Historical theories can never have the same precision and neatness that we can get from an algebraical equation that describes a circle or a parabola. During much of last century, many intrepid people did nevertheless try to pin Plato's Atlantis to a precise geographical spot, usually somewhere between the Azores and Newfoundland. Few if any presented circumstantial, and least of all, hard evidence.

All in all only two articulate proposals with a certain consistency have emerged in the last 50 years: the Azorean hypothesis, grandly illustrated by Otto Muck in his erudite book The Secret of Atlantis, and the Minoan/Theran hypothesis put forward by a school of archaeologists, historians and geologists headed by Professors Galanopoulos and J.V. Luce.

Regarding Otto Muck's book, I wrote a criticism of it way back in 1985 for the now defunct Society for the Research and Investigation of Phenomena (SRIP). In short, I found that Muck's scientific evidence, however watertight and impressive it seemed on first reading, in reality leaked from many places.

For example, his suggestion that the disappearance of Atlantis provoked the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, by virtue of allowing the warm Gulf Stream to spread into the ice-bound northern hemisphere, suffers from one basic problem. In fact, the well known Pleistocene Ice Age was not one ice age but nine, punctuated by eight interglacials. So what was Atlantis doing during these other warm intervals: playing hide and seek with the Gulf Stream?

Other so-called scientific evidence is equally faulty. Muck's claim that Atlantis would fit into Continental Drift reconstructions of the old super-continent of Pangea, wedged in neatly between North America and Eurasia, does not find any corroboration in all the reconstructions that I have seen so far in scientific articles on the subject.

Another of his intuitions is his claim that Atlantis is the missing bridge between the Old and New World pre-Spanish cultures. This theory has been thrown at us untold times in the last 30 years since Erich von Däniken revived the idea of a heroic super civilisation "before the dawn of human history".

Although the similarities between some elements of the two civilisations (mainly pyramids) might seem impressive, in reality there is a time gap of such huge proportions than any attempt at finding a common ancestor to both is intrinsically doomed to fail. If Atlantis perished 9,000 years before Solon, why did it take the Egyptians and Sumerians another 7,000 years and the Aztecs 10,200 years to reproduce those hypothetical original Atlantian pyramids? Beats me!

I still find Muck's book stimulating in many arguments but I must confess that as a tangible case for a Platonic Atlantis it lacks accuracy and a sufficient concreteness in the evidence which his attitude otherwise makes one believe does exist.

The Minoan/Theran Hypothesis is a refreshingly original and stimulating piece of detective work into the shrouded realm of mythology and pre-history. Its promoters are a group of scholars from various fields: archaeologists, geologists, historians and the edifice they have been building has gained solidity with time.

As usual with this type of "detective" science, its very tentative, unassuming, one could say lukewarm approach, building on the accumulation of little bits of soundly derived insights, has attracted the venom of the amateurs, who are usually impatient with half measures, preferring wide-sweeping, crowd-pulling statements. But in the end, the Minoan/Theran hypothesis is the best "fit" we have so far on Plato's Atlantis.

The first consideration these scientists make is that Plato's text has to be carefully scrutinised on comparative and historical evaluations. In other words it is not to be taken literally lock stock and barrel as Muck and his ilk do. This is quite standard procedure in historical and mythological studies and even books as holy as the Bible have not been spared such treatment.

What about Plato's text then? The Greek philosopher tells us that he received the story from his cousin Critias who had heard it from his grandfather Critias senior who had in turn heard it from the mouth of Dropides, a contemporary of Solon. This Solon had gone to Egypt in the year 590 BC after his extensive law reforms in Athens.

The Egyptians at this time were starting to take an antiquarian interest in the world around them. Since they were philhellenic and the Greeks were also becoming aware of their status in the politics of the ancient world, Solon thought it appropriate to go to Egypt and learn some history from the wise men of the Nile.

