The Peoples of the Lost Book

Margot Crossing and the Search for Israelite Memory Across Asia

Across the mountains of northeast Myanmar, western China and Central Asia, communities separated by language, geography and political history preserve stories about who they are and where they came from. Some remember long migrations from the west. Others tell of ancestors who possessed a sacred book or scroll that was later lost. Certain communities retain names, ritual practices or oral narratives that researchers have compared with traditions found in the Hebrew Scriptures.

For Australian independent researcher Margot Crossing, these dispersed traditions have become the focus of decades of inquiry.

Crossing's work asks an unusual but important historical question: might some of the oral traditions preserved among peoples of Central, East and Southeast Asia contain distant memories connected with the dispersal of ancient Israel?

It is a question she approaches through oral history, cultural tradition, early ethnographic accounts, migration narratives, historical sources and compariative study. Her current Acadamia.edu profile identifies her areas of research as the Zo peoples of Mizoram and Manipur, hill peoples of Myanmar, the Q'iang of southwest China, the Kyrgz and the movement of ancient peoples through Central Asia.

From communities to connections

One of the distinctive features of Crossing's research is its geographical breadth.

Rather than treating the Mizo, Kuki, Chin, Karen, Q'iang and Kyrgyz traditions as isolated curiosities, she has explored whether patterns appearing across these communities might be understood relationally.

Her 2023 paper "Oral Histories Intersecting to Build a Picture of Ancient isrealites Throughout Asia" brought together traditions associated with Kyrgyz, Mizo, Chin, Kuki, Q'iang Min and Karen communities. The material considered included migration memories, traditions of a lost book, cave and mountain narratives, related ancestral names, cultural practices and other forms of community memory.

This compariative approach does not establish a common ancestry by itself. Oral traditions can change, similar stories can arise independently, and linguistic resemblance requires much more than similarity of sound. Crossing's argument is instead that converging traditions deserve to be documented and investigated rather than dismissed simply because they survive outside conventional written archives. This distinction is important.

Her work is most compelling when understood not as proof of a predetermined conclusion, but as the identification of a broad pattern of traditions, migration memories and cultural parallels that invite further historical, linguistic, ethnographic and comparative investigation.

The peoples of the "Lost Book"

At the centre of Crossing's research is what she calls the Lost Book Peoples.

In a paper presented at the World Epic Festival scientific symposium in Bishkek in 2019, Crossing described traditions extending from Kyrgyzstan through China to northeast India in which communities remembered possessing a sacred book, scroll or inherited body of knowledge that had subsequently been lost. She also drew attention to ancestral names including Manas, Manasi, Manmassi occurring at different points across this geographical arc.

The details are not identical from community to community. Nor should they be expected to be after centuries of migration, language change and cultural interaction. What interested Crossing was the recurrence of the underlying pattern.

Among communities in northeast India and Myanmar, traditions speak of migration through China and the loss of an ancestral book. Crossing has also drawn attention to Q'iang traditions from western Sichuan involving a lost scroll and belief in a supreme Creator. Her Mizoram: Lost Tribe of Israel? paper attempts to follow these traditions westward through the Silk Road world and Central Asia.

The historical interpretation remains contested. Yet the traditions themselves are significant cultural evidence irrespective of whether the proposed Israelite connection is ultimately sustained.

Manasseh, Manas and remembered names

A related strand of Crossing's work concerns traditions associated with Manasseh.

Among the Kuki-Chin-Mizo peoples, forms such as Manmassi and Manasi have been associated in community traditions with an ancestral figure. Crossing has compared these with the Hebrew Menashe and with the name Manas, central to the Kyrgyz Epic of Manas.

Her later work has extended the proposed migration framework through Central Asian peoples and polities, including the Massagetae, Saka/Scythian world and Yuezhi, before considering possible movements farther east. Her 2023 presentation "How did the Manasi Reach NE India?" developed precisely this proposed chain of connections.

Name similarity alone cannot establish historical descent, and shuch comparisons require careful linguistic testing. Crossing's contribution lies in setting those names beside oral histories, migration narratives and cultural traditions and asking whether the combined pattern warrants closer investigation.

The Karen and the recovery of early records

The Karen peoples of Myanmar and Thailand occupy another important place in Crossing's work.

Ninteeth-century missionaries recorded Karen traditions concerning a supreme Creator, humanities departure from an original relationship with God and the loss of sacred knowledge. Some early observers interpreted these traditions through a biblical framework and even proposed a relationship with the dispersed tribes of Israel.

Crossing has recently been recovering and republishing some of this historical material as a research resource. In 2024 she made available surviving sections of Francis Mason's 1834-1835 writings on the Karen of Burmah, explicitly presenting them as historical evidence to be read alongside contemporary research rather than as a final answer of Karen origins.

This archival dimension of her work is significant. Whatever conclusions later researchers draw, early accounts can preserve traditions recorded before many communities experienced the profound transformations associated with modernisation, missionisation, migration and political disruption.

