Archaix: "Archaeology's Lies About the Age of Gobekli Tepe"

 Archaix   

The Ongoing Gobekli tepe Psyop

The 'experts' claim Gobekli and other tepe sites are dated circa 8000 BCE, but they completely ignore that effigies, architectural styles and pillars at Gobekli perfectly match other site around the world dated precisely at 2500-1800 BCE. In fact, further excavation has been halted because more and more they are uncovering evidence that Gobekli tepe isn't anywhere near as old as they claimed. Gobekli Tepe was same culture as Catal Huyuk, all the tepes and huyuk sites, with Jericho and the similarities to Easter Island can not be ignored. 3800-2300 BCE. The Sumerian E.DINs were places man was banished from. That history began in 3895 BCE with the Adam and Eve Genesis reset, a worldwide destruction that sent mankind back to Year One. The tepes, like Gobekli tepe, are located where the story began. The academic claim that the builders suddenly buried their own sites is ridiculous. Gobekli Tepe, all the Tepe and Huyuk sites were buried in a Phoenix catastrophe.

His video "Gobekli Tepe: A 70 Year Old Lie Became a 12,000 Year Old Truth" ( Archaix Jan 30, 2023)

and the dating? Here's what he claims: 

"We are told that Gobekli Tepe in Turkey dates to about 9500 BC to 8200 BC. We’re told that it’s old because it was underground and that it dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. That sounds really impressive.

Now, for those who don’t know, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic is a term invented by Kathleen Kenyon. She believed she came from a monkey, so Kathleen Kenyon, when she found that the earliest levels of Jericho did not have pottery shards (she found this out around 1952 to 1954), coined the term “Pre-Pottery Neolithic” for what she found at Jericho’s ruins.

And then the scientific establishment overlaid her new system and description over the entire world, from one little excavation at Jericho. So the new dating assumption over the entire topography of the world was established by the established scientific community. Now that they did that, any archaeological sites that do not yield pottery shards are to be dated at 9500 BC to 8200 BC. My friends, that’s how simple it is. That is exactly how they got the Pre-Pottery Neolithic model. It’s just weird".

What is weird is that he should think (and presume to misinform his readers) that this is how the site is dated.  

This really needs to be seen together with this video: 'A Total Dismantling of Hancock's 9600 BCE Atlantis Dating' (Jul 21, 2023):

This really takes the cake, views of how to read the King Lists (and whether one COULD expect them to tally with the Hebrew Scriptures) have really moved on since the eighteenth century "sources" he cites. As has our understanding of the Egyptians' understanding of the calendar. The video is excruciatingly repetetive. 

Former Classics Student Attempts to "Correct Thinking" on the Palaeolithic, but Just Spreads Misinformation

 

Michael Button, the classics graduate who wants to join the ranks of the amateurs who challenge archaeological "orthodoxy" has done it again. Here on Twitter he triumphantly announces some sensational news: "Archaeologists discovered a structure that is 500,000 years old at Chichibu, Japan Clear evidence of building, intelligence and engineering - all staggeringly early":

"Things keep getting older", eh? The problem is this young-man-in-a-hurry did not check the information. A two second (literally) image search reveals the source of the photos and the newspaper article it came from -  The Japan Times, February 22, 2000. Quarter of a century ago. It refers to the Ogasaka site in Chichibu, the Saitama Prefecture. The proposed early dating of this site was called into question very soon after its discovery (' Can the "500,000-Year-Old Site" Really Be Believed?', Shukan Shincho, March 9, 2000) The finds at Ogasaka were said to have no scientific basis and were probably just "mura okoshi" (local hype to attract visitors), not necessarily faked, just without any scientific basis and therefore probably mistaken interpretations.

The site is now considered to be part of a major archaeological hoax, which came to light in 2000. The discoveries, particularly those claiming to be 500,000 years old, were fabricated by the discredited archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura and have since been shown to be false. It was one of several locations where it was later determined that Fujimura planted artefacts, including stone tools, to inflate their age and significance (the site is specifically mentioned here and here ). These too are publications from over a quarter of a century ago, and the Japanese Paleolithic hoax involving Lower and Middle Paleolithic finds in Japan discovered by amateur archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura prior to its discovery in 2000 is pretty well-known, so it shows what kind of a "researcher" the cocky "content creator" actually is. Classics possibly is not the best preparation for a career in archaeology-bashing.

