Augustus Le Plongeon

Augustus Henry Julian Le Plongeon (4 May 1825 – 13 December 1908) was a British-American archeologist and photographer who studied the pre-Columbian ruins of America, particularly those of the Maya civilization on the northern Yucatán Peninsula. While his writings contain many notions that were not well received by his contemporaries and were later disproven, Le Plongeon left a lasting legacy in his photographs documenting the ancient ruins. He was one of the earliest proponents of Mayanism.

Maya decipherment
Le Plongeon argued that "the grammatical forms and syntax of the Mayan and Egyptian languages were nearly identical, despite the fact that the Egyptian language had no known connections in Asia or Africa". Consequently, he claimed that etymologies of ancient place names across Asia and Africa could be derived from the Mayan language. He further contended that the hieratic alphabets of the Egyptian and Mayan priests were almost indistinguishable. Le Plongeon went so far as to claim that the Greek alphabet, when read in the Mayan language, formed a poem narrating the demise of Atlantis. In one of his articles, he controversially stated that Jesus spoke in the Mayan language, not Aramaic.