Atlantis

Atlantis - The Lost Continent movie poster

"Plato had a cyclic – or “spiraling” – view of history, in which the cycles bear the regular scars of catastrophe, the plural catastrophes being epochal in the root sense of articulating a dehiscence between one age and another.  . . . one effect of the regular cataclysmic events is periodically to interrupt the record of history and reset cultural development at its degree-zero.  When the earth shakes or fire falls from the sky or the oceans rise to inundate the land, civilization, painfully built up over the centuries, vanishes under the onslaught of nature; only a few mountain-dwellers or lucky, remote people survive.  Since the simple, unlettered survivors take no custody of the written lore, almost every verbal trace of the smashed civilization also vanishes.  The priest tells Solon that quirks of nature permit a few exceptions, and that the Nile Delta is one of them – a place unaffected by universal disasters, where continuous records chronicle humanity’s adventures going back tens of thousands of years into the past.  Atlantis and the Prehistoric Athens attained high civilization; their achievements, technical and political, indeed put to shame all the societies of Solon’s day, including Attic society.  A scourge of earthquakes and flooding obliterated both nations and the stunned survivors managed to live at a stone-age level of material culture only." - Thomas F. Beronneau

He goes on for a bit about legend of Atlantis. "dehiscence" is a new word to me. Merriam-Webster tells us it means: "a split along a natural line".