ABOUT WORKINGBOOKS
WorkingBooks is a workspace made public—a collection of investigations into historical and geographical puzzles that have stayed with me long after I should have put the books down. The seven projects currently underway:
Atlantis — Did Plato’s lost civilisation have roots in the Green Sahara?
The Sphinx — Age, erosion, and the question of who carved it.
Silphium — The plant that built an empire and then vanished—and whether it actually did.
Rise of the Templars — The first nine years: what were they actually doing?
The Argonautica — The outward journey, mapped against real geography.
The Olmecs — Origins, arrivals, and the problem of cultural transmission.
Madagascar Colonisation — Who got there first, and why the standard model doesn’t work.
These are not academic papers. I am not a historian, a palaeoclimatologist, or an anthropologist. I am a curious amateur with an internet connection, a stubborn refusal to force evidence, and a conviction that the questions worth asking don’t always fit inside a single department. Any errors on this site are entirely my own making. What I am is someone who knows how to measure, how to read, and how to distrust his own hopes. That last skill turned out to matter most.
The Method
There is a particular kind of madness in taking an ancient text at its word. It is the madness of looking at a map and thinking, What if? Not the comfortable, academic what if that lives safely within the margins of a scholarly paper, but the kind that has you at two in the morning, measuring the distance between a volcanic crater in the Sahara and a ghost river that has not flowed for five thousand years. That madness runs through every project on this site.
The method is consistent across all seven investigations, and it came into focus through failure. The rule is simple: if the numbers do not fit, they do not fit. No fudging. No special pleading. No talking yourself into a match because you’ve already invested the emotional energy in wanting one.
The Atlantis investigation is the oldest and most developed of the seven, and it serves as the worked example of everything this site tries to do. It began with a paperback copy of Plato’s Timaeus and Critias and a question that wouldn’t leave me alone. Plato packed his Atlantis story with numbers—precise dimensions, specific allotments, a complete inventory of stones and metals. A philosopher constructing an allegory has no reason to do this. An allegory does not need a plain of exactly 3,000 by 2,000 stadia. It does not need 60,000 land allotments. It does not need the stones of the city walls to be red, white, and black.
That precision is the crack in the door. It suggested to me not a fable, but a dossier—a report, telescoped by time and translation, of a real place with real dimensions. I decided to take Plato at his word and treat the text as a set of geographic coordinates. My job was to find where they pointed, or to fail honestly in the attempt.
I failed repeatedly. I tried the Reguibat Plateau. The size would not work. I measured a candidate plain and got back a ratio that was mathematically elegant, unquestionably significant in the ancient Greek world—and completely wrong. I deleted the markers and started again. This happened not once, but a dozen times. The landscape was allowed to say no. That is what makes the eventual yes feel earned.
What struck me hardest throughout all of this was the scale. The Sahara is vast in a way that defies intuition. To sit with Google Maps and realise that hundreds of kilometres of sand and rocky desert were once hundreds of kilometres of savannah grassland—the same green world, breathing and teeming, stretching from the Atlas Mountains to the Sahel—was a vertigo of the imagination. It made the numbers in Plato’s text feel not like fantasy, but like memory.
The full Atlantis hypothesis is laid out in detail on its project page. In brief: Plato’s Timaeus and Critias may have their geographical roots in the landscapes and cattle-based peoples of central north-west Africa during the last African Humid Period. The desertification process of approximately 4500 to 4000 BCE split the occupying tribes. The resource-dependent peoples followed the retreating water south and south-west. The elite pushed northeast towards the Nile.
What the priests of Egypt preserved was not a myth. It was a dossier delivered by the former masters of a dying world.
Start Here
Each project on this site follows the same discipline. Start with the source text or the archaeological record. Identify the specific claims it makes. Ask whether those claims point to a real time and place. Let the landscape answer. Walk away when it doesn’t.
The projects are independent and can be read in any order. But if you want to understand how I think—how the method was built, tested, and broken before it held—begin with Atlantis. It is where I learned to distrust my own hopes, and it is the foundation on which everything else here stands.
I invite correction. I welcome contributions from specialists in palaeoclimatology, geology, archaeology, historical linguistics, and any other field represented on this site. If you can show me where I’ve gone wrong, I will say so, clearly and prominently, on the relevant page. This is a live document, and it is stronger for being challenged.
Start anywhere. The questions are waiting.
John