A rebellion sprang up in Atlantis (see Murray's "Manual of Mythology,"
p. .30) against Zeus; it is known in mythology as the "War of the Titans:"
"The struggle lasted many years, all the might which the Olympians could bring to bear being useless, until, on the advice of Gaea, Zeus set free the Kyklopes and the Hekatoncheires" (that is, brought the ships into play), "of whom the former fashioned thunder-bolts for him, while the latter advanced on his side with force equal to the shock of an earthquake. The earth trembled down to lowest Tartarus as Zeus now appeared with his terrible weapon and new allies. Old Chaos thought his hour had come, as from a continuous blaze of thunder-bolts the earth took fire, and the waters seethed in the sea. The rebels were partly slain or consumed, and partly hurled into deep chasms, with rocks and hills reeling after them."
Do not these words picture the explosion of a mine with a "force equal to the shock of an earthquake?"
We have already shown that the Kyklopes and Hekatoncheires were probably great war-ships, armed with some explosive material in the nature of gunpowder.
Zeus, the king of Atlantis, was known as "the thunderer," and was represented armed with thunder-bolts.
Some ancient nation must, in the most remote ages, have invented gunpowder; and is it unreasonable to attribute it to that "great original race" rather than to any one people of their posterity, who seem to have borrowed all the other arts from them; and who, during many thousands of years, did not add a single new invention to the list they received from Atlantis?
Iron.--have seen that the Greek mythological legends asserted that before the submergence of the great race over whom their gods reigned there had been not only an Age of Bronze but an Age of Iron. This metal was known to the Egyptians in the earliest ages; fragments of iron have been found in the oldest pyramids. The Iron Age in Northern Europe far antedated intercourse with the Greeks or Romans. In the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, as I have shown, the remains of iron implements have been found. In the "Mercurio Peruano" (tom. i., p. 201, 1791) it is stated that "anciently the Peruvian sovereigns worked magnificent iron mines at Ancoriames, on the west shore of Lake Titicaca." "It is remarkable," says Molina, "that iron, which has been thought unknown to the ancient Americans, had particular names in some of their tongues."
In official Peruvian it was called quillay, and in Chilian panilic. The Mound Builders fashioned implements out of meteoric iron. (Foster's "Prehistoric Races," p. 333.)
As we find this metal known to man in the earliest ages on both sides of the Atlantic, the presumption is very strong that it was borrowed by the nations, east and west, from Atlantis.
Paper.--The same argument holds good as to paper. The oldest Egyptian monuments contain pictures of the papyrus roll; while in Mexico, as I have shown, a beautiful paper was manufactured and formed into books shaped like our own. In Peru a paper was made of plantain leaves, and books were common in the earlier ages. Humboldt mentions books of hieroglyphical writings among the Panoes, which were "bundles of their paper resembling our volumes in quarto."
Silk Manufacture.--The manufacture of a woven fabric of great beauty out of the delicate fibre of the egg-cocoon of a worm could only have originated among a people who had attained the highest degree of civilization; it implies the art of weaving by delicate instruments, a dense population, a patient, skilful, artistic people, a sense of the beautiful, and a wealthy and luxurious class to purchase such costly fabrics.
We trace it back to the most remote ages. In the introduction to the "History of Hindostan," or rather of the Mohammedan Dynasties, by Mohammed Cassim, it is stated that in the year 3870 B.C. an Indian king sent various silk stuffs as a present to the King of Persia. The art of making silk was known in China more than two thousand six hundred years before the Christian era, at the time when we find them first possessed of civilization. The Ph?nicians dealt in silks in the most remote past; they imported them from India and sold them along the shores of the Mediterranean. It is probable that the Egyptians understood and practised the art of manufacturing silk. It was woven in the island of Cos in the time of Aristotle. The "Babylonish garment" referred to in Joshua (chap. vii., 21), and for secreting which Achan lost his life, was probably a garment of silk; it was rated above silver and gold in value.
It is not a violent presumption to suppose that an art known to the Hindoos 3870 B.C., and to the Chinese and Ph?nicians at the very beginning of their history--an art so curious, so extraordinary--may have dated back to Atlantean times.
Civil Government.--Mr. Baldwin shows ("Prehistoric Nations," p. 114) that the Cushites, the successors of the Atlanteans, whose very ancient empire extended from Spain to Syria, were the first to establish independent municipal republics, with the right of the people to govern themselves; and that this system was perpetuated in the great Ph?nician communities; in "the fierce democracies" of ancient Greece; in the "village republics" of the African Berbers and the Hindoos; in the "free cities" of the Middle Ages in Europe; and in the independent governments of the Basques, which continued down to our own day. The Cushite state was an aggregation of municipalities, each possessing the right of self-government, but subject within prescribed limits to a general authority; in other words, it was precisely the form of government possessed to-day by the United States. It is a surprising thought that the perfection of modern government may be another perpetuation of Atlantean civilization.
