Lost Lands

Capitals swallowed by the sea, phantom isles surfacing through fog, kingdoms hidden behind snow mountains or beneath the earth's crust, countries of gold that stay forever one march away — lost lands turn up in the records of every civilization. This collection gathers fourteen of the most storied: from Plato's Atlantis, sunk in a single day and night, to Penglai hanging like cloud over the Bohai Sea; from Kitezh, which prayed itself beneath a Russian lake, to Hy-Brasil, which haunted nautical charts for five hundred years.

Their paper trails could hardly differ more. Some rest on classical canon — Plato's Timaeus, Sima Qian's Records, Pindar's odes; some crystallized in medieval saints' lives and chronicles, like Avalon and Ys; others are outright modern inventions — Mu was born of a mistranslated Maya codex, Lemuria began as a zoologist's land-bridge hypothesis, and Agartha was assembled by French occult writers. From the late nineteenth century, Theosophy and its heirs wove these unrelated place-names into a single narrative of lost civilizations, and sunken continents, subterranean kingdoms, and polar paradises have been entangled in popular esoterica ever since.

Each entry here cites the earliest source and traces the later career of the legend, keeping tale and verifiable fact apart: Muisca goldwork really has been recovered from Lake Guatavita, Glastonbury's "tomb of Arthur" was more likely a medieval fundraising scheme, and there is definitively no drowned continent under the Pacific plate. And every legend is pinned to the place it claimed — the Atlantic beyond Gibraltar, the Bay of Douarnenez, the still water of Lake Svetloyar.