Paul Jordan (1) (1941–)

In this book, Paul Jordan takes a look at the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: how the list (or rather lists, since there were many) were compiled4, who compiled the lists (the Ancient Greeks), why specific wonders ended up on the lists, what the ancient wonders looked like since none exists in their original form and many of them have been destroyed, where they were located, and what eventually happened to them. The book includes a map and illustrations. I found this book to be generally interesting, but was disappointed by the chapter on the Egyptian Pyramids which was outdated (even at the time of going into press). Jordan also discusses possible wonders from other civilizations that may (or may not) have made it onto such a list had the Ancient Greeks known about them.

Other relevant book:
Wonders of the Ancient World: Antiquity's Greatest Feats of Design and Engineering by Justin Pollard
… (mais)

Rather disappointing. The Atlantis Syndrome is a history – and debunking – of ideas about of Atlantis. If you haven’t be reading Plato recently, Atlantis appears in two dialogues, Timaeus and Critias; and that’s it – all other Classical references can be traced back to these, and, despite Plato’s claim that Solon of Athens heard the story of Atlantis from Egyptian priests who had detailed records, no such ancient Egyptian records have ever appeared. The general consensus among non-nutcases is that Plato made up Atlantis himself as a hook for dialogs about the nature of government and ethics, and never expected anybody in his audience to take it any more seriously than the myth of Phaeton crashing and burning with the Horse of the Sun – also mentioned in Timaeus. Author Paul Jordon does a very good job of tracing the history of the Atlantis myth (with the exception of a whole chapter devoted to human evolution, which doesn’t have a lot to do with Atlantis and seems out of place; possibly inserted here because Jordon has another book on human evolution and had some stuff left over?)


So far so good; unfortunately Jordon doesn’t do a very good job in the debunking part. Perhaps the problem is that there is just so much material to be debunked that you can’t devote much time to any particular Atlantis theory. Jordon devotes only a few lines to each Atlantis proposal, and his debunking doesn’t come across as any more scientific than any of the pro-Atlantis arguments, consisting mostly of armwaving and sarcasm. I found the best one-sentence refutation is not by Jordon himself, but a comment from L. Sprague deCamp about the tendency of Atlantologists to change details in Plato to fit their theory: if you are allowed to change gender, age, time period, location, and personality, you can easily prove Cleopatra is King Arthur. Jordon should either stick with this or go into heavy detail; instead he makes a few debunking comments here, a little sarcasm there, and so on, such that the whole thing is rather unsatisfactory.


Well done if you’re interested in the history of Atlantis claims; if you bring it to the meeting of the Atlantis Truth Society, they’ll run you over like a regional bus.… (mais)

Jordan starts out with a rather lengthy treatment of Plato's Atlantis story and its place in his oeuvre, and includes a long sketch of the mainstream account of prehistory, but the bulk of the book deals with 19th and 20th century writers who have, in more or less direct intellectual descent from Ignatius Donnelly, seen Atlantis as the ur-civilization, from which all historical civilizations derive. The titular "syndrome" consists of a number of recurring features in these writings, most notably the refusal to believe that anything in human culture, from civilization itself to the building of pyramids, could have multiple independent origins. Others include a propensity to believe in civilization as a gift from superior outsiders to grateful natives - Jordan connects this to 19th century notions of the white man bringing civilization to the rest of the world - and a hostile attitude to the academic community.

The book concludes with some speculations into the psychology behind Atlantologists' writings and attitudes. Whether you'll like it depends largely on your appetite for pages and pages of summaries of more-or-less outlandish ideas interspersed with the summarizer wrily pointing out holes in them. I confess my appreciation is allied to the impulse that sent people to watch freakshows (and, I guess, sends them to watch much of "reality" TV).… (mais)