Conference hydra::dejavu

    
    Re .0
    
    >    Cayce predicted that Atlantis would be found in 1968 (?) and the Bimini
>    wall in Bermuda was found the same year. If not Atlantis, what is the
>    significance of this wall? Who built it? Also, does anyone know why the
>    Atlantic ocean is called that?

    MAybe a little more  info on the Bimini wall? is it confirmed that
    it is not a natural feature of the terrain?
    
    Neal/B(an_inactive_ARE_member)

    I can't give you many specifics, since I don't have the book here. It's
    in one of a dozen baxes still unpacked from our last move, but I'll
    state what I *believe* to be true.
    The Bimini wall was discovered some distance away from Bimini in
    Bermuda, in 1968. I don't remember how deeply submerged it is; the wall
    consists of rectangular blocks, I also cannot recall the dimensions,
    but they are obviously the work of some civilization, that is, they
    could not occur naturally. There was a picture of it in the book, taken
    by some divers; it looks like it's made of white blocks roughly the
    shape of concrete blocks used in cement walls.
    I will try to find the book, so I can describe it better, this is all I
    can remember off the top of my head.
    There are no records of any island being submerged by natural (or
    otherwise) disasters in that area. Certainly not any that would have
    contained such a wall. It is clearly the work of humans (or at least
    intelligent beings).
    
    Can anyone else add to this?
    
    Marilyn

    re: .0
    
          You don't have to read all the notes, all the topics might
    help, though.  Note 1000 contains a listing of topics (1200 + of them,
    of which this one could have been one less  ;-) )
          There IS a note about Atlantis, I don't feel like doing the
    homework to find it (it is within the first 400 or so notes, however.)
    
    Frederick
    

    Re. .3 (Frederick)
    
    Thanks for the info, however, I *had* done a directory and there is no
    note with Atlantis in the title. I checked again after reading your
    note and it's not there, even in the first 400. As I stated in my
    basenote, there is mention of it in the Edgar Cayce note, but it does
    not address my questions. In any case, it seems there is at least
    another noter that had not read about the Bimini wall, so I guess it's
    not a rehash of old information for all of us.....
    I suppose I could do a search, but may be I'm just lazy.
    
    Marilyn

    
    Oops!!!!!!
    
    Just found the note called an Icy Grave for Atlantis (on my third try
    through the directory).
    
    Gotta go read it.
    
    
    Marilyn

    
    re: .5 (Marilyn)
    
    >  -< Is my face red???? >-
    
    No, but on my screen your type was a bit amber.....:-)
    
    guy

    OK, just got through reading the previous Atlantis note, and there is
    no note which deals with the Bimini wall. There was , however, a lot of
    conversation around the lack of physical evidence for the existence of
    Atlantis, so I stand by my basenote.
    
    Has anyone else read about this? 
    
    Re. .6 (Guy)
    
    My terminal is green, I guess I'm either envious or sick to my stomach.
    (I HATE being wrong! :-)
    
    Humbly,
    
    Marilyn

    Marilyn, Note 904 also deals with Atlantis. I think you are a fairly
    new noter. If so, welcome to the wacky and wonderful world of VAXNotes
    and to DEJAVU. 
    
    One thing that you can do, is at the NOTES prompt type in SHOW
    KEYWORDS. This will give you a list of the keywords assigned to certain
    topics. When you see the one you want, tupe in DIR/KEY=name of keyword.
    In this case it would be Atlantis. Perhaps you might want Edgar_Cayce
    also. This will print a directory of only those notes pertaining to the
    topic you selected. I'm not that good at using systems myself and have
    to pick up these little tricks as I go along. 
    
    
                                     Happy Noting,
    
    
                                     Phil

RE: .2 (Marilyn)
    
    I know I've entered this, but it doesn't seem to be in the Atlantis
    notes (check out 904.* as well as 154.*, by the way).  Perhaps it is
    in one of the Cayce notes.  Anyway...
    
    I'm pretty certain that the "Bimini wall" that you mention is the
    "Atlantis discovery" which turned out, upon carefull examination, to
    be large stone blocks which were being transported for purposes of
    building some large public building (marble or a special granite).
    A storm at sea forced the captain to dump them off the barges or risk
    losing the ships.  This was not simply an hypothesis -- the specific
    event and location has been identified by the investigator.
    
