Plato lived 400 years before the birth of Christ.  His ancestor, Solon, was the great law-giver of Athens 600 years before the Christian era.  Solon visited Egypt.  Plutarch says, “Solon attempted in verse a large description, or rather fabulous account of the Atlantic Island, which he had learned from the wise men of Sais, and which particularly concerned the Athenians; but by reason of his age, not want of leisure (as Plato would have it), he was apprehensive the work would be too much for him, and therefore did not go through with it.  These verses are a proof that business was not the hinderance: 

     “‘I grow in learning as I grow in age.’

And again: 

     “’Wine, wit, and beauty still their charms bestow,
     Light all the shades of life, and cheer us as we go.’

“Plato, ambitious to cultivate and adorn the subject of the Atlantic Island, as a delightful spot in some fair field unoccupied, to which also he had some claim by reason of his being related to Solon, laid out magnificent courts and enclosures, and erected a grand entrance to it, such as no other story, fable, or Poem ever had.  But, as he began it late, he ended his life before the work, so that the more the reader is delighted with the part that is written, the more regret he has to find it unfinished.”

There can be no question that Solon visited Egypt.  The causes of his departure from Athens, for a period of ten years, are fully explained by Plutarch.  He dwelt, he tells us,

     “On the Canopian shore, by Nile’s deep mouth.”

There be conversed upon points of philosophy and history with the most learned of the Egyptian priests.  He was a man of extraordinary force and penetration of mind, as his laws and his sayings, which have been preserved to us, testify.  There is no improbability in the statement that he commenced in verse a history and description of Atlantis, which he left unfinished at his death; and it requires no great stretch of the imagination to believe that this manuscript reached the hands of his successor and descendant, Plato; a scholar, thinker, and historian like himself, and, like himself, one of the profoundest minds of the ancient world.  The Egyptian priest had said to Solon, “You have no antiquity of history, and no history of antiquity;” and Solon doubtless realized fully the vast importance of a record which carried human history back, not only thousands of years before the era of Greek civilization, but many thousands of years before even the establishment of the kingdom of Egypt; and he was anxious to preserve for his half-civilized countrymen this inestimable record of the past.

We know of no better way to commence a book about Atlantis than by giving in full the record preserved by Plato.  It is as follows: