Lemuria / Kumari

As described in ancient Tamil and Sanskrit literature, the Pandyan legends of lands lost to the ocean, say an ancient Tamil civilization existed on Lemuria, before it was lost to the sea in a catastrophe. Kumari Kandam was the place where the first two Tamil literary academies (sangams) were organised during the Pandyan reign. 

1864, "The Mammals of Madagascar" by zoologist and biogeographer Philip Sclater appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Science. Using a classification he referred to as lemurs, but which included related primate groups,[4] and puzzled by the presence of their fossils in Madagascar and India, but not in Africa or the Middle East, Sclater proposed that Madagascar and India had once been part of a larger continent (he was correct in this; though in reality this was Mauritia[5] and the supercontinent Gondwana).

The anomalies of the mammal fauna of Madagascar can best be explained by supposing that... a large continent occupied parts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans... that this continent was broken up into islands, of which some have become amalgamated with... Africa, some... with what is now Asia; and that in Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands we have existing relics of this great continent, for which... I should propose the name Lemuria![4]

The concept of Lemuria was developed in detail by James Churchward, who referred to it as Mu and identified it as a lost continent in the Pacific Ocean. Churchward appropriated this name from Augustus Le Plongeon, who had used the concept of the "Land of Mu" to refer to the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. Churchward's books included The Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Men (1926), The Children of Mu (1931), The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1933), Cosmic Forces of Mu (1934), and Second Book of Cosmic Forces of Mu (1935). 

The idea of Lemuria was later incorporated into the philosophy of Theosophy and has persisted as a theme in pseudoarchaeology and discussions of lost lands. 

All share a common belief that a continent existed in what is now either the Pacific Ocean or the Indian Ocean in ancient times and claim that it became submerged as a result of a geological cataclysm

NOTES

• Roos, Dave (22 June 2022). "Did the Lost Continent of Lemuria Ever Exist?". HowStuffWorks. Archived from the original on 4 June 2023. Retrieved 15 July 2022.

• Morelle, Rebecca (2013-02-25). "BBC News - Fragments of ancient continent buried under Indian Ocean". BBC.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2019-04-15. Retrieved 2013-09-21.

• "Navigation News". Frontline.in. Archived from the original on 2019-12-22. Retrieved 2013-09-21.

• Neild, Ted Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet Harvard University Press (2 Nov 2007) ISBN 978-0-674-02659-9 pp. 38–39

• "An Entire Lost Continent Was Found Under the Island of Mauritius". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2022-03-15. Retrieved 2022-03-15.

• L. Sprague de Camp, Lost Continents, 1954 (First Edition), p. 52

• "Fragments of continents hidden under lava in Indian Ocean: New micro-continent detected under Reunion and Mauritius". Archived from the original on 2024-07-22. Retrieved 2022-03-15.

• Cerve, Wishar S. (1931). Lemuria, The Lost Continent Of the Pacific (PDF). AMORC. dust jacket. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-03-27. Retrieved 2023-03-13.

• Ramaswamy, Sumathi. (1999). "Catastrophic Cartographies: Mapping the Lost Continent of Lemuria". Representations. 67: 92-129