In 2001 the Japanese Archaeological Association reviewed all of Fujimura's "discoveries" and concluded that he'd planted artefacts at 42 excavation sites. The following year, the association formally concluded that none of the objects supposedly found by Fujimura were correctly dated, finding that some bore marks from metal implements, and that some were just stones.

Pseudoarchaeologists of all kinds are dismayed that academic/professional archaeology does not easily recognise their lack of formal qualifications, experience and training as qualifying them to produce acceptable analyses and interpretation of archaeological data, or pose achievable research goals. Here however, we see two cases that constitute a very clear example of that, the amateur digger Fujimara  and the unprepared "cointent creator" both using the material not to actually advance knowledge, but advance their own positions, regardless of teh actual truth. 

The earliest human settlement in Japan known today on the basis of reliable physical evidence (not unsupported pseudoarchaeological claims) dates to c. 40 000 BP. 

 References 

 Taiga Uranaka, 'Faked digs put archaeologists on defensive', The Japan Times January 28, 2001

' Fake discoveries shock archaeologists', Mainichi Daily News November 7, 2000.

'Archaeologist faked finds at 42 sites' The Japan Times Oct 8, 2001

'Archaeological probe dismisses 'findings' of disgraced Fujimura' The Japan Times May 27, 2002.

Hat tip to Hugh Thomas @DrHughT for spotting this first.

William Scott-Elliot

 

In Theosophical cosmology, as formulated by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine (1888), human history unfolds through a sequence of “root races,” each associated with vast prehistoric landmasses that have since vanished. These lost continents—most famously Atlantis in the Atlantic and Lemuria (or Mu) in the Pacific—were imagined as the cradles of advanced civilizations whose destruction in immense geological catastrophes both explained their disappearance and reinforced their mythic status.

This framework was significantly elaborated by later Theosophists, particularly William Scott-Elliot, whose The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904) built a detailed narrative of these vanished worlds. Scott-Elliot drew heavily on the “astral clairvoyance” of Charles Webster Leadbeater, who claimed access to esoteric knowledge transmitted by Theosophical “Masters.” Scott-Elliot attempted to supplement Leadbeater’s visionary material with what he regarded as scholarly and scientific support, producing a hybrid of imaginative prehistory and quasi-scientific speculation. His two volumes were later republished together in 1925 as The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria.

Within Scott-Elliot’s reconstruction, Atlantis is portrayed as a highly sophisticated civilization whose internal development and eventual fragmentation map onto the evolution of successive root races. Influenced by Ignatius Donnelly’s enormously popular Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), Scott-Elliot embellished the myth with further geographic and historical detail. He described Atlantis as breaking into two interconnected landmasses (Daitya and Ruta) before shrinking to the final island of Poseidonis, which itself ultimately sank. 

Map of Lemuria superimposed over the modern continents
                              from The Story of Atlantis and Lost Lemuria.                               

Lemuria, meanwhile, was imagined as a gigantic Pacific continent, home to an earlier root race whose physical form and societal life diverged dramatically from those of later humanity.

The lost civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis were thus inserted into a grand, speculative narrative of human evolution. Lemurians, depicted as enormous, egg-laying beings with avian visual capacities and minimal cranial development, were said to have interbred with animals and produced ape-like ancestors of later races. After Lemuria’s destruction, Atlantis became the arena in which new human types emerged: from the dark-skinned “Rmoahal” and “Tlavatli” peoples to the technologically advanced “Toltecs,” who allegedly developed airships. Later sub-races (such as the “First Turanians,” “Original Semites,” Akkadians, and Mongolians) were woven into this imaginative prehistory, with each group assigned a place in the declining phases of Atlantean civilization.

Scott-Elliot’s account extended beyond grand continental narratives to specific cultural claims. For example, he asserted that a group of Atlantean-derived Akkadians migrated to Britain 100,000 years ago and constructed Stonehenge. The monument’s architectural simplicity was explained not as primitive but as a deliberate reaction against what he portrayed as the excessive ornamentation and self-deifying religious practices of late Atlantean temples.