    						Topher

    
    Topher,
    
    If this is the same wall I've seen pictures of, I don't
    see how they could have been arranged so neatly if they
    were dumped in a hurry - unless they could dump off about
    50 at a time.  How would they do that?
    
    guy

    Topher,

    I think Guy is right.  My memory tells me this is in shallow water
    (about 10-20 feet), just the tops of the stones are visible and they
    are very uniform and placed very close together.  I'll try to find
    my reference.  BTW, this is a popular dive spot and is fairly
    accessible.  Organized dive trips are freqently advertised in "Skin 
    Diver" magazine.  There isn't a consensus on what they are, I don't
    think, but the trips are advertised as "The Lost Atlantis" (marketing
    purposes, of course).

    Marilyn,

    If you have an interest in Atlantis, check out the Hopi legends.  They
    very closely parellels Edgar Cayce's account of the three upheavals.  
    He gave his readings during the thirties and forties while the Hopi 
    legends weren't widly known, written or translated until sometime in the 
    seventies.  Try _The Book of the Hopi_ by Frank Waters.

    Terry

    Topher,
    
    Guy beat me to it, but yes, I saw pictures of the wall, and I really
    have a hard time believing that any kind of blocks dumped overboard at
    sea could sink so uniformly so as to form a wall. Even 50 at a time,
    they would hardly arrange themselves without gaps or overlaps.
    I'm perfectly willing to accept it if it turns out that this was part
    of an island that sank, or if the pictures turn out to be of something
    altogether different, but the other seems too far-fetched.
    
    Any ideas?
    
    
    Phil,
    
    Thanks for the info, I'll use it in future.

    Thanks Terry, 
    
    I'll try and see if my local library has the book. Yes, Atlantis does
    interest me.
    Also, since I haven't read note # 904  (I did read 154) I am somewhat
    hesitant to enter this, but according to Cayce, the surviving
    Atlanteans settled in the Pyrenees (?), anyways, in the Basque region
    of Spain/France, in the Yucatan peninsula and in Egypt. Could this be
    the reason for there to be pyramids in both Egypt and Meso-America?
    I wonder if any studies have been done to compare the Basque language
    and that of the ancient Egyptians and Mayans. I know the Basque
    language is not of Indo-European origin.
    
    Oh, well........

    Topher,
    
    I think you confused a Mediterranean "Atlantis" find with the
    solution to the "Bimini wall".  The former was thought to be
    ancient building stone, including the fist of a gigantic statue,
    whereas it turned out to be the dumped building material you
    mentioned.  The "fist" was just a block deeply scored by the
    jaws of a steam shovel.
    
    The Bimini wall turned out to be a natural phenomenon.  Originally
    (zillions of years ago) a flat sheet of rock (I think a lava flow,
    but I don't promise.), it had cracked in parallel lines, as such
    rock commonly does.  There were two sets of such cracks, at
    approximately right angles to each other.  After umblety years of
    wave erosion, the edges around the cracks had worn away, leaving
    something that looked remarkably like fitted stone blocks.
    
    						Ann B.

    Ann,
    
    Can you name our source for this natural road? I don't know much about
    rocks, do they also have "grains"? If they do, I can see them splitting
    in a straight line one way, but the perpendicular would be jagged,
    uneven breaks.
    
    Marilyn

RE: .14 (Ann B.)
    
    > I think you confused a Mediterranean "Atlantis" find with the
    > solution to the "Bimini wall".
    
    Hmm, could be but I don't think so.  What I remember of the case:
    
    	1) Definitely New World -- probably Bahamian but possibly
    	   Carribean (my feelings that it was more likely Bahamian could
    	   easily be a result of confusion with the "Bimini wall" case).
    
    	2) "Discovered" in the late 60's or early 70's.
    
    	3) In fairly deep water but divable water.
    
    	4) The dumping (perhaps some barges sank as well) was modern.
    
    	5) Just blocks of stone -- no mention of any statuary.
    
