Sundaland: Cradle of Civilization

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Three prominent AI platforms were consulted to do comparative analyses of prominent theories regarding the location of Atlantis: OpenAI/ChatGPT, Google/Gemini and Hangzhou/DeepSeek. The analyses were performed by applying a score to each criterion. These AI platforms all concluded that the Sundaland (Java Sea – Dhani Irwanto) theory ranked highest in terms of the strength of theory construction scores based on their respective criteria.

Comprehensive Research for Human Civilizations

Human civilization has always been shaped by the interplay between memory, myth, and material evidence. Across cultures, ancient narratives preserve echoes of real places, events, and societies that time has otherwise obscured. Yet historians and archaeologists have often regarded myths and legends as unreliable, dismissing them as fiction or metaphor rather than as encoded fragments of memory. This research challenges this dismissal by developing a methodology that treats myths, legends, and symbolic records as structured systems of signs — open to semiotic and linguistic decoding, and capable of yielding historical truths when analyzed systematically.

Over the past several decades, the work has centered on reconstructing the forgotten civilizations of Southeast Asia, particularly Sundaland, the now-submerged subcontinent that once connected the islands of Indonesia with the Asian mainland. Drawing on geology, archaeology, linguistics, climatology, and comparative mythology, it proposes that Sundaland was not only a cradle of human civilization, but also the setting for many of the world’s most enduring cultural myths, including Plato’s Atlantis, the Egyptian Land of Punt, the Greco-Roman Taprobana, and the Aurea Chersonesus.

The core of the research is a semiotic and linguistic framework for historical reconstruction. This framework integrates the classic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Roman Jakobson, and Roland Barthes with three methodological reconstruction models: Potsherds, Anastylosis, and Puzzle. By decoding signs and narratives across multiple layers of meaning — denotation, connotation, and myth — and reassembling them into structured objects, this method provides a rigorous approach for interpreting symbolic sources.

Crucially, the framework relies on the principle of consilience of evidence: the convergence of independent data from multiple disciplines toward the same conclusion. A single myth or inscription may be ambiguous, but when myths align with geology, when linguistics supports archaeology, and when cartographic traditions echo oral memory, the cumulative weight of evidence becomes compelling. It is this interdisciplinary synthesis that transforms speculative interpretation into robust reconstruction.

Through this approach, the research has advanced several key discoveries:

Sundaland as the cradle of early civilizations, submerged by rising seas after the last Ice Age.
Atlantis, as described by Plato, located in the Java Sea.
The Land of Punt, remembered in Egyptian records, identified with Sumatra.
Taprobana, long debated in classical geography, reinterpreted as Borneo (Kalimantan).
The Aurea Chersonesus (“The Cape of Gold”) of Greco-Roman maps, identified as Tanjungemas (‘cape of gold’) in Sumatra.

These findings do not merely propose alternative geographies; they suggest a profound reorientation of world history — one in which Southeast Asia is recognized as a central hub of early human civilization, cultural diffusion, and maritime exchange.

The research is not intended to offer definitive answers, but to provide a replicable framework for decoding the past. By treating myths and legends as meaningful data, and by validating them through consilience across disciplines, the research aims to build bridges between symbolic memory and historical reality. In doing so, the hope is to inspire both scholars and the wider public to look at ancient narratives with renewed curiosity — not as distant fictions, but as coded testimonies of shared human origins.

View the research paper.