Not Atlantis alone: Sunken ancient civilizations, traces of which are still looking for today

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The legends of Atlantis are widely known, the legends of Hyperborea are not much less. But these are not the only hypothetical ancient civilizations, in the existence of which not only lovers of historical riddles believe, but also some scientists. If you collect all the legends about great civilizations that flourished in time immemorial, and then died as a result of some cataclysm and went under water, it turns out that on our planet in each of the oceans you can find the ruins of such a civilization …

Atlantis, according to most people studying the legends about it, rests somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and Hyperborea, according to one version, can be found at the bottom of the Arctic. But in the remaining oceans, perhaps, it is also worth looking for dead civilizations: in the Pacific - Pacifida, and in the Indian - Lemuria. And they were even looked for there in the twentieth century - though not too diligently and unsuccessfully.

The Pacific Ocean has its own "Atlantis"

Pacifida is also called the Continent of Mu, and was initially confused with Atlantis. For the first time, the French missionary and scientist Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg spoke about it in the 19th century, who, while traveling in Mexico, bought several Mayan manuscripts there and tried to decipher them. One of the manuscripts told about a certain "country of Mu", rich and prosperous, but in ancient times completely sunk under water. De Bourbourg at first decided that the author of the manuscript meant Atlantis, but after studying its description more closely, he found that it was not the Atlantic Ocean, but, most likely, the Pacific Ocean - about the region where Easter Island is located with with its mysterious giant statues.

The missionary suggested that in this part of the Pacific Ocean there could be a large island or even a small mainland, which was then destroyed by an earthquake and the "fragment" of which is Easter Island. In the twentieth century, this idea came to the liking of scientists: if there was a sufficiently large continent in the largest of the earth's oceans, this would explain why there are many animals and plants belonging to to the same species. It was difficult to believe that these plants and animals spread over such long distances across the ocean - it was much easier to assume that they traveled part of the way by land in the center of the ocean.

In 1923, a book by biologist Mikhail Menzbir, "Secrets of the Great Ocean," was published in Russia, in which he argued that the Pacific continent really existed. A year later, a similar book - "The Secret of the Pacific Ocean" - was published in England. Its author, ethnographer John Macmillan Brown, having read Menzbier's work, supplemented it with his reasoning about where the remnants of this continent could be hiding. Fans of all kinds of mysticism and esotericism became interested in both books, declaring that it was Pacifida, and not Atlantis, that was “the cradle of science and art” and that she died because its inhabitants “played too much” with the forces of nature unknown to us.

Several scientific expeditions have visited the Easter Island area, trying to find at least some hint of the existence of a highly developed civilization there. But they did not find anything, and after that those who wanted to fund such expeditions noticeably diminished. So the question of whether the mysterious Continent of Mu was in those places is still open.

Lemurians - friends of the Atlanteans

The hypothesis of the existence of another continent called Lemuria was put forward in the 19th century by the English biologist Philip Latley Sclater. This idea was also prompted by representatives of the fauna, but not the same, as in the case of Pacifida, but on the contrary, too different on the island of Madagascar and in all other places. Sclater suggested that Madagascar is the remnant of a larger continent, on which all the unusual animals living on it now developed. He named this hypothetical continent Lemuria in honor of the most unusual Madagascar animals - small lemur monkeys.

Sclater's assumption seemed to be confirmed by the legends of the inhabitants of India and the island of Ceylon about the country in the Indian Ocean, where the god Shiva lived, as well as references in ancient Egyptian papyri about the land, which was located about the same place and "disappeared in the waves." Esotericists who believed in the existence of Atlantis, including members of the Theosophical Society of Helena Blavatsky, also happily agreed with the scientist. They created their own theory that Atlantis and Lemuria existed at the same time, that their inhabitants shared their scientific achievements with each other, and that both continents perished at the same time due to some large-scale experiment of these inhabitants, in which something- then it went wrong.

Some scientists tried to find traces of Lemuria in Madagascar and on other islands of the Indian Ocean, but, like their colleagues, who were looking for Pacifis, Atlantis and Hyperborea, they were unlucky.

Most likely, all the legends about ancient prosperous countries, whose inhabitants reached heights in the sciences and arts and did not need anything, are just variations of the legends about the Golden Age, when everything was "better than now." But, on the other hand, the bottom of the oceans is still practically not studied, and it is probably impossible to say with confidence that there are no remnants of dead supercivilizations …