Lemuria, Kumari Kandam and Mu usually travel together. Books and videos treat them as three names for the same drowned homeland, a vast land in the Indian or Pacific Ocean whose survivors carried civilization to the rest of the world.

Each of the three has a traceable origin, and they turn out to be very different things. One began as a scientific hypothesis about lemurs. One is a genuine strand of ancient Tamil literature. One came from a misreading of a Maya book. They merged in the twentieth century, and underneath all three lies a drowned world that is real.

Lemuria began as a zoologist’s answer to a puzzle about lemurs

In 1864 the British zoologist Philip Sclater published a short paper called The Mammals of Madagascar. He was troubled by a pattern in the fossil record. Lemur-like primates appeared in Madagascar and in India, and he could find no trace of them in the lands between.

His solution was a land bridge, a continent in the Indian Ocean connecting the two, since sunk. He named it Lemuria, after the animals it was meant to explain.

For a scientist of the 1860s this was a reasonable idea. Continental drift had not been proposed, and land bridges were the standard way to explain why related species turned up on separate landmasses.

An 1876 map illustrating the supposed location of Lemuria and the hypothetical dispersal routes of the "12 varieties of men" from their alleged Lemurian origin across the globe. Credit: Public Domain

Occultists turned it into a homeland of lost races

The idea did not stay with zoology for long. In 1868 the German biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested Lemuria might be the cradle of humanity, a lost paradise where the first humans had evolved and from which they spread.

In 1888 Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, made it far stranger. In The Secret Doctrine, Lemuria became the home of the Third Root Race, giant beings who lived long before Atlantis. Her follower William Scott-Elliot published The Lost Lemuria in 1904, complete with maps.

By the early twentieth century a hypothesis about primate fossils had become a spiritual history of humanity.

Tamil literature already remembered a land taken by the sea

Here the story changes character, because this part rests on genuine ancient texts.

The Silappatikaram, one of the great Tamil epics, composed in the early centuries AD, mentions in passing that the cruel sea swallowed the Pahruli river and the many-peaked Kumari mountains in the south. The Manimekalai, its companion epic, tells how the port city of Puhar was swallowed by the sea after its king neglected the festival of Indra.

Then there are the Sangams, the legendary academies of Tamil poetry. A commentary on the Iraiyanar Akapporul, written down around the eighth century, says the first Sangam met in a southern Madurai for 4,440 years with 549 members including gods, and the second at Kapatapuram for 3,700 years. Both cities, it says, were lost to the sea. The third Sangam met at the present Madurai, where the surviving classics were composed. A later medieval commentator, Adiyarkkunallar, described the lost land as divided into 49 territories between the Pahruli and Kumari.

"Lemuria" in Tamil nationalist mysticist literature as Kumari Kandam, connecting Madagascar, South India, and Australia, covering most of the Indian Ocean. Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0

The name Kumari Kandam itself comes from the fifteenth-century Kandapuranam, where it refers to a portion of the world rather than a sunken continent. The historian Sumathi Ramaswamy, in The Lost Land of Lemuria, traced how Tamil writers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries fused these older traditions with Sclater’s Lemuria, producing a Tamil homeland stretching toward Madagascar and Australia, the cradle of Tamil language and culture.

The fusion was modern. The memory of a southern coast taken by the sea is old.

Mu came from a misreading of a Maya book

In 1864, the same year Sclater named Lemuria, the French priest and antiquarian Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg set out to translate a Maya codex, then called the Troano Codex and now part of the Madrid Codex.

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Those few lines grew into one of the largest bodies of literature attached to any biblical figure, and over the past century scholars have traced where much of it came from. The trail leads to Babylon, to a king who ruled the city of the sun god before the flood.

A whole library grew out of four verses

By the third century BC a substantial collection of writings had formed around Enoch, now known as 1 Enoch. In its opening section, the Book of the Watchers, two hundred angels descend on Mount Hermon, take human wives, and teach metalworking, weapons, cosmetics, sorcery and the reading of the stars. Their offspring are giants, the earth fills with violence, and the flood follows. Enoch stands in the middle as the man the fallen angels ask to plead for them.

Another early section, the Astronomical Book, lays out the movements of the sun, moon and stars and argues for a calendar of 364 days. The Book of Jubilees, from the second century BC, calls Enoch the first human to learn writing.

The collection survived complete only in Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia, where it remains part of the Ethiopian Orthodox canon. Europe learned of it when the Scottish traveler James Bruce brought manuscripts home in 1773. It was never entirely forgotten elsewhere, since the New Testament letter of Jude quotes it directly. In 1976 the scholar Józef Milik published Aramaic fragments of Enoch from Qumran Cave 4, and they confirmed the oldest sections go back at least to the third century BC.

In Jewish mysticism he becomes Metatron

Later tradition went further still. In the work known as 3 Enoch, Enoch is carried up to heaven, his body turned to fire, and he becomes Metatron, the highest of the angels, even called the lesser YHWH.

