We must first of all consider that, as Plato himself said (), this was a story told by Egyptian priests to their Greek visitor Solon. And Plato specified that he himself translated their geographical indications into toponyms of geographical regions known to the Greeks and the names of foreign characters according to their meaning into Greek names to facilitate the understanding of his account by Athenians.
So we intend to demonstrate that the failure to identify Plato's Atlantis island so far was mainly due to the error in locating the Herakles' columns and the Gadiric region by geographers, due to the the wrong orientation of the world maps before the Alexandrian times.
It also appears that Plato could take its sources from the Periegesis of Hecataeus of Miletus (probably disappeared in the fire of the Alexandrian library), just like Strabo ( ), who used the same terms.
Decoding of Plato's Atlantis story
