Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • In the Lost Dialogue, Hermocrates says that Critias mistranslated Egyptian into Greek and gave a tenfold error when citing the distance of Atlantis from Greece and the era in which it existed. Socrates then comments that the actual numbers must be a tenfold fewer, since a tenfold greater is ridiculously over the top. So why do Indy and all the other characters refer to it as "Plato's tenfold numbering error"? The error is Critias's. Plato simply wrote about it in his dialogues. For that matter, how silly is it that Hermocrates knows Egyptian numbering well enough to realize that Critias was wrong by a factor of ten, but not know whether it's a multiplication of ten or a division of ten? He basically says, "I know you're wrong Critias, but I don't know HOW you're wrong."