Atlantis Trivia
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59 free Atlantis trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Atlantis appears in exactly two ancient texts, Plato's Timaeus and Critias, and everything else, from lost-continent bestsellers to Disney cartoons, grew out of a few pages of philosophy. This quiz starts with what Plato actually wrote: which god got the island, how many kings ruled it, what its walls were coated with, who beat its armies and how quickly it vanished. Then it asks what the ancients themselves made of it, from the pupil who called it a fable to the churchman who used it to prove the earth was flat. From there it follows the modern legend: the Minnesota congressman whose 1882 book turned Atlantis into a real place, Madame Blavatsky's root races, Edgar Cayce's prophecy for the 1960s, and the long parade of candidate sites in Santorini, Doggerland, Andalusia, Ireland, the Azores and Antarctica. It finishes in popular culture with Francis Bacon and Thomas More, Jules Verne, Donovan's spoken-word hit, Disney's box-office flop, Aquaman, Stargate, a Bahamas resort and a Space Shuttle. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Atlantis and the works that borrowed its name, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Greek mythology, ancient Greece and Plato quizzes next.
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Q 01In which two of Plato's dialogues does the story of Atlantis appear?
Timaeus and Critias
Timaeus and Critias open what looks like a planned trilogy, but the Critias breaks off mid-story and no third dialogue is known.
Q 02Plato's full Greek name for the land, Atlantis nesos, literally means what?
Island of Atlas
Island of Atlas: in Plato's tale this Atlas is not the sky-bearing Titan but the island's first king, a son of its divine founder, and the surrounding ocean took his name too.
Q 03Plato says the story reached Greece through which famous lawgiver, who heard it from priests in Egypt?
Solon
Solon, Plato says, meant to turn the tale into an epic that might have rivalled Homer, but political strife at home left him no time to write it.
Q 04According to Plato, Atlantis lay beyond what landmark?
The Pillars of Hercules
The Pillars of Hercules are the rocks flanking the Strait of Gibraltar, which the hero was said to have set up to mark the farthest limit of his travels and of safe seafaring.
Q 05Plato dates the fall of Atlantis to roughly how long before his own time?
9,000 years
9,000 years before the tale was first told would put the war near 9600 BC, deep in the Stone Age, yet Plato's Atlantis has metal-plated walls, chariots and a fleet of triremes.
Q 06Plato describes Atlantis as an island larger than which two lands combined?
Libya and Asia
Libya and Asia meant North Africa and, on a common reading, Asia Minor; beside the ocean around his island, Plato calls the whole Mediterranean only a harbour.
Q 07Which god was allotted the island of Atlantis when the deities divided the earth?
Poseidon
Poseidon was the god of earthquakes as well as the sea, so the island Plato gives him is finally destroyed by the very forces he commanded.
Q 08Atlantis's divine founder fell in love with the mortal Cleito, who bore him which children?
Five pairs of male twins
Five pairs of male twins were born to Cleito, and the god split the island into ten kingdoms so that every son had a realm of his own.
Q 09In Plato's tale, the island's god ringed the central hill of Atlantis with three circular what?
Moats
Moats: the god cut three rings of sea around the hill to guard the woman he loved, and the Atlanteans later tunnelled through the land between them so ships could sail into the city.
Q 10The walls of Atlantis were covered in brass, tin and which legendary precious metal?
Orichalcum
Orichalcum, Plato says, was mined on the island and ranked second only to gold in value, yet by his own day it survived as nothing more than a name.
Q 11Who led the alliance that defeated the Atlantean empire in Plato's story?
The Athenians
The Athenians first led a Greek alliance and then, deserted by their allies, beat the invaders alone, a victory Plato gives to a city modelled on his ideal state.
Q 12How quickly did Atlantis disappear into the sea, according to Plato?
In a single day and night
In a single day and night of earthquakes and floods, Plato says, the island sank and the victors' whole army was swallowed by the earth along with it.
Q 13What did Plato say the sunken island of Atlantis left behind, making the sea there impassable?
A shoal of mud
Q 21Which occultist claimed her 1888 book drew on ancient verses first composed in Atlantis?
Helena Blavatsky
Helena Blavatsky said The Secret Doctrine came from the Book of Dzyan, written in a lost tongue called Senzar, yet no scholar of ancient languages has ever found a trace of either.
Q 22Which American psychic predicted that Atlantis would rise from the sea again in the 1960s?
