Most of the historically proposed locations are in or near the Mediterranean Sea: islands such as Sardinia, Crete, Santorini, Sicily, Cyprus, and Malta; land-based cities or states such as Troy,[70] Tartessos, and Tantalus (in the province of Manisa, Turkey); Israel-Sinai or Canaan;[citation needed] and northwestern Africa.[71][72] The Thera eruption, dated to the 17th or 16th century BC, caused a large tsunami that some experts hypothesize devastated the Minoan civilization on the nearby island of Crete, further leading some to believe that this may have been the catastrophe that inspired the story.[73]
A. G. Galanopoulos argued that Plato's dating of 9,000 years before Solon's time was the result of an error in translation, probably from Egyptian into Greek, which produced "thousands" instead of "hundreds". Such an error would also rescale Plato's Atlantis to the size of Crete, while leaving the city the size of the crater on Thera; 900 years before Solon would be the 15th century BC.[74] In the area of the Black Sea the following locations have been proposed: Bosporus and Ancomah[75][76] (a legendary place near Trabzon).