In ancient Anatolia, there must have been many legends of giants or mountain gods supporting the sky. Fortunately, the works of ancient authors have preserved the story of one of these mythological characters. His name was Tantalum, and he was the legendary king of Lydia, where Croesus later ruled, as well as neighbouring Phrygia.
Historians of antiquity have long come to the conclusion that Tantalus, in fact, is a Lydia analogue of the Atlas. Tantalus had so many kinship ties with the titans, the Atlas race, that he may have been considered a titan himself; he was even called the son-in-law of the Atlas. Like Atlas, Tantalus showed boldness and challenged the Olympic gods. The gods respected him as their friend and confidant; they even accepted his invitation to dinner, where Tantalus made a tragic mistake in offering them the meat of his murdered son Pelop as a treat.
But the analogies between Tantalus and Atlas are not limited to this. It was believed that Tantalus, like Atlas, had previously ruled his own kingdom. In the center of the kingdom was the city he founded near Mount Sipila in the rich golden country of Lydia. Like King Croesus, Tantalus was famous for his wealth.
When Tantalus lost his blessing to the gods, his capital was destroyed by a major earthquake and its ruins sank to the bottom of the lake. The dead city was called Tantalis.
The resemblance between Tantalis and the capital of Atlantis is immediately striking: the fairytale rich city, once loved by the gods, is deprived of their patronage and dies as a result of the earthquake and flood. The fact that the rulers of these cities, Tantalus and Atlas, were two hypostases of the same mythological character, means that both stories are genetically related.
Since the legend of Tantalus is of Lidian origin, it is reasonable to assume that it was known at the court of the Lidian king Croesus at the time when Solon visited his palace (around 570 BC). According to the Greek historian Herodotus, during the meeting they exchanged stories about the vicissitudes of fate. The Lidian story of Tantalus and its city, with the morality of the vanity of all earthly greatness, fits well with this definition. If Solon took away the story of Tantalus from Lydia, it contained all the key elements for further transformation into a legend about Atlantis - from incredible blossoming to catastrophe and general death.
However, how could the story of the sunken city of Lydia become a legend of a continent destroyed 9600 years before Christ? Geographical displacement is easy to explain. If Solon or Plato "transferred" the name of Tantalus to a more familiar version (Atlas), the scene of the disaster was erroneously moved far to the west, to the place of exile of Atlas, not to his original home. Then, having received a "propiska" on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the story of the sunken kingdom could grow into exaggerations in the process of retelling for several generations from Solon to Platon.
Concerning date, it is much more natural to assume, that the source not the Egyptian origin used by Solon, and then Platon, informed on the empire existing for thousand years before the beginning of the Egyptian civilization. In the ancient world between the Middle Eastern neighbors of the Greeks conducted fierce competition for the right to be called the oldest people. Around 440 BC Herodotus said that the two main rivals were the Egyptians and the Phrygians (Phrygia was a neighbor to Lydia and a part of the kingdom of Tantalus). At that time, many believed that the first people in the world had grown out of the Phrygian soil, like plants. Herodotus reports on an anthropological experiment carried out by one of the Egyptian pharaohs in the 7th century B.C. to address this issue. He took two children, a Phrygian and an Egyptian, and forced a mute goat-feeder to them in the hope of determining which language was the "true" or original language of mankind. The first word spoken by both children was "Beck," which in Frigian meant bread. The irony of the situation was that the children were likely to mimic goat bleaching.
Whether it was true or not, it didn't matter. As a result, the Phrygians won the dispute; their superiority was considered proven and even recognized by the Pharaoh. Tantalus was not only king of Lydia, but also of Phrygia. It is quite possible that at the court of King Cresa (VI century BC) with confidence spoke about the great city built by Tantalus long before the beginning of Egyptian civilization. It was not true, but people believed it. As Plato himself attributed the birth of the Egyptian civilization 8000 years before his own time, it was not difficult for him to come to the conclusion that Atlantis (that is, Tantalis) was a thousand years older than Egypt.