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It is tempting to look for that upheaval in the oldest writing we have. Sumerian king lists, Egyptian temple texts, Plato, Tamil epics and Norse myth all speak of floods, lost lands and a world that ended once before. Some of those threads lead back toward the Ice Age. Others turn out to be far younger than they look, and a few were invented in the nineteenth century.

The Sumerian King List counts its early kings in units of 3,600

The best copy is the Weld-Blundell Prism in the Ashmolean Museum, a clay prism about twenty centimetres tall inscribed on four sides around 1800 BC. Herbert Weld Blundell bought it on the antiquities market in 1922, and it is said to come from Larsa.

It opens with kingship descending from heaven to Eridu and lists eight kings in five cities before the flood. Alulim reigns 28,800 years, Alalngar 36,000, En-men-lu-ana 43,200, down to Ubara-Tutu at 18,600. Then comes a single line saying the flood swept over, and kingship descends again, this time at Kish.

The numbers repay attention. 28,800 is eight units of 3,600, the sar, the great round number of Sumerian base-sixty arithmetic. 36,000 is ten sars and 43,200 is twelve. These are schematic counts, the way a scribe expresses immense age, and after the flood the reigns shorten step by step through Etana at 1,500 years into ordinary human spans.

The Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in Greek around 280 BC, gives ten kings before the flood and a total of 432,000 years, which is 120 sars. Genesis also has ten generations from Adam to Noah, with Adam at 930 years and Methuselah at 969. The parallel is real and much studied, and what it shows is a shared Mesopotamian literary pattern, a vast age before the flood and a shortening after it.

Egypt’s king lists begin with gods, and the totals are calendrical

The Turin King List, a papyrus from the reign of Ramesses II now in the Museo Egizio, is the one Egyptian list that runs back past Menes. It broke badly when it was shipped to Italy in the early nineteenth century and has been reassembled since. Its opening lists gods, then spirits and the Followers of Horus, then human kings.

A later tradition attributed to Manetho, the Egyptian priest who wrote in Greek in the third century BC, gives a grand total of 36,525 years. That is 25 times 1,461, the length of the Sothic cycle over which the Egyptian civil calendar drifted back into line with Sirius. Like the Sumerian sars, it is a number built from astronomy.

The Edfu Building Texts describe an island of the egg, a serpent enemy, and divine builders called the Shebtiw who carried the art of temple building to Egypt. They are genuine and remarkable. They are also carved on a temple built between 237 and 57 BC, and the Egyptologist Eve Reymond published them in 1969 as a Ptolemaic theology of how temples came to be. They preserve older ideas at more than nine thousand years’ distance from the end of the Ice Age.

The sea did rise, and some people remember it

This is the strongest part of the case, and it deserves more attention than it gets.

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The study appears in npj Heritage Science.

Codex Arundel MS 263, folio 36-recto. Credit: British Library Board

A page otherwise given over to flowing water

The drawing is on folio 36 recto of the Codex Arundel, a bound collection of Leonardo’s loose sheets held at the British Library as Arundel MS 263. The volume covers hydraulics, geometry and a scatter of other subjects.

Carlo Vecce, one of the leading specialists on Leonardo, dates the sketch to the artist’s second stay in Florence. Those were years in which Leonardo was thinking hard about water, including the scheme to divert the Arno, and the rest of the page is taken up with notes on fluvial dynamics. The beetle is the only thing on it that has nothing to do with rivers.

A female Meloe, probably from the Florentine lowlands

Leonardo drew it carefully enough for two specialists to name it five centuries later.

Oil beetles of both sexes have no flight wings, short wing cases and a swollen abdomen, and the form of the antennae marks this one as a female. Two Meloe species live in the part of Tuscany where Leonardo was working. One is confined to the Alps and the Apennines. The other, Meloe proscarabaeus, also ranges through the lowlands around Florence, and Bologna and Zilli take it as the likelier match.

The name oil beetle comes from the insect’s defense. When disturbed it bleeds an oily yellow fluid from its leg joints, and that fluid carries cantharidin, the compound that raises blisters on skin.

Detail of the Meloe beetle depicted in Codex Arundel, MS 263, folio 36r. Credit: British Library Board

Why draw a wingless insect at all

Leonardo’s notebooks are full of insects, and nearly all of them fly. Dragonflies, bees, wasps and butterflies feed into his long study of wing mechanics and his designs for flying machines.

He did draw a few that stay on the ground. There is a crab, some worker ants, and what researchers now take to be Morimus asper, a flightless longhorn beetle common in Tuscany. The Meloe joins that short list.

Bologna and Zilli set out three possible reasons for it. He may have noticed the beetle in the grass during fieldwork and drawn it from plain curiosity. He may have wanted a flightless insect to set against the flying ones he was studying, the same instinct behind the longhorn beetle. Or he may have known exactly what the beetle was for. The first two can sit together.

Two thousand years of cantharidin

The third possibility is the one the paper explores most fully.

Cantharidin comes from two related beetle families, and cultures in China, Peru, South Africa and the Mediterranean all put it to use independently for at least two thousand years. It served as an aphrodisiac, an anti-inflammatory and a treatment for warts and tumours, and in larger doses as a poison.

