Mu (lost continent)

Mu
Map of Mu by James Churchward
Lost Continent of Mu Motherland of Men location
Created by	Augustus Le Plongeon
Genre	Pseudoscience
Type	Hypothetical lost continent

Mu is the name of a suggested lost continent whose concept and name were proposed by 19th-century traveler and writer Augustus Le Plongeon, who claimed that several ancient civilizations, such as those of Egypt and Mesoamerica, were created by refugees from Mu—which he located in the Atlantic Ocean. This concept was popularized and expanded by James Churchward, who asserted that Mu was once located in the Pacific.

The existence of Mu was already being disputed in Le Plongeon's time. Today scientists dismiss the concept of Mu (and of other alleged lost continents such as Lemuria) as physically impossible, arguing that a continent can neither sink nor be destroyed in the short period of time required by this premise. Mu's existence is now considered to have no factual basis.

The mythical idea of Mu first appeared in the works of Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), after his investigations of the Maya ruins in Yucatán. He claimed that he had translated ancient Mayan writings which supposedly showed that the Maya civilization of the Yucatán was older than those of Greece and Egypt, and told the story of an even older continent.

Le Plongeon actually got the name "Mu" from Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, who in 1864 mistranslated what was then called the Troano Codex using the de Landa alphabet. Brasseur believed that a word which he read as Mu referred to a land which had been submerged by a catastrophe. Le Plongeon then identified this lost land with Atlantis, and turned it into a continent which had supposedly sunk into the Atlantic Ocean:

In our journey westward across the Atlantic we shall pass in sight of that spot where once existed the pride and life of the ocean, the Land of Mu, which, at the epoch that we have been considering, had not yet been visited by the wrath of Human, that lord of volcanic fires to whose fury it afterward fell a victim. The description of that land given to Solon by Sonchis, priest at Sais; its destruction by earthquakes, and submergence, recorded by Plato in his Timaeus, have been told and retold so many times that it is useless to encumber these pages with a repetition of it.

...
Wikipedia