From individual research to the Lost Tribes Institute

Crossing's work has increasingly moved from individual investigation toward collaborative research.

Together with Richard Hewitt, she founded the Lost Tribes Institute, bringing researchers and representatives of different communities into conversation through scientific symposia and published proceedings. A current 2026 biography describes Crossing as having spent decades working among the Mizo of northeast India and previously among the Karen communities of Thailand and Myanmar, and states that she and Hewitt have now initiated more than five scientific symposia concerned with documenting oral histories and traditions for future research and verification.

The first major symposium on the Interconnectedness of Israelites in Asia was held in Aizawl, Mizorim, in November 2023 and brought together contributors from India, Japan, Korea and elsewhere in Asia.

In May 2024, Crossing served as keynote presenter at the second international symposium in Chiang Mai, Thailand. That gathering focused particularly on Karen and other hill peoples. Crossing's own contribution examined ancient trade and migration routes, including the Tea and Horse Routes, as possible corridors through which peoples and traditions moved across Asia. The proceedings were subsequently published.

The work continued in 2025, when Crossing and Hewitt appeared as Lost Tribes Institute co-founders at an international symposium in Japan alongside representatives and researchers associated with Karen, Kyrgyz, Mizo and Japanese traditions.

Preserving voices before they disappear

Increasingly, preservation appears to be as important to Crossing's work as interpretation.

In a 2025 Lost Tribes Institute piece concerned with traditional songs and chants, she wrote of the rapid disappearance of community knowledge and described the Institute's aim of documenting songs, stories and oral traditions through its symposia and making an online archive available for future access.

This may ultimately prove one of the most valuable dimensions of the project.

Much of what communities remember of their past is carried through stories, songs. customs, names, migration traditions and sacred narrarives rather than through written records. For Crossing, documenting these traditions is therefore an urgent task. Once they are lost, changed beyond recognition or no longer remembered by younger generations, an important source of historical and cultural knowledge may disappear with them.

Evidence, patterns and interpretations

Research into the Lost Tribes sits in a difficult scholarly space.

Migration across Eurasia is historically undeniable, but establishing descent between particular ancient and contemporary populations requires multiple forms of evidence. Oral histories may preserve genuine historical memory while also absorbing later interpretation. Linguistic similarities can be significant or coincidental. Ritual resemblance does not necessarity indicate common origin. Religious traditions may move between communities independently of population movement.

For this reason, Crossing's work is best approached neither through automatic acceptance nor automatic rejection.

The strongest questions raised by her research are relational ones: why do particular traditions recur across widely separated communities? Which elements can be independently dated? Where do oral histories intersect with documented migraiton routes? Which similarities survive linguistic or anthropological scrutiny? And what do communities themselves say about the meaning of those traditions?

Those are researchable questions.

The importance of Margot Crossing's work

Crossing's contribution extends beyond the claim that particular peoples might descend from ancient Israel.

Her work draws attention to communities whose histories have often been recorded from outside while their own explanations of identiy remain comparitively unheard. It insists that oral tradition is evidence - not infallible evidence, but evidence that deserves to be preserved, contextualised and tested alongside other sources.

For Pinion Institute, that principle is particularly significant.

Recognition does not require us to accept every historical claim uncritically. Neither does scholarly caution require us to disregard the communities who carry those claims.

Between those two extremes lies the work of careful investigation: listening to the traditions communities have preserved, documenting them accurately, comparing them with other sources, and remaining open to what further research may reveal.

Margo Crossing has spent decades doing precisely the first part of that work - following stories across mountains, borders and generations, asking why distant peoples remember what they do, and creating spaces in which those memories can be preserved for the researchers who come after her.

The answers continue to unfold.

The voices should not be lost.

Further Reading

Margot Crossing on Acadamia.edu

Her current profile includes free papers and presentations on the Mizo, Karen, Q'iang, Kyrgyz and broader "Lost Book Peoples" research, including Lost Book Peoples, How did the Manasi Reach NE India? and Oral Histories Intersecting to Build a Picture of Ancient Israelites Throughout Asia.

ABOUT MARGOT CROSSING

Margot Crossing is an Australian independent researcher whose work focuses on oral history, migration traditions and cultural memory among peoples of Central, East and Southeast Asia. Her research has included the Mizo and related Zo peoples of northeast India, Karen communities of Myanmar and Thailand., the Q'iang of western China, and Kyrgyz traditions of Central Asia. She is the co-founder of the Lost Tribes Institute and has contributed to a growing series of international symposia exploring oral traditions, migration histories and possible Israelite connections across Asia.

Profile prepared by Suzanne Power for Pinion Institute Perspectives.

Disclosure: Suzanne Power is also Director of the Lost Tribes Institute Academy and has an ongoing professional association with the Lost Tribe Institute.

This article introduces the work of the researcher and does not imply endorsement by Pinion Institute of every historical conclusion or interpretation discussed.