title: Bo Burnham

text: In recent years Burnham has expressed regret about how his career started, particularly of his early "shock-jock offensive comedy done by a sixteen-year-old without any tact." During press for his film "Eighth Grade" in 2018, Burnham used controversies surrounding his work as a way to express his concern about teenagers' mistakes being immortalized on the internet; in an interview with The Off Camera Show Burnham stated that "I'm happy to be an example of someone who failed out loud publicly, in a certain way, and who has hopefully been able to evolve and get past that. And I do worry that kids don't have that freedom anymore." In an interview with NPR, he addressed the problematic nature of his comedy stating that "I have a lot of material from back then that I'm not proud of and I think is offensive and I think is not helpful." He also covers these issues in the lyrics of his song "Problematic" in , he writes "I started doing comedy when I was just a sheltered kid, I wrote offensive shit and I said it" and "all of it was perfectly lawful, just not very thoughtful at all and really shitty."


title: Bo Burnham

text: Burnham has been in a relationship with filmmaker Lorene Scafaria since 2013. They live in Los Angeles. Burnham is known to be a private person and rarely does interviews unless they are for promotional work.


title: Bo Burnham

text: At the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he was nominated for the main Edinburgh Comedy Award and won both the Edinburgh Comedy Awards' panel prize and the Malcolm Hardee "Act Most Likely to Make a Million Quid" Award.


title: Bo Burnham

text: For his 2018 film "Eighth Grade" and 2021 comedy special "Inside" he received several awards and nominations for his writing and directing, including the following:


title: Letitia Wright

text: Letitia Michelle Wright (born 31 October 1993) is a Guyanese-British actress. She began her career with guest roles in the television series "Top Boy", "Coming Up", "Chasing Shadows", "Humans", "Doctor Who", and "Black Mirror". For the latter, she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. She then had her breakthrough for her role in the 2015 film "Urban Hymn," for which the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) named Wright among the 2015 group of BAFTA Breakthrough Brits.


title: Letitia Wright

text: In 2018, she attained global recognition for her portrayal of Shuri in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film "Black Panther", for which she won an NAACP Image Award and a SAG Award. She reprised the role in "" (2018), "" (2019), and "" (2022). In 2019, she received the BAFTA Rising Star Award. She also appeared in the 2020 anthology series "Small Axe", which earned her a Satellite Award nomination.


title: Letitia Wright

text: Letitia Michelle Wright was born on 31 October 1993 in Georgetown, Guyana. She has one brother, Ivan Bombokka. Her family moved to London, England, when she was seven years old, and she attended Northumberland Park Community School. while her brother relocated to Europe.


title: Letitia Wright

text: Wright performed in school plays, but she credits her desire to be a professional actress to seeing the 2006 film "Akeelah and the Bee". She found Keke Palmer's performance inspiring, remarking that the role "resonated. It's one of the reasons why I'm here". She attended the Identity School of Acting, enrolling at the age of 16.


title: Letitia Wright

text: In 2011, she appeared in two episodes of the television drama series "Holby City" and "Top Boy". She had a small role in the 2012 film "My Brother the Devil", for which she was recognized by Screen International as one of its 2012 Stars of Tomorrow. Michael Caton-Jones cast Wright in her first leading role in "Urban Hymn" (2015), which brought her to the attention of Hollywood. The same year, she appeared in the "Doctor Who" episode "Face the Raven", and the following year, she began a recurring role as Renie on "Humans". During this time, she also appeared in the play "Eclipsed" (written by Danai Gurira) at London's Gate Theatre. In 2017, Wright starred in the "Black Mirror" episode "Black Museum"; her performance earned her a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie.


title: Letitia Wright

text: Wright co-starred in the 2018 film "Black Panther", playing the role of Shuri, King T'Challa's sister and princess of Wakanda. Part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the film also starred Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, and Danai Gurira. Wright won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Breakthrough Performance in a Motion Picture for her work in the film, and reprised the role in "", which was released two months later. Also in 2018, Wright appeared as Reb in Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of the 2011 science-fiction novel "Ready Player One". Wright features as one of the cameos in Drake's music video for "Nice for What".


title: Letitia Wright

text: In 2018, Wright was also featured in a play called "The Convert", which was staged at London's Young Vic Theatre. The play was the story of an English-speaking missionary in the 19th century, where the Africans were trained to speak Victorian English and engage in Christianity. This play was set in 1895, when a Black male Catholic teacher and missionary called Chilford occupies a mission house in Rhodesian Salisbury. Wright plays the character of a Jekesai, a young Rhodesia girl who is being forced into marriage by her uncle, but luckily is saved by Chilford.


title: Letitia Wright

text: In 2019, Wright won the BAFTA Rising Star Award. In April 2019, Wright appeared alongside Donald Glover and Rihanna in "Guava Island", a short musical film released by Amazon Studios, before reprising her role as Shuri in "".


title: Letitia Wright

text: In November 2018, it was announced that Wright would be starring alongside John Boyega in a novel adaptation of "Hold Back The Stars". Wright will appear in 2022's "Death on the Nile". She was also cast in Steve McQueen's mini-series "Small Axe", set in London's West Indian community between the 1960s and 1980s. In the first episode, "Mangrove", which premiered on BBC One on 15 November 2020, Wright plays British Black Panther leader Altheia Jones-LeCointe, who, along with eight other Black activists, was arrested and charged with inciting a riot after a peaceful protest in 1970. Wright earned "Best Supporting Actress" nominations for this role, bringing "focussed energy and passion" to her depiction of the real-life Jones-LeCointe, as noted by "The New Yorker".


title: Letitia Wright

text: In February 2020, it was announced that Wright had accepted to play twin sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons in the film "The Silent Twins", based on the 1986 book of the same name by Marjorie Wallace, with shooting beginning in April. The film was released in September 2022.


title: Letitia Wright

text: Wright returned as Shuri for "", which depicts Shuri becoming the new Black Panther following the death of T'Challa; the film marked her first leading role. Released in November 2022, the film was made in honor of Chadwick Boseman, who died from colon cancer in 2020. During the filming of a chase sequence in August 2021, she fractured her shoulder and suffered a concussion following a motorcycle accident, causing production to pause while she recuperated.


title: Letitia Wright

text: Wright has opened up about her struggles with depression. She told "Vanity Fair" in 2018 that when she first experienced depression at the age of 20, she "was in the dark going through so many bad things". Wright credits her Christian faith with helping her overcome the depression, which she discovered after attending a London actors' Bible study meeting. To focus on her recovery and her faith, she turned down film roles. She later explained she "needed to take a break from acting" and "went on a journey to discover my relationship with God, and I became a Christian."


title: Letitia Wright

text: In December 2020, Wright generated backlash for sharing a 69-minute video from the YouTube channel "On The Table" on Twitter, in which Tomi Arayomi, a senior leader with the "Light London" church, questioned the legitimacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and accused China of spreading COVID-19, amongst other controversial statements; YouTube deleted the video for violation of its terms of service. Wright later clarified, "My intention was not to hurt anyone, my ONLY intention of posting the video was it raised my concerns with what the vaccine contains and what we are putting in our bodies. Nothing else." She subsequently left social media.


title: Letitia Wright

text: In October 2021, "The Hollywood Reporter" reported that Wright had parted ways with her U.S. team of representatives due to uproar over the video and her alleged continued promotion of anti-vaccine sentiments on the set of "" during production in Atlanta. Wright returned to social media to deny these claims.


title: Letitia Wright

text: During a November 2022 feature with "Variety", "Wakanda Forever" co-star Angela Bassett stated that she had never heard Wright share anti-vaccine sentiments during filming, while Marvel vice president Nate Moore claimed that he did know her vaccination status, that she was not sharing her views on set, and that her status did not affect production, aside from her injuries from a motorcycle accident while filming. During the interview, her publicist and representatives evaded "Variety"s attempts to ask about her updated vaccinated status, instead redirecting them to Wright's prior statement in 2021.


title: Letitia Wright

text: Later that month, Wright condemned "The Hollywood Reporter" for an article that included her amongst awards-season prospects with "personal baggage", in which its author Scott Feinberg compared her past comments with men accused of abuse and sexual misconduct. She reiterated that she had already apologised for her comments two years prior and had remained silent on the topic, and accused both the publication and Feinberg of having an "agenda" against her, which she described as "vile" and "disgusting" behaviour.


title: Flat Earth

text: The flat-Earth model is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat-Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period (5th century BC), the Bronze and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period (31 BC), and China until the 17th century.


title: Flat Earth

text: The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in ancient Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC). However, most pre-Socratics (6th–5th century BC) retained the flat-Earth model. In the early 4th century BC, Plato wrote about a spherical Earth. By about 330 BC, his former student Aristotle had provided strong empirical evidence for a spherical Earth. Knowledge of the Earth's global shape gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world. By the early period of the Christian Church, the spherical view was widely held, with some notable exceptions.


title: Flat Earth

text: It is a historical myth or modern misconception that medieval Europeans generally thought the Earth was flat. This myth was created in the 17th century by Protestants to argue against Catholic teachings. Despite the scientific fact and obvious effects of Earth's sphericity, pseudoscientific flat-Earth conspiracy theories are espoused by modern flat Earth societies and, increasingly, by unaffiliated individuals using social media.


title: Flat Earth

text: In early Egyptian and Mesopotamian thought, the world was portrayed as a disk floating in the ocean. A similar model is found in the Homeric account from the 8th century BC in which "Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the Earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly of all gods."


title: Flat Earth

text: The Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts of ancient Egypt show a similar cosmography; Nun (the Ocean) encircled "nbwt" ("dry lands" or "Islands").


title: Flat Earth

text: The Israelites also imagined the Earth to be a disc floating on water with an arched firmament above it that separated the Earth from the heavens. The sky was a solid dome with the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars embedded in it.


title: Flat Earth

text: This poetic tradition of an Earth-encircling ("gaiaokhos") sea (Oceanus) and a disc also appears in Stasinus of Cyprus, Mimnermus, Aeschylus, and Apollonius Rhodius.


title: Flat Earth

text: Homer's description of the disc cosmography on the shield of Achilles with the encircling ocean is repeated far later in Quintus Smyrnaeus' "Posthomerica" (4th century AD), which continues the narration of the Trojan War.


