Could the ‘Eye of the Sahara’ Be the Lost City of Atlantis?

The Eye of the Sahara really looking like an eye. Image credit: Axelspace Corporation
There have been many other ‘parallels’ pointed to by the proponents of the “Eye of the Sahara = Atlantis” theory, some of which appear to be even more far-fetched. Five-time EMMY Award winning writer Paul Wagner, for example, claims nonetheless that King Atlas, aka King of Atlantis, and namer of the Atlantic Ocean is the same person as Atlas of Mauritania; or that Herodotus’s map from 450 BC places Atlantis in the same place as the Eye.

Well, the bad news is that Herodotus did not produce any maps himself. That said, the maps you see circulating on the internet as his are neither real nor a hoax. They were made thousands of years later, based on his work, to help modern readers keep track of all the peoples and geographical features Herodotos mentions. One of these features is Mount Atlas, and one of these peoples is the tribe of the Atlantes (= the people of Mount Atlas). But Herodotos never mentions any place called Atlantis.