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When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1799, he took with him the largest collection of scholars ever to accompany a military campaign. The finds and discoveries made by Napoleon's archaeologists generated a national obsession with all things ancient, in time inspiring a fellow Frenchman Jules Verne to take the story of Atlantis from the arcane libraries of a few lonely scholars into the imagination of the whole world.
Here were the encrusted remains of an Acropolis, with the floating foams of a Parthenon. Here were the vestiges of an ancient port on the shore of a vanished sea, which had once given shelter to merchant ships and craft of war. Palestine was outlines of crumpled walls and long-lines of wide deserted streets. An ancient Pompeii buried beneath the sea. Atlantis.
Jules Verne's image of Atlantis in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea was perhaps the most spellbinding description of the lost city since Plato's.
It was published in 1870, enormously popular book, the drawings that actually accompanied the book showed people marching around in Greek, sunken Greek temples and this of course was kind of an interesting concept and probably was the element that got people more and more interested in Atlantis. The idea that under water, you could walk around in sunken Greek temples.
Written in the 1870s as the effects of the industrial revolution and new technologies were rapidly changing the world, Verne's story of under sea exploration was a prescient guess of the shape of things to come.
It was really a Da Vinci kind of prophecy. The general population of the day had no idea about the oceans really. Most people did not know how to swim; Most people certainly had never been underwater. All they knew was that the ocean was populated by monsters of one kind or another/ that probably ate ships and certainly ate people.
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arcane: adj. 神秘的
vestige: n. 遗迹
crumpled: adj. 皱的
spellbinding: adj. 引诱的，吸引的
prescient: adj 预见的，预知的
prophecy: n. 预言
populate: v. 使人居住
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