title: Flat Earth

text: Several pre-Socratic philosophers believed that the world was flat: Thales (c. 550 BC) according to several sources, and Leucippus (c. 440 BC) and Democritus (c. 460–370 BC) according to Aristotle.


title: Flat Earth

text: Thales thought that the Earth floated in water like a log. It has been argued, however, that Thales actually believed in a round Earth. Anaximander (c. 550 BC) believed that the Earth was a short cylinder with a flat, circular top that remained stable because it was the same distance from all things. Anaximenes of Miletus believed that "the Earth is flat and rides on air; in the same way the Sun and the Moon and the other heavenly bodies, which are all fiery, ride the air because of their flatness". Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 500 BC) thought that the Earth was flat, with its upper side touching the air, and the lower side extending without limit.


title: Flat Earth

text: Belief in a flat Earth continued into the 5th century BC. Anaxagoras (c. 450 BC) agreed that the Earth was flat, and his pupil Archelaus believed that the flat Earth was depressed in the middle like a saucer, to allow for the fact that the Sun does not rise and set at the same time for everyone.


title: Flat Earth

text: Hecataeus of Miletus believed that the Earth was flat and surrounded by water. Herodotus in his "Histories" ridiculed the belief that water encircled the world, yet most classicists agree that he still believed Earth was flat because of his descriptions of literal "ends" or "edges" of the Earth.


title: Flat Earth

text: The ancient Norse and Germanic peoples believed in a flat-Earth cosmography with the Earth surrounded by an ocean, with the axis mundi, a world tree (Yggdrasil), or pillar (Irminsul) in the centre. In the world-encircling ocean sat a snake called Jormungandr. The Norse creation account preserved in Gylfaginning (VIII) states that during the creation of the Earth, an impassable sea was placed around it:


title: Flat Earth

text: In ancient China, the prevailing belief was that the Earth was flat and square, while the heavens were round, an assumption virtually unquestioned until the introduction of European astronomy in the 17th century. The English sinologist Cullen emphasizes the point that there was no concept of a round Earth in ancient Chinese astronomy:


title: Flat Earth

text: The model of an egg was often used by Chinese astronomers such as Zhang Heng (78–139 AD) to describe the heavens as spherical:


title: Flat Earth

text: This analogy with a curved egg led some modern historians, notably Joseph Needham, to conjecture that Chinese astronomers were, after all, aware of the Earth's sphericity. The egg reference, however, was rather meant to clarify the relative position of the flat Earth to the heavens:


title: Flat Earth

text: Further examples cited by Needham supposed to demonstrate dissenting voices from the ancient Chinese consensus actually refer without exception to the Earth being square, not to it being flat. Accordingly, the 13th-century scholar Li Ye, who argued that the movements of the round heaven would be hindered by a square Earth, did not advocate a spherical Earth, but rather that its edge should be rounded off so as to be circular. However, Needham disagrees, affirming that Li Ye believed the Earth to be spherical, similar in shape to the heavens but much smaller. This was preconceived by the 4th-century scholar Yu Xi, who argued for the infinity of outer space surrounding the Earth and that the latter could be either square or round, in accordance to the shape of the heavens. When Chinese geographers of the 17th century, influenced by European cartography and astronomy, showed the Earth as a sphere that could be circumnavigated by sailing around the globe, they did so with formulaic terminology previously used by Zhang Heng to describe the spherical shape of the Sun and Moon (i.e. that they were as round as a crossbow bullet).


title: Flat Earth

text: As noted in the book "Huainanzi", in the 2nd century BC, Chinese astronomers effectively inverted Eratosthenes' calculation of the curvature of the Earth to calculate the height of the Sun above the Earth. By assuming the Earth was flat, they arrived at a distance of (approximately ). The "Zhoubi Suanjing" also discusses how to determine the distance of the Sun by measuring the length of noontime shadows at different latitudes, a method similar to Eratosthenes' measurement of the circumference of the Earth, but the "Zhoubi Suanjing" assumes that the Earth is flat.


title: Flat Earth

text: Pythagoras in the 6th century BC and Parmenides in the 5th century stated that the Earth is spherical, and this view spread rapidly in the Greek world. Around 330 BC, Aristotle maintained on the basis of physical theory and observational evidence that the Earth was spherical, and reported an estimate of its circumference. The Earth's circumference was first determined around 240 BC by Eratosthenes. By the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy had derived his maps from a globe and developed the system of latitude, longitude, and climes. His "Almagest" was written in Greek and only translated into Latin in the 11th century from Arabic translations.


title: Flat Earth

text: Lucretius (1st century BC) opposed the concept of a spherical Earth, because he considered that an infinite universe had no center towards which heavy bodies would tend. Thus, he thought the idea of animals walking around topsy-turvy under the Earth was absurd. By the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder was in a position to claim that everyone agreed on the spherical shape of Earth, though disputes continued regarding the nature of the antipodes, and how it is possible to keep the ocean in a curved shape.


title: Flat Earth

text: The Vedic texts depict the cosmos in many ways. One of the earliest Indian cosmological texts picture the Earth as one of a stack of flat disks.


title: Flat Earth

text: In the Vedic texts, Dyaus (heaven) and Prithvi (Earth) are compared to wheels on an axle, yielding a flat model. They are also described as bowls or leather bags, yielding a concave model. According to Macdonell: "the conception of the Earth being a disc surrounded by an ocean does not appear in the Samhitas. But it was naturally regarded as circular, being compared with a wheel (10.89) and expressly called circular (parimandala) in the "Shatapatha Brahmana"."


title: Flat Earth

text: By about the 5th century CE, the "siddhanta" astronomy texts of South Asia, particularly of Aryabhata, assume a spherical Earth as they develop mathematical methods for quantitative astronomy for calendar and time keeping.


title: Flat Earth

text: The medieval Indian texts called the Puranas describe the Earth as a flat-bottomed, circular disk with concentric oceans and continents. This general scheme is present not only in the Hindu cosmologies, but also in Buddhist and Jain cosmologies of South Asia. However, some Puranas include other models. The fifth canto of the "Bhagavata Purana", for example, includes sections that describe the Earth both as flat and spherical.


title: Flat Earth

text: During the early period of the Christian Church, the spherical view continued to be widely held, with some notable exceptions.


title: Flat Earth

text: Athenagoras, an eastern Christian writing around the year 175 CE, said that the Earth was spherical. Methodius (c. 290 AD), an eastern Christian writing against "the theory of the Chaldeans and the Egyptians" said: "Let us first lay bare ... the theory of the Chaldeans and the Egyptians. They say that the circumference of the universe is likened to the turnings of a well-rounded globe, the Earth being a central point. They say that since its outline is spherical, ... the Earth should be the center of the universe, around which the heaven is whirling." Lactantius, a western Christian writer and advisor to the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, writing sometime between 304 and 313 CE, ridiculed the notion of "antipodes" and the philosophers who fancied that "the universe is round like a ball. They also thought that heaven revolves in accordance with the motion of the heavenly bodies. ... For that reason, they constructed brass globes, as though after the figure of the universe." Arnobius, another eastern Christian writing sometime around 305 CE, described the round Earth: "In the first place, indeed, the world itself is neither right nor left. It has neither upper nor lower regions, nor front nor back. For whatever is round and bounded on every side by the circumference of a solid sphere, has no beginning or end ..."


title: Flat Earth

text: The influential theologian and philosopher Saint Augustine, one of the four Great Church Fathers of the Western Church, similarly objected to the "fable" of antipodes:


title: Flat Earth

text: Some historians do not view Augustine's scriptural commentaries as endorsing any particular cosmological model, endorsing instead the view that Augustine shared the common view of his contemporaries that the Earth is spherical, in line with his endorsement of science in "De Genesi ad litteram". C. P. E. Nothaft, responding to writers like Leo Ferrari who described Augustine as endorsing a flat earth, says that "...other recent writers on the subject treat Augustine’s acceptance of the earth’s spherical shape as a well-established fact".


title: Flat Earth

text: Diodorus of Tarsus, a leading figure in the School of Antioch and mentor of John Chrysostom, may have argued for a flat Earth; however, Diodorus' opinion on the matter is known only from a later criticism. Chrysostom, one of the four Great Church Fathers of the Eastern Church and Archbishop of Constantinople, explicitly espoused the idea, based on scripture, that the Earth floats miraculously on the water beneath the firmament. Athanasius the Great, Church Father and Patriarch of Alexandria, expressed a similar view in "Against the Heathen".


title: Flat Earth

text: "Christian Topography" (547) by the Alexandrian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, who had traveled as far as Sri Lanka and the source of the Blue Nile, is now widely considered the most valuable geographical document of the early medieval age, although it received relatively little attention from contemporaries. In it, the author repeatedly expounds the doctrine that the universe consists of only two places, the Earth below the firmament and heaven above it. Carefully drawing on arguments from scripture, he describes the Earth as a rectangle, 400 days' journey long by 200 wide, surrounded by four oceans and enclosed by four massive walls which support the firmament. The spherical Earth theory is contemptuously dismissed as "pagan".


title: Flat Earth

text: Severian, Bishop of Gabala ( 408), wrote that the Earth is flat and the Sun does not pass under it in the night, but "travels through the northern parts as if hidden by a wall". Basil of Caesarea (329–379) argued that the matter was theologically irrelevant.


title: Flat Earth

text: Early medieval Christian writers in the early Middle Ages felt little urge to assume flatness of the Earth, though they had fuzzy impressions of the writings of Ptolemy and Aristotle, relying more on Pliny.


title: Flat Earth

text: With the end of the Western Roman Empire, Western Europe entered the Middle Ages with great difficulties that affected the continent's intellectual production. Most scientific treatises of classical antiquity (in Greek) were unavailable, leaving only simplified summaries and compilations. In contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire did not fall, and it preserved the learning. Still, many textbooks of the Early Middle Ages supported the sphericity of the Earth in the western part of Europe.