Edgar Cayce
Edgar Cayce, who died in 1945, called the island of Bimini a mountaintop of Atlantis, and a line of stone slabs found there in 1968 is still promoted as its road, though geologists call it beachrock.
Q 23Which scientific development of the 1960s made theories of a vast sunken Atlantis wane?
A shoal of mud suited what Greeks of Plato's day believed about the outer ocean, which even their scientists described as shallow because of mud.
Q 14Scholars read Plato's Atlantis, a sea empire of the west, as a deliberate contrast to which real land empire of the east?
The Achaemenid Persians
The Achaemenid Persians had invaded Greece from the east a century before Plato wrote, and his tale may replay that war in reverse, with the invader arriving by sea from the west.
Q 15Which philosopher is traditionally said to have joked that the man who invented Atlantis also sank it?
Aristotle
Aristotle is usually credited with the jibe, preserved without his name by a later geographer, which likens Plato to Homer building and then washing away the Greek wall at Troy.
Q 16The sixth-century writer Cosmas Indicopleustes cited the Atlantis story in a book arguing that the Earth is what shape?
Flat
Flat: Cosmas modelled the world on the box-like tabernacle of Moses, and claimed the Atlantis tale itself was borrowed from Moses.
Q 17In Plato's tale, which animals did the kings of Atlantis hunt with only staves and nooses before a sacrifice?
Bulls
Bulls roamed free in the island's great temple, and the kings cut the captured animal's throat over a column inscribed with their laws before swearing to obey them.
Q 18Some scholars think Plato modelled Atlantis's fortifications on which Sicilian city he knew well?
Syracuse
Syracuse was where Plato had tried, and failed, to turn the young tyrant Dionysius II into a philosopher-king, and some scholars see its harbours and walls in his island city.
Q 19Which Bronze Age volcano's eruption is often proposed as the catastrophe behind the Atlantis story?
Thera (Santorini)
Thera (Santorini) erupted about 3,600 years ago, burying a wealthy island town in ash and leaving the sea-filled crater that ships sail into today.
Q 20Whose 1882 book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World is credited with reviving the Atlantis myth?
Ignatius Donnelly
Ignatius Donnelly, a former Minnesota congressman, claimed every ancient civilisation descended from Atlantis, then wrote another book arguing that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.
Acceptance of continental drift
Acceptance of continental drift showed that sea floors spread rather than swallow land, leaving a continent nowhere to sink, an idea mapmaker Abraham Ortelius had floated in 1596 while musing on Atlantis.
Q 24The Atlantis resort that opened in 2008 at the tip of a man-made island in the Gulf is in which city?
Dubai
Dubai's Atlantis The Palm crowns Palm Jumeirah, an island built mostly of sand dredged from the sea floor, so a hotel named for a sunken land stands on ground raised from the sea.
Q 25Which drowned land beneath the North Sea, once home to Stone Age hunters, has been proposed as the real Atlantis?
Doggerland
Doggerland joined Britain to mainland Europe until melting ice sheets drowned it, and North Sea fishermen still haul up ancient bones and tools from its plains.
Q 26In 2011 a US-led team claimed in a TV documentary to have found Atlantis in which Spanish national park?
Doñana
Doñana's marshes, the team said, hid a city swamped by a tsunami, but Spanish researchers who had been studying the site since 2005 criticised the claim.
Q 27Ulf Erlingsson argued in 2004 that Plato modelled Atlantis, with its central plain open to the sea, on which island?
Ireland
Ireland was, he said, the only one of the world's 50 largest islands to fit Plato's description, though he called Atlantis itself a utopia that never existed.
Q 28Which Atlantic archipelago, often touted as Atlantis, has been an undersea plateau for millions of years?
The Azores
The Canaries and Madeira have been steadily uplifted, not sunk, over four million years.
Q 29Under the ice of which landmass have several writers claimed the ruins of Atlantis lie hidden?
Antarctica
Antarctica drew Atlantis hunters partly because a 1513 Ottoman chart, the Piri Reis map, was said to show its coast free of ice, a reading historians of cartography have disproved.
Q 30Which landform in Mauritania, whose concentric rings show clearly from orbit, have some theorists put forward as Atlantis?
The Richat Structure
The Richat Structure reminds believers of Plato's ringed capital, but geologists say it is a dome of rock worn down by erosion, deep in the Sahara.