steve0discusses:
Okay okay, this blog hasn’t been active in over a year but I’m coming back to explain some history! There’s a lot of confusing things in this episode, but most of it gets vaguely explained later. There’s only one thing that’s not explained and that’s the writer’s decision to use Atlantis for their filler season in a series that loves to focus on Ancient Egypt.
Basically, Atlantis is a Greek myth written down in Greek about an Ancient Greek civilization. Which obviously is why there were greek pillars in the first episode. But the way the narrator/author of the legend framed the story actually includes Egypt. The books Timaeus and Critias (Yes Yugi’s dragon is named after the book Atlantis comes from) start off with the author Plato saying his friend told him this story and he was just writing it down. To be a warning for Greek civilization blah blah blah philosophy cause it’s Plato. Anyway, Plato’s friend supposedly heard the story on a trip to Egypt. The guy apparently saw some hieroglyphics describing the tale and his tour guide translated it. These hieroglyphs have never been found by modern-day archeologists but it’s also not impossible for Egypt to have a legend about Atlantis.
Fun fact about Egypt, Egypt was considered old by the Greeks too. So when the Greeks heard a story about a civilization that lived where they currently live but was destroyed they also figured it was a long time ago and Egypt was just around to hear of the tragedy and write it down. Plato actually places it at around 9,600 BC by our standards so that’s where the 10,000 years come in. Obviously, Plato was wrong since the myth was most likely based on the Minoans who existed around 1,500 BC or a little over 3,000 years ago. As in a civilization that was around and traded with Egypt.
The Dub says the Pharoah is from 5,000 years ago, but the sub says 3,000 years. At the end of the day, this doesn’t usually matter since one just puts Pharoah in the Old Kingdom instead of the New Kingdom. But here it matters since Atlantis was written down just over 2,000 years ago and the fall of the Minoans happened right around 3,000 years ago. Basically tossing out the 10,000 years bit, which is only because of Plato’s translation, and Atlantis would have fallen only a few centuries at most before Yami was Pharoah. (also fun fact since I just saw the subs of the scene. Tea says she saw Arthur’s discovery of Atlantis on the news. Nothing about reading a book about it once lol)
The writers in Japan most likely said 10,000 years because that was what Plato said and they actually try pretty hard to reference the legend in this season. But it would also have been common knowledge that it was actually about the Minoans. Who existed around the time of their fictional Pharoah. Making it easy to say a race that lived across the pond was also summoning monsters and just got destroyed before Egypt did.
