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

which carry back the antiquity of the science of astronomy, together with the constellations, to within a few years of the Deluge, even on the longer chronology of the Septuagint.” (“The Miracle in Stone,” p.

142.) Josephus attributes the invention of the constellations to the family of the antediluvian Seth, the son of Adam, while Origen affirms that it was asserted in the Book of Enoch that in the time of that patriarch the constellations were already divided and named. The Greeks associated the origin of astronomy with Atlas and Hercules, Atlantean kings or heroes. The Egyptians regarded Taut (At?) or Thoth, or At-hotes, as the originator of both astronomy and the alphabet; doubtless he represented a civilized people, by whom their country was originally colonized. Bailly and others assert that astronomy “must have been established when the summer solstice was in the first degree of Virgo, and that the solar and lunar zodiacs were of similar antiquity, which would be about four thousand years before, the Christian era. They suppose the originators to have lived in about the fortieth degree of north latitude, and to have been a highly-civilized people.” It will be remembered that the fortieth degree of north latitude passed through Atlantis. Plato knew (” Dialogues, Phædo,” 108) that the earth “is a body in the centre of the heavens” held in equipoise. He speaks of it as a “round body,” a “globe;” he even understood that it revolved on its axis, and that these revolutions produced day and night. He says—“Dialogues, Timæus”—“The earth circling around the pole (which is extended through the universe) be made to be the artificer of night and day.” All this Greek learning was probably drawn from the Egyptians.

Only among the Atlanteans in Europe and America do we find traditions preserved as to the origin of all the principal inventions which have raised man from a savage to a civilized condition. We can give in part the very names of the inventors.

Starting with the Chippeway legends, and following with the Bible and Phœnician records, we make a table like the appended: -----------+----------------------------+

The Invention or Discovery. The Race. The Inventors.

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Fire Atlantean Phos, Phur, and Phlox.

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The bow and arrow Chippeway Manaboshu.

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The use of flint ” ”

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The use of copper ” ”

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The manufacture of bricks Atlantean Autochthon and Technites.

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Agriculture and hunting ” Argos and Agrotes.

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Village life, and the ” Amynos and Magos. rearing of flocks

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The use of salt ” Misor and Sydyk.

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The use of letters ” Taautos, or Taut.

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Navigation ” The Cabiri, or Corybantes.

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The art of music Hebrew Jubal.

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Metallurgy, and the use of ” Tubal-cain. iron

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The syrinx Greek Pan.

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The lyre ” Hermes.

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We cannot consider all these evidences of the vast antiquity of the great inventions upon which our civilization mainly rests, including the art of writing, which, as I have shown, dates back far beyond the beginning of history; we cannot remember that the origin of all the great food-plants, such as wheat, oats, barley, rye, and maize, is lost in the remote past; and that all the domesticated animals, the horse, the ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and the hog had been reduced to subjection to man in ages long previous to written history, without having the conclusion forced upon us irresistibly that beyond Egypt and Greece, beyond Chaldea and China, there existed a mighty civilization, of which these states were but the broken fragments.

CHAPTER X.

THE ARYAN COLONIES FROM ATLANTIS.

We come now to another question: “Did the Aryan or Japhetic race come from Atlantis?”

If the Aryans are the Japhetic race, and if Japheth was one of the sons of the patriarch who escaped from the Deluge, then assuredly, if the tradition of Genesis be true, the Aryans came from the drowned land, to wit, Atlantis. According to Genesis, the descendants of the Japheth who escaped out of the Flood with Noah are the Ionians, the inhabitants of the Morea, the dwellers on the Cilician coast of Asia Minor, the Cyprians, the Dodoneans of Macedonia, the Iberians, and the Thracians.

These are all now recognized as Aryans, except the Iberians.

“From non-Biblical sources,” says Winchell, “we obtain further information respecting the early dispersion of the Japhethites or Indo-Europeans—called also Aryans. All determinations confirm the Biblical account of their primitive residence in the same country with the Hamites and Semites. Rawlinson informs us that even Aryan roots are mingled with Presemitic in some of the old inscriptions of Assyria. The precise region where these three families dwelt in a common home has not been pointed out.” (“Preadamites,” p. 43.) I have shown in the chapter in relation to Peru that all the languages of the Hamites, Semites, and Japhethites are varieties of one aboriginal speech.

The centre of the Aryan migrations (according to popular opinion) within the Historical Period was Armenia. Here too is Mount Ararat, where it is said the ark rested—another identification with the Flood regions, as it represents the usual transfer of the Atlantis legend by an Atlantean people to a high mountain in their new home.

Now turn to a map: Suppose the ships of Atlantis to have reached the shores of Syria, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, where dwelt a people who, as we have seen, used the Central American Maya alphabet; the Atlantis ships are then but two hundred miles distant from Armenia.

But these ships need not stop at Syria, they can go by the Dardanelles and the Black Sea, by uninterrupted water communication, to the shores of Armenia itself. If we admit, then, that it was from Armenia the Aryans stocked Europe and India, there is no reason why the original population of Armenia should not have been themselves colonists from Atlantis.

But we have seen that in the earliest ages, before the first Armenian migration of the historical Aryans, a people went from Iberian Spain and settled in Ireland, and the language of this people, it is now admitted, is Aryan. And these Iberians were originally, according to tradition, from the West.

The Mediterranean Aryans are known to have been in Southeastern Europe, along the shores of the Mediterranean, 2000 B.C. They at that early date possessed the plough; also wheat, rye, barley, gold, silver, and bronze.

Aryan faces are found depicted upon the monuments of Egypt, painted four thousand years before the time of Christ. “The conflicts between the Kelts (an Aryan race) and the Iberians were far anterior in date to the settlements of the Phœnicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, and Noachites on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea.” (“American Cyclopædia,” art.

Basques.) There is reason to believe that these Kelts were originally part of the population and Empire of Atlantis. We are told (Rees’s “British Encyclopædia,” art. Titans) that “Mercury, one of the Atlantean gods, was placed as ruler over the Celtæ, and became their great divinity.” F. Pezron, in his “Antiquity of the Celtæ,” makes out that the Celtæ were the same as the Titans, the giant race who rebelled in Atlantis, and “that their princes were the same with the giants of Scripture.” He adds that the word Titan “is perfect Celtic, and comes from tit, the earth, and ten or den, man, and hence the Greeks very properly also called them terriginæ, or earth-born.” And it will be remembered that Plato uses the same phrase when he speaks of the race into which Poseidon intermarried as “the earth-born primeval men of that country.”

The Greeks, who are Aryans, traced their descent from