Lemurian Empire.

 

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Lemuria was a continent proposed in 1864 by zoologist Philip Sclater, theorized to have sunk beneath the Indian Ocean. The theory was discredited with the discovery of plate tectonics and continental drift in the 20th century. The hypothesis was proposed as an explanation for the presence of lemur fossils on Madagascar and the Indian subcontinent but not in continental Africa or the Middle East. Biologist Ernst Haeckel's suggestion in 1870 that Lemuria could be the ancestral home of humans caused the hypothesis to move beyond the scope of geology and zoogeography, ensuring its popularity outside of the framework of the scientific community.

For my purposes, Lemuria creates two extra choke points for navigation around the Indian Ocean. 1860 the Suez Canal is opened, giving better and faster access to the East. But, those routes had to go North through the Palk Channel, between Lemuria and India or the Southern route through the Mozambique Channel between Lemuria and Africa. This gave whoever controlled Lemuria a greater say in what happened in those waters. It also made Lemuria a prize worth fighting for.

Lemuria had a varied history through the ages. Human occupation started from both ends of the lands. Asian peoples went across the Palk Strait and started exploring the new land till they ran into the Negro peoples who had started in the Madagascar area and slowly explored north into what would become Lemuria. These peoples fought over the middle ground of Lemuria for centuries. A third player arrived along the coasts of Lemuria about 200AD as the Arab dhows explored out of the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, and Somalia. These pirates were not averse to picking up slaves for sale in the ever ready slave markets in Europe. Whole villages along the coasts of Lemuria would disappear into the slave markets.

The advent of metal working and metal weapons changed the dynamics on Lemuria. The northern Tamil Empire got these first and forced the people of the Merina Kingdom out of central Lemuria back to their ancestral homeland in Madagascar. The Battle of Antsiranana stopped the Tamil advance, but the Merina' did not have the strength to push the Tamils back out of Lemuria Central. That was how the continent remained till the European explorers arrived in the area in the 13th and 14th centuries.

During the Crusades, the Crusaders  had received intelligence of an unknown land that was another unholy land. Arab dhows were commandeered on the Red Sea and a small expedition was sent out to gather more information. They never returned. But they did actually get to Lemuria and interacted with the Asian peoples of Central and Northern Lemuria. The efforts to promote Christianity and convert the Tamil People led to an early grave for the group who were denounced by the local religious people and put to death. Only two remained and they had been kept alive by the Tamil leadership to learn what they could of these pale skin people that thought so much of themselves. With the expedition, or any knowledge of it, disappearing, the Crusader leadership wrote it off as a loss to the elements and carried on to lose their war.

The next time Lemuria came into the European consciousness was when the Portugese, Spanish, and Dutch explorers passed through the area and Lemuria received names on the European maps/rutters (a book of sailing directions used by mariners in the Middle Ages to navigate, listing harbours, reefs, and tides) of the time. This information was jealously guarded by those countries as expeditions to this new land were put together to expand their empires and rob the natives. The treasure that could be returned to an Empires coffers. paid for so much of the expansion of all the military arms and the amount of land under the Empires rule.

The European Wars between the English, French, Spanish, Portugese, Italy, Germany and the rest, were repeated out in the colonies of Empire. The areas controlled by those countries on Lemuria also changed hands as Governments rose and fell in Europe.