The lost Pacific continent born of a mistranslation
Mu is the product of a nineteenth-century scholarly blunder; no ancient myth mentions it. In 1869-70 the French abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg published a reading of the Troano Codex (part of the Madrid Codex) based on Bishop Diego de Landa's unreliable "Maya alphabet", claimed to find in it the record of a land destroyed by catastrophe, and assembled two undecipherable glyphs into its name, Mu. The photographer Augustus Le Plongeon then announced that Queen Móo of Mu had fled to Egypt and founded Nile civilization, placing the continent in the Atlantic, nearly on top of Atlantis.
In 1926 the Anglo-American writer James Churchward published The Lost Continent of Mu and rewrote the story wholesale. He claimed that as a young man in India a temple priest had taught him to read the "Naacal tablets", which revealed a continent some eight thousand kilometres wide spanning the central Pacific, home to sixty-four million people, swallowed overnight by volcanoes and collapsing land twelve thousand years ago; Easter Island's statues and the islands of Polynesia were its remnants. No one else ever saw the tablets.
The modern decipherment of Maya script proved Brasseur's reading pure invention, and plate tectonics rules out any sunken continental crust beneath the Pacific. Mu survives instead in subculture: the submerged rock terraces off Japan's Yonaguni Island are often claimed as its ruins, and it recurs in anime, tokusatsu, and fantasy games.
