Why the Greeks Forgot
The priest explains that fires and floods keep wiping out people and their memories, but Egypt kept its records safe.
Plato's priest speaks of events 9,000 years before Solon (about 9600 BCE)
What the text says
There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.
Timaeus 22c
In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones
Timaeus 23b
and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves.
Timaeus 23b
As touching your citizens of 9000 years ago, I will briefly inform you of their laws and of their most famous action
Timaeus 23e
The story
The priest explains why the Greeks know so little. Again and again, he says, the world is struck by disasters. The worst come from fire and from water. The Greek story of Phaethon, who crashed the sun's chariot and burned the earth, is a memory of one of these fires.
When floods come, the people in Greek cities are swept away. Only shepherds in the mountains survive, and they cannot read or write. So each time, the Greeks start over like children and forget everything that came before.
Egypt is different, the priest says. The Nile protects it, and the priests write down every great event and keep it in their temples. That is how they know about a time 9,000 years earlier, when Athens was the best city in the world and fought a mighty enemy.
Plato does not say which Egyptian records the priest meant, and the priest promises to show the written details later. In the dialogue, that never happens.
No Egyptian record of Atlantis has been found, and Jowett noted that the story appears in no writer before Plato. One theory links Plato's 9,000 years to the end of the last ice age: the warm period we live in, the Holocene, began about 11,700 years ago, close to the 11,600 years that Plato's number gives. This is a match of dates only. No ruins or objects tie Atlantis to that time.