Taken together, these works exemplify the Theosophical approach to “lost civilizations”: a synthesis of Victorian esotericism, speculative anthropology, and imaginative prehistory. Atlantis and Lemuria served not only as mythic locations for vanished advanced cultures but also as structural pillars in a cosmological system that sought to explain human origins, diversity, and spiritual destiny through the rise and literal disappearance of entire continents.

James Churchward and the "Lost Continent of Mu".

James Churchward (1851–1936) was a British writer, industrialist, and former military officer best known for his occultist works. After leaving the army, he travelled in Southeast Asia, worked as a tea planter in Sri Lanka, and emigrated to the United States in the 1890s. By 1914 he had retired to a seven-acre estate in Connecticut, where he devoted himself to questions that had preoccupied him since his Pacific travels.

At seventy-five he published The Lost Continent of Mu: Motherland of Men (1926), arguing that a vast continent had once occupied much of the Pacific Ocean before sinking through cataclysmic geological events. He went on to publish several further books expanding this theory. In these works he described Mu as an advanced civilisation of 64 million inhabitants, reaching its peak 50,000 years before the present era, possessing technology superior to that of the early twentieth century, and seeding later cultures such as those of India, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and the Maya.

The name “Mu” had first been proposed by Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), who associated a “Land of Mu” with Atlantis. Churchward adapted and extended this idea, identifying Mu with the hypothetical continent of Lemuria and locating it in the Pacific. He drew heavily on Le Plongeon’s writings—particularly Queen Moo and Sacred Mysteries—and on the notion of a lost Naacal civilisation. According to his biographer Percy Tate Griffith (My Friend Churchey and His Sunken Continent), Churchward had discussed the subject with Le Plongeon and his wife in the 1890s, but he later reshaped the idea to suit his own broader narrative.

Both men regarded the Maya as an exceptionally ancient and accomplished people. Le Plongeon argued that they originated in Central America and spread civilisation abroad, while Churchward claimed they had migrated from Mu and carried its culture around the world. In both versions, an original, highly advanced Maya race was eventually displaced by less developed groups.

Churchward further asserted that the Garden of Eden had been located on Mu, that the Biblical creation story ultimately derived from this “Motherland of Men,” and that Mu had once spanned nearly half the Pacific—from the northern Hawaiian Islands to Fiji and Easter Island. Its destruction, he believed, resulted from a sequence of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and even a pole shift, after which some fifty million square miles of ocean filled its place.

Central to his account was the claim that an Indian priest had taught him to read the sacred writings of the Naacals, preserved on ancient tablets. Churchward said the language was then understood by only three people in India and is now extinct. He maintained that he eventually saw these tablets, though their present whereabouts are unknown, and that they represented only fragments of a much larger body of knowledge hidden in the archives of other ancient cultures. According to Churchward, the tablets revealed that the Garden of Eden was not in the Middle East, but on Mu, that Mu was an advanced civilization many tens of thousands of years old, and that science and religion were fused together in their belief system.

Churchward’s books blend imaginative prehistory, exotic travel narratives, and bold reinterpretations of ancient myth, forming one of the classic expressions of the Pacific lost-continent tradition. By the second half of the twentieth century, improvements in oceanography, in particular understanding of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics, have left little scientific basis for claims of geologically recent lost continents such as Mu. Churchward's books contain geological and archaeological errors. Archaeologists regard his writings, at best, as pseudoscience. Other scholars regard them as a hoax (Gardener 1957 p. 170). According to Stephen Williams (1991 p. 152), Churchward's "translations are outrageous, his geology, in both mechanics and dating, is absurd, and his mishandling of archaeological data, as in the Valley of Mexico, is atrocious." According to Gordon Stein (1993 pp. 52–53) "it is difficult to assess whether Churchward really believed what he said about Mu, or whether he was knowingly writing fiction". Then there is the quote from the book by Percy Tate Griffith “My Friend Churchey and His Sunken Island of Mu” where James tells the author (Reconciling the evidence part 1) they were fiction.

" Of course, as I have sufficiently indicated before, there were no such Naacal tablets. The claim about them he had admitted to me was simply pure fiction. It was irrelevant, superfluous, and extraneous at best. His story in the main was the same as Le Plongeon’s. It was what we discussed with the old professor Augustus Le Plongeon and his young wife Madame Alice Dixson Le Plongeon in my home in those early days when I had introduced them both to my friend Churchey, to King Gillette and others".

