For the Phoenicians, this was a familiar role. The Phoenicians appear as supporting players, wheeled on to lend credence to the wider project of cementing Sweden's linguistic and cultural pre-eminence in European prehistory. The Atlantica is thus part linguistic treatise, part sacred geography, part nationalist originmyth. This could be under the influence of the Scythian hypothesis, which argued that the Scythians were speakers of the mother language of Europe. Rudbeck also counts the Scythians among them, while simultaneously using the ethnonym Skyter "Scythians" for the prehistoric Swedes. Some Swedes settled there and eventually became other people, such as Trojans, Persians, and Phoenicians. During an exodus around four thousand years ago, led by kings who are now remembered as the Nordic gods, Swedish culture and customs influenced the civilizations around the Mediterranean. Once he was there, a rich culture flourished. He proposed that Japheth, the eldest son of Noah, who during Early Modern times was often seen as the ancestor of the Europeans, migrated from Mount Ararat, up through Russia and into Sweden. However, like many Early Modern writers he connected his nation's earliest origins with the travels of Noah's offspring. Rudbeck's argument is not primarily based in biblical reference, as much research at the time was, and he never claims that Sweden was the location of the garden of Eden or that Swedish was the original language spoken by Adam and Eve.
The main thesis is that Sweden, especially the old pagan settlement Gamla Uppsala (about five km from the center of Uppsala), is the cradle of civilization. In an academic world where the use of Latin was ubiquitous, Rudbeck instead wrote in Swedish and commissioned a Latin translation to be published together with the original. It is in essence a work of proto-nationalism, from its subject matter to the choice of language.
Arship it defies modern disciplinary boundaries, offering conclusions on history, geography, linguistics, genealogy, and religion.
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