[lolinder]

There is one—"a thousand feet"—but also you can't use the existence of measurements as evidence of authenticity.

For one, those measurements can't possibly have been recorded by Plato or a contemporary, because if there were a historical Atlantis all claims point to it being centuries older than Plato. Any numbers he's using are either completely fictitious or passed down and distorted through generations. Either way, Plato clearly didn't care that they were accurate.

Second, ancient literature is kind of obsessed with giving precise measurements for things that can't possibly be accurate. The numbers are inserted to give a sense of grandeur, and are just a part of the style of this kind of work. Where they seem odd and out of place to us, they were common at the time. See the Bible, Herodotus, and many others.

[bombcar]

Tolkien's writing is accurate and descriptive enough to not only produce an atlas [5], and a legendarium of plants [24356] but for said atlas to not only describe the routes, but the types of land/mountains traversed, and how they would have come to be.

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Middle-Earth-Revised-Karen-Fons...

[24356] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Flora_of_Middle-Earth

[YeGoblynQueenne]

But, how do we know the atlas etc are accurate? There's no real places or objects to compare them with.

[bombcar]

They're accurate to the text, and "how things are on earth" which is all we can compare them to.

The point being you can have a description of an entirely fantastical area with no inherent contradictions.

[jvanderbot]

Any major event must last 40 days and 40 nights, for example.