A City of Canals and Shining Walls
The kings of Atlantis grow rich and build a city of bridges, canals, harbours, metal-covered walls and a silver temple.
Many generations after Atlas, still more than 9,000 years before Solon
What the text says
orichalcum, was dug out of the earth in many parts of the island, being more precious in those days than anything except gold.
Critias 114e
And beginning from the sea they bored a canal of three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone
Critias 115d
The entire circuit of the wall, which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a coating of brass, and the circuit of the next wall they coated with tin, and the third, which encompassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalcum.
Critias 116b-c
All the outside of the temple, with the exception of the pinnacles, they covered with silver, and the pinnacles with gold.
Critias 116d
the canal and the largest of the harbours were full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts, who, from their numbers, kept up a multitudinous sound of human voices, and din and clatter of all sorts night and day.
Critias 117e
The story
The island gives the kings everything: timber, fruit, scented plants, and herds of animals, even elephants. From the ground they dig a metal called orichalcum, worth more than anything except gold.
The kings bridge the rings of water and dig a huge canal from the sea to the outer ring, wide enough for the biggest ships. They cut tunnels through the land rings so ships can sail from ring to ring under the bridges.
They build walls of white, black and red stone. The outer wall is covered in brass, the next in tin, and the wall around the centre shines red with orichalcum. In the middle stands Poseidon's temple, covered in silver with golden peaks. Inside is a golden statue of the god driving six winged horses, so tall his head touches the roof, with a hundred sea nymphs riding dolphins around him.
Beyond the rings, a great wall circles a crowded city. The harbour is packed with ships and traders from everywhere, and the noise never stops, day or night. Plato does not say what the people traded or what language they spoke.
No ruins of a ringed city with brass, tin and orichalcum walls have ever been found. Even in Plato's time, orichalcum was a metal 'now only a name'. In 2015 divers found 39 metal ingots off Gela in Sicily, about 2,600 years old, made mostly of copper and zinc, a kind of brass; some researchers called it orichalcum, but that tells us what the Greeks may have meant by the word, not that Atlantis existed.