In Greek and Roman medicine its use as a male stimulant is recorded by Hippocrates, Aristotle, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder and Galen. It stayed in Italian folk medicine through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and on into the nineteenth century. The species most tied to the practice is Lytta vesicatoria, still called Spanish fly, though Meloe was used too.

What cantharidin actually does is inflame the urinary tract, and the effect people mistook for arousal came from that irritation. It is dangerous in small quantities and has killed a good many of the people who took it.

Leonardo had the book, and the interest

Vecce notes that Leonardo owned a copy of the Hortus Sanitatis, an early printed encyclopedia of natural history published in Mainz in 1491 by Jacob Meydenbach. Its section on animals describes blister beetles as both irritants and aphrodisiacs.

The subject also fits Leonardo’s wider notes. He wrote and drew in detail about the anatomy of the penis and the part blood flow plays in erection, in the Windsor collection at folio 2 verso, and elsewhere he set down an aphrodisiac recipe, in the Codex Atlanticus at folio 482 recto.

The authors leave the question open

Bologna and Zilli choose not to settle on one explanation. A single isolated drawing on an unrelated page carries too little context to decide it, and Meloe is an unusual insect for anyone to sketch.

Their point is a wider one. Following the most plausible leads from one small beetle opens other overlooked corners of the notebooks, and adds to the picture of a mind that found almost everything worth recording.

For a few dollars a month you will get stories like this one every day, from Leonardo's notebooks to newly deciphered tablets, plus short documentaries and the full archive. Subscribe and keep Ancient Content going.

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Sources: Bologna, M.A., and Zilli, A. (2026). “On Leonardo’s Choice to Depict a Wingless Blister Beetle Producing a Sexual Stimulant.” npj Heritage Science 14, 407. doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-02896-8

Humanity has always mapped its anxieties onto the cosmos. Whether examining clay tablets from Uruk or reviewing equations in theoretical physics, the impulse remains the same: trying to determine if the end of an era is a permanent curtain or merely a transition.

Apocalyptic Concepts in Ancient Civilizations

The Mesopotamian Perspective on Cosmic Endings

Mesopotamian mythologies viewed civilizational order as a temporary exception rather than a permanent baseline. Divine authority struggled constantly against primordial chaos, a tension reflected in texts like the Enuma Elish.

Systemic breakdown was never treated as an unexpected tragedy; it was the default reality whenever human ritual or royal authority faltered. Apocalyptic scenarios in the Fertile Crescent focused on the breakdown of cosmic equilibrium rather than a singular termination of time itself.

Hindu Cycles and the Yugas

Sanskrit texts frame cosmic decay through extraordinarily vast temporal architecture. Time moves through four distinct yugas, descending from the golden age of Satya Yuga down to the moral fragmentation of our current epoch, Kali Yuga.

Satya Yuga ──> Treta Yuga ──> Dvapara Yuga ──> Kali Yuga ──> (Reset via Kalki)

The inevitable culmination of Kali Yuga brings the avatar Kalki to clear the board, restarting the sequence. Dissolution in this framework operates as a necessary maintenance phase rather than an absolute tragedy.

The Great Dissolution (Maha Pralaya)

Zooming out past the yugas brings us to Maha Pralaya, or the “Great Dissolution.” Every 4.3 billion years, matter, planetary structures, and sub-deities collapse back into an unmanifest state.

This vast cosmic intake of breath lasts as long as the creation itself before Brahma initiates a fresh universe. Destruction behaves less like a cliff and more like an established biological rhythm on a galactic scale.

How Cultures View Cycles and Endings

The Maya Calendar and the 2012 Misconception

The popular panic surrounding December 21, 2012, says far more about Western culture than it does about ancient Mesoamerica. Maya chronologists tracked long-count dates through complex, overlapping wheels of time.

The end of the 13th B’ak’tun was simply a major odometer turn, not a prediction of doomsday. It signaled the closing of one epochal calendar page and the turning of the next.

Is Time Linear or Cyclical?

Western thought inherited a straight-line model of time, heavily influenced by Abrahamic teleology, the Industrial Revolution, and mechanical clocks. This perspective insists on a fixed origin, a progression of unique events, and a definitive end point.

Linear time creates an existential pressure where every collapse feels permanent. Cyclical time, by contrast, treats collapse as a structural prerequisite for regeneration.

End-of-Universe Theories in Contemporary Cosmology

The Big Freeze (Heat Death)

Modern astrophysics presents two dramatically different scenarios for cosmic destiny. The standard thermodynamic model predicts the Big Freeze, where entropy approaches its maximum state over trillions of years.

Stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, galaxies drift out of visual contact, and the universe settles into a cold, uniform equilibrium. It is an end driven by gradual exhaustion rather than violent catastrophe.

The Big Bounce and Cyclical Models

Alternative cosmological models challenge this linear decay. Theories derived from loop quantum cosmology suggest the universe may contract under gravitational force until quantum pressure prevents a singular collapse, triggering a new expansion.

Big Bang ──> Expansion ──> Contraction ──> Big Crunch ──> Big Bounce ──> (Repeat)

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