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

in the Aryan family: “to the east those who specially called themselves Arians, whose descendants inhabited Persia, India, etc.; to the west, the Yavana, or the Young Ones, who first emigrated westward, and from whom have descended the various nations that have populated Europe. This is the name (Javan) found in the tenth chapter of Genesis.” (Lenormant and Chevallier, “Ancient History of the East,” vol. ii., p. 2.) But surely those who “first emigrated westward,” the earliest to leave the parent stock, could not be the “Young Ones;” they would be rather the elder brothers. But if we can suppose the Bactrian population to have left Atlantis at an early date, and the Greeks, Latins, and Celts to have left it at a later period, then they would indeed be the “Young Ones” of the family, following on the heels of the earlier migrations, and herein we would find the explanation of the resemblance between the Latin and Celtic tongues. Lenormant says the name of Erin (Ireland) is derived from Aryan; and yet we have seen this island populated and named Erin by races distinctly. connected with Spain, Iberia, Africa, and Atlantis.

There is another reason for supposing that the Aryan nations came from Atlantis.

We find all Europe, except a small corner of Spain and a strip along the Arctic Circle, occupied by nations recognized as Aryan; but when we turn to Asia, there is but a corner of it, and that corner in the part nearest Europe, occupied by the Aryans. All the rest of that great continent has been filled from immemorial ages by non-Aryan races. There are seven branches of the Aryan family: 1. Germanic or Teutonic; 2.

Slavo-Lithuanic; 3. Celtic; 4. Italic; 5. Greek; 6. Iranian or Persian; 7. Sanscritic or Indian; and of these seven branches five dwell on the soil of Europe, and the other two are intrusive races in Asia from the direction of Europe. The Aryans in Europe have dwelt there apparently since the close of the Stone Age, if not before it, while the movements of the Aryans in Asia are within the Historical Period, and they appear as intrusive stocks, forming a high caste amid a vast population of a different race. The Vedas are supposed to date back to 2000 B.C., while there is every reason to believe that the Celt inhabited Western Europe 5000 B.C. If the Aryan race had originated in the heart of Asia, why would not its ramifications have extended into Siberia, China, and Japan, and all over Asia? And if the Aryans moved at a comparatively recent date into Europe from Bactria, where are the populations that then inhabited Europe—the men of the ages of stone and bronze? We should expect to find the western coasts of Europe filled with them, just as the eastern coasts of Asia and India are filled with Turanian populations. On the contrary, we know that the Aryans descended upon India from the Punjab, which lies to the north-west of that region; and that their traditions represent that they came there from the west, to wit, from the direction of Europe and Atlantis.

CHAPTER XI.

ATLANTIS RECONSTRUCTED.

The farther we go back in time toward the era of Atlantis, the more the evidences multiply that we are approaching the presence of a great, wise, civilized race. For instance, we find the Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Israelites, from the earliest ages, refusing to eat the flesh of swine. The Western nations departed from this rule, and in these modern days we are beginning to realize the dangers of this article of food, on account of the trichina contained in it; and when we turn to the Talmud, we are told that it was forbidden to the Jews, “because of a small insect which infests it.”

The Egyptians, the Ethiopians, the Phœnicians, the Hebrews, and others of the ancient races, practised circumcision. It was probably resorted to in Atlantean days, and imposed as a religious duty, to arrest one of the most dreadful scourges of the human race-a scourge which continued to decimate the people of America, arrested their growth, and paralyzed their civilization. Circumcision stamped out the disease in Atlantis; we read of one Atlantean king, the Greek god Ouranos, who, in a time of plague, compelled his whole army and the armies of his allies to undergo the rite. The colonies that went out to Europe carried the practice but not the disease out of which it originated with them; and it was not until Columbus reopened communication with the infected people of the West India Islands that the scourge crossed the Atlantic and “turned Europe,” as one has expressed it, “into a charnal-house.”

Life-insurance statistics show, nowadays, that the average life and health of the Hebrew is much greater than that of other men; and he owes this to the retention of practices and beliefs imposed ten thousand years ago by the great, wise race of Atlantis.

Let us now, with all the facts before us, gleaned from various sources, reconstruct, as near as may be, the condition of the antediluvians.

They dwelt upon a great island, near which were other smaller islands, probably east and west of them, forming stepping-stones, as it were, toward Europe and Africa in one direction, and the West India Islands and America in the other. There were volcanic mountains upon the main island, rising to a height of fifteen hundred feet, with their tops covered with perpetual snow. Below these were elevated table-lands, upon which were the royal establishments. Below these, again, was “the great plain of Atlantis.” There were four rivers flowing north, south, east, and west from a central point. The climate was like that of the Azores, mild and pleasant; the soil volcanic and fertile, and suitable at its different elevations for the growth of the productions of the tropical and temperate zones.

