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.

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