Many scholars think Plato could have been thinking of a real place when he wrote about Atlantis. Many, many people have thought of many, many places where the real place that inspired Atlantis could have been. For example, there was a Minoan kingdom on the island of Santorini. The Minoan kingdom was very powerful thousands of years before Plato, and their society was damaged when a volcano erupted on their island. According to Plato, Atlantis was very large, as big as North Africa, so it should not have been hard to find.