In March 1995, a sport diver unintentionally
strayed beyond the standard safety parimeter near the south shore of
Okinawa. A battleground for the last land campaign of World War II,
the island was about to become the scene of another kind of drama.
As he glided through unvisited depths some forty feet beneath the
clear blue Pacific, the diver was suddenly confronted by what
appeared to be a great stone building heavily encrusted with coral.
Approaching closer, he could see that the colossal structure
was black and gaunt, a sunken arrangement of monolithic blocks,
their original configuration obscured by the organic accretion of
time. After encircling the anonymous monument several times and
taking several photographs of it, he rose to the surface, reoriented
himself and kicked for shore. Next day, photographs of his find
appeared in Japan's largest newspapers. The structure sparked
instant controversy and attracted crowds of diving archaeologists,
newsmedia people and curious nonprofessionals, none of whom were
able to ascertain its identity. They could not even agree if it was
manmade, let alone ancient or modern. Was it the remnant of some
forgotten military coastal defense from the war? Or could it
possibly date back to something entirely different and profoundly
older?
Already there were whispers of the lost culture of
Mu, preserved in legend as the Motherland of Civilization, which
perished in the sea long before the beginning of recorded time. But
Okinawa's drowned enigma was hermetically locked within too thick an
encrustation. The structure looked anciently manmade. Nature,
however, sometimes made her own forms appear artificial. Popular and
scientific debate concerning its origins argued back and forth.
Then, in late summer of the following year, another diver in Okinawa
waters was shocked to see a massive arch or gateway of huge stone
blocks beautifully fitted together in the manner of prehistoric
masonry found among the Inca cities on the other side of the Pacific
Ocean, in the Andes Mountains of South America.
This time
there was no doubt. Thanks to swift currents in the area, coral had
been unable to gain any foothold on the structure, leaving it
unobscured in the 100-foot visibility of the crystal-clear waters.
It was certainly manmade and very old. It seemed nothing short of
miraculous, an unbelievable vision standing in apparently unruined
condition on the ocean floor. But its discovery was only the first
of that summer's undersea revelations. Now fired by the possibility
of more sunken structures in the area, teams of expert divers fanned
out from the south coast of Okinawa using standard grid-search
patterns. Their professional efforts were soon rewarded. Before the
onset of autumn, they found five sub surface archaeological sites
near three offshore islands.
The locations vary at depths
from 100 to only 20 feet, but are all stylistically linked, despite
the great variety of their architectural details. They comprise
paved streets and crossroads, huge altar-like formations, grand
staircases leading to broad plazas and processional ways surmounted
by pairs of towering features resembling pylons. The sunken
buildings are known to cover the ocean bottom (although not
continuously) from the small island of Yonaguni in the southwest to
Okinawa and its neighboring islands, Kerama and Aguni, some 311
miles. If, after all, ongoing exploration here does indeed reveal
more structures linking Yonaguni with Okinawa, the individual sites
may be separate components of a huge city lying at the bottom of the
Pacific.
The single largest structure so far discovered lies
near the eastern shore of Yonaguni at 100 feet down. It is
approximately 240 feet long, 90 feet across and 45 feet high. All
the monuments appear to have been built from a granitic sandstone,
although no internal passages or chambers have been found. To a
degree, the underwater structures resemble ancient buildings on
Okinawa itself, such as Nakagusuku Castle. More of a ceremonial
edifice than a military installation, Nakagusuku dates back to the
early centuries of the first millennium B.C., although its identity
as a religious habitation site is older still. Its builders and the
culture it originally expressed are unknown, although the precinct
is still regarded with a superstitious awe by local Okinawans. Other
parallels with Okinawa's oldest sacred buildings are found near
Noro, where burial vaults designed in the same rectilinear style are
still venerated as repositories for the islanders' ancestral dead.
