Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly (good books to read txt) 📖

>The illustrations of discoidal stones on page 263 are from the “North Americans of Antiquity,” p. 77. The objects represented were taken from an ancient mound in Illinois. It would be indeed surprising if two distinct peoples, living in two different continents, thousands of miles apart, should, without any intercourse with each other, not only form their vases in the same inconvenient form, but should hit upon the same expedient as a remedy.

We observe, in the American spear-head and the Swiss hatchets, on the opposite page, the same overlapping of the metal around the staff, or handle—a very peculiar mode of uniting them together, which has now passed out of use.

A favorite design of the men of the Bronze Age in Europe is the spiral or double-spiral form. It appears on the face of the urn in the shape of a lake dwelling, which is given on p. 255; it also appears in the rock sculptures of Argyleshire, Scotland, here shown.

We find the same figure in an ancient fragment of pottery from the Little Colorado, as given in the “United States Pacific Railroad Survey Report,” vol. iii., p. 49, art. Pottery. It was part of a large vessel.

The annexed illustration represents this.

DISCOIDAL STONES, ILLINOIS. COPPER SPEAR-HEAD, LAKE SUPERIOR. BRONZE HATCHETS, SWITZERLAND.

The same design is also found in ancient rock etchings of the Zuñis of New Mexico, of which the cut on p. 265 is an illustration.

We also find this figure repeated upon vase from a Mississippi Valley mound, which we give elsewhere. (See p. 260.) It is found upon many of the monuments of Central America. In the Treasure House of Atreus, at Mycenæ, Greece, a fragment of a pillar was found which is literally covered with this double spiral design. (See “Rosengarten’s Architectural Styles,” p, 59.) This Treasure House of Atreus is one of the oldest buildings in Greece.

We find the double-spiral figure upon a shell ornament found on the breast of a skeleton, in a carefully constructed stone coffin, in a mound near Nashville, Tennessee.

Lenormant remarks (“Anc. Civil.,” vol. ii., p. 158) that the bronze implements found in Egypt, near Memphis, had been buried for six thousand years; and that at that time, as the Egyptians had a horror of the sea, some commercial nation must have brought the tin, of which the bronze was in part composed, from India, the Caucasus, or Spain, the nearest points to Egypt in which tin is found.

Heer has shown that the civilized plants of the lake dwellings are not of Asiatic, but of African, and, to a great extent, of Egyptian origin.

Their stone axes are made largely of jade or nephrite, “a mineral which, strange to say, geologists have not found in place on the continent of Europe.” (Foster’s “Prehistoric Races,” p. 44.) Compare this picture of a copper axe from a mound near Laporte, Indiana, with this representation of a copper axe of the Bronze Age, found near Waterford, Ireland. Professor Foster pronounces them almost identical.

Compare this specimen of pottery from the lake dwellings of Switzerland with the following specimen from San José, Mexico. Professor Foster calls attention to the striking resemblance in the designs of these two widely separated works of art, one belonging to the Bronze Age of Europe, the other to the Copper Age of America.

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FRAGMENT OF POTTERY, LAKE FRAGMENT OF POTTERY, SAN JOSÉ, NEUFCHATEL, SWITZERLAND. MEXICO.

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These, then, in conclusion, are our reasons for believing that the Bronze Age of Europe has relation to Atlantis: 1. The admitted fact that it is anterior in time to the Iron Age relegates it to a great antiquity.

2. The fact that it is anterior in time to the Iron Age is conclusive that it is not due to any of the known European or Asiatic nations, all of which belong to the Iron Age.

3. The fact that there war. in Europe, Asia, or Africa no copper or tin age prior to the Bronze Age, is conclusive testimony that the manufacture of bronze was an importation into those continents from some foreign country.

4. The fact that in America alone of all the world is found the Copper Age, which must necessarily have preceded the Bronze Age, teaches us to look to the westward of Europe and beyond the sea for that foreign country.

5. We find many similarities in forms of implements between the Bronze Age of Europe and the Copper Age of America.

6. if Plato told the truth, the Atlanteans were a great commercial nation, trading to America and Europe, and, at the same time, they possessed bronze, and were great workers in the other metals.

7. We shall see hereafter that the mythological traditions of Greece referred to a Bronze Age which preceded an Iron Age, and placed this in the land of the gods, which was an island in the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Pillars of Hercules; and this land was, as we shall see, clearly Atlantis.

8. As we find but a small development of the Bronze Age in America, it is reasonable to suppose that there must have been some intermediate station between America and Europe, where, during a long period of time, the Bronze Age was developed out of the Copper Age, and immense quantities of bronze implements were manufactured and carried to Europe.

CHAPTER IX.

ARTIFICIAL DEFORMATION OF THE SKULL.

An examination of the American monuments shows (see figure on page 269) that the people represented were in the habit of flattening the skull by artificial means. The Greek and Roman writers had mentioned this practice, but it was long totally forgotten by the civilized world, until it was discovered, as an unheard-of wonder, to be the usage among the Carib Islanders, and several Indian tribes in North America. It was afterward found that the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans practised this art: several flattened Peruvian skulls are depicted in Morton’s “Crania Americana.” It is still in use among the Flat-head Indians of the north-western part of the United States.

In 1849 a remarkable memoir appeared from the pen of M. Rathke, showing that similar skulls had been found near Kertsch, in the Crimea, and calling attention to the book of Hippocrates, “De Aeris, Aquis et Locu,”

lib. iv., and a passage of Strabo, which speaks of the practice among the Scythians. In 1854 Dr. Fitzinger published a learned memoir on the skulls of the Avars, a branch of the Uralian race of Turks. He shows that the practice of flattening the head had existed from an early date throughout the East, and described an ancient skull, greatly distorted by artificial means, which had lately been found in Lower Austria.

Skulls similarly flattened have been found in Switzerland and Savoy. The Huns under Attila had the same practice of flattening the heads.

Professor Anders Retzius proved (see “Smithsonian Report,” 1859) that the custom still exists in the south of France, and in parts of Turkey.

“Not long since a French physician surprised the world by the fact that nurses in Normandy were still giving the children’s heads a sugar-loaf shape by bandages and a tight cap,

STUCCO BAS-RELIEF IN THE PALACE OF PALENQUE.

while in Brittany they preferred to press it round. No doubt they are doing so to this day.” (Tylor’s “Anthropology,” p. 241.) Professor Wilson remarks:

“Trifling as it may appear, it is not without interest to have the fact brought under our notice, by the disclosures of ancient barrows and cysts, that the same practice of nursing the child and carrying it about, bound to a flat cradle-board, prevailed in Britain and the north of Europe long before the first notices of written history reveal the presence of man beyond the Baltic or the English Channel, and that in all probability the same custom prevailed continuously from the shores of the German Ocean to Behring’s Strait.” (“Smithsonian Report,” 1862, p. 286.)

Dr. L. A. Gosse testifies to the prevalence of the same custom among the Caledonians and Scandinavians in the earliest times; and Dr. Thurman has treated of the same peculiarity among the Anglo-Saxons. (“Crania Britannica,” chap. iv., p. 38.)

PERUVIAN SKULL. CHINOOK (FLAT-HEAD), AFTER CATLIN.

Here, then, is an extraordinary and unnatural practice which has existed from the highest antiquity, over vast regions of country, on both sides of the Atlantic, and which is perpetuated unto this day in races as widely separated as the Turks, the French, and the Flat-head Indians. Is it possible to explain this except by supposing that it originated from some common centre?

The annexed out represents an ancient Swiss skull, from a cemetery near Lausanne, from a drawing of Frederick Troyon. Compare this with the illustration given on page 271, which represents a Peruvian flat-head, copied from Morton’s “Ethnography and Archæology of the American Aborigines,” 1846. This skull is shockingly distorted. The dotted lines indicate the course of the bandages by which the skull was deformed.

The following heads are from Del Rio’s “Account of Palenque,” copied into Nott and Gliddon’s “Types of Mankind,” p. 440. They show that the receding forehead was a natural characteristic of the ancient people of Central America. The same form of head has been found even in fossil skulls. We may therefore conclude that the skull-flattening, which we find to have been practised in both the Old and New Worlds, was an attempt of other races to imitate the form of skull of a people whose likenesses are found on the monuments of Egypt and of America. It has been shown that this peculiar form of the head was present even in the fœtus of the Peruvian mummies.

Hippocrates tells us that the practice among the Scythians was for the purpose of giving a certain aristocratic distinction.

HEADS FROM PALENQUE.

Amedée Thierry, in his “History of Attila,” says the Huns used it for the same reason; and the same purpose influences the Indians of Oregon.

Dr. Lund, a Swedish naturalist, found in the bone caves of Minas-Geraes, Brazil, ancient human bones associated with the remains of extinct quadrupeds. “These skulls,” says Lund, “show not only the peculiarity of the American race but in an excessive degree, even to the entire disappearance of the forehead.” Sir Robert Schomburgh found on some of the affluents of the Orinoco a tribe known as Frog Indians, whose heads were flattened by Nature, as shown in newly-born children.

In the accompanying plate we show the difference in the conformation of the forehead in various races. The upper dotted line, A, represents the shape of the European forehead; the next line, B, that of the Australian; the next, C, that of the Mound Builder of