We must therefore allow that the story could have suffered somewhat in the way of embellishment and interpretation. The suspicion also arises that the story was deliberately inflated with philosophical and political bias especially when one remembers that shortly after Solon, the Greeks had a 100-year struggle with the mighty Persians in front of them.

When one reads that Zeus saw the iniquity of the Atlantians and decided to chastise them by a terrible catastrophe, one gets the uncanny feeling of reading a Greek version of Genesis with the Persians thrown in as bogey men.

Now let us go back to Solon, who must be an important element in the deciphering of the whole mystery. Plato tells us that Solon had to translate all the names of gods and places from the Egyptian into known Greek counterparts. This means that Solon translated into Greek either literally or by association. So we ask: what could the priests of Sais have been referring to so that he would translate the name of the island into Atlantis, which in Greek means the island of Atlas?

In Greek mythology Atlas was the son of Poseidon and his job was to hold one of the pillars of heaven on his shoulders, far out into the western ocean, at one of the corners of the world. Certain intellectuals in Plato's time had of course dismissed this fanciful idea in favour of a spherical self-supporting Earth but in Solon's time the myth of Atlas was as good as true.

On the other hand, the Egyptian worldview, as we know, was very restricted, Egypt being hemmed in by deserts on two sides, impenetrable highlands to the south and the "Great Green Sea" to the north. But to get a real measure of how restricted their view was, there is an indicative hint found in the Ipuwer Papyrus; Egyptian schoolchildren used to be taught to say "as far west as Keftiu" during their geography lessons, much as they might have said "as far south as Nubia". It was a handy way of defining boundaries.

But Keftiu was no imaginary island either; Egypt traded with the "men from Keft" who brought timber, copper and fine pottery in their countless ships. What is particularly interesting about Keftiu is that the name in Egyptian means the "island of the pillars of heaven". Archaeologists have identified Keftiu, after intensive study of the many Pharaonic inscriptions in which it appears, as the island of Crete. The Bible gives a similar rendering of the name for Crete: Caphtor. It seems Crete was the farthest west for the Egyptians. So could Crete be our Atlantis, to some extent at least?

The connection with Crete may seem absurd at first. The Greeks and Egyptians of Plato's time knew about Crete and were quite positive that the island had no sea-borne empire and no fabulous civilisation. On the contrary it was a Dorian backwater. Besides, Crete was still there whereas Atlantis had sunk into the sea in a terrible night of fire and destruction.

Solving this apparent inconsistency has not been easy but ingenious suggestions have been forthcoming and they are in line with the tentative approach we have been illustrating so far. Professor P. Andrews, according to Luce, has observed that in Greek there is a close similarity between the words for "larger than" and "midway in between", that is meson with an s and mezon with a z.

So we might ask: did Plato misread or deliberately misspell the word from Solon's notes, rendering thus that Atlantis was "larger than Libya and Asia" (the western shores of Turkey) instead of lying "midway between them".

It is quite obvious that the latter description would fit Crete perfectly. This intuition is somewhat given away by Plato himself who says that the island lay on the way to other islands (which in this case would be the Cyclades) and then to the boundless continent which surrounded the sea (which would perfectly describe the European mainland surrounding the Mediterranean).

The second ingenious insight deals with a historical evaluation of Plato's text. Professor Galanopoulos, according to Mavor, thinks that Solon could have had serious doubts about what the Egyptian priests were telling him and he might have asked to consult their written records.

Let us assume, for the moment, that they did have documents relating to information on the civilisation of Keftiu and let us suppose that the information was written in Linear script from Minoan times or at least a translation from such, possibly contemporary with the former.

Galanopoulos observes that the Linear script had very similar numerical symbols for the numbers 100, 1,000 and 10,000, which even with us present slight problems with the odd zero slipping here and there. But in the Cretan script it was trickier because all three numbers were denoted by a circle with marks like dots and crosses making the only difference on the inside.