title: Flat Earth

text: Europe's view of the shape of the Earth in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages may be best expressed by the writings of early Christian scholars:


title: Flat Earth

text: Bishop Isidore of Seville (560–636) taught in his widely read encyclopedia, the "Etymologies", diverse views such as that the Earth "resembles a wheel" resembling Anaximander in language and the map that he provided. This was widely interpreted as referring to a disc-shaped Earth. An illustration from Isidore's "De Natura Rerum" shows the five zones of the Earth as adjacent circles. Some have concluded that he thought the Arctic and Antarctic zones were adjacent to each other. He did not admit the possibility of antipodes, which he took to mean people dwelling on the opposite side of the Earth, considering them legendary and noting that there was no evidence for their existence. Isidore's T and O map, which was seen as representing a small part of a spherical Earth, continued to be used by authors through the Middle Ages, e.g. the 9th-century bishop Rabanus Maurus, who compared the habitable part of the northern hemisphere (Aristotle's northern temperate clime) with a wheel. At the same time, Isidore's works also gave the views of sphericity, for example, in chapter 28 of "De Natura Rerum", Isidore claims that the Sun orbits the Earth and illuminates the other side when it is night on this side. See French translation of "De Natura Rerum". In his other work "Etymologies", there are also affirmations that the sphere of the sky has Earth in its center and the sky being equally distant on all sides. Other researchers have argued these points as well. "The work remained unsurpassed until the thirteenth century and was regarded as the summit of all knowledge. It became an essential part of European medieval culture. Soon after the invention of typography it appeared many times in print." However, "The Scholastics – later medieval philosophers, theologians, and scientists – were helped by the Arabic translators and commentaries, but they hardly needed to struggle against a flat-Earth legacy from the early middle ages (500–1050). Early medieval writers often had fuzzy and imprecise impressions of both Ptolemy and Aristotle and relied more on Pliny, but they felt (with one exception), little urge to assume flatness."


title: Flat Earth

text: St Vergilius of Salzburg (c. 700–784), in the middle of the 8th century, discussed or taught some geographical or cosmographical ideas that St Boniface found sufficiently objectionable that he complained about them to Pope Zachary. The only surviving record of the incident is contained in Zachary's reply, dated 748, where he wrote:


title: Flat Earth

text: Some authorities have suggested that the sphericity of the Earth was among the aspects of Vergilius's teachings that Boniface and Zachary considered objectionable. Others have considered this unlikely, and take the wording of Zachary's response to indicate at most an objection to belief in the existence of humans living in the antipodes. In any case, there is no record of any further action having been taken against Vergilius. He was later appointed bishop of Salzburg and was canonised in the 13th century.


title: Flat Earth

text: A possible non-literary but graphic indication that people in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth (or perhaps the world) was a sphere is the use of the "orb" (globus cruciger) in the regalia of many kingdoms and of the Holy Roman Empire. It is attested from the time of the Christian late-Roman emperor Theodosius II (423) throughout the Middle Ages; the "Reichsapfel" was used in 1191 at the coronation of emperor Henry VI. However the word means "circle", and there is no record of a globe as a representation of the Earth since ancient times in the west until that of Martin Behaim in 1492. Additionally it could well be a representation of the entire "world" or cosmos.


title: Flat Earth

text: A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth". However, the work of these intellectuals may not have had significant influence on public opinion, and it is difficult to tell what the wider population may have thought of the shape of the Earth, if they considered the question at all.


title: Flat Earth

text: Hermannus Contractus (1013–1054) was among the earliest Christian scholars to estimate the circumference of Earth with Eratosthenes' method. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the most widely taught theologian of the Middle Ages, believed in a spherical Earth and took for granted that his readers also knew the Earth is round. Lectures in the medieval universities commonly advanced evidence in favor of the idea that the Earth was a sphere.


title: Flat Earth

text: Jill Tattersall shows that in many vernacular works in 12th- and 13th-century French texts the Earth was considered "round like a table" rather than "round like an apple". "In virtually all the examples quoted ... from epics and from non-'historical' romances (that is, works of a less learned character) the actual form of words used suggests strongly a circle rather than a sphere", though she notes that even in these works the language is ambiguous.


title: Flat Earth

text: Portuguese navigation down and around the coast of Africa in the latter half of the 1400s gave wide-scale observational evidence for Earth's sphericity. In these explorations, the Sun position moved more northward the further south the explorers travelled. Its position directly overhead at noon gave evidence for crossing the equator. These apparent solar motions in detail were more consistent with north–south curvature and a distant Sun, than with any flat-Earth explanation. The ultimate demonstration came when Ferdinand Magellan's expedition completed the first global circumnavigation in 1521. Antonio Pigafetta, one of the few survivors of the voyage, recorded the loss of a day in the course of the voyage, giving evidence for east–west curvature.


title: Flat Earth

text: The Abbasid Caliphate saw a great flowering of astronomy and mathematics in the 9th century AD. Muslim scholars of the past believed in a spherical Earth.


title: Flat Earth

text: The Quran mentions that the Earth ("al-arḍ") was "spread out". Prior to the introduction of Greek cosmology into the Islamic world, early Muslims tended to also view the Earth as flat, and Muslim traditionalists who rejected Greek philosophy continued to hold to this view later on while various theologians held different opinions. For example, a "tafsir" on Qur'an 13:3 saying that God stretched out the Earth was commented on by Al-Mawardi as being written "in response to those who claim that it is round like a ball". The same argument against a spherical Earth was made in a "tafsir" by Al-Qurtubi in the 13th century. which he said was the opinion of the scholars of the law.


title: Flat Earth

text: Beginning in the 10th century onwards, some Muslim traditionalists began to adopt the notion of a spherical Earth. For example, regarding the Qur'anic statements about the Earth spreading, the 12th-century commentary, the Tafsir al-Kabir (al-Razi) by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi states: "If it is said: Do the words 'And the Earth We spread out' indicate that it is flat? We would respond: Yes, because the Earth, even though it is round, is an enormous sphere, and each little part of this enormous sphere, when it is looked at, appears to be flat. As that is the case, this will dispel what they mentioned of confusion. The evidence for that is the verse in which Allah says (interpretation of the meaning): 'And the mountains as pegs' [an-Naba' 78:7]. He called them "awtaad" (pegs) even though these mountains may have large flat surfaces. And the same is true in this case." In the 11th century, Ibn Hazm claimed that "Evidence shows that the Earth is a sphere but public people say the opposite." He added: "None of those who deserve being Imams for Muslims has denied that Earth is round. And we have not received anything indicates a denial, not even a single word."


title: Flat Earth

text: A spherical terrestrial globe was introduced to Yuan-era Khanbaliq (i.e. Beijing) in 1267 by the Persian astronomer Jamal ad-Din, but it is not known to have made an impact on the traditional Chinese conception of the shape of the Earth. As late as 1595, an early Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, recorded that the Ming-dynasty Chinese say: "The Earth is flat and square, and the sky is a round canopy; they did not succeed in conceiving the possibility of the antipodes."


title: Flat Earth

text: In the 17th century, the idea of a spherical Earth spread in China due to the influence of the Jesuits, who held high positions as astronomers at the imperial court. Matteo Ricci, in collaboration with Chinese cartographers and translator Li Zhizao, published the "Kunyu Wanguo Quantu" in 1602, the first Chinese world map based on European discoveries. The astronomical and geographical treatise "Gezhicao" () written in 1648 by Xiong Mingyu () explained that the Earth was spherical, not flat or square, and could be circumnavigated.


title: Flat Earth

text: In the 19th century, a historical myth arose which held that the predominant cosmological doctrine during the Middle Ages was that the Earth was flat. An early proponent of this myth was the American writer Washington Irving, who maintained that Christopher Columbus had to overcome the opposition of churchmen to gain sponsorship for his voyage of exploration. Later significant advocates of this view were John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, who used it as a major element in their advocacy of the thesis that there was a long-lasting and essential conflict between science and religion. Some studies of the historical connections between science and religion have demonstrated that theories of their mutual antagonism ignore examples of their mutual support.


title: Flat Earth

text: Subsequent studies of medieval science have shown that most scholars in the Middle Ages, including those read by Christopher Columbus, maintained that the Earth was spherical.


title: Flat Earth

text: In the modern era, the pseudoscientific belief in a flat Earth originated with the English writer Samuel Rowbotham with the 1849 pamphlet "Zetetic Astronomy". Lady Elizabeth Blount established the Universal Zetetic Society in 1893, which published journals. Other notable flat-Earthers in the 19th and early 20th centuries include William Carpenter, E. W. Bullinger, John Jasper, Paul Kruger, and Wilbur Glenn Voliva. In 1956, Samuel Shenton set up the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), better known as the "Flat Earth Society" from Dover, England, as a direct descendant of the Universal Zetetic Society.


title: Flat Earth

text: In the Internet era, the availability of communications technology and social media like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have made it easy for individuals, famous or not, to spread disinformation and attract others to erroneous ideas, including that of the flat Earth.


title: Flat Earth

text: To maintain belief in the face of overwhelming contrary, publicly available empirical evidence accumulated in the Space Age, modern flat-Earthers must generally embrace some form of conspiracy theory out of the necessity of explaining why major institutions such as governments, media outlets, schools, scientists, and airlines all assert that the world is a sphere. They tend to not trust observations they have not made themselves, and often distrust or disagree with each other.


title: Flat Earth

text: The term "flat-earth-man", used in a derogatory sense to mean anyone who holds ridiculously antiquated or impossible views, predates the more compact "flat-earther". It was recorded in 1908: "Fewer votes than one would have thought possible for any human candidate, were he even a flat-earth-man." According to the "Oxford English Dictionary", the first use of the term "flat-Earther" was in 1934 in "Punch" magazine: "Without being a bigoted flat-earther, [Mercator] perceived the nuisance ... of fiddling about with globes ... in order to discover the South Seas."


title: Atlantis

text: Atlantis () is a fictional island mentioned in an allegory on the hubris of nations in Plato's works "Timaeus" and "Critias", wherein it represents the antagonist naval power that besieges "Ancient Athens", the pseudo-historic embodiment of Plato's ideal state in "The Republic". In the story, Athens repels the Atlantean attack unlike any other nation of the known world, supposedly bearing witness to the superiority of Plato's concept of a state. The story concludes with Atlantis falling out of favor with the deities and submerging into the Atlantic Ocean.


