Dissecting Literature

  Lost worlds and lost citirs are infinite sources for our blog and a great source of inspiration for writers. There are famous ones like El Dorado that we covered in our previous post (you can read it here ( link )) or Troy from Illiad but today I like to introduce a lesser known one, known as the “Atlantis of the Sands”: the city of Iram. The idea for this post came from a very interesting Youtube video, and since our own work features something similar, I thought it’d make an excellent topic for today. I. The City of Pillars Iram appears in the folklore of pre-Islamic arabia but is also mentioned in the Quran as Iram of the Pillars, because the city was known from its huge pillars and towers. They were so big, that they thought the city was build by giants, or another race technologically more advanced than humans were at that times. Once source called the people of ʿĀd, other tales claim they were actually djinns, or even nephilims, giant hybrids of humans and angels. (Note tha...

  Hey there, travelers! Moving on from continents lost to mankind to a smaller scale, we’re here to talk about one of the most ridiculous shared delusions of 16th-century powers – the City of Gold, El Dorado. If you missed the previous stop on lost continents, be sure to check it out to get a grasp on how the mentality behind these myths works. So, El Dorado. To be honest with you, I have a ridiculous fascination with both secret hidden civilizations and pre-colonial America, so I can’t help but love the idea of a city hidden within the jungles of the New World, if not exactly for the gold. But do you know who loved it for the gold? The Spanish conquistadors who made it up. I. The Golden Man The whole story starts with a local legend the conquistadors heard about “El Hombre Dorado”, or the golden man, a tribal chief so rich he’s coated with gold dust. So being the brave conquerors they are, they trod off to find this El Hombre Dorado – and (for the last time in this whole story) th...