Did Solon misread again or blatantly misuse the Cretan numbers to exaggerate the story out of proportion? Was the age of Atlantis 9,000 years or simply 900, which would make it contemporary with the end of Minoan civilisation around 1490 BC? Was the royal plain of Atlantis 340 by 230 miles, larger than the whole of Greece or just 34 by 23 miles, which are the dimensions of the plain of Megara over which dominated the Minoan cities of Knossos, Mallia Phaistos and Hagia Triada?

Are we to believe that the said plain was surrounded by a man-made ditch 1,100 miles long or a more believable 110 miles? Did Atlantis have the capacity to field an army of 1,200,000 men and a navy of 1,200 ships, which are incredible figures even by today's standards, or was its capacity a more reasonable 120,000 men at arms and 120 ships? We can only pause and wonder!

Anyway let us leave this number mix-up for what it is, just a tantalising possibility and go over to what sort of parallels Minoan civilisation itself can furnish us with the Atlantian. First of all it was literally dug out of the blue: nobody had known about it before and the Greeks had only dim recollections of a mythical kingdom ruled by King Minos.

It turned out from the excavations of Sir Arthur Evans on Crete itself and others on the Greek mainland and the Aegean islands that Minoan civilisation was in fact a formidable entity, a far-flung commercial empire backed by a powerful fleet, dominating the whole eastern Mediterranean and extending as far west as Southern Italy.

This is exactly what Plato says about the empire of Atlantis, only that it seems incredible that an island in the centre of the Atlantic Ocean could possibly throw its tentacles so far.

If we now close up on certain details mentioned in the longer Critias dialogue we find the peculiar fact that the Atlantians kept sacred bulls inside their temple of Poseidon which were hunted by the ten kings of Atlantis without weapons but with staves and nooses. We know that the bull was held in great esteem by the Minoans who seem to have brought this reverence from Asia Minor, usually regarded as their place of origin.

Golden cups from Vapheo depict just such weapon-less hunts vividly and in the great palace of Knossos, the capital of Minoan Crete, we can see the world-famous bull-leaping frescoe, which again emphasises this peculiar relationship between man and bull.

It seems the Greeks did not completely forget this peculiar Minoan tradition. Some scholars have suggested that initially the Minoans used to ask for sacrificial hostages from the Myceneans of the Greek mainland to perform for them in Knossos as illustrated on the said fresco.

After the catastrophe of 1450, the Myceneans are thought to have invaded Crete and the Aegean islands, and when they, in turn, were overrun by the Iron Age Greeks, they seem to have passed on faint memories of this long lost kingdom to the Hellenes.

Such is probably the origins of the famous myth of Theseus slaying the Minotaur after dragging him out from his labyrinth. This legend clearly betrays Minoan origins: the name Minotaur is pretty obvious and in certain Greek depictions of the Theseus myth we can even discern the peculiar Minoan column in the background setting.

In fact, to anyone who has been to Knossos, as I have, the monumentality and complexity of the royal palace easily brings to mind the labyrinth of King Minos. If the Myceneans had indeed invaded Knossos, as now seems probable, they might even have found one or two sacred bulls still roaming savagely about the palace basements. Such, as I said, is the stuff out of which legends are moulded.

Plato makes much of the architectural abilities of the Atlantians. He marvels at their drainage systems and the plumbing serving sumptuous baths and ponds. This affluence is exactly what we find in all Minoan palaces, especially Knossos. Archaeologists in fact have never stopped admiring this almost modern concern for hygiene and amenity at such an early date.

All in all, such circumstantial evidence presents a rather intriguing case for identifying Atlantis with Crete. The only serious problem with it however remains pretty obvious: Crete is still there whereas Atlantis perished. The solution to this conundrum lies only 60 miles north of Crete, where to this day, out of the deep blue Mediterranean, rises one of the largest, most spectacular active volcanoes on the planet - Santorini.

(To be concluded)