I'm committed to the Crete story, and following it a bunch of fun stuff in New Kingdom Egypt. On paper sounds amusing enough; the coming of the Sea Peoples and the beginnings of the end for the Mycenaean civilization in the Aegean at the end of the Bronze Age, through the eyes of a young woman. And for Egypt, an extended musing on the process of understanding history and immortality set in the worker camps of the Valley of Kings and the ruins of the royal city of Akhenaton.
But I can't help think of things that are easier to write.
My trouble with Atlantis is that it isn't possible, not as given. This is true for pretty much all the popular conspiracy fodder, from Lemuria to Hollow Earth to the Bermuda Triangle. (Which is to say, the ideas that are well-known enough to attract a casual reader's eye, detailed enough to be easy to write about, and "big" enough to spin some epic about.)
Re the latter, archaeologists get excited about whether overshot flaking was developed earlier than supposed, but its hard to imagine chase scenes and gunfights erupting over that secret.
So, yeah. You could come up with an original mystery that isn't as badly contravened by the evidence as is Atlantis. Say, that Great Zimbabwe had steam power, electrification and sent explorers as far as Wisconsin. (One has to assume the Rhodesian Government did a hell of a lot more covering up than they are even historically blamed for). Or if hard tech isn't to your taste, that the real source of the Mayan mathematic genius was the Norte-Chico civilization, who had moved far beyond Set Theory into multi-dimensional manifolds and chaos math. Or if biological advances are your go-to, that the Sumerian King List is actually factual, that they had somehow managed to bred for extreme longevity, and aside from some of the Noachian patriarchs and odd hanger's on like Lazarus the line died with them.
All bunnies above are free for the taking, by the by.
Atlantis just doesn't work, not in the real world. There's three major ways around it. One is to change Atlantis, but by the time you've made it a town in the Italian Alps in around 200 AD there's hardly a point in claiming any connection is left to Plato.
The next is to assume it is, indeed, fake. You can go an Eco-ish route with this; either people who can't accept it is fake and build their own conspiracy around it, or it is indeed balderdash but in the process of looking into it anyway some totally unrelated thing is discovered. ("Look, guys, it isn't a Deep One after all -- it's just old Mr. British Petroleum trying to hide his fracking operation!")
Or, you change the world. (Actually, you pretty much have to change Atlantis a little anyhow. Continent filling the ocean and diving beneath the waves in a day? Not going to happen on this globe). I rather like the possibilities of this one. Plato wrote, then other writers added to, commented, criticized. There is archaeological evidence. Basically, it was a real place that left a real impact on the historical and archaeological and, yes, geological record.
And that brings me around -- Atlantis not necessarily included or wanted -- to two very different books I might prefer to be writing.
The first is the Fake Real. A story set either in a period of historical archaeology or in a couple of periods, with the discoveries made in one era being amplified on by another. The later would allow you to put both Carter and Ventris in the same story. So in this one, the past is stranger than it is in our world, and so is the present. Not only do some of the hidden technologies of the Atlanteans (or whatever) start showing up in the shops of London or as weapons in the wars, the historical characters themselves become para-historical; younger, stronger, prettier, more accomplished.
The other is the Real Fake. A story set in modern day or, better yet, somewhere between the 70's and the 90's (between the rise of Von Daniken and the rise of the cable TV pseudo-history channels.) Not only are the Lemurians as fake as they are in the real world, so is the archaeologist; a Remington Steele type created by a television show to be the world-famous discoverer of a new secret every week. Except that their patsy develops a conscience. Hence tension...and story.
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