Agriculture.--The Greek traditions of "the golden apples of the Hesperides" and "the golden fleece" point to Atlantis. The allusions to the golden apples indicate that tradition regarded the "Islands of the Blessed" in the Atlantic Ocean as a place of orchards. And when we turn to Egypt we find that in the remotest times many of our modern garden and field plants were there cultivated. When the Israelites murmured in the wilderness against Moses, they cried out (Numb., chap. xi., 4, 5), "Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the Melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic." The Egyptians also cultivated wheat, barley, oats, flax, hemp, etc. In fact, if we were to take away from civilized man the domestic animals, the cereals, and the field and garden vegetables possessed by the Egyptians at the very dawn of history, there would be very little left for the granaries or the tables of the world.
Astronomy.--The knowledge of the ancients as to astronomy was great and accurate. Callisthenes, who accompanied Alexander the Great to Babylon, sent to Aristotle a series of Chaldean astronomical observations which he found preserved there, recorded on tablets of baked clay, and extending back as far as 2234 B.C. Humboldt says, "The Chaldeans knew the mean motions of the moon with an exactness which induced the Greek astronomers to use their calculations for the foundation of a lunar theory." The Chaldeans knew the true nature of comets, and could foretell their reappearance. "A lens of considerable power was found in the ruins of Babylon; it was an inch and a half in diameter and nine-tenths of an inch thick." (Layard's "Nineveh and Babylon," pp.
16,17.) Nero used optical glasses when he watched the fights of the gladiators; they are supposed to have come from Egypt and the East.
Plutarch speaks of optical instruments used by Archimedes "to manifest to the eye the largeness of the sun." "There are actual astronomical calculations in existence, with calendars formed upon them, which eminent astronomers of England and France admit to be genuine and true, and 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, Phaedo," 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, Timaeus"--"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 Ph?nician records, we make a table like the appended:
+------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The Invention or Discovery. The Race. The Inventors. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ Fire Atlantean Phos, Phur, and Phlox. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The bow and arrow Chippeway Manaboshu. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The use of flint " " +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The use of copper " " +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The manufacture of bricks Atlantean Autochthon and Technites. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ Agriculture and hunting " Argos and Agrotes. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ Village life, and the " Amynos and Magos. rearing of flocks +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The use of salt " Misor and Sydyk. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The use of letters " Taautos, or Taut. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ Navigation " The Cabiri, or Corybantes. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The art of music Hebrew Jubal. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ Metallurgy, and the use of " Tubal-cain. iron +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The syrinx Greek Pan. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+ The lyre " Hermes. +------------------------------+-----------+----------------------------+
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 Ph?nicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, and Noachites on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea." ("American Cyclopaedia," 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 Encyclopaedia," art. Titans) that "Mercury, one of the Atlantean gods, was placed as ruler over the Celtae, and became their great divinity." F. Pezron, in his "Antiquity of the Celtae," makes out that the Celtae 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 terriginae, 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 the people who were destroyed by the Flood, as did other races clearly Aryan.
"The nations who are comprehended under the common appellation of Indo-European," says Max Muller--"the Hindoos, the Persians, the Celts, Germans, Romans, Greeks, and Slavs--do not only share the same words and the same grammar, slightly modified in each country, but they seem to have likewise preserved a mass of popular traditions which had grown up before they left their common home."
"Bonfey, L. Geiger, and other students of the ancient Indo-European languages, have recently advanced the opinion that the original home of the Indo-European races must be sought in Europe, because their stock of words is rich in the names of plants and animals, and contains names of seasons that are not found in tropical countries or anywhere in Asia."
("American Cyclopaedia," art. Ethnology.)
By the study of comparative philology, or the seeking out of the words common to the various branches of the Aryan race before they separated, we are able to reconstruct an outline of the civilization of that ancient people. Max Muller has given this subject great study, and availing ourselves of his researches we can determine the following facts as to the progenitors of the Aryan stock: They were a civilized race; they possessed the institution of marriage; they recognized the relationship of father, mother, son, daughter, grandson, brother, sister, mother-in-law, father-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law, and had separate words for each of these relationships, which we are only able to express by adding the words "in-law." They recognized also the condition of widows, or "the husbandless." They lived in an organized society, governed by a king.
They possessed houses with doors and solid walls. They had wagons and carriages. They possessed family names. They dwelt in towns and cities, on highways. They were not hunters or nomads. They were a peaceful people; the warlike words in the different Aryan languages cannot be traced back to this original race. They lived in a country having few wild beasts; the only wild animals whose names can be assigned to this parent stock being the bear, the wolf, and the serpent. The name of the elephant, "the beast with a hand," occurs only twice in the "Rig-Veda;"
a singular omission if the Aryans were from time immemorial an Asiatic race; and "when it does occur, it is in such a way as to show that he was still an object of wonder and terror to them." (Whitney's "Oriental and Linguistic Studies," p. 26.) They possessed nearly all the domestic animals we now have--the ox and the cow, the horse, the dog, the sheep, the goat, the hog, the donkey, and the goose. They divided the year into twelve months. They were farmers; they used the plough; their name as a race (Aryan) was derived from it; they were, par excellence, ploughmen; they raised various kinds of grain, including flax, barley, hemp, and wheat; they had mills and millers, and ground their corn. The presence of millers shows that they had proceeded beyond the primitive condition where each family ground its corn in its own mill. They used fire, and cooked and baked their food; they wove cloth and wore clothing; they spun wool; they possessed the different metals, even iron: they had gold. The word for "water" also meant "salt made from water," from which it might be inferred that the water with which they were familiar was saltwater. It is evident they manufactured salt by evaporating salt water. They possessed boats and ships. They had progressed so far as to perfect "a decimal system of enumeration, in itself," says Max Muller, "one of the most marvellous achievements of the human mind, based on an abstract conception of quantity, regulated by a philosophical classification, and yet conceived, nurtured, and finished before the soil of Europe was trodden by Greek, Roman, Slav, or Teuton."
