Lost City of Z
- For other uses see Lost City of Z (disambiguation)
The Lost City of Z is the name given by Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British surveyor, to a city that he thought existed in the jungle of the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. This mysterious city is referenced in a document known as Manuscript 512, housed at the National Library of Rio de Janeiro by Portuguese slave-hunter (bandeirante) João da Silva Guimarães who wrote that he'd visited the city in 1753. The city is described in great detail without providing a specific location. Fawcett allegedly heard about this city in the early 1900s and went to Rio de Janeiro to learn more, and came across the earlier report. He was about to go in search of the city when World War I intervened. In 1925, Fawcett, his son Jack, and Raleigh Rimell disappeared in the Mato Grosso while searching for Z.
Although the search for the lost city was made in the Mato Grosso, Manuscript 512 was written after explorations made in the sertão of the province of Bahia.
Lost City found?
David Grann's New Yorker article "The Lost City of Z" (2005) was expanded into a book The Lost City of Z (2009). A movie based on the book is reported to commence filming in early 2015. It was reported that an archaeologist, Michael Heckenberger, might have found the city at the site known as Kuhikugu.[1] He had discovered clusters of settlements (20 settlements in all) with each cluster containing up to 5,000 people and said "All these settlements were laid out with a complicated plan, with a sense of engineering and mathematics that rivalled anything that was happening in much of Europe at the time."[2] Using Google Earth, three scientists may have found the lost city in the upper Amazonian basin, near the Brazilian-Bolivian border. Geoglyphs have been identified in a report as remnants of roads, bridges and other man-made structures over a 155 mile area.[3]
See also
Sources
- Fawcett, Percy and Brian Fawcett. - Lost Trails, Lost Cities Funk & Wagnalls (1953)
- Furneaux, Rupert. The World's Strangest Mysteries. Ace Books. New York. 1961.
- The Guardian: Veil lifts on jungle mystery of the colonel who vanished. 21 March 2004, URL accessed 19 May 2007.
- Smith, Warren. Lost Cities of the Ancients-Unearthed!. Zebra Books. New York. 1976.
- Time: Fawcett of the Mato Grosso. 25 May 1953, URL accessed 18 May 2007.
Footnotes
- ↑ Grann, David (19 September 2005). "The Lost City of Z". A Reporter at Large. p. 56.
- ↑ Robert-Goldwater-Library: September 2005
- ↑ Caesar, Ed (10 January 2010). "Google Earth helps find El Dorado". Times Online.
Further reading
- Grann, David (2009). The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-51353-1.
- Langer, Johnni (2002). "A Cidade Perdida da Bahia: mito e arqueologia no Brasil Império". Revista Brasileira de História (in Portuguese) 22 (43): 126–152. doi:10.1590/S0102-01882002000100008. ISSN 1806-9347. Retrieved October 19, 2013.