    I'll have to see if I can track down the reference.  It would not be
    surprising if the same kind of event could result in the same, or
    roughly the same, mistaken identification multiple times.  In fact,
    I can add a third, not particularly serious example:
    
    The Rhode Island Science Fiction Association used to have outings every
    once in a while to an isolated beach in Rhode Island.  On the beach
    were a number of very large stone blocks (granite if I remember).  The
    blocks were (presumably still are) had some quite professional carvings
    (almost certainly carved in when the blocks were cut), which with only
    a slight stretch of the imagination could be interepretted as abstract
    representation of Cthulhu.  The game was to pretend that the very much
    out of place blocks were there as a result of some unimaginable
    cataclysm in Cthulhu's sunken city (what was its name, Steve?).  That
    city is, of course, a literary derivative of the Atlantis story.  My
    best guess on the actual origin of the blocks is that they were
    deposited there by a shipwreck (bargewreck?) some time in the last
    two centuries.  (Unless you are using your imagination there is nothing
    sinister about the carvings -- they are just fleur-de-lis variations).
    
    Given the differences that came out between "my" explanation and what
    people had seen of the Bimini "Wall", I had two primary guesses as
    to what caused it:
    
    	1) Some combination of my misremembering details of the incident
    	   I was talking of, and deceptive photo's and descriptions
    	   (unfortunately, Fortean books suffer heavily from this, often
    	   without any deliberate attempt to deceive by the author, who
    	   "got" the story from somewhere else already in a misleading
    	   form).
    
    	2) Essentially what Ann claims is the known cause -- rock
    	   fracturing.  Yes, rock can have a structure such that it tends
    	   to fracture along either of two or even any of three perpendicular
    	   planes.
    
    					Topher

    Re .16 (Topher):
    
    >........................ The game was to pretend that the very much
    >out of place blocks were there as a result of some unimaginable
    >cataclysm in Cthulhu's sunken city (what was its name, Steve?).
     
    R'yleh, as I recall.  (Excuse spelling: I sometimes misplace
    Lovecraftian apostrophes.)
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.                  

    I found it!  Topher was right, there were dumped blocks of building
    material: "cement, cast in the shape of the barrels in which...".
    It's in _Flim_Flam!_ by James Randi, in Chapter 3.
    
    The stone of which the Bimini road is made "is known to geology
    as `beach rock'".  It is formed when grains of sand "pick up calcium
    carbonate from the sea" (mostly from seashells).  Together, they
    form a cement-like rock mass at the shoreline which is quite hard,
    but fractures easily.  Sometimes, the waves erode the sand under
    the beach rock, and then it fractures, first parallel to the shore,
    and then at right angles to the first break.  Should the sea continue
    to encroach on the beach rock, it will eventually be submerged.
    
    When I wrote "zillions" of years, I should have been more precise:
    2,200 years, by radiocarbon dating.  Yes, dear reader, beach rock
    is very young.  Current on-the-beach beach rock even has bits of
    nails, nuts, and glass in it -- very contemporary.
    
    Nor is the Bimini road likely to have been man-made from beach rock.
    The side by side pieces of the "road" have the same internal
    striations and grain size, which would vary if you were building
    a road and trying to match pieces.  (At the very least, a chunk
    would be used upside down, from time to time.)  This sampling and
    analysis were done by John Gifford and E.A. Shinn.
    
    						Ann B.

    Ann,,
    
       I'm really confused. What was Topher right about? "Cement cast in
    the shape of the barrels in which..." does not match the rest of the
    note. If the beach rock is formed naturally, and I am willing to accept
    that, then where are the aforementioned dumped blocks of concrete to be
    found?
    
    Thanks for checking,
    
    
    Marilyn

    Marilyn,
    
    Imagine that the first you hear of the Bimini road is the claim
    that it is a paved road, submerged off Bimini, with segments of
    round, fluted columns nearby, all in the simple Atlantean style.
    
    Then Topher enters the correction that the "round, fluted columns"
    were dumped overboard by a floundering ship at a known time and
    location.
    
    Then I enter two corrections.  First, that the "round, fluted
    columns" were barrel-shaped chunks of cement, and the "fluting"
    was just the marks of the staves.  Second, that the "paved road"
    was just fractured, submerged beach rock.
    
    Now does it seem more coherent?
    
    						Ann B.

re: .20 (Ann B., replying to Marilyn)
    
    To flesh that out a little more.  Initially I remembered something of
    the explanation for the columns and forgot the details of and explanation
    for the road completely (an engineer might say that my memories were
    fairly accurate but not at all precise).  Ann then came in with the
    explanation of the "road" but forgot about the columns.  She then
    found her source and resolved the seeming contradictions between our
    respective memories.
    
    						Topher

    Oh. Glad you explained it, I still thought you still were talking about
    two different sites. (I was still thinking of Ann's comment that Topher 
    must have been thinking about a site in the Mediterranean.)
    