title: Atlantis

text: Despite its minor importance in Plato's work, the Atlantis story has had a considerable impact on literature. The allegorical aspect of Atlantis was taken up in utopian works of several Renaissance writers, such as Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis" and Thomas More's "Utopia". On the other hand, nineteenth-century amateur scholars misinterpreted Plato's narrative as historical tradition, most famously Ignatius L. Donnelly in his "". Plato's vague indications of the time of the events (more than 9,000 years before his time) and the alleged location of Atlantis ("beyond the Pillars of Hercules") gave rise to much pseudoscientific speculation. As a consequence, Atlantis has become a byword for any and all supposed advanced prehistoric lost civilizations and continues to inspire contemporary fiction, from comic books to films.


title: Atlantis

text: While present-day philologists and classicists agree on the story's fictional character, there is still debate on what served as its inspiration. Plato is known to have freely borrowed some of his allegories and metaphors from older traditions, as he did, for instance, with the story of Gyges. This led a number of scholars to investigate possible inspiration of Atlantis from Egyptian records of the Thera eruption, the Sea Peoples invasion, or the Trojan War. Others have rejected this chain of tradition as implausible and insist that Plato created an entirely fictional account, drawing loose inspiration from contemporary events such as the failed Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415–413 BC or the destruction of Helike in 373 BC.


title: Atlantis

text: The only primary sources for Atlantis are Plato's dialogues "Timaeus" and "Critias"; all other mentions of the island are based on them. The dialogues claim to quote Solon, who visited Egypt between 590 and 580 BC; they state that he translated Egyptian records of Atlantis. Plato introduced Atlantis in "Timaeus", written in 360 BC:


title: Atlantis

text: The four people appearing in those two dialogues are the politicians Critias and Hermocrates as well as the philosophers Socrates and Timaeus of Locri, although only Critias speaks of Atlantis. In his works Plato makes extensive use of the Socratic method in order to discuss contrary positions within the context of a supposition.


title: Atlantis

text: The "Timaeus" begins with an introduction, followed by an account of the creations and structure of the universe and ancient civilizations. In the introduction, Socrates muses about the perfect society, described in Plato's "Republic" (), and wonders if he and his guests might recollect a story which exemplifies such a society. Critias mentions a tale he considered to be historical, that would make the perfect example, and he then follows by describing Atlantis as is recorded in the "Critias". In his account, ancient Athens seems to represent the "perfect society" and Atlantis its opponent, representing the very antithesis of the "perfect" traits described in the "Republic".


title: Atlantis

text: According to Critias, the Hellenic deities of old divided the land so that each deity might have their own lot; Poseidon was appropriately, and to his liking, bequeathed the island of Atlantis. The island was larger than Ancient Libya and Asia Minor combined, but it was later sunk by an earthquake and became an impassable mud shoal, inhibiting travel to any part of the ocean. Plato asserted that the Egyptians described Atlantis as an island consisting mostly of mountains in the northern portions and along the shore and encompassing a great plain in an oblong shape in the south "extending in one direction three thousand "stadia" [about 555 km; 345 mi], but across the center inland it was two thousand stadia [about 370 km; 230 mi]." Fifty stadia [9 km; 6 mi] from the coast was a mountain that was low on all sides ... broke it off all round about ... the central island itself was five stades in diameter [about 0.92 km; 0.57 mi].


title: Atlantis

text: In Plato's metaphorical tale, Poseidon fell in love with Cleito, the daughter of Evenor and Leucippe, who bore him five pairs of male twins. The eldest of these, Atlas, was made rightful king of the entire island and the ocean (called the Atlantic Ocean in his honor), and was given the mountain of his birth and the surrounding area as his fiefdom. Atlas's twin Gadeirus, or Eumelus in Greek, was given the extremity of the island toward the pillars of Hercules. The other four pairs of twins—Ampheres and Evaemon, Mneseus and Autochthon, Elasippus and Mestor, and Azaes and Diaprepes—were also given "rule over many men, and a large territory."


title: Atlantis

text: Poseidon carved the mountain where his love dwelt into a palace and enclosed it with three circular moats of increasing width, varying from one to three stadia and separated by rings of land proportional in size. The Atlanteans then built bridges northward from the mountain, making a route to the rest of the island. They dug a great canal to the sea, and alongside the bridges carved tunnels into the rings of rock so that ships could pass into the city around the mountain; they carved docks from the rock walls of the moats. Every passage to the city was guarded by gates and towers, and a wall surrounded each ring of the city. The walls were constructed of red, white, and black rock, quarried from the moats, and were covered with brass, tin, and the precious metal orichalcum, respectively.


title: Atlantis

text: According to Critias, 9,000 years before his lifetime a war took place between those outside the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar and those who dwelt within them. The Atlanteans had conquered the parts of Libya within the Pillars of Hercules, as far as Egypt, and the European continent as far as Tyrrhenia, and had subjected its people to slavery. The Athenians led an alliance of resistors against the Atlantean empire, and as the alliance disintegrated, prevailed alone against the empire, liberating the occupied lands.


title: Atlantis

text: The logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos wrote an earlier work entitled "Atlantis", of which only a few fragments survive. Hellanicus' work appears to have been a genealogical one concerning the daughters of Atlas (Ἀτλαντὶς in Greek means "of Atlas"), but some authors have suggested a possible connection with Plato's island. John V. Luce notes that when Plato writes about the genealogy of Atlantis's kings, he writes in the same style as Hellanicus, suggesting a similarity between a fragment of Hellanicus's work and an account in the "Critias". Rodney Castleden suggests that Plato may have borrowed his title from Hellanicus, who may have based his work on an earlier work about Atlantis.


title: Atlantis

text: Castleden has pointed out that Plato wrote of Atlantis in 359 BC, when he returned to Athens from Sicily. He notes a number of parallels between the physical organisation and fortifications of Syracuse and Plato's description of Atlantis. Gunnar Rudberg was the first who elaborated upon the idea that Plato's attempt to realize his political ideas in the city of Syracuse could have heavily inspired the Atlantis account.


title: Atlantis

text: Some ancient writers viewed Atlantis as fictional or metaphorical myth; others believed it to be real. Aristotle believed that Plato, his teacher, had invented the island to teach philosophy. The philosopher Crantor, a student of Plato's student Xenocrates, is cited often as an example of a writer who thought the story to be historical fact. His work, a commentary on "Timaeus", is lost, but Proclus, a Neoplatonist of the fifth century AD, reports on it. The passage in question has been represented in the modern literature either as claiming that Crantor visited Egypt, had conversations with priests, and saw hieroglyphs confirming the story, or, as claiming that he learned about them from other visitors to Egypt. Proclus wrote:


title: Atlantis

text: The next sentence is often translated "Crantor adds, that this is testified by the prophets of the Egyptians, who assert that these particulars [which are narrated by Plato] are written on pillars which are still preserved." But in the original, the sentence starts not with the name Crantor but with the ambiguous "He"; whether this referred to Crantor or to Plato is the subject of considerable debate. Proponents of both Atlantis as a metaphorical myth and Atlantis as history have argued that the pronoun refers to Crantor.


title: Atlantis

text: Alan Cameron argues that the pronoun should be interpreted as referring to Plato, and that, when Proclus writes that "we must bear in mind concerning this whole feat of the Athenians, that it is neither a mere myth nor unadorned history, although some take it as history and others as myth", he is treating "Crantor's view as mere personal opinion, nothing more; in fact he first quotes and then dismisses it as representing one of the two unacceptable extremes".


title: Atlantis

text: Cameron also points out that whether "he" refers to Plato or to Crantor, the statement does not support conclusions such as Otto Muck's "Crantor came to Sais and saw there in the temple of Neith the column, completely covered with hieroglyphs, on which the history of Atlantis was recorded. Scholars translated it for him, and he testified that their account fully agreed with Plato's account of Atlantis" or J. V. Luce's suggestion that Crantor sent "a special enquiry to Egypt" and that he may simply be referring to Plato's own claims.


title: Atlantis

text: Another passage from the commentary by Proclus on the "Timaeus" gives a description of the geography of Atlantis:


title: Atlantis

text: Other ancient historians and philosophers who believed in the existence of Atlantis were Strabo and Posidonius. Some have theorized that, before the sixth century BC, the "Pillars of Hercules" may have applied to mountains on either side of the Gulf of Laconia, and also may have been part of the pillar cult of the Aegean. The mountains stood at either side of the southernmost gulf in Greece, the largest in the Peloponnese, and it opens onto the Mediterranean Sea. This would have placed Atlantis in the Mediterranean, lending credence to many details in Plato's discussion.


title: Atlantis

text: The fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus, relying on a lost work by Timagenes, a historian writing in the first century BC, writes that the Druids of Gaul said that part of the inhabitants of Gaul had migrated there from distant islands. Some have understood Ammianus's testimony as a claim that at the time of Atlantis's sinking into the sea, its inhabitants fled to western Europe; but Ammianus, in fact, says that "the Drasidae (Druids) recall that a part of the population is indigenous but others also migrated in from islands and lands beyond the Rhine" ("Res Gestae" 15.9), an indication that the immigrants came to Gaul from the north (Britain, the Netherlands, or Germany), not from a theorized location in the Atlantic Ocean to the south-west. Instead, the Celts who dwelled along the ocean were reported to venerate twin gods, (Dioscori), who appeared to them coming from that ocean.


title: Atlantis

text: During the early first century, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo wrote about the destruction of Atlantis in his "On the Eternity of the World", xxvi. 141, in a longer passage allegedly citing Aristotle's successor Theophrastus:


title: Atlantis

text: The theologian Joseph Barber Lightfoot ("Apostolic Fathers", 1885, II, p. 84) noted on this passage: "Clement may possibly be referring to some known, but hardly accessible land, lying without the pillars of Hercules. But more probably he contemplated some unknown land in the far west beyond the ocean, like the fabled Atlantis of Plato ..."


title: Atlantis

text: Other early Christian writers wrote about Atlantis, although they had mixed views on whether it once existed or was an untrustworthy myth of pagan origin. Tertullian believed Atlantis was once real and wrote that in the Atlantic Ocean once existed "[the isle] that was equal in size to Libya or Asia" referring to Plato's geographical description of Atlantis. The early Christian apologist writer Arnobius also believed Atlantis once existed, but blamed its destruction on pagans.


