The Strange Case of the Yonaguni Tablets: Paleo-Sanskrit from Atlantis?

​I saw on the Ancient Origins Facebook page a series of photographs depicting what are claimed to be “Paleo-Sanskrit” inscriptions on broken tablets recovered from the geological formation known as the Yonaguni Monument because lost civilization believers think the underwater rock is the remains of an Ice Age temple. The pictures were new to me, but apparently they have been in circulation online for at least two years as part of a Hindu supremacist effort to argue that Yonaguni is a Vedic site.

​Take a look at one of the pictures. The art style appears at first glance to be modern, from the “talentless, childish scrawl” school of art seen on other crude forgeries, such as the Father Crespi artifacts, the Michigan Relics, the Burrows Cave artifacts, etc. It never ceases to amaze me how the most “important” artifacts on Earth, those that would rewrite history as we know it, were mostly made by the very worst student artists and rank amateurs. Surely someone who saw an alien or met someone from Atlantis had the artistic skill to draw a decent image.

​The website where these pictures were apparently first posted promotes all manner of fringe beliefs and has accepted a wide range of hoaxes and frauds as evidence of a lost ancient Vedic world culture.
 
Regardless of where the pictures of the tablets came from, the claim of inscriptions stems from an earlier allegation, apparently from 2013, that a diver found characters “carved” into the so-called human head feature at Yonaguni. This in turn seems to derive from a 1991 claim by a Japanese believer in the lost continent of Mu. Masaaki Kimura alleged in his book Mu tairiku wa Ryukyu ni atta (The Continent of Mu was in Ryukyu) that there were images of people and animals carved on the rocks, along with a horse-like image that Kimura alleged was a primitive version of Yonaguni’s indigenous writing system, the Kaidā glyphs. It is my understanding that the glyphs were first recorded in the seventeenth century CE. Needless to say, mainstream observers have failed to confirm the existence of anything but cracks and fractures on the Yongauni “monument.”
 
From this, a legend has grown up that the “face” on the monument—also first identified by Kimura—contained a large number of inscribed characters. More recently, Hindu nationalists have alleged that these characters were not Kaidā glyphs but rather Paleo-Sanskrit, a proposed ancient language otherwise unattested outside the work of Kurt Schildmann, a deceased German fringe history believer who produced what the English translation of his work produced by Hindu nationalists describes this way:

This 79-page selection from the ultimate work of expert epigrapher Professor Kurt Schildmann comprises the definitive decipherment of Paleolithic texts from the Indus Valley, Pakistan; the Illinois Cave Archive, US; Glozel, France and Tayos Cave, Ecuador.
 
Unparalleled insights related in this text regarding the highly advanced technologies of our ancient Sanskrit world culture, including the related phenomena of 'alien' abduction, subterranean bases and cattle mutilation, place this work in the class of 'sensitive' material marked for censorship.

All the classics: The fake cave where Erich von Däniken pretended to find the alien library that ended up being conflated with the fake Crespi artifacts, the massive hoax that is Burrows Cave, and the Glozel hoax! Apparently Schildmann was Zecharia Sitchin with fewer scruples about making things up. His Paleo-Sanskrit was allegedly the language of Atlantis, according to fringe websites.
 
So now we have the alleged Yonaguni tablets “revealed” to be non-existent Paleo-Sanskrit, which in turn “reveals” that the tablets reflect modern yoga-style Hindu cosmology. Note, too, that whoever made the “translation” has hidden this a bit by translating the name of the Vedic storm god Indra by the name of the Roman god Jupiter.