    Thanks for clearing that up.
    
    
    Marilyn
    
    
    Not to belabor the point, but do either of you have any hypotheses on
    where the Basque came from?  (See what you get when you try to help?)
    :-)
    
    M

RE: .13, .22 (Marilyn)
    
    Sorry that its taken me awhile to answer this but I've been rather
    busy.  Anyway I seem to be fated to answer this question -- last week
    I just happened to read two unrelated articles on the history of
    and relationships between languages (one in the current issue of
    the bimonthly magazine The Sciences, the other in the weekly journal
    Nature).
    
    Anyway...
    
    It used to be true that Basque had "no known affinities to any known
    language".  Actually, this is not terribly surprising: there are
    hundrends of languages, living and dead, for which the same could
    be said.  Most languages, after all, have never had a written form.
    Groups may be relatively isolated for centuries and develop their
    own "root language" then migrate.  Some of the migrating sub-groups
    are wiped out, some are linguistically absorbed into other populations
    (no one is up to discovering distant comparisons between odd languages
    and a few words in a local dialect of an entirely different langauge),
    and those that are left are geographically separated.  Showing that
    two languages are related is a laborious process involving a detailed
    knowledge of those two langauges, and a reason to believe that they
    should be compared.
    
    What made Basque notable in the poplular mind was that it was an
    example of such a mystery language "near to home", i.e., western
    Europe.  It's OK for languages to be mysterious in, say, India, but
    if someone "real", who we might well meet on the street, speaks such
    a language -- well that's a real MYSTERY.  This made the Basques a
    popular choice in speculations about mystery races of all kinds --
    Atlantean, lost tribes of Israel, space contactees, Inner Earth
    refugees, etc.
    
    Anyway, in the '70s with improved lingusitic knowledge and techniques
    (including the use of computers) a number of the "isolated" languages,
    including Basque, were found to belong to a newly discovered family
    of languages called "North Caucasian".  Basque's linguistic lineage
    is not only now known, but is rather illustrious.  It includes
    Etruscan -- the language of the people from whom those who later
    became known as the Romans learned much of their culture -- and
    Sumarian the oldest known written language.  The linguistic evidence
    is that the Basques left Asia Minor about 4000 years ago (which says
    nothing about when after that point they settled in the Pyranese).
    
    Maya, the language of the Mayans, is a member of a group of languages
    known collectively as Mayan.  These have distinct affinities for other
    native American languages, but the exact historical nature of those
    affinities is controversial -- i.e., who was descended from whom, etc.
    It has recently -- and very controversially -- been proposed that
    all the North American languages fall into language families --
    Eskimo-Aleutian, Na-Dene, and Amerind.  Almost all Native American
    languages -- excepting some in Northwest Canada and perhaps some around
    the Great Lakes -- are of the Amerind family; including of course the
    Mayan group.  This proposal is consistent with genetic, archeological,
    and cultural evidence.  To this outsider, the controversy seems to
    be almost entirely about turf wars -- the suggestion was made by
    a noted linguist who was not a member of the community of linguists
    who studies New World languages, using methods which had not previously
    been used by that group.  He also has tentatively identified the
    Amerind family with the Norstratic superfamily which includes the
    Indo-European family of languages but does *not* include the North
    Caucasian family.  This means that Basque and Maya are as distantly
    related as it is possible to establish languages to be (many linguists
    would claim that what little connections which have been claimed are
    grossly beyond what can actually be inferred).
    
    Meanwhile -- Egyptian is a member of the Hamitic branch of the
    Hamo-semitic family of languages (also known as the Afro-Asian family).
    The Hamo-semitic family is also a member of the Norstralic superfamily,
    which makes it (if the current proposals are correct) distantly related
    to the Maya language, but no more so, for example, than French is to
    Hopi.
    
    Whew...
    
    					Topher
    
                                                                        

    Thanks, Topher.
    
    I knew you'd come through. You're better than an Encyclopaedia.
    
    
    Marilyn

    -digression:
    A recent Scientific American (within the past few months, I think) had
    an article on the techniques employed in tracing the "lineage" of
    langauges, and some of the currently accepted views, and how they had
    changed.
    
    It didn't stick well enough for me to try to for a summary.  It
    concentrated on the "European" langauges and their interrelations and
    ancestors, extending back into central and southern Asia.
    
    thanks
    dwp