The story of Atlantis begins on a warm afternoon in classical Athens.
Plato, in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, introduces for the first time a word that would change the human imagination forever.Atlantis.

There are no previous mentions.

There are no ancient inscriptions.

It all starts there.

Plato recounts a story passed down by Egyptian priests: a powerful island beyond the Pillars of Hercules that dominated the seas until arrogance condemned it to a final cataclysm.

For Plato’s contemporaries, the message was clear.

It was not a map, nor a historical chronicle.

It was a moral warning.

A civilization built on greed was destined to collapse.

And yet, the text is never completed.

Critias breaks off mid-sentence.

The ending disappears.

That silence became a void that entire generations would try to fill.

Centuries later, the obsession shifted from myth to archaeology.

If Atlantis didn’t have a language, why do we keep looking for one? The answer lies in the real civilizations that existed within the same timeframe that Plato imagined.
In the heart of the Aegean Sea, on the island of Crete, a brilliant maritime culture flourished: the Minoans.They built complex palaces, advanced hydraulic systems and, most disturbingly, they wrote in a system that we still cannot read today.

Linear A.

This writing system, used between 1800 and 1450 BC

It appears on clay tablets, offering tables, and pottery.

More than 1.

500 registrations, about 7.

000 signs in total.

We know it’s not decorative.

It’s accounting, administration, record keeping.

An empire that wrote itself.

But the language behind those signs remains silent.

There are no long texts.

There is no bilingual translation.

There is no Rosetta Stone.
And that’s where artificial intelligence comes in.In recent years, interdisciplinary teams have begun to apply advanced computational models to Linear A.

Not to “guess” words, but to detect patterns impossible to see with the naked eye.

The first major crack in the wall was the numerical system.

The symbols followed a clear additive logic: vertical lines for units, horizontal lines for tens, circles for hundreds.

It was organized, precise, almost modern.

Then came the fractions, the real mystery.

In 2021, a team from the University of Bologna used AI-assisted constraint programming to test thousands of possible combinations.

The algorithm discarded any system that did not fit into all known tables.

The result was disturbing in its elegance: at least 17 fraction signs with exact values.

One tenth, one quarter, one eighth, one fifth, one sixth, even divisions into sixtieths.

It wasn’t improvisation.

It was a sophisticated mathematical system designed for trade, temples, and resource control.

Each fraction appeared alongside ideograms of real goods: grain, oil, wine, wool.

The records said things like “such a person received such a fraction of grain”.

AI didn’t translate a language, but it resurrected a mental structure.
A way of thinking about the world.And that structure belonged to an advanced, maritime, island civilization… that suffered a natural disaster of biblical proportions.

On the island of Thera, now Santorini, a volcanic eruption occurred between 1627 and 1600 BC

It destroyed entire cities and generated tsunamis that struck Crete, Anatolia and beyond.

Akrotiri was frozen in ash, with murals of ships and dolphins still intact.

Within that destruction, fragments of Linear A appeared.

The same writing.

The same culture.

The same commercial network.

A powerful island erased by the sea.

The echo is impossible to ignore.

But the story doesn’t end there.

While AI was deciphering ancient numbers, another revolutionary project was doing something even bolder: reading texts that should never have survived.

In Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius in the year 79, hundreds of papyrus scrolls were carbonized.

For centuries they were unreadable.

Opening them meant destroying them.
Until artificial intelligence learned to see the invisible.Using micro-CT scans and machine learning models, researchers began to detect subtle alterations in the papyrus fibers caused by carbon ink.

In 2023 and 2024, the so-called Vesuvius Challenge achieved the unthinkable: reading thousands of Greek characters without touching the scrolls.

Philosophy.

Reflections on pleasure, moderation, and luxury.

Voices that had been silent for two thousand years spoke again.

The parallel is unsettling.

Civilizations buried by volcanoes.

Forgotten languages.

Fragmentary records.

And a modern technology that doesn’t invent answers, but connects points scattered in time.

Artificial intelligence did not “prove” the existence of Atlantis.

But it revealed something perhaps more disturbing: that behind the myth there are real patterns, cultural memories of authentic catastrophes, and systems of knowledge that humanity is only beginning to understand.

Atlantis, perhaps, was never an exact place on a map.

But its language, its logic, its downfall… could be the distorted reflection of a world that actually existed.

And thanks to artificial intelligence, that world is no longer completely silent.