title: Atlantis

text: Cosmas Indicopleustes in the sixth century wrote of Atlantis in his "Christian Topography" in an attempt to prove his theory that the world was flat and surrounded by water:


title: Atlantis

text: Aside from Plato's original account, modern interpretations regarding Atlantis are an amalgamation of diverse, speculative movements that began in the sixteenth century, when scholars began to identify Atlantis with the New World. Francisco Lopez de Gomara was the first to state that Plato was referring to America, as did Francis Bacon and Alexander von Humboldt; Janus Joannes Bircherod said in 1663 "orbe novo non-novo" ("the New World is not new"). Athanasius Kircher accepted Plato's account as literally true, describing Atlantis as a small continent in the Atlantic Ocean.


title: Atlantis

text: Contemporary perceptions of Atlantis share roots with Mayanism, which can be traced to the beginning of the Modern Age, when European imaginations were fueled by their initial encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Americas. From this era sprang apocalyptic and utopian visions that would inspire many subsequent generations of theorists.


title: Atlantis

text: Most of these interpretations are considered pseudohistory, pseudoscience, or pseudoarchaeology, as they have presented their works as academic or scientific, but lack the standards or criteria.


title: Atlantis

text: The Flemish cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius is believed to have been the first person to imagine that the continents were joined before drifting to their present positions. In the 1596 edition of his "Thesaurus Geographicus" he wrote: "Unless it be a fable, the island of Gadir or Gades will be the remaining part of the island of Atlantis or America, which was not sunk (as Plato reports in the "Timaeus") so much as torn away from Europe and Africa by earthquakes and flood... The traces of the ruptures are shown by the projections of Europe and Africa and the indentations of America in the parts of the coasts of these three said lands that face each other to anyone who, using a map of the world, carefully considered them. So that anyone may say with Strabo in Book 2, that what Plato says of the island of Atlantis on the authority of Solon is not a figment."


title: Atlantis

text: The term "utopia" (from "no place") was coined by Sir Thomas More in his sixteenth-century work of fiction "Utopia". Inspired by Plato's Atlantis and travelers' accounts of the Americas, More described an imaginary land set in the New World. His idealistic vision established a connection between the Americas and utopian societies, a theme that Bacon discussed in "The New Atlantis" (). A character in the narrative gives a history of Atlantis that is similar to Plato's and places Atlantis in America. People had begun believing that the Mayan and Aztec ruins could possibly be the remnants of Atlantis.


title: Atlantis

text: Much speculation began as to the origins of the Maya, which led to a variety of narratives and publications that tried to rationalize the discoveries within the context of the Bible and that had undertones of racism in their connections between the Old and New World. The Europeans believed the indigenous people to be inferior and incapable of building that which was now in ruins and by sharing a common history, they insinuate that another race must have been responsible.


title: Atlantis

text: In the middle and late nineteenth century, several renowned Mesoamerican scholars, starting with Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, and including Edward Herbert Thompson and Augustus Le Plongeon, formally proposed that Atlantis was somehow related to Mayan and Aztec culture.


title: Atlantis

text: The French scholar Brasseur de Bourbourg traveled extensively through Mesoamerica in the mid-1800s, and was renowned for his translations of Mayan texts, most notably the sacred book Popol Vuh, as well as a comprehensive history of the region. Soon after these publications, however, Brasseur de Bourbourg lost his academic credibility, due to his claim that the Maya peoples had descended from the Toltecs, people he believed were the surviving population of the racially superior civilization of Atlantis. His work combined with the skillful, romantic illustrations of Jean Frederic Waldeck, which visually alluded to Egypt and other aspects of the Old World, created an authoritative fantasy that excited much interest in the connections between worlds.


title: Atlantis

text: Inspired by Brasseur de Bourbourg's diffusion theories, the pseudoarchaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon traveled to Mesoamerica and performed some of the first excavations of many famous Mayan ruins. Le Plongeon invented narratives, such as the kingdom of Mu saga, which romantically drew connections to him, his wife Alice, and Egyptian deities Osiris and Isis, as well as to Heinrich Schliemann, who had just discovered the ancient city of Troy from Homer's epic poetry (that had been described as merely mythical). He also believed that he had found connections between the Greek and Mayan languages, which produced a narrative of the destruction of Atlantis.


title: Atlantis

text: The 1882 publication of "" by Ignatius L. Donnelly stimulated much popular interest in Atlantis. He was greatly inspired by early works in Mayanism, and like them, attempted to establish that all known ancient civilizations were descended from Atlantis, which he saw as a technologically sophisticated, more advanced culture. Donnelly drew parallels between creation stories in the Old and New Worlds, attributing the connections to Atlantis, where he believed the Biblical Garden of Eden existed. As implied by the title of his book, he also believed that Atlantis was destroyed by the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible.


title: Atlantis

text: Donnelly is credited as the "father of the nineteenth century Atlantis revival" and is the reason the myth endures today. He unintentionally promoted an alternative method of inquiry to history and science, and the idea that myths contain hidden information that opens them to "ingenious" interpretation by people who believe they have new or special insight.


title: Atlantis

text: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophists, took up Donnelly's interpretations when she wrote "The Secret Doctrine" (1888), which she claimed was originally dictated in Atlantis. She maintained that the Atlanteans were cultural heroes (contrary to Plato, who describes them mainly as a military threat). She believed in a form of racial evolution (as opposed to primate evolution). In her process of evolution the Atlanteans were the fourth "root race", which were succeeded by the fifth, the "Aryan race", which she identified with the modern human race.


title: Atlantis

text: In her book, Blavatsky reported that the civilization of Atlantis reached its peak between 1,000,000 and 900,000 years ago, but destroyed itself through internal warfare brought about by the dangerous use of psychic and supernatural powers of the inhabitants. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy and Waldorf Schools, along with other well known Theosophists, such as Annie Besant, also wrote of cultural evolution in much the same vein. Other occultists followed the same lead, at least to the point of tracing the lineage of occult practices back to Atlantis. Among the most famous is Dion Fortune in her "Esoteric Orders and Their Work".


title: Atlantis

text: Drawing on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and Hanns Hörbiger, Egon Friedell started his book "", and thus his historical analysis of antiquity, with the ancient culture of Atlantis. The book was published in 1940.


title: Atlantis

text: Blavatsky was also inspired by the work of the 18th-century astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who had "Orientalized" the Atlantis myth in his mythical continent of Hyperborea, a reference to Greek myths featuring a Northern European region of the same name, home to a giant, godlike race. Dan Edelstein claims that her reshaping of this theory in "The Secret Doctrine" provided the Nazis with a mythological precedent and a pretext for their ideological platform and their subsequent genocide. However, Blavatsky's writings mention that the Atlantean were in fact olive-skinned peoples with Mongoloid traits who were the ancestors of modern Native Americans, Mongolians, and Malayans.


title: Atlantis

text: The idea that the Atlanteans were Hyperborean, Nordic supermen who originated in the Northern Atlantic or even in the far North, was popular in the German ariosophic movement around 1900, propagated by Guido von List and others. It gave its name to the "Thule Gesellschaft", an antisemite Münich lodge, which preceded the German Nazi Party (see Thule). The scholars (1920) and Herman Wirth (1928) were the first to speak of a "Nordic-Atlantean" or "Aryan-Nordic" master race that spread from Atlantis over the Northern Hemisphere and beyond. The Hyperboreans were contrasted with the Jewish people. Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg (in "The Myth of the Twentieth Century", 1930) and SS-leader Heinrich Himmler made it part of the official doctrine. The idea was followed up by the adherents of Esoteric Nazism such as Julius Evola (1934) and, more recently, Miguel Serrano (1978).


title: Atlantis

text: The idea of Atlantis as the homeland of the Caucasian race would contradict the beliefs of older Esoteric and Theosophic groups, which taught that the Atlanteans were non-Caucasian brown-skinned peoples. Modern Esoteric groups, including the Theosophic Society, do not consider Atlantean society to have been superior or Utopian—they rather consider it a lower stage of evolution.


title: Atlantis

text: The clairvoyant Edgar Cayce spoke frequently of Atlantis. During his "life readings", he claimed that many of his subjects were reincarnations of people who had lived there. By tapping into their collective consciousness, the "Akashic Records" (a term borrowed from Theosophy), Cayce declared that he was able to give detailed descriptions of the lost continent. He also asserted that Atlantis would "rise" again in the 1960s (sparking much popularity of the myth in that decade) and that there is a "Hall of Records" beneath the Egyptian Sphinx which holds the historical texts of Atlantis.


title: Atlantis

text: As continental drift became widely accepted during the 1960s, and the increased understanding of plate tectonics demonstrated the impossibility of a lost continent in the geologically recent past, most "Lost Continent" theories of Atlantis began to wane in popularity.


title: Atlantis

text: Plato scholar Julia Annas, Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, had this to say on the matter:


title: Atlantis

text: One of the proposed explanations for the historical context of the Atlantis story is a warning of Plato to his contemporary fourth-century fellow-citizens against their striving for naval power.


title: Atlantis

text: Kenneth Feder points out that Critias's story in the "Timaeus" provides a major clue. In the dialogue, Critias says, referring to Socrates' hypothetical society:


title: Atlantis

text: Feder quotes A. E. Taylor, who wrote, "We could not be told much more plainly that the whole narrative of Solon's conversation with the priests and his intention of writing the poem about Atlantis are an invention of Plato's fancy."


title: Atlantis

text: Since Donnelly's day, there have been dozens of locations proposed for Atlantis, to the point where the name has become a generic concept, divorced from the specifics of Plato's account. This is reflected in the fact that many proposed sites are not within the Atlantic at all. Few today are scholarly or archaeological hypotheses, while others have been made by psychic (e.g., Edgar Cayce) or other pseudoscientific means. (The Atlantis researchers Jacques Collina-Girard and Georgeos Díaz-Montexano, for instance, each claim the other's hypothesis is pseudoscience.) Many of the proposed sites share some of the characteristics of the Atlantis story (water, catastrophic end, relevant time period), but none has been demonstrated to be a true historical Atlantis.


title: Atlantis

text: Most of the historically proposed locations are in or near the Mediterranean Sea: islands such as Sardinia, Crete, Santorini (Thera), Sicily, Cyprus, and Malta; land-based cities or states such as Troy, Tartessos, and Tantalis (in the province of Manisa, Turkey); Israel-Sinai or Canaan; and northwestern Africa, including the Richat Structure in Mauritania.


