Atlantis: The Antediluvian World is a pseudoarchaeological book published in 1882 by Minnesota populist politician Ignatius L. Donnelly. Donnelly considered Plato's account of Atlantis as largely factual and suggested that all known ancient civilizations were descended from this lost land through a process of hyperdiffusionism.

Content

Many of its theories are the source of many modern-day concepts about Atlantis, including these: the civilization and technology beyond its time, the origins of all present races and civilizations, and a civil war between good and evil. Much of Donnelly's writing, especially with regard to Atlantis as an explanation for similarities between ancient civilizations of the Old and New Worlds, was inspired by the publications of Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg and the fieldwork of Augustus Le Plongeon in the Yucatan. It was avidly supported by publications of Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society as well as by Rudolf Steiner.

Author's stated intentions

Donnelly discusses many aspects of his proposed theory in extreme detail. He includes many illustrations as well as charts with lingual similarities. With his book he states that he is trying to prove thirteen distinct hypotheses:

Legacy

In 1883, a sequel or companion, Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, was published. Donnelly's work on Atlantis inspired books by James Churchward on the lost continent of Mu, also known as Lemuria. Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods proposes, like Donnelly, that civilizations in Egypt and the Americas had a common origin in a civilization lost to history, although in Hancock's book the civilization was not located in the northern Atlantic.