The people represented at least two different races: a dark brown reddish race, akin to the Central Americans, the Berbers and the Egyptians; and a white race, like the Greeks, Goths, Celts, and Scandinavians. Various battles and struggles followed between the different peoples for supremacy. The darker race seems to have been, physically, a smaller race, with small hands; the lighter-colored race was much larger—hence the legends of the Titans and Giants. The Guanches of the Canary Islands were men of very great stature. As the works of the Bronze Age represent a small-handed race, and as the races who possessed the ships and gunpowder joined in the war against the Giants, we might conclude that the dark races were the more civilized, that they were the metal-workers and navigators.

The fact that the same opinions and customs exist on both sides of the ocean implies identity of origin; it might be argued that the fact that the explanation of many customs existing on both hemispheres is to be found only in America, implies that the primeval stock existed in America, the emigrating portion of the population carrying away the custom, but forgetting the reason for it. The fact that domestic cattle and the great cereals, wheat, oats, barley, and rye, are found in Europe and not in America, would imply that after population moved to Atlantis from America civilization was developed in Atlantis, and that in the later ages communication was closer and more constant between Atlantis and Europe than between Atlantis and America. In the case of the bulky domestic animals, it would be more difficult to transport them, in the open vessels of that day, from Atlantis across the wider expanse of sea to America, than it would be to carry them by way of the now submerged islands in front of the Mediterranean Sea to the coast of Spain. It may be, too, that the climate of Spain and Italy was better adapted to the growth of wheat, barley, oats and rye, than maize; while the drier atmosphere of America was better suited to the latter plant Even now comparatively little wheat or barley is raised in Central America, Mexico, or Peru, and none on the low coasts of those countries; while a smaller quantity of maize, proportionately, is grown in Italy, Spain, and the rest of Western Europe, the rainy climate being unsuited to it.

We have seen (p. 60, ante) that there is reason to believe that maize was known in a remote period in the drier regions of the Egyptians and Chinese.

As science has been able to reconstruct the history of the migrations of the Aryan race, by the words that exist or fail to appear in the kindred branches of that tongue, so the time will come when a careful comparison of words, customs, opinions, arts existing on the opposite sides of the Atlantic will furnish an approximate sketch of Atlantean history.

The people had attained a high position as agriculturists. The presence of the plough in Egypt and Peru implies that they possessed that implement. And as the horns and ox-head of Baal show the esteem in which cattle were held among them, we may suppose that they had passed the stage in which the plough was drawn by men, as in Peru and Egypt in ancient times, and in Sweden during the Historical Period, and that it was drawn by oxen or horses. They first domesticated the horse, hence the association of Poseidon or Neptune, a sea-god, with horses; hence the race-courses for horses described by Plato. They possessed sheep, and manufactured woollen goods; they also had goats, dogs, and swine.

They raised cotton and made cotton goods; they probably cultivated maize, wheat, oats, barley, rye, tobacco, hemp, and flax, and possibly potatoes; they built aqueducts and practised irrigation; they were architects, sculptors, and engravers; they possessed an alphabet; they worked in tin, copper, bronze, silver, gold, and iron.

During the vast period of their duration, as peace and agriculture caused their population to increase to overflowing, they spread out in colonies east and west to the ends of the earth. This was not the work of a few years, but of many centuries; and the relations between these colonies may have been something like the relation between the different colonies that in a later age were established by the Phœnicians, the Greeks, and the Romans; there was an intermingling with the more ancient races, the autochthones of the different lands where they settled; and the same crossing of stocks, which we know to have been continued all through the Historical Period, must have been going on for thousands of years, whereby new races and new dialects were formed; and the result of all this has been that the smaller races of antiquity have grown larger, while all the complexions shade into each other, so that we can pass from the whitest to the darkest by insensible degrees.

In some respects the Atlanteans exhibited conditions similar to those of the British Islands: there were the same, and even greater, race differences in the population; the same plantation of colonies in Europe, Asia, and America; the same carrying of civilization to the ends of the earth. We have seen colonies from Great Britain going out in the third and fifth centuries to settle on the shores of France, in Brittany, representing one of the nationalities and languages of the mother-country—a race Atlantean in origin. In the same way we may suppose Hamitic emigrations to have gone out from Atlantis to Syria, Egypt, and the Barbary States. If we could imagine Highland Scotch, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish populations emigrating en masse from England in later times, and carrying to their new lands the civilization of England, with peculiar languages not English, we would have a state of things probably more like the migrations which took place from Atlantis.

England, with a civilization Atlantean in origin, peopled by races from the same source, is repeating in these modern times the empire of Zeus and Chronos; and,