To be fair, Troy was also mostly thought to be mystical before Heinrich Schliemann went on a quest to find it (and subsequently destroyed most of it as he used explosives to perform archeological digs).

https://www.pottertour.co.uk/blog/george-heriots-school-harr...

Mind you - I'm not really that big a Harry Potter fan but I did live in that part of Edinburgh for many years and my son went to Heriots after adventures at other schools...

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230212-a-city-under-the...

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2017/10/12/bye-bye...

https://www.scld.org/st-pancras-station-sparks-imaginations/

Humans model their world on stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Iliad#Hitti...

Homer certainly didn't give a super detailed description of Troy's location. The Iliad is an epic poem not a historical account. The Homeric Question is a debate almost as ancient as the Iliad, after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question

As to Schleimann, he was certainly all too ready to "discover" elements of the Homeric epics. For example, "the mask of Agamemnon":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon

Or "The Jewels of Helen":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File...

There are plenty of Mediterranean historical fiction-like tales where an original grain of truth does seem promising. Besides popular cases like Atlantis, and Troy as a site, there’s e.g. Aeneas coming from Troy to Rome as a possible reflection of an Bronze Age-collapse era migration from western Anatolia to Italy bringing the Etruscan language.

I dislike this quote since it basically discourages further research.

[0] not sure where, have only seen other people mention this

> On the side toward the sea, and in the center of the whole island, there was a plain which is said to have been the fairest of all plains, and very fertile. Near the plain again, and also in the center of the island, at a distance of about fifty stadia (one stadia=606 feet), there was a mountain, not very high on any side.

> And, beginning from the sea, they dug a canal three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth, and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this,

> Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two, as well the zone of water as of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia.

These are features of a geographical account.

> And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below.

> The entrance to the Citadel also looked eastward, but was delved in the heart of the rock; thence a long lamp-lit slope ran up to the seventh gate. Thus men reached at last the High Court, and the place of the Fountain before the feet of the White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to the pinnacle, where the banner of the Stewards floated a thousand feet above the plain.

This is also a geographical account, by Tolkien of Minas Tirith.

There are actually striking similarities in style, which is unsurprising given that Tolkien was a scholar who patterned his works on ancient epics. The main difference is that the ancient text has more numbers, which, given the timescales a historical Atlantis would have to have occurred on, were certainly not literal measurements recorded by Plato or a contemporary.

For one, those measurements can't possibly have been recorded by Plato or a contemporary, because if there were a historical Atlantis all claims point to it being centuries older than Plato. Any numbers he's using are either completely fictitious or passed down and distorted through generations. Either way, Plato clearly didn't care that they were accurate.

Second, ancient literature is kind of obsessed with giving precise measurements for things that can't possibly be accurate. The numbers are inserted to give a sense of grandeur, and are just a part of the style of this kind of work. Where they seem odd and out of place to us, they were common at the time. See the Bible, Herodotus, and many others.

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Middle-Earth-Revised-Karen-Fons...

[24356] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Flora_of_Middle-Earth

The point being you can have a description of an entirely fantastical area with no inherent contradictions.

Plato, fond of such rhetorical devices himself, is more than likely to be following a similar game.

city of troy

niebelungenlied

noah's ark

The Song of the Nibelungs has many purely fictional parts.

Noah's Ark and the Flood are mere myths with 0 proof of any kind of historical reality, and 0 chance of there ever being one.

what is fictional about the niebelungen?

the ark is about the creation of the black sea

there are stories that might be 100000 years old https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom...