Abbé Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (8 September 1814 – 8 January 1874) was a noted French writer, ethnographer, historian, archaeologist, and Catholic priest.

In 1837 aged 23, Brasseur traveled to Paris with supported by French poet Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat Lamartine's, and became involved with political newspapers that sought the democratization of power such as Le Monde.

Correspondence began in late 1844, with Abbé Gingras claiming that the seminary should "...move heaven and earth to ensure that such a splendid bird does not escape us and fly to Montreal, where it would be so highly thought of".

A year later after having obtained his ordination, Brasseur de Bourbourg's job in Quebec was approved by the Archbishop, Joseph Signay, and in the autumn of 1845 he left Europe for the British colony of the Province of Canada, stopping briefly in Boston along the way.

Towards the end of the year Brasseur de Bourbourg returned to Europe, to spend some time conducting research in the archives of Rome and Madrid, in preparation for a new project—travel to Central America.

During these journeys he gave great attention to Mesoamerican antiquities and became well-versed in the then-current theories and knowledge about the history of the region and the Pre-Columbian civilisations whose sites and monuments remained, yet were little understood.

In 1862 while searching through archives at the Royal Academy of History in Madrid for New World materials, he came across an abridged copy of a manuscript which had originally been written by the Spanish cleric Diego de Landa sometime around 1566.

De Landa had been one of those charged with disseminating the Roman Catholic faith amongst the Maya peoples in Spain's new Central American possessions during the period after the Spanish conquest of Yucatán, and had lived there for several years.

In this passage de Landa had annotated the Mayan symbols (or glyphs) which supposedly corresponded to the letters of the Spanish alphabet, as given to him by a Maya informant who he had quizzed.

Although Waldeck's depictions of the ruins at Palenque were based on first-hand knowledge, his artistic reconstructions and embellishments implied a close relationship between Maya art and architecture and that of Classical antiquity Greece and Rome.

This was subsequently demonstrated to be spurious, but not before Waldeck's artwork had inspired speculations about contact between New and Old World civilizations, specifically via the lost continent of Atlantis.

In this publication, Brasseur de Bourbourg made extensive parallels between Maya and Egyptian pantheons and cosmologies, implying that they all had a common source on the lost continent of Atlantis.

He developed these ideas further in his publication Quatre lettres sur le Mexique (1868), which presents a history of Atlantis based on his interpretation of Maya myths.

His writings inspired Augustus Le Plongeon and also Ignatius L. Donnelly, whose book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World contains numerous references to Brasseur de Bourbourg's scholarship.

The codex contained numerous signs and drawings, which Brasseur de Bourbourg was readily able to identify as being Mayan in origin, having seen and studied many similar markings and glyphs while in Central America.

A collection of travel accounts and reports which Brasseur de Bourbourg sent to the French Minister for Education and Religion from Mexico, Guatemala and Spain is stored at the Archives Nationales (Paris), F17, 2942.