title: Atlantis

text: The Thera eruption, dated to the seventeenth or sixteenth century BC, caused a large tsunami that some experts hypothesize devastated the Minoan civilization on the nearby island of Crete, further leading some to believe that this may have been the catastrophe that inspired the story. In the area of the Black Sea the following locations have been proposed: Bosporus and Ancomah (a legendary place near Trabzon).


title: Atlantis

text: Others have noted that, before the sixth century BC, the mountains on either side of the Laconian Gulf were called the "Pillars of Hercules", and they could be the geographical location being described in ancient reports upon which Plato was basing his story. The mountains stood at either side of the southernmost gulf in Greece, the largest in the Peloponnese, and that gulf opens onto the Mediterranean Sea. If from the beginning of discussions, misinterpretation of Gibraltar as the location rather than being at the Gulf of Laconia, would lend itself to many erroneous concepts regarding the location of Atlantis. Plato may have not been aware of the difference. The Laconian pillars open to the south toward Crete and beyond which is Egypt. The Thera eruption and the Late Bronze Age collapse affected that area and might have been the devastation to which the sources used by Plato referred. Significant events such as these would have been likely material for tales passed from one generation to another for almost a thousand years.


title: Atlantis

text: The location of Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean has a certain appeal given the closely related names. Popular culture often places Atlantis there, perpetuating the original Platonic setting as they understand it. The Canary Islands and Madeira Islands have been identified as a possible location, west of the Straits of Gibraltar, but in relative proximity to the Mediterranean Sea. Detailed studies of their geomorphology and geology have demonstrated, however, that they have been steadily uplifted, without any significant periods of subsidence, over the last four million years, by geologic processes such as erosional unloading, gravitational unloading, lithospheric flexure induced by adjacent islands, and volcanic underplating.


title: Atlantis

text: Various islands or island groups in the Atlantic were also identified as possible locations, notably the Azores. Similarly, cores of sediment covering the ocean bottom surrounding the Azores and other evidence demonstrate that it has been an undersea plateau for millions of years. The area is known for its volcanism however, which is associated with rifting along the Azores Triple Junction. The spread of the crust along the existing faults and fractures has produced many volcanic and seismic events. The area is supported by a buoyant upwelling in the deeper mantle, which some associate with an Azores hotspot. Most of the volcanic activity has occurred primarily along the Terceira Rift. From the beginning of the islands' settlement, around the 15th century, there have been about 30 volcanic eruptions (terrestrial and submarine) as well as numerous, powerful earthquakes. The island of São Miguel in the Azores is the site of the Sete Cidades volcano and caldera, which are the byproducts of historical volcanic activity in the Azores.


title: Atlantis

text: In 2004, Swedish physiographist Ulf Erlingsson proposed that the legend of Atlantis was based on Stone Age Ireland. He later stated that he does not believe that Atlantis ever existed but maintained that his hypothesis that its description matches Ireland's geography has a 99.8% probability. The director of the National Museum of Ireland commented that there was no archaeology supporting this.


title: Atlantis

text: Several hypotheses place the sunken island in northern Europe, including Doggerland in the North Sea, and Sweden (by Olof Rudbeck in "Atland", 1672–1702). Doggerland, as well as Viking Bergen Island, is thought to have been flooded by a megatsunami following the Storegga Slide of c. 6100 BC. Some have proposed the Celtic Shelf as a possible location, and that there is a link to Ireland.


title: Atlantis

text: In 2011, a team, working on a documentary for the National Geographic Channel, led by Professor Richard Freund from the University of Hartford, claimed to have found possible evidence of Atlantis in southwestern Andalusia. The team identified its possible location within the marshlands of the Doñana National Park, in the area that once was the Lacus Ligustinus, between the Huelva, Cádiz, and Seville provinces, and they speculated that Atlantis had been destroyed by a tsunami, extrapolating results from a previous study by Spanish researchers, published four years earlier.


title: Atlantis

text: Spanish scientists have dismissed Freund's speculations, claiming that he sensationalised their work. The anthropologist Juan Villarías-Robles, who works with the Spanish National Research Council, said, "Richard Freund was a newcomer to our project and appeared to be involved in his own very controversial issue concerning King Solomon's search for ivory and gold in Tartessos, the well documented settlement in the Doñana area established in the first millennium BC", and described Freund's claims as "fanciful".


title: Atlantis

text: A similar theory had previously been put forward by a German researcher, Rainer W. Kühne, that is based only on satellite imagery and places Atlantis in the Marismas de Hinojos, north of the city of Cádiz. Before that, the historian Adolf Schulten had stated in the 1920s that Plato had used Tartessos as the basis for his Atlantis myth.


title: Atlantis

text: Several writers, such as Flavio Barbiero as early as 1974, have speculated that Antarctica is the site of Atlantis. A number of claims involve the Caribbean, such as an alleged underwater formation off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula in Cuba. The adjacent Bahamas or the folkloric Bermuda Triangle have been proposed as well. Areas in the Pacific and Indian Oceans have also been proposed, including Indonesia (i.e. Sundaland). The stories of a lost continent off the coast of India, named "Kumari Kandam", have inspired some to draw parallels to Atlantis.


title: Atlantis

text: In order to give his account of Atlantis verisimilitude, Plato mentions that the story was heard by Solon in Egypt, and transmitted orally over several generations through the family of Dropides, until it reached Critias, a dialogue speaker in "Timaeus" and "Critias". Solon had supposedly tried to adapt the Atlantis oral tradition into a poem (that if published, was to be greater than the works of Hesiod and Homer). While it was never completed, Solon passed on the story to Dropides. Modern classicists deny the existence of Solon's Atlantis poem and the story as an oral tradition. Instead, Plato is thought to be the sole inventor or fabricator.


title: Atlantis

text: Hellanicus of Lesbos used the word "Atlantis" as the title for a poem published before Plato, a fragment of which may be Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 11, 1359. This work only describes the Atlantides (the daughters of Atlas), however, and has no relation to Plato's Atlantis account.


title: Atlantis

text: In the new era, the third century AD Neoplatonist Zoticus wrote an epic poem based on Plato's account of Atlantis. Plato's work may already have inspired parodic imitation, however. Writing only a few decades after the "Timaeus" and "Critias", the historian Theopompus of Chios wrote of a land beyond the ocean known as Meropis. This description was included in Book 8 of his "Philippica", which contains a dialogue between Silenus and King Midas. Silenus describes the Meropids, a race of men who grow to twice normal size, and inhabit two cities on the island of Meropis: "Eusebes" (, "Pious-town") and "Machimos" (, "Fighting-town"). He also reports that an army of ten million soldiers crossed the ocean to conquer Hyperborea, but abandoned this proposal when they realized that the Hyperboreans were the luckiest people on earth. Heinz-Günther Nesselrath has argued that these and other details of Silenus' story are meant as imitation and exaggeration of the Atlantis story, by parody, for the purpose of exposing Plato's ideas to ridicule.


title: Atlantis

text: The creation of Utopian and dystopian fictions was renewed after the Renaissance, most notably in Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis" (1627), the description of an ideal society that he located off the western coast of America. Thomas Heyrick (1649-1694) followed him with "The New Atlantis" (1687), a satirical poem in three parts. His new continent of uncertain location, perhaps even a floating island either in the sea or the sky, serves as background for his exposure of what he described in a second edition as "A True Character of Popery and Jesuitism".


title: Atlantis

text: The title of "The New Atalantis" by Delarivier Manley (1709), distinguished from the two others by the single letter, is an equally dystopian work but set this time on a fictional Mediterranean island. In it sexual violence and exploitation is made a metaphor for the hypocritical behaviour of politicians in their dealings with the general public. In Manley's case, the target of satire was the Whig Party, while in David Maclean Parry's "The Scarlet Empire" (1906) it is Socialism as practised in foundered Atlantis. It was followed in Russia by Velimir Khlebnikov's poem "The Fall of Atlantis" ("Gibel' Atlantidy", 1912), which is set in a future rationalist dystopia that has discovered the secret of immortality and is so dedicated to progress that it has lost touch with the past. When the high priest of this ideology is tempted by a slave girl into an act of irrationality, he murders her and precipitates a second flood, above which her severed head floats vengefully among the stars.


title: Atlantis

text: A slightly later work, "The Ancient of Atlantis" (Boston, 1915) by Albert Armstrong Manship, expounds the Atlantean wisdom that is to redeem the earth. Its three parts consist of a verse narrative of the life and training of an Atlantean wise one, followed by his Utopian moral teachings and then a psychic drama set in modern times in which a reincarnated child embodying the lost wisdom is reborn on earth.


title: Atlantis

text: In Hispanic eyes, Atlantis had a more intimate interpretation. The land had been a colonial power which, although it had brought civilization to ancient Europe, had also enslaved its peoples. Its tyrannical fall from grace had contributed to the fate that had overtaken it, but now its disappearance had unbalanced the world. This was the point of view of Jacint Verdaguer's vast mythological epic "L'Atlantida" (1877). After the sinking of the former continent, Hercules travels east across the Atlantic to found the city of Barcelona and then departs westward again to the Hesperides. The story is told by a hermit to a shipwrecked mariner, who is inspired to follow in his tracks and so "call the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old". This mariner, of course, was Christopher Columbus.


title: Atlantis

text: Verdaguer's poem was written in Catalan, but was widely translated in both Europe and Hispano-America. One response was the similarly entitled Argentinian "Atlantida" of Olegario Víctor Andrade (1881), which sees in "Enchanted Atlantis that Plato foresaw, a golden promise to the fruitful race" of Latins. The bad example of the colonising world remains, however. José Juan Tablada characterises its threat in his "De Atlántida" (1894) through the beguiling picture of the lost world populated by the underwater creatures of Classical myth, among whom is the Siren of its final stanza with


title: Atlantis

text: There is a similar ambivalence in Janus Djurhuus' six-stanza "Atlantis" (1917), where a celebration of the Faroese linguistic revival grants it an ancient pedigree by linking Greek to Norse legend. In the poem a female figure rising from the sea against a background of Classical palaces is recognised as a priestess of Atlantis. The poet recalls "that the Faroes lie there in the north Atlantic Ocean/ where before lay the poet-dreamt lands," but also that in Norse belief, such a figure only appears to those about to drown.