         Bibliography

1. The Lost Continent of Mu, the Motherland of Men (1926)
2. The Children of Mu (1931)
3. The Sacred Symbols of Mu (1933)
4. Cosmic Forces of Mu (1934)
5. Second Book of Cosmic Forces of Mu (1935)

See also: 

Gardner, Martin. (1957). Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Dover Publications.

Stein, Gordon 1993, ' Encyclopedia of Hoaxes', Gale Group.

Williams, Stephen 1991, 'Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory', University of Pennsylvania Press.

Worth a visit, Jack Churchward, blog.my-mu, and the research website my-mu.com used to discuss and investigate the theories of James Churchward and the Lost Continent of Mu.

Augustus Le Plongeon and the Emergence of Early Pseudoarchaeology

 

Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908) occupies an ambiguous position in the history of archaeology: while he was an important early photographer of Maya sites and a pioneer of mayanism, his interpretations of Mesoamerican history became some of the earliest, most elaborate examples of what is now recognised as pseudoarchaeology. Working primarily in the Yucatán between 1873 and 1885, Le Plongeon combined meticulous visual documentation with speculative historical narratives that far exceeded the available evidence and were ultimately rejected by contemporary scholars.

Central to his pseudoarchaeological framework was the conviction that the Maya were the world’s primordial civilisers. Influenced by earlier diffusionist ideas and by esoteric writings such as those of Brasseur de Bourbourg, he argued that Maya culture had spread eastward across Asia, reached the lost continent of Atlantis, and from there laid the foundations of ancient Egypt. This grand transoceanic schema relied on the assumption that architectural and iconographic similarities must derive from direct contact or common origin, a hallmark of later diffusionist pseudohistories. Even when advances in archaeological dating showed that Egyptian civilisation predated the Maya, Le Plongeon maintained his position, dismissing critics as “armchair archaeologists”.

Le Plongeon called the disseminators of the wisdom of the lost land "the Naacal". The first recorded use of this term is contained in his work from 1896, "Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx":

"Perhaps also will be felt the necessity of recovering the libraries of the Maya sages (hidden about the beginning of the Christian era to save them from destruction at the hands of the devastating hordes that invaded their country in those times), and to learn from their contents the wisdom of those ancient philosophers, of which that preserved in the books of the Brahmins is but the reflection. That wisdom was no doubt brought to India, and from there carried to Babylon and Egypt in very remote ages by those Maya adepts (Naacal—'the exalted'), who, starting from the land of their birth as missionaries of religion and civilization, went to Burmah, where they became known as Nagas, established themselves in the Dekkan, whence they carried their civilizing work all over the earth".

("Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx." From pages xxiii - xxiv of the preface) According to Augustus Le Plongeon, the Naacals were the missionaries of Mayan religion and civilization. Le Plongeon advocated that the original, great civilization was in Central America.

His reading of Maya texts further illustrates the pseudoscientific character of his work. Le Plongeon attempted a complete translation of the Codex Troano, despite the fact that the decipherment of Maya glyphs was still in its infancy and he lacked a method grounded in linguistics. Unsurprisingly, his translations, such as the claim that the codex narrates the destruction of “Mu,” a civilisation he equated with Atlantis, are now regarded as imaginative inventions. These interpretations helped popularise the legend of Mu, later elaborated by James Churchward and absorbed into 20th-century occult and “lost civilisation” literature.

Le Plongeon’s fieldwork also fed into his speculative narratives. His discovery of a reclining figure at Chichén Itzá (later known as the Chac Mool) was accompanied by an invented name and an associated storyline linking the sculpture to his larger diffusionist theories. Although archaeologists rejected his interpretations, the invented term Chac Mool entered scholarly vocabulary as a stylistic label, illustrating how the boundary between documentation and speculation can blur in early archaeological practice.

In retrospect, Le Plongeon’s legacy is twofold. His photographs constitute a valuable early record of Maya architecture and glyphs, preserving details later lost to weathering and looting. At the same time, his sweeping historical narratives exemplify the emergence of pseudoarchaeology in the late 19th century: a mixture of genuine field research, diffusionist fantasies, and esoteric speculation that projected global civilisational origins onto the Maya and fed directly into later Atlantis- and Mu-centered alternative historiographies.