Very remarkably, the Okinawan term for these vaults is moai, the
same word Polynesians of Easter Island, more than 6,000 miles away,
used to describe the famous, large-headed, long-eared statues
dedicated to their ancestors!
Possible connections far
across the Pacific may be more than philological. Some of the sunken
features bear even closer comparison to heiau found in the distant
Hawaiian Islands. These are linear temples of long stone ramparts
leading to great staircases surmounted by broad plazas, where wooden
shrines and carved idols were placed. Many heiau still exist and
continue to be venerated by native Hawaiians. In terms of
construction, the Okinawan examples comprise enormous, single
blocks, while the heiau are made up of far more numerous, smaller
stones. They were first built, according to Hawaiian tradition, by
the Menehune, a red-haired race of master masons who occupied the
islands long before the arrival of the Polynesians. The original
inhabitants left, unwilling to intermarry with the newcomers.
Okinawa's drowned structures find possible counterparts at
the eastern limits of the Pacific Ocean, along Peruvian coasts. The
most striking similarities occur at ancient Pachacamac, a sprawling
religious city a few miles south of the modern capital at Lima.
Although functioning into Inca times, as late as the sixteenth
century, it pre-dated the Incas by at least 1,500 years and was the
seat of South America's foremost oracle. Pilgrims visited Pachacamac
from all over the Tiawantisuyu, the Inca Empire, until it was sacked
and desecrated by the Spaniards under Francisco Pizarro's
high-spirited brother, Hernando, with 22 heavily armed
conquistadors. Enough of the sun-dried, mud-brick city remains, with
its sweeping staircases and broad plazas, to suggest parallels with
the sunken buildings around Okinawa.
Two other pre-Inca
sites in the north, just outside Trujillo, likewise share some
leading elements in common with the overseas, undersea structures.
The so-called Temple of the Sun is a terraced pyramid built 2,000
years ago by a people known as the Moche. More than 100 feet high
and 684 feet long, the irregularly stepped platform of unfired adobe
bricks was formerly the colossal centerpiece of a city sheltering
30,000 inhabitants. Its resemblance to the structure found at
Yonaguni is remarkable.
On the other side of the Pacific,
the first emperor of Japan was remembered as Jimmu, whose immediate
descendant was Kamu, among the legendary founders of Japanese
society. Another ancestral emperor was Temmu, who was said to have
committed to memory the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) and the
Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan). In northern Japan runs a river deemed
sacred because it carried the first semi-divine beings into the
country; it is called the Mu River. In Japanese, the word mu means,
that which does not exist or no longer exists, just as it does in
Korean. Does it harken back to a land that no longer
exists?
In ancient Rome, the Lemuria was a ritual conduced by
the head of each household to properly appease the spirits of the
deceased, who returned annually. Lemuria was also the Roman name for
a huge island kingdom they believed once lay in the Far Eastern Sea,
sometimes imagined to have been the Indian Ocean. It vanished to
become the abode of troubled souls. The Lemurian ceremony was
instituted by Romulus in expiation for the murder of Remus. Here,
too, we encounter mu in relation to the founding of a civilization,
since the brothers were accepted as the progenitors of Rome. In
Latin, their names are pronounced with the accent on the second
syllable: RoMUlus and ReMUs.
In the early nineteenth
century, when English biologists were in the process of mammal
classification, they applied the ancient term, lemur, to describe
primitive tree primates first found in Madagascar, because the
creatures possessed large, glaring eyes, just like the ghostly
lemures described in Roman myth. When lemurs were discovered outside
Africa, in such widely separated locations as south India and
Malaya, scientists theorized that a continent in the Indian Ocean
may have once connected all these lands before it sank beneath the
waves. Oceanographers have since established that no such continent
ever existed.
