate sections, as it in fact used to do, prior to the construction of that short tunnel on the Gudja-Kirkop road which first made it possible for them to be joined into one. Readers of Hubert Zeitlmair's own Die Säulen von Atlantis: Malta - Handschrift einer verschwundenen Hochkultur (ISBN 3-935910-00-2; 2001) will easily appreciate Zeitlmair and his associates' romantically inspired cultural insights diverge very considerably from any that derive from a sober consideration of the actual facts.
• This highly significant photo-map in Joseph S. Ellul's possession is a print made from a post-World-War-II twin set of negatives dating from some time before Maltese Independence, which, as prime-minister Eddie Fenech Adami has said, might more fittingly be celebrated on the Feast of Our Lady of Victories, 8 September, the official Birthday of the Lady of All Nations.
• (5) Plate 5 in the 1st edition of the work under discussion exhibits, by kind courtesy of the Times of Malta, a photograph of several automobiles moving through flood-water at Msida on 25 March 1983. The caption connects this episode with the occurrence of an earthquake registering 6.4 on the Richter scale some 217 miles west of Athens shortly before. Many buildings on Malta were reduced to ruins by enemy action during World-War-II, and some of the rubble was used to reclaim from the sea that present portion of land which extends from the church of the Annunciation to the Misram Guze Ellul Mercer. As was only too well appreciated on 25 March 1983, the then flooding of this area - whether or not related in any way to any particular earthquake - was quite obviously the only too predictable consequence of ex-prime-minister Mintoff's rejection, when in office, of some experienced fishermen's advice. He had neglected to arrange for the row of oblong apertures visible in the photograph on the right-hand side of the road to be so constructed as to keep sea-water out during Spring high-tides which sometimes, as on this occasion, run some 7 centimetres higher than other high-tides ever do.
• When events proved the fishermen right, official perseverance in what, speaking objectively, is 'culpable ignorance' (which is, of course, very far from being by any means a Maltese monopoly) was on this occasion compounded by arranging for this series of apertures to be partially obstructed by the immediately adjacent construction of a vertical stone ledge, which, unsurprisingly, prevented any heavy rain-water running-off down the road from Birkirkara from making its way straight into the sea at Msida Creek. The reason why that doesn't happen nowadays is not that either of these mistakes has been corrected; they have, instead, been compensated for by building a new stretch of road directly on top of that shown in this photograph - that is why the present road here is at a higher level than its continuation on either side of the Creek.
• (6) The captions and commentaries relating to the three additional illustrations inside the front cover of the 2nd edition of Echoes of Plato's Island mistakenly suggests that two of these are in a most ancient (and, as it happens, until recently undeciphered) script. In fact, two of them are in Phoenician

Whether or not one believes in 'Atlantis' at all, Andrew Collins' arguments in favour either of Cuba's or of anywhere near Libya's being the original site of the actual capitol city of Plato's Atlantis are of extremely doubtful validity - and, even though it features some otherwise quite unknown features of Homer's Exeter, don't allow yourself to be misled either by any of the theories illustrated by the 1994 film Macgyver - The Lost Treasure of Atlantis. Despite all the various counter-claims advanced in favour of the the Arctic, Australia, the Bahamas, Bimini, Brazil, the Caucasus, Ceylon, the Crimea, Greenland, Heligoland, Iran, Mongolia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Nigeria, North and South America, Portugal, Prussia, South Africa, Spain, Spitzbergen, Homer's Troy and Tunisia, the capital of Atlantis was, as Filip Coppens, following Marcel Mestdagh (1926-1990), has most persuasively argued, very probably situated in France where the ancient city of Sens now stands. The Caribbean islands were impacted by the Flood-Wave only on the rebound, after the breaking up of the Gibraltar-Tangiers high land-ridge. As for "Libya", in ancient times that was the name for the whole of known Africa West of the Nile (for a convenient study of its alleged Atlantean connections, cf. E. Chaouat, Lumière sur l'Atlantide, Bulletin no.3, Marseille 1956).

The conjectural map provided by R. M. Gattefosse, in his interesting 1923 study already referred to, shows Atlantis proper as quite a large land-mass to the West of Gibraltar that extends northwards almost to southern Ireland while, to the South, it extends more than twice as far. Also of interest in this map and, probably, of much greater value is its approximate indication of 76 specific locations around the globe where "myths" about cataclysms in our remote past are still remembered. Gattefosse has classified these as "fire myths", "flood myths", "tower myths", "hot flood myths", "hot air myths", "myths in which waters sink", "myths in which waters rise", "ark myths" and "mountain ascent myths". Clearly, such a preliminary classification is extremely helpful.

Neither should we neglect Jean Gattefosse's September 1932 study Atlantis and the Western Tritonis (published by the Moroccan Society for Prehistory) nor his timely reminder in a May 1959 letter from Ain Sebaa (published in Atlantis - a journal of research, vol. 13, no. 3, April 1960, pp. 49-50) that "if Plato produced the first study of the island Atlantis, it must not be forgotten that the problem of the African Atlantis was first put by Diodorus, who devoted numerous pages of his Library to the traditions of the Atlanteans and of the peoples who succeeded them in Africa... I affirm that the Pillars of Hercules were at Tartessos, and that they still exist at Seville where they are a popular tourist attraction, which is why I identify Tartessos with that city, as mentioned in my 'Archaeological Walks in Andalusia' and by Madame Wishaw, the lady whose Atlantis in Andalusia is known to you all..."

Echoes of Plato's Island is nothing like as far-reaching in its survey of alternative accounts of Atlantis as serious researchers are nowadays entitled to expect, and those reading it may wish to compare it more especially with F. Butavand's 1925 study, La Véritable Histoire de l'Atlantide, in which Atlantis was said to be series of now submerged islands lying off the Tunisian Coast. Thus, it comprehended not only the area where Carthage and Utica were later founded and built, but also extended eastwards to include the present islands of Lampedusa, Kerkenna, Gharba, Djerba and others, while its southern portion comprised much of the present coast of Tripoli. However, Butavand's Atlantis included neither Gozo nor Malta, although it did include certain now submarine banks lying to the North of Pantellaria and to the South-West of Sicily. Neither did Butavand specify the whereabouts of the capital of his Atlantis. Nevertheless, since we are told that when Myrina, Queen of the Amazons, attacked the Atlanteans, she drove them to take refuge in a city called Cercennes, it is, perhaps, not entirely fanciful to conclude that today's Kerkenna must in ancient days have been the site of some quite important city. Very probably, then, we are at the very least justified in saying that, if North Africa was not Atlantis, it must have been a very important part of the Atlantean Empire.

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