Books by Augustus Le Plongeon:

•  Queen Móo and the Egyptian Sphinx (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1896) (second edition; New York: The author; London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1900).
• 
  
• Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 Years Ago: Their Relation to the Sacred Mysteries of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea and India; Free Masonry in Times Anterior to the Temple of Solomon (New York: R. Macoy, 1886) Gutenberg text and illustrated HTML  (third edition; New York: Macoy Pub. and Masonic Supply Co., 1909)
• 
  
• Vestiges of the Mayas: or, Facts Tending to Prove that Communications and Intimate Relations Must Have Existed, in very Remote Times, Between the Inhabitants of Mayab and Those of Asia and Africa (New York: J. Polhemus, 1881)  Gutenberg text .

References

Lawrence G. Desmond: Augustus Le Plongeon. A fall from archaeological grace, in: Alice B. Kehoe und Mary Beth Emmerichs (Hrsg.): Assembling the Past. Studies in the Professionalization of Archaeology, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1999, 81–90. 

Lawrence G. Desmond/Phyllis Mauch Messenger: A dream of Maya, Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon in nineteenth-century Yucatan. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1988. 

The Niven Tablets

William Niven (1850 - 1937) was a Scottish-American mineralogist and amateur archaeologist who was famed also for a large collection of stone tablets. Of Scottish origin, Niven emigrated to the United States in 1879, where he became deeply involved in mineralogy and mining. In 1921, during excavations at San Miguel Amantla, Azcapotzalco (an important city-state conquered by the Aztec Empire in 1431 and now part of northwestern Mexico City), Niven discovered the first of several hundred andesite tablets during excavations. The undeciphered glyphs on these tablets became the subject of intense speculation during the final years of his life. Some observers associated them with Scandinavian petroglyphs.

The writer James Churchward proposed an interpretation of the tablets that greatly undermined confidence in their authenticity. Churchward was one of the leading proponents of theories about lost continents, especially the lost continent of Mu. He believed that at the dawn of human history there existed a continent called Mu whose civilisation was technologically highly advanced but was destroyed by a natural catastrophe. After examining Niven’s tablets, Churchward became convinced that a group of people had escaped the destruction, migrated to other parts of the world, and spread their culture and belief system. He claimed that the symbols and inscriptions on the tablets had their origins in the ancient Mu culture. This association greatly reinforced suspicions that the tablets were a hoax. Archaeologists rejected Churchward’s pseudohistorical ideas and regarded the Niven tablets as a “crude, though voluminous, hoax” (Fritze 1993, pp. 178-179).

                         Jack Churchyard Blog                         

Niven devoted much of the final years of his life to selling the tablets and investigating their origins and meaning, but he never succeeded in resolving either question. Numerous scholars and enthusiasts offered interpretations and proposed theories, yet none proved conclusive. The tablets themselves were eventually lost late in Niven’s life, during an attempted shipment from Mexico to the United States. Today, the only surviving record consists of the rubbings taken from the originals and a few surviving examples, including those in an anonymous private collection published on his blog by Jack Churchyard ('More "Mu" stones surface' August 6 2017).

It seems that Niven and Churchyard knew each other possibly before the latter's offer to translate the ‘tablets’. In James’ 1926 book, "Lost Continent of Mu Motherland of Men", there was an entire chapter on Niven’s "Ancient Buried cities" (that was in fact plagiarized from the original newspaper article), images of three of Niven's tablets and one was interpreted. The 1931 Children of Mu showed Niven as one of his ‘three best friends’.

References

Churchward, Jack and Churchward James 2014, 'Stone Tablets of Mu' Ozark Mountain Publishing.

Fritze, Ronald H. (1993). Legend and Lore of the Americas Before 1492: An Encyclopedia of Visitors, Explorers, and Immigrants. ABC-CLIO. pp. 178-179.

Robert, Wicks; Harrison, Roland (1999). Buried Cities, Forgotten Gods: William Niven's Life of Discovery and Revolution in Mexico and the American Southwest, Texas Tech University Press.

|