title: Atlantis

text: The fact that Atlantis is a lost land has made of it a metaphor for something no longer attainable. For the American poet Edith Willis Linn Forbes (1865-1945), "The Lost Atlantis" stands for idealisation of the past; the present moment can only be treasured once that is realised. Ella Wheeler Wilcox finds the location of "The Lost Land" (1910) in one's carefree youthful past. Similarly, for the Irish poet Eavan Boland in "Atlantis, a lost sonnet" (2007), the idea was defined when "the old fable-makers searched hard for a word/ to convey that what is gone is gone forever".


title: Atlantis

text: For some male poets too, the idea of Atlantis is constructed from what cannot be obtained. Charles Bewley in his Newdigate Prize poem (1910) thinks it grows from dissatisfaction with one's condition,


title: Atlantis

text: in a dream of Atlantis. Similarly for the Australian Gary Catalano in a 1982 prose poem, it is "a vision that sank under the weight of its own perfection". W. H. Auden, however, suggests a way out of such frustration through the metaphor of journeying toward Atlantis in his poem of 1941. While travelling, he advises the one setting out, you will meet with many definitions of the goal in view, only realising at the end that the way has all the time led inward.


title: Atlantis

text: A few late-19th century verse narratives complement the genre fiction that was beginning to be written at the same period. Two of them report the disaster that overtook the continent as related by long-lived survivors. In Frederick Tennyson's "Atlantis" (1888), an ancient Greek mariner sails west and discovers an inhabited island which is all that remains of the former kingdom. He learns of its end and views the shattered remnant of its former glory, from which a few had escaped to set up the Mediterranean civilisations. In the second, "Mona, Queen of Lost Atlantis: An Idyllic Re-embodiment of Long Forgotten History" (Los Angeles CA 1925) by James Logue Dryden (1840–1925), the story is told in a series of visions. A Seer is taken to Mona's burial chamber in the ruins of Atlantis, where she revives and describes the catastrophe. There follows a survey of the lost civilisations of Hyperborea and Lemuria as well as Atlantis, accompanied by much spiritualist lore.


title: Atlantis

text: William Walton Hoskins (1856–1919) admits to the readers of his "Atlantis and other poems" (Cleveland OH, 1881), that he is only 24. Its melodramatic plot concerns the poisoning of the descendant of god-born kings. The usurping poisoner is poisoned in his turn, following which the continent is swallowed in the waves. Asian gods people the landscape of "The Lost Island" (Ottawa 1889) by Edward Taylor Fletcher (1816–97). An angel foresees impending catastrophe and that the people will be allowed to escape if their semi-divine rulers will sacrifice themselves. A final example, Edward N. Beecher's "The Lost Atlantis or The Great Deluge of All" (Cleveland OH, 1898) is just a doggerel vehicle for its author's opinions: that the continent was the location of the Garden of Eden; that Darwin's theory of evolution is correct, as are Donnelly's views.


title: Atlantis

text: Atlantis was to become a theme in Russia following the 1890s, taken up in unfinished poems by Valery Bryusov and Konstantin Balmont, as well as in a drama by the schoolgirl Larissa Reisner. One other long narrative poem was published in New York by George V. Golokhvastoff. His 250-page "The Fall of Atlantis" (1938) records how a high priest, distressed by the prevailing degeneracy of the ruling classes, seeks to create an androgynous being from royal twins as a means to overcome this polarity. When he is unable to control the forces unleashed by his occult ceremony, the continent is destroyed.


title: Atlantis

text: The Spanish composer Manuel de Falla worked on a dramatic cantata based on Verdaguer's "L'Atlántida", during the last 20 years of his life. The name has been affixed to symphonies by Jānis Ivanovs (1941), Richard Nanes, and Vaclav Buzek (2009). There was also the symphonic celebration of Alan Hovhaness: "Fanfare for the New Atlantis" (Op. 281, 1975).


title: Atlantis

text: The Bohemian-American composer and arranger Vincent Frank Safranek wrote "Atlantis (The Lost Continent) Suite in Four Parts"; I. Nocturne and Morning Hymn of Praise, II. A Court Function, III. "I Love Thee" (The Prince and Aana), IV. The Destruction of Atlantis, for military (concert) band in 1913.


title: Atlantis

text: The opera "Der Kaiser von Atlantis" ("The Emperor of Atlantis") was written in 1943 by Viktor Ullmann with a libretto by Petr Kien, while they were both inmates at the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt. The Nazis did not allow it to be performed, assuming the opera's reference to an Emperor of Atlantis to be a satire on Hitler. Though Ullmann and Kiel were murdered in Auschwitz, the manuscript survived and was performed for the first time in 1975 in Amsterdam.


title: Atlantis

text: Paintings of the submersion of Atlantis are comparatively rare. In the seventeenth century there was François de Nomé's "The Fall of Atlantis", which shows a tidal wave surging toward a Baroque city frontage. The style of architecture apart, it is not very different from Nicholas Roerich's "The Last of Atlantis" of 1928.


title: Atlantis

text: The most dramatic depiction of the catastrophe was Léon Bakst's "Ancient Terror" ("Terror Antiquus", 1908), although it does not name Atlantis directly. It is a mountain-top view of a rocky bay breached by the sea, which is washing inland about the tall structures of an ancient city. A streak of lightning crosses the upper half of the painting, while below it rises the impassive figure of an enigmatic goddess who holds a blue dove between her breasts. Vyacheslav Ivanov identified the subject as Atlantis in a public lecture on the painting given in 1909, the year it was first exhibited, and he has been followed by other commentators in the years since.


title: Atlantis

text: Sculptures referencing Atlantis have often been stylized single figures. One of the earliest was Einar Jónsson's "The King of Atlantis" (1919–1922), now in the garden of his museum in Reykjavík. It represents a single figure, clad in a belted skirt and wearing a large triangular helmet, who sits on an ornate throne supported between two young bulls. The walking female entitled "Atlantis" (1946) by Ivan Meštrović was from a series inspired by ancient Greek figures with the symbolical meaning of unjustified suffering.


title: Atlantis

text: In the case of the Brussels fountain feature known as "The Man of Atlantis" (2003) by the Belgian sculptor , the 4-metre tall figure wearing a diving suit steps from a plinth into the spray. It looks light-hearted but the artist's comment on it makes a serious point: "Because habitable land will be scarce, it is no longer improbable that we will return to the water in the long term. As a result, a portion of the population will mutate into fish-like creatures. Global warming and rising water levels are practical problems for the world in general and here in the Netherlands in particular".


title: Atlantis

text: Robert Smithson's "Hypothetical Continent (Map of broken clear glass, Atlantis)" was first created as a photographical project on Loveladies Island NJ in 1969, and then recreated as a gallery installation of broken glass. On this he commented that he liked "landscapes that suggest prehistory", and this is borne out by the original conceptual drawing of the work that includes an inset map of the continent sited off the coast of Africa and at the straits into the Mediterranean.


title: Second Chechen War

text: The Second Chechen War (, ) took place in Chechnya and the border regions of the North Caucasus between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, from August 1999 to April 2009. In August 1999, Islamist fighters from Chechnya infiltrated Russia's Dagestan region, violating Russia's borders. During the initial campaign, Russian military and pro-Russian Chechen paramilitary forces faced Chechen separatists in open combat and seized the Chechen capital Grozny after a winter siege that lasted from December 1999 until February 2000. Russia established direct rule over Chechnya in May 2000 although Chechen militant resistance throughout the North Caucasus region continued to inflict heavy Russian casualties and challenge Russian political control over Chechnya for several years. Both sides carried out attacks against civilians. These attacks drew international condemnation.


title: Second Chechen War

text: In mid-2000, the Russian government transferred certain military responsibilities to pro-Russian Chechen forces. The military phase of operations was terminated in April 2002, and the coordination of the field operations was given first to the Federal Security Service and then to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the summer of 2003.


title: Second Chechen War

text: By 2009, Russia had severely disabled the Chechen separatist movement and large-scale fighting ceased. Russian army and Interior Ministry troops ceased patrolling. Grozny underwent reconstruction efforts and much of the city and surrounding areas were rebuilt quickly. Sporadic violence continued in the North Caucasus; occasional bombings and ambushes against federal troops and forces of the regional governments in the area still occur.


title: Second Chechen War

text: In April 2009, the government operation in Chechnya officially ended. As the bulk of the army was withdrawn, responsibility for dealing with the low-level insurgency was shouldered by the local police force. Three months later, the exiled leader of the separatist government, Akhmed Zakayev, called for a halt to armed resistance against the Chechen police force from August and said he hoped that "starting with this day Chechens will never shoot at each other". This marked the end of the Chechen conflict. The death toll of the conflict is unknown, although the total loss of human life, including both combatants and non-combatants, is estimated to be over 60,000.


title: Second Chechen War

text: The Second Chechen War is also known as the Second Chechen Campaign () or the Second Russian Invasion of Chechnya from the rebel Chechen point of view.


title: Second Chechen War

text: Chechnya is an area in the Northern Caucasus which has constantly fought against foreign rule, including the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century. The Russian Terek Cossack Host was established in lowland Chechnya in 1577 by free Cossacks who were resettled from the Volga to the Terek River. In 1783, the Russian Empire and the Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, under which Kartli-Kakheti became a Russian protectorate. To secure communications with Georgia and other regions of the Transcaucasia, the Russian Empire began spreading its influence into the Caucasus region, starting the Caucasus War in 1817. Russian forces first moved into highland Chechnya in 1830, and the conflict in the area lasted until 1859, when a 250,000-strong army under General Aleksandr Baryatinsky broke down the highlanders' resistance. Frequent uprisings in the Caucasus also occurred during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78.


title: Second Chechen War

text: Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Chechens established a short-lived Caucasian Imamate which included parts of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia; there was also the secular pan-Caucasian Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus. The Chechen states were opposed by both sides of the Russian Civil War and most of the resistance was crushed by Bolshevik troops by 1922. Then, months before the creation of the Soviet Union, the Chechen Autonomous Oblast of the Russian SFSR was established. It annexed a part of territory of the former Terek Cossack Host. Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia formed the Checheno–Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936. In 1941, during World War II, a Chechen revolt broke out, led by Hasan Israilov. In 1944, Chechens were deported to the Kazakh SSR and Kirghiz SSR in an act of ethnic cleansing; this was done under the false pretext of Chechen mass collaboration with Nazi Germany. An estimated 1/4 to 1/3 of the Chechen population perished due the harsh conditions. Many scholars recognize the deportation as an act of genocide, as did the European Parliament in 2004. In 1992 the separatist government built a memorial dedicated to the victims of the acts of 1944. The pro-Russian government would later demolish this memorial. Tombstones which were an integral part of the memorial were found planted on the Akhmad Kadyrov Square next to granite steles honoring the losses of the local pro-Russian power.


