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Homer [8th Century BC] Plato [c427- 347 BC]] ***** How Big Was Atlantis? Plato said the island was larger than Asia and Libya combined. What he meant was Asia Minor and North Africa put together. The best map is found in Athanasius Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus, 1665. Kircher [1602-1680] said he found the original leather map in the Vatican Library, and copied it. I have inverted [with North at top] it to make the topography clearer. ***** When compared with seabed geography/topography, Atlantis either stretches N-S from the Azores to the Canaries. [This takes in the three sets of Horseshoe Seamounts]:- Or from the Azores to the Cape Verde Islands:- Frank Joseph [pg 11] gives the greatest E-W width of the Horseshoe Seamounts as 515 km, compared to his estimate of 588 km for Plato's island. From the northernmost to the southernmost Mounts he says is 310 km, and that Plato's island was 365 km long. The highest peak of the Mounts is Mt Ampere at 3000 metres. Its summit is only 65 m below the ocean's surface [ref: pg 13]. Putting the sonar, seabed topography, and paleobiological evidence together,Joseph concludes that ***** "a large mountainous landmass somewhat smaller than Portugal (about 90,000 square kilometres, did in fact occupy the mid-Atlantic Ocean in the past 10,000 years." Joseph wondered whether Mt Ampere might've been the volcano, Mt Atlas, that dominated Atlantis. Others consider Pico Alto in the Azores to be its remnant. Above left: Cosmas' image. Above right and below left: Mayan. Below right: Kircher. The most obvious feature is the distinctive summit, which is why the Mayans called it 'Kukulkan' ['The Crooked Mountain']. Mt Atlas [Mt Meru in Hindu myth] was one of the causes of Atlantis' demise [see the Death of Atlantis ]. ***** One Island or Several? Although Plato's dialogues are set on a large island-continent, he does allude to "other islands" from which it was possible to "sail...to the whole continent on the other side". Some have speculated this is America. Proclus [410-485 AD] wrote the following intriguing statement: ***** "There were seven islands in that sea [the Atlantic], sacred to Persephone [wife of Pluto], and three others of great size: one sacred to Pluto, one to Ammon [Amun], one to Poseidon. This last was a thousand stadia in area. They also say that the inhabitants of this island...preserved the remembrance of their ancestors, and of the Atlantic island that existed there... . Which had, for centuries, dominated all the islands in the Atlantic Sea...and was also sacred to Poseidon."
The first literary mention of Atlantis was in his Odyssey [Books 5-7 ]. He called it Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians. Odysseus sights it 17-18 days after leaving Oggyia, the island of the nymph Calypso. At the time of Odysseus the king is Alcinous. It is described as being like ''a shield lain on a misty sea". It rises sheer: "no coves, harbours,... nothing but headlands jutting out". And protected by lethal rocks and reefs. It has northern mountains. Its fertile land is ''divided up for cultivation''. Pomegranates and figs grow there. Odysseus finds safety in a the mouth of river, which seems to run east-west. 
In his Kritias and Timaeus he also describes a rocky island with northern mountains. But, it is clear that, from the two writers, for the mostpart, Atlantis was a plateau. As this image by the 6th Century AD monk Cosmas shows:-
Most of Plato's is dominated a huge fertile plain [55 km long by 37 km wide], open to the south. It is divided by irrigation channels 18 km apart. Diodorus Siculus [1st Century BC] calls them "navigable rivers", which were also used to water the fields. Around it is a large channel [100 ft deep and 1800 km long] fed by streams from the high mountains in the north. There are figs, chestnuts, and a variety of crops.
There are horses and "a great number of elephants." Interestingly, Frank Joseph, in Atlantis and Other Lost Worlds [2008; pg 12], said in 1960, oceanographers discovered "hundreds of elephant bones from more than forty different locations", about 322 km west of Portugal. They concluded that these pachyderms had crossed "a now submerged land bridge, extending from the Atlantic shores of Morocco into formerly dry land long since sunk... ."
