CHAPTER XXIV.
THE LOST ATLANTIS.
“Man’s steps are not upon thy paths; thy fields
Are not a spoil for him; thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth’s destruction, thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send him, shivering in thy playful spray,
And howling to his gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dash him again to earth—there let him lie.”
“THE Story of Atlantis,” recorded by Plato in his Timaeus, as communicated to Solon by the Egyptian priests, has, in the light of modern geography, been generally regarded as a myth, but within a few years has been revived, and there are not wanting investigators of profound learning who regard it as authentic. The following is the translation from the Greek of Plato: “Among the great deeds of Athens, of which the recollection is preserved in our books, there is one which should be placed above all others. Our books tell that the Athenians destroyed an army which came across the Atlantic Sea, and insolently invaded Europe and Asia; for this sea was then navigable, and beyond the strait where you place the Pillars of Hercules, there was an island larger than Asia (Minor) and Lybya combined. From this island one could pass easily to other islands, and from these to the continent which lies around the Interior Sea.
“The sea on this side the strait (Gibraltar) of which we speak, resembles an harbor with a narrow entrance; but there is a genuine sea, and the land which surrounds it is a veritable continent. In the Island of Atlantis lived three kings with great and marvelous power. They had under their dominion the whole of Atlantis, several other islands and some parts of the continent.
“At one time their power extended into Lybya, and into Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Italy), and uniting their whole force, they sought to destroy our whole country at a blow; but their defeat stopped the invasion and gave entire independence to all the countries this side the Pillars of Hercules. Afterwards, in one day and one fatal night, there came earthquakes and inundations which engulfed the warlike people.
“Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea, and then that sea became inaccessible so that navigation on it ceased on account of the quantity of mud the engulfed island left in its place.”
Plutarch, in his life of Solon, relates that when the law-giver was in Egypt “he conferred with the priests and learned the story of