The author is an English architect, lawyer, and archaeologist, from a family of publishers. A comparative study of 15 vanished civilizations across the globe and spanning 5000 years: Atlantis, Malta, Avebury, Stonehenge, Ur, Troy, Pyramids, Mohenjo-Daro, Persepolis, Pompeii, Chichen Itza, Angkor, Benin, Zimbabwe, Machu Picchu, Easter Island. The author intends to learn something from each of the cultures presented here [11]--their disappearance would appear to highlight the importance of the lesson.

The 'greatest mystery of all' is ATLANTIS [193ff], the lost world of which we know the least. According to Plato, the great Athenian law-maker, Solon, visited Egypt in approximately 600 BC and a priest in the city of Sais told Solon the story of this great civilization in the Atlantic, now submerged. Sais itself is now submerged, or buried, in the mud of the Nile delta. A similar legend is told in two epic poems of India. Aside from the tidings of fabilists, many claims are made based on sunken stone: extraordinary blocks off the island of Little Bimini, the volcanic Aegean island of Santorini which exploded in 1500 BC, Crete whose ports were destroyed by a tidal wave 190 meters high.[198] ( )