In his Timaeus and Critias dialogues, Plato wrote of two ancient civilisations that flourished more than 9,000 years before his time. Socrates accepted the account as true, and modern archaeological techniques may yet prove him right. In Plato Prehistorian, Mary Settegast takes us from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the shrines of Catalhoeyuk, demonstrating connections both to Plato's tale and to the mystery religions of antiquity. She then traces the mid-seventh millennium impulse that revitalised the spiritual life of Catalhoeyuk and spread agriculture from Iran to the Greek Peninsula -- at precisely the time given by Aristotle for the legendary Persian prophet Zarathustra, for whom the cultivation of the earth was a religious imperative. This new edition of Settegast's ground-breaking synthesis of classical and archaeological scholarship features an appendix on the recent excavations at Goebekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, which have upended the conventional view of the rise of civilisation.
