Tectonics & Lost Civilizations

Do ancient accounts such as the Gilgamesh from the Fertile Crescent civilization of Sumer, as well as Egyptian, Hebrew, Persian, Greek and Asian oral traditions and written legends, place a "lost" civilization in what is now north amerika? Pacific rim civilizations from Tahiti and Fiji through Borneo, New Guinea, Micronesia and Hawaii to Japan and China share a common legend of what is generally known as Lemuria, or "Mu." These legends are not remarkably similar, they are virtually identical, in both nature and content, to North African, European and Mediterranean tales of Atlantique, or Atlantis. In ancient tongues an ocean was named for the fabled land that lay beyond.

The oldest written material ever to have been discovered and interpreted tell of a king who built a raft and returned to the "land in the West," where a great civilization had once existed. The account goes on to tell how the king returned from the journ ey unsuccessful in his quest to find a means of returning his best friend from death, but giving navigational reports that are clear enough to follow today. From the directions and geological references given in this four thousand year old account, we see that the Sumerian empire had navigational information four thousand years ago that extended beyond the Mediterranean to at least the Canary and Cape Verde islands in the Atlantic Ocean, and possibly to the amerikas.

Older accounts in what was at first thought to have been pictographs but has since been determined to be a true form of writing (while continuing to defy interpretation) come from the Incas. Does the combination of well documented Viking trade with western hemisphere aborigines circa 800 to 1100 C.E. and legends of white men from across the ocean that were common from Nova Scotia to central amerika and Caribbean islands at the beginning of the fifteenth century prove that the thousands of nations that inhabited this continent once shared a single culture and had a transcontinental communication network? Norse Sagas many centuries older than Lief Erikson's trade with Vinland mirror the Gilgamesh. Looking at all the now known facts it is possible to hypothesize that the survivors of the Lemurian/Atlantian culture of scientists and scholars may very well have settled the western continent only to have been decimated by European diseases. Multiple pandemics were recorded in great detail by the earliest European invaders as proof that their Christian god meant for them to have the land from the indiginous savages.

If the king of Sumer actually visited the western hemisphere circa 2,000 B.C.E. and even intermittent contact continued to the time of the Norsemen, it is likely that epidemics and pandemics would have reduced the population to a point where peoples who had previously enjoyed frequent communication would loose all contact with one another. Within two or three generations, such contact would easily have been relegated to legend. In those places where softwoods such as pine and willow were used as framework for straw or palm thatch and nothing was made of metal or stone, homes, shops and even palaces would have been reclaimed by forests within a century.

The earliest of the so called "Conquistadors" to follow Colombo to the New World reported seeing vast cities in the Americas that dwarfed any in Europe at the time. Records from rapists and murderers like Cortez and De Soto speak of peaceful agrarian feudal communities that took Spanish troops days to ride through on horseback. Later explorations of the same areas revealed little or no trace of the people that had once lived and thrived there. Natives who were not put to the sword or burned or worked or raped to death are now known to have been finished off by such insidious weapons as smallpox and syphilis.

The early sixteenth century was not the first time that an entire people had disappeared. Nearly eight hundred years before Europeans conquered their fear of falling off the edge of a flat planet, the Inca seem to have vanished from the face of an Earth that they knew was a sphere, leaving behind magnificent cities of temples, homes, pyramids, markets, shops and sports arenas that stand today in better condition than many far more modern buildings the world over. The Egyptiam Book of the Dead speaks of a land in the west to which the deceased shall return. Did the most famous pf the long forgotten pyramid builders learn their craft from ancient amerikans?

The great ziggurat of Sumer, Egyptian pyramids and the Sphinx are also built beyond modern technology's ability to duplicate, but evidence of even older, more complex structures have been found in the americas. The oldest unearthed human habitation is in Buenos Aires, south america. It is not much more than a cave, but relics from the site have been dated to circa 28,000 B.C.E. On the other hand, Captain Cousteau and his team of divers from the Calypso have found and filmed what appear to be temples and palaces of enormous proportions under more than three hundred feet of water in what is now Belize, central amerika. The submerged city is estimated to have fallen beneath the sea more than a dozen centuries ago, predating Asian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Sumerian and all other known civilizations.

In north america the most ancient of Hopi legends spoke of the Anazazzi, or "ancient ones," whose ruins are now a National Monument. In addition to evidence of ritual cannibalism, this extinct culture left behind a great proliferation of icons carved or painted in the geometric pattern of concentric circles. This is the description given by the Greek teacher Plato of both the city of Atlantis and the atoll island on which it was said to have existed.

Whether or not the fabled lost continents of Atlantis and Mu boasted a society governed by scientists and scholars who enjoyed solar electricity and lighter-than-air dirigible airships, or were cannibals or primitive farmers shall remain a matter of speculation for romanticists and science fiction writers. The evidence to support the claim that a culture more technologically advanced, and with a greater knowledge of mathematics and astronomy than any other ancient people, once inhabited both north and south america, however, is overwhelming and irrefutable. What became of those people shall remain a mystery for now. Certainly cataclysms, as traditional legends dictate, are believable - especially in light of discoveries such as Captain Cousteau's - but the known outcome of contact with other races, such as pandemic reaction to the above mentioned diseases, would certainly have compounded any such natural catastrophe.