A Plausible Explanation for the Lost City of Manuscript 512

​When the explorer Percy Fawcett vanished in 1925 searching for the mythical Lost City of Z, he was also hunting a fabulous city described in Manuscript 512 in the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. The document, written in 1753, tells of a Portuguese expedition, which discovered a city reminiscent of Classical settlements like Rome and Athens deep in the Brazilian rainforest. It contained arches and domes, statues, and mysterious hieroglyphic engravings. Fawcett thought Z to be the capital of a vast civilization of which the Manuscript 512 city was a mere outpost. 

​Now, researcher Julio Cesar Assis Kühl has provided me with a plausible solution to the mystery of Manuscript 512, inspired by reports that appeared in the Brazilian press in recent years and developed through his own careful and original archival research.
 
In 2019, Brazilian media on the hunt for “pre-Egyptians” and “Atlanteans” suggested that the real location of the MS. 512 city was an area now known as Gentio do Ouro, adjacent to Xique-Xique in the state of Bahia, a state that is traditionally associated with MS. 512. (Gentio do Ouro only became an independent community of that name in the 1950s.) Brian Fawcett, Percy’s son, identified the town now known as Gentio do Ouro as Percy Fawcett’s ultimate destination in the map of Fawcett’s 1925 expedition he published in 1953’s Exploration Fawcett. Brian Fawcett named the location as the “city of 1753.” But the media reports correctly noted natural city-like stone formations in the area that may have inspired the city architecture in MS. 512. Aspects of the 1753 report, including the river, waterfall, and mountains are also found in similar locations near Gentio do Ouro.

You can see how city-like the area appears in these stills from a YouTube video touring the region:

​But Kühl also knew that the area around Gentio do Ouro is full of ancient cave paintings. This led to an important discovery. While the cave paintings are pictograms and not engravings, there is confusion in Portuguese sources between painted images and engraved letters, due to translation errors. The Portuguese scholar and regional governor Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença Homem (1693-1743) delivered a lecture on ancient Portuguese dolmens in 1733, and when cave paintings were found 1500 km from Gentio do Ouro in Itaguatiara in the province of Minas Gerais, he had the expertise to report on them. The word “itaguatiara” or itacoatiara in modern spelling means both “painted stone” or “engraved stone” in the local Tupi language, and Martinho de Mendonça incorrectly chose to translate it as “engraved,” using a Portugese phrase (inscrição enigmática) meaning “enigmatic inscription” and thus creating the impression that the painted geometric symbols were carved letters.

“Inscrição enigmática formada em quatro regras” (Enigmatic inscription formed in four ways) in the Códice Costa Matoso (1749-1752). Figueiredo, Luciano (ed.) Códice Costa Matoso, 1999

​Martinho de Mendonça’s work circulated widely in Brazil in the middle eighteenth century. His depiction of the cave paintings, as it appears in the Códice Costa Matoso (1749-1752), bears a resemblance to the “hieroglyphs” of Manuscript 512, produced a year later.  Samples of the MS. 512 “hieroglyphs” are below:

​MS. 512 is too fanciful and obviously Classicizing to be an accurate firsthand account, but it seem to plausibly be a literary adaptation of genuine reports of Gentio do Ouro, composed by a writer familiar with Martinho de Mendonça’s writings and who thus revised misunderstood firsthand travelers’ or native tales into something more grandiose.