Lord Kingsborough Lost His Fortune Trying to Prove the Maya Were Descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes

Home > Magazines > BAR > September/October 1985

In 837, Edward King, Viscount of Kingsborough, sat languishing in a Dublin debtor’s prison, sick and impoverished. He had spent his entire fortune and was suffering from typhus. Within a month, he would die in prison at the age of 42. He had, some would say, squandered his patrimony in publishing a series of books on the peoples of Mesoamerica. (“Mesoamerica” refers to an area where native civilizations thrived before the Spanish Conquest, comprising much of central and southern Mexico, all of Guatemala, Belize and the northern part of Honduras.) Kingsborough’s nine-volume set, The Antiquities of Mexico, is, quite […]

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Footnotes

See “Part of Ten Lost Tribes Located,” BAR 01:03.

Endnotes

Allen H. Godbey, The Lost Tribes—A Myth (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1974).

D. Brent Smith, The House of Israel and Native Americans (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies).

Thomas Thorowgood, Jewes in America (London, 1650).

Thomas Stuart Ferguson, One Fold and One Shepherd (San Francisco: Books of California, 1958).

Michael D. Coe, “Mormons and Archaeology: An Outside View,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1973, Los Angeles.

Coe, The Maya (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), pp. 43–45.