Lost continents

Did you know that lost continents suffer from drift?

Mu certainly does – it moved.

When it was first ‘discovered’ by 19^th century traveller and writer Auguste Le Plongeon, it was apparently hanging out in the Atlantic Ocean.  However, James Churchward, who ended up penning no less than seven [? Check this!] books on the place, insisted that it lived in the Pacific.

Perhaps it couldn’t take all the competition with Atlantis, so it had to strike out on its own.

Okay, so admittedly this crack is a tad unfair once you start looking at the ‘facts’ (such as they aren’t).

According to that great authority Le Plongeon, Atlantis and Mu were really one and the same place.  He got the name ‘Mu’ from Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, who had managed to mistranslate the famous Troano Codex of the Mayans, using the now discredited de Landa alphabet.  De Bourbourg believed that the word he had read as ‘Mu’ referred to a great land submerged by a terrible catastrophe.

There’s nothing like a good story, so of course Le Plongeon couldn’t resist the temptation to embellish it all a bit.  He claimed that the civilization of Ancient Egypt had actually been founded by Queen Moo (yes, this is the correct spelling), a refugee from Mu.  Other refugees went to Central America, where they became the Mayans.

More seriously suspect linguistics were then brought to bear on the problem, courtesy of James Churchward and the mysterious Naga-Maya tablets.  While working in India, he claimed that he was befriended by a high-ranking priest who eventually let him into a great secret.  This priest was one of only two remaining people in the entire modern world to be able to read this incredibly ancient language inscribed on a set of stone tablets rescued from the great deluge that overcame Mu, then brought to India by yet more of the survivors.

Because Churchward was such a splendid chap, the priest decided to be jolly decent and taught him how to read the tantalising tablets.  However, everyone else since then who might have fancied having a go has been a bit stuck.  Like the golden plates of the Mormons, no-one else has ever seen these tablets.

Churchward seems to have been another of these roaringly confident blustering amateurs who reckon they have got a firm grip on such complex and detailed disciplines as comparative linguistics when really they haven’t got a clue.  To give just one example amongst many, he apparently thought that the name of the ancient Egyptian god of the sun Ra is related to the Rapanui word for ‘sun’ ‘ra’a’.  But he couldn’t even spell the Rapanui word correctly.  So how the hell could he possibly make any accurate assumptions?

Like many at that time, he suffered from the usual rubbish belief in European supremacy.  He was convinced that none of the local populations living in Polynesia would have ever been up to constructing any of the megalithic art found on their doorsteps

Therefore they must have been created by the people of Mu – who most certainly did not end up becoming the ancestors of the modern Polynesians, seeing as most of them died in the cataclysm that did for their continent.  So that ‘explains’ why no more of these monuments were built in more recent times, I suppose.

Churchward and co did – and still do – have some solid supporters.  Founder of the Turkish Republic Kemal Ataturk, for one, was said to be very interested in Churchward’s work, even wondering if Mu was the location of the original Turkish homeland.

Naturally the so-called ‘science’ behind this theory turns out to be the standard load of old bollocks.  Yes, continents drift and seafloors spread.  As a result, continents can and do change their shapes and positions.  They can even split into pieces.

But these geological processes only happen very, very slowly.  It takes hundreds of millions of years for something like this to happen, not a single, sodding night! During the entire course of human existence, the continents have only moved a mere few centimetres.

History does admit that entire cities have been destroyed and sunk beneath the sea.  But these disasters have always happened to either islands or places on the coasts of continents that still exist.

They were all caused by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions – which do work pretty quickly.  The recent Japanese earthquake that caused so much trouble only took [4? minutes?  Have to check this one out as well]   

Archaeology has also revealed a series of devastating local disasters that probably changed the course of human history quite radically.  There has been an 80m rise in sea levels over the past 12, 000 years.  The Black Sea is known to have flooded 7, 600 years ago.  The devastating eruption of Santorini 3, 600 years ago destroyed much of Cretan civilization and may well have been one of the major inspirations for the Atlantis myth.