What race was there, other than the people of Atlantis, that existed before the Iron Age-before the Greek, Roman, Etruscan, and Phoenician—that was civilized, that worked in metals, that carried on a commerce with all parts of Europe? Does history or tradition make mention of any such?
We find a great resemblance between the pottery of the Bronze Age in Europe and the pottery of the ancient inhabitants of America. The two figures on page 260 represent vases from one of the mounds of the Mississippi Valley. Compare them with the following from the lake dwellings of Switzerland:
VASES
FROM
SWITZERLAND
.
It will be seen that these vases could scarcely stand upright unsupported; and we find that the ancient inhabitants of Switzerland had circles or rings of baked earth in which they placed them when in use, as in the annexed figure. The Mound Builders used the same contrivance.
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 Zunis 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 Mycenae, 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 Jose, 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.
---------------------------------+
FRAGMENT
OF
POTTERY
,
LAKE
FRAGMENT
OF
POTTERY
,
SAN
JOSE
,
NEUFCHATEL
,
SWITZERLAND
.
MEXICO
.
---------------------------------+
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 was 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.
&nbs
p; 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 Archaeology 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 foetus 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
.
Amedee 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 the United States; the next, D, that of the Guanche of the Canary Islands; and the next, E, that of a skull from the Inca cemetery of Peru. We have but to compare these lines with the skulls of the Egyptians, Kurds, and the heroic type of heads in the statues of the gods of Greece, to see that there was formerly an ancient race marked by a receding forehead; and that the practice of flattening the skull was probably an attempt to approximate the shape of the head to this standard of an early civilized and dominant people.
Not only do we find the same receding forehead in the skulls of the ancient races of Europe and America, and the same attempt to imitate this natural and peculiar conformation by artificial flattening of the head, but it has been found (see Henry Gillman’s “Ancient Man in Michigan,” “Smithsonian Report,” 1875, p. 242) that the Mound Builders and Peruvians of America, and the Neolithic people of France and the Canary Islands, had alike an extraordinary custom of boring a circular bole in the top of the skulls of their dead, so that the soul might readily pass in and out. More than this, it has been found that in all these ancient populations the skeletons exhibit a remarkable degree of platicnemism, or flattening of the tibiae or leg bones. (Ibid., 1873, p.367.) In this respect the Mound Builders of Michigan were identical with the man of Cro Magnon and the ancient inhabitants of Wales.
The annexed ancient Egyptian heads, copied from the monuments, indicate either that the people of the Nile deformed their beads by pressure upon the front of the skull, or that
EGYPTIAN
HEADS
.
there was some race characteristic which gave this appearance to their heads. These heads are all the heads of priests, and therefore represented the aristocratic class.
The first illustration below is taken from a stucco relief found in a temple at Palenque, Central America. The second is from an Egyptian monument of the time of Rameses IV.
The outline drawing on the following page shows the form of the skull of the royal Inca line: the receding forehead here seems to be natural, and not the result of artificial compression.
Both illustrations at the bottom of the preceding page show the same receding form of the forehead, due to either artificial deformation of the skull or to a common race characteristic.
We must add the fact that the extraordinary practice of deforming the skull was found all over Europe and America to the catalogue of other proofs that the people of both continents were originally united in blood and race. With the couvade, the practice of circumcision, unity of religious beliefs and customs, folk-lore, and alphabetical signs, language and flood legends, we array together a mass of unanswerable proofs of prehistoric identity of race.
PART IV.
THE MYTHOLOGIES OF THE OLD WORLD A RECOLLECTION OF ATLANTIS.
CHAPTER I. TRADITIONS OF ATLANTIS.
We find allusions to the Atlanteans in the most ancient traditions of many different races.
The great antediluvian king of the Mussulman was Shedd-Ad-Ben-Ad, or Shed-Ad, the son of Ad, or Atlantis.
Among the Arabians the first inhabitants of that country are known as the Adites, from their progenitor, who is called Ad, the grandson of Ham. These Adites were probably the people of Atlantis or Ad-lantis.
“They are personified by a monarch to whom everything is ascribed, and to whom is assigned several centuries of life.” (“Ancient History of the East,” Lenormant and Chevallier, vol. ii., p. 295.), Ad came from the northeast. “He married a thousand wives, had four thousand sons, and lived twelve hundred years. His descendants multiplied considerably.
After his death his sons Shadid and Shedad reigned in succession over the Adites. In the time of the latter the people of Ad were a thousand tribes, each composed of several thousands of men. Great conquests are attributed to Shedad; he subdued, it is said, all Arabia and Irak. The migration of the Canaanites, their establishment in Syria, and the Shepherd invasion of Egypt are, by many Arab writers, attributed to
an expedition of Shedad.” (Ibid., p. 296.) Shedad built a palace ornamented with superb columns, and surrounded by a magnificent garden. It was called Irem. “It was a paradise that Shedad had built in imitation of the celestial Paradise, of whose delights he had heard.” (“Ancient History of the East,” p. 296.) In other words, an ancient, sun-worshipping, powerful, and conquering race overran Arabia at the very dawn of history; they were the sons of Adlantis: their king tried to create a palace and garden of Eden like that of Atlantis.
The Adites are remembered by the Arabians as a great and civilized race.
“They are depicted as men of gigantic stature; their strength was equal to their size, and they easily moved enormous blocks of stone.” (Ibid.) They were architects and builders. They raised many monuments of their power; and hence, among the Arabs, arose the custom of calling great ruins “buildings of the Adites.” To this day the Arabs say “as old as Ad.” In the Koran allusion is made to the edifices they built on “high places for vain uses;” expressions proving that their “idolatry was considered to have been tainted with Sabaeism or star-worship.” (Ibid.) “In these legends,” says Lenormant, “we find traces of a wealthy nation, constructors of great buildings, with an advanced civilization, analogous to that of Chaldea, professing a religion similar to the Babylonian; a nation, in short, with whom material progress was allied to great moral depravity and obscene rites. These facts must be true and strictly historical, for they are everywhere met with among the Cushites, as among the Canaanites, their brothers by origin.”
Nor is there wanting a great catastrophe which destroys the whole Adite nation, except a very few who escape because they had renounced idolatry. A black cloud assails their country, from which proceeds a terrible hurricane (the water-spout?) which sweeps away everything.
The first Adites were followed by a second Adite race; probably the colonists who had escaped the Deluge. The centre of its power was the country of Sheba proper. This empire endured for a thousand years. The Adites are represented upon the Egyptian monuments as very much like the Egyptians themselves; in other words, they were a red or sunburnt race: their great temples were pyramidal, surmounted by buildings. (“Ancient History of the East,” p. 321.) “The Sabaeans,” says Agatharchides (“De Mari Erythraeo,” p. 102), “have in their houses an incredible number of vases, and utensils of all sorts, of gold and silver, beds and tripods of silver, and all the furniture of astonishing richness. Their buildings have porticos with columns sheathed with gold, or surmounted by capitals of silver. On the friezes, ornaments, and the framework of the doors they place plates of gold incrusted with precious stones.”
Antediluvian world Page 25