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PLOUGH
And herein we find another evidence of relationship between the Aryans and the people of Atlantis. Although Plato does not tell us that the Atlanteans possessed the decimal system of numeration, nevertheless there are many things in his narrative which point to that conclusion "There were ten kings ruling over ten provinces; the whole country was divided into military districts or squares ten stadia each way; the total force of chariots was ten thousand; the great ditch or canal was one hundred feet deep and ten thousand stadia long; there were one hundred Nereids," etc. In the Peruvian colony the decimal system clearly obtained: "The army had heads of ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. . . . The community at large was registered in groups, under the control of officers over tens, fifties, hundreds, and so on." (Herbert Spencer, "Development of Political Institutions," chap.
x.) The same division into tens and hundreds obtained among the Anglo-Saxons.
Where, we ask, could this ancient nation, which existed before Greek was Greek, Celt was Celt, Hindoo was Hindoo, or Goth was Goth, have been located! The common opinion says, in Armenia or Bactria, in Asia. But where in Asia could they have found a country so peaceful as to know no terms for war or bloodshed;--a country so civilized as to possess no wild beasts save the bear, wolf, and serpent? No people could have been developed in Asia without bearing in its language traces of century-long battles for life with the rude and barbarous races around them; no nation could have fought for ages for existence against "man-eating"
tigers, lions, elephants, and hyenas, without bearing the memory of these things in their tongue. A tiger, identical with that of Bengal, still exists around Lake Aral, in Asia; from time to time it is seen in Siberia. "The last tiger killed in 1828 was on the Lena, in latitude fifty-two degrees thirty minutes, in a climate colder than that of St.
Petersburg and Stockholm."
The fathers of the Aryan race must have dwelt for many thousand years so completely protected from barbarians and wild beasts that they at last lost all memory of them, and all words descriptive of them; and where could this have been possible save in some great, long-civilized land, surrounded by the sea, and isolated from the attack of the savage tribes that occupied the rest of the world? And if such a great civilized nation had dwelt for centuries in Asia, Europe, or Africa, why have not their monuments long ago been discovered and identified? Where is the race who are their natural successors, and who must have continued to live after them in that sheltered and happy land, where they knew no human and scarcely any animal enemies? Why would any people have altogether left such a home? Why, when their civilization had spread to the ends of the earth, did it cease to exist in the peaceful region where it originated?
Savage nations cannot usually count beyond five. This people had names for the numerals up to one hundred, and the power, doubtless, of combining these to still higher powers, as three hundred, five hundred, ten hundred, etc. Says a high authority, "If any more proof were wanted as to the reality of that period which must have preceded the dispersion of the Aryan race, we might appeal to the Aryan numerals as irrefragable evidence of that long-continued intellectual life which characterizes that period." Such a degree of progress implies necessarily an alphabet, writing, commerce, and trade, even as the existence of words for boats and ships has already implied navigation.
In what have we added to the civilization of this ancient people? Their domestic animals were the same as our own, except one fowl adopted from America. In the past ten thousand years we have added one bird to their list of domesticated animals! They raised wheat and wool, and spun and wove as we do, except that we have added some mechanical contrivances to produce the same results. Their metals are ours. Even iron, the triumph, as we had supposed, of more modern times, they had already discovered.
And it must not be forgotten that Greek mythology tells us that the god-like race who dwelt on Olympus, that great island "in the midst of the Atlantic," in the remote west, wrought in iron; and we find the remains of an iron sword and meteoric iron weapons in the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, while the name of the metal is found in the ancient languages of Peru and Chili, and the Incas worked in iron on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
A still further evidence of the civilization of this ancient race is found in the fact that, before the dispersion from their original home, the Aryans had reached such a degree of development that they possessed a regularly organized religion: they worshipped God, they believed in an evil spirit, they believed in a heaven for the just. All this presupposes temples, priests, sacrifices, and an orderly state of society.
We have seen that Greek mythology is really a history of the kings and queens of Atlantis.
When we turn to that other branch of the great Aryan family, the Hindoos, we find that their gods are also the kings of Atlantis. The Hindoo god Varuna is conceded to be the Greek god Uranos, who was the founder of the royal family of Atlantis.