So much has been written and surmised about the "lost continent" of Atlantis in recent decades that it's easy to forget that the whole tale rests upon just one source of highly uncertain provenance: a description by Plato in his Timaeus and Critias. Plato claims, in these writings, that the story came to him by way of various intermediaries from his ancestor Solon who learned it, in turn, from Egyptian priests in 590 BC.