title: Second Chechen War

text: During the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechnya declared independence. In 1992, Chechen and Ingush leaders signed an agreement splitting the joint Checheno–Ingush republic in two, with Ingushetia joining the Russian Federation and Chechnya remaining independent. The debate in Chechnya over independence ultimately led to a small-scale civil war since 1992, in which the Russians covertly tried to oust the government of Dzhokhar Dudayev. The First Chechen War began in 1994, when Russian forces entered Chechnya to restore constitutional order. Following nearly two years of brutal fighting, with a death toll exceeding 100,000 by some estimates, the 1996 Khasavyurt ceasefire agreement was signed and Russian troops were withdrawn from the republic.


title: Second Chechen War

text: Following the first war, the government's grip on Chechnya was weak, especially outside the ruined capital Grozny. The areas controlled by separatist groups grew larger and the country became increasingly lawless. The war ravages and lack of economic opportunities left large numbers of heavily armed and brutalized former separatist fighters unemployed. The authority of the government in Grozny was opposed by extremist warlords like Arbi Barayev, who according to some sources was in cooperation with the FSB. Chechen warlords had been steadily increasing abductions and raids into other parts of the Northern Caucasus. In place of the devastated economic structure, kidnapping emerged as the principal source of income countrywide, procuring over $200 million during the three-year independence of Chechnya. It has been estimated that up to 1,300 people were kidnapped in Chechnya between 1996 and 1999, and in 1998, a group of four Western hostages was murdered. In 1998, a state of emergency was declared by the authorities in Grozny. Tensions led to open clashes like the July 1998 confrontation in Gudermes, in which some 50 people died in fighting between Chechen National Guard troops and the Islamist militias.


title: Second Chechen War

text: Political tensions were fueled in part by allegedly Chechen or pro-Chechen terrorist and criminal activity in Russia, as well as by border clashes. On 16 November 1996, in Kaspiysk (Dagestan), a bomb destroyed an apartment building housing Russian border guards, killing 68 people. The cause of the blast was never determined, but many in Russia blamed Chechen separatists. Three people died on 23 April 1997, when a bomb exploded in the Russian railway station of Armavir (Krasnodar Krai), and two on 28 May 1997, when another bomb exploded in the Russian railway station of Pyatigorsk (Stavropol Krai). On 22 December 1997, forces of Dagestani militants and Chechnya-based Arab warlord Ibn al-Khattab raided the base of the 136th Motor Rifle Brigade of the Russian Army in Buynaksk, Dagestan, inflicting heavy casualties.


title: Second Chechen War

text: The 1997 election brought to power the separatist president Aslan Maskhadov. In 1998 and 1999, President Maskhadov survived several assassination attempts, blamed on the Russian intelligence services. In March 1999, General Gennady Shpigun, the Kremlin's envoy to Chechnya, was kidnapped at the airport in Grozny and ultimately found dead in 2000 during the war. On 7 March 1999, in response to the abduction of General Shpigun, Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin called for an invasion of Chechnya. However, Stepashin's plan was overridden by the prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov. Stepashin later said:


title: Second Chechen War

text: In late May 1999, Russia announced that it was closing the Russian-Chechnya border in an attempt to combat attacks and criminal activity; border guards were ordered to shoot suspects on sight. On 18 June 1999, seven servicemen were killed when Russian border guard posts were attacked in Dagestan. On 29 July 1999, the Russian Interior Ministry troops destroyed a Chechen border post and captured an 800-meter section of strategic road. On 22 August 1999, 10 Russian policemen were killed by an anti-tank mine blast in North Ossetia, and, on 9 August 1999, six servicemen were kidnapped in the Ossetian capital Vladikavkaz.


title: Second Chechen War

text: The Invasion of Dagestan was the trigger for the Second Chechen War. On 7 August 1999, Shamil Basayev (in association with the Saudi-born Ibn al-Khattab, Commander of the Mujahedeen) led two armies of up to 2,000 Chechen, Dagestani, Arab and international mujahideen and Wahhabist militants from Chechnya into the neighboring Republic of Dagestan. This war saw the first (unconfirmed) use of aerial-delivered fuel air explosives (FAE) in mountainous areas, notably in the village of Tando. By mid-September 1999, the militants were routed from the villages they had captured and pushed back into Chechnya. At least several hundred militants were killed in the fighting; the Federal side reported 275 servicemen killed and approximately 900 wounded.


title: Second Chechen War

text: Before the wake of the Dagestani invasion had settled, a series of bombings took place in Russia (in Moscow and in Volgodonsk) and in the Dagestani town of Buynaksk. On 4 September 1999, 62 people died in an apartment building housing members of families of Russian soldiers. Over the next two weeks, the bombs targeted three other apartment buildings and a mall; in total over 350 people were killed. A criminal investigation of the bombings was completed in 2002. The results of the investigation, and the court ruling that followed, concluded that they were organized by Achemez Gochiyaev, who remains at large, and ordered by Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif (both of whom were later killed), in retaliation for the Russian counteroffensive against their incursion into Dagestan. Six other suspects have been convicted by Russian courts. However, Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents were caught by local police for planting one of the bombs, but were later released on orders from Moscow. Many observers, including State Duma deputies Yuri Shchekochikhin, Sergei Kovalev and Sergei Yushenkov, cast doubts on the official version and sought an independent investigation. Some others, including David Satter, Yury Felshtinsky, Vladimir Pribylovsky and Alexander Litvinenko, as well as the secessionist Chechen authorities, claimed that the 1999 bombings were a false flag attack coordinated by the FSB in order to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya, which boosted the popularity of Prime Minister and former FSB Director Vladimir Putin, brought the pro-war Unity Party to the State Duma in the 1999 parliamentary election, and secured Putin as president within a few months. A description of the bombings as FSB false-flag operations appears in the book "Blowing Up Russia", which is banned in the Russian Federation.


title: Second Chechen War

text: In late August and early September 1999, Russia mounted a massive aerial campaign over Chechnya, with the stated aim of wiping out militants who invaded Dagestan earlier in the same month. On 26 August 1999, Russia acknowledged bombing raids in Chechnya. The Russian air strikes were reported to have forced at least 100,000 Chechens to flee their homes to safety; the neighbouring region of Ingushetia was reported to have appealed for United Nations aid to deal with tens of thousands of refugees. On 2 October 1999, Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations reported that 78,000 people had fled the air strikes in Chechnya; most of them went to Ingushetia, where they arrived at a rate of 5,000 to 6,000 a day.


title: Second Chechen War

text: As of 22 September 1999, Deputy Interior Minister Igor Zubov said that Russian troops had surrounded Chechnya and were prepared to retake the region, but the military planners were advising against a ground invasion because of the likelihood of heavy Russian casualties.


title: Second Chechen War

text: The Chechen conflict entered a new phase on 1 October 1999, when Russia's new Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared the authority of Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov and his parliament illegitimate. At this time, Putin announced that Russian troops would initiate a land invasion but progress only as far as the Terek River, which cuts the northern third of Chechnya off from the rest of the republic. Putin's stated intention was to take control of Chechnya's northern plain and establish a "cordon sanitaire" against further Chechen aggression; he later recalled that the cordon alone was "pointless and technically impossible," apparently because of Chechnya's rugged terrain. According to Russian accounts, Putin accelerated a plan for a major crackdown against Chechnya that had been drawn up months earlier.


title: Second Chechen War

text: The Russian army moved with ease in the wide open spaces of northern Chechnya and reached the Terek River on 5 October 1999. On this day, a bus filled with refugees was reportedly hit by a Russian tank shell, killing at least 11 civilians; two days later, Russian Su-24 fighter bombers dropped cluster bombs on the village of Elistanzhi, killing some 35 people. On 10 October 1999, Maskhadov outlined a peace plan offering a crackdown on renegade warlords; the offer was rejected by the Russian side. He also appealed to NATO to help end fighting between his forces and Russian troops, without effect.


title: Second Chechen War

text: On 12 October 1999, the Russian forces crossed the Terek and began a two-pronged advance on the capital Grozny to the south. Hoping to avoid the significant casualties that plagued the first Chechen War, the Russians advanced slowly and in force, making extensive use of artillery and air power in an attempt to soften Chechen defences. Many thousands of civilians fled the Russian advance, leaving Chechnya for neighbouring Russian republics. Their numbers were later estimated to reach 200,000 to 350,000, out of the approximately 800,000 residents of the Chechen Republic. The Russians appeared to be taking no chances with the Chechen population in its rear areas, setting up "filtration camps" in October in northern Chechnya for detaining suspected members of "bandformirovaniya" militant formations (literally: "bandit formations").


title: Second Chechen War

text: On 15 October 1999, Russian forces took control of a strategic ridge within artillery range of the Chechen capital Grozny after mounting an intense tank and artillery barrage against Chechen fighters. In response, President Maskhadov declared a "gazavat" (holy war) to confront the approaching Russian army. Martial law was declared in Ichkeria and reservists were called, but no martial law or state of emergency had been declared in Chechnya or Russia by the Russian government. The next day, Russian forces captured the strategic Tersky Heights, within sight of Grozny, dislodging 200 entrenched Chechen fighters. After heavy fighting, Russia seized the Chechen base in the village of Goragorsky, west of the city.


title: Second Chechen War

text: On 21 October 1999, a Russian Scud short-range ballistic missile strike on the central Grozny marketplace killed more than 140 people, including many women and children, and left hundreds more wounded. A Russian spokesman said the busy market was targeted because it was used by separatists as an arms bazaar. Eight days later, Russian aircraft carried out a rocket attack on a large convoy of refugees heading into Ingushetia, killing at least 25 civilians including Red Cross workers and journalists. Two days later Russian forces conducted a heavy artillery and rocket attack on Samashki; some claimed that civilians were killed in Samashki in revenge for the heavy casualties suffered there by Russian forces during the first war.