But collectors of oral traditions throughout
the island peoples of the Pacific were perplexed by recurring themes
of a vanished motherland from which ancestral culture-bearers
arrived to re-plant society's seeds. On Kaua'i, the Hawaiians told
of the Mu (also known as the Menehune mentioned earlier) who arrived
in the dim past from a floating island. The most important ancestral
chant known to the Hawaiians was the Kumulipo, which recounts a
terrific flood that destroyed the world long ago. Its concluding
lines evoke some natural catastrophe in the deep past: Born the
roaring, advancing and receding of waves, the rumbling sound, the
earthquake. The sea rages, rises over the beach, rises to the
inhabited places, rises gradually up over the land. Ended is the
line of the first chief of the dim past dwelling in cold uplands.
Dead is the current sweeping in from the navel of the earth. That
was a warrior wave. Many who came vanished, lost in the passing
night. The survivor who escaped the warrior wave was Kuamu.
Despite an abundance of folk traditions spanning the
Pacific, all describing a sunken homeland, the first accurate,
sonar-generated maps of the ocean bottom revealed nothing resembling
a lost continent. But archaeological enigmas supporting the myths
still exist at such remote locations as tiny Malden Island, where a
road of paved stones leads directly into and under the sea. The
uninhabited island is also home to forty platform-pyramids.
A provocative architectural theme linking South America to
Japan through Polynesia and suggesting a lost intermediary culture
is the sacred gate. The aesthetic focus of Tiahuanaco, a great
ceremonial city high in Bolivia's Andes near Lake Titicaca, is two
ritual gates. One above the sunken court at the entrance
dramatically frames the 12-foot-tall statue of a god or man, while
the other, at the far end of the complex, is the famous Gateway of
the Sun, oriented to various solar phenomena.
Out across the
Pacific, in the Polynesian island of Tonga, stands the
Haamonga-a-Maui, The Burden of Maui, a 15-foot-high stone gate
weighing some 109 tons and aligned with sunrise of the summer
solstice. Japan is covered by many thousands of such gates, most of
them wooden, but all used to define a sacred space. Known as Torii,
the same word appears in ancient Indo-European languages and
survives in the German word for gate: Tor. An outstanding feature of
the sunken structures in the vicinity of Okinawa is an unconnected
gate of massive stonework. The Romans, who celebrated a Lemuria
festival every May, ornamented their empire with free-standing
ceremonial gates.
These intriguing parallels, combined with
a wealth of archaeological evidence and descriptive native
traditions, convince investigators that some powerful, centrally
located X-culture indeed existed in the Pacific, from which
civilizing influences spread in both directions. Their conclusion
seemed borne out with recent discoveries among the Ryukyu Islands,
where architectural features of the sunken structures bear tell-tale
affinities to pre-Inca structures in Peru and ancestral burial
vaults on Okinawa. But the sunken buildings provoke more questions
than they answer. How old are they? Why are they under water? Who
built them? For what purposes?
What evidence has so far been
collected suggests that the site did not succumb to a sudden
geologic catastrophe. Aside from one or two monuments leaning at
irregular angles, none of them displays any structural damage, no
cracks or fallen stones. Instead, they appear in unruined, virtually
pristine condition. They were either overwhelmed by rising
sea-levels, sank with a slowly collapsing land-mass, or some
combination of both. Most researchers opt for the last scenario,
since oceanographers tell us that sea-levels rose from 100 feet 1.7
million years ago. Even so, the Japanese sites must be very old.
They are constantly being swept clean by strong currents, so
radiocarbon dating material is not available.
The purposes
for which they were made appear less difficult to understand,
because their strongest resemblance to Hawaiian heiau implies that
they were mostly ceremonial in nature. Their expansive staircases
lead up to presently barren platforms, where wooden shrines and
carved idols were probably set up for religious dramas.
Just
who were their worshippers and builders suggests a word most
professional American archaeologists are unable to pronounce. But,
in view of the numerous accounts from hundreds of cultures around
the Pacific of a flood that destroyed some former civilization, if
Okinawa's sunken city is not lost Lemuria, then what is
it?
Frank Joseph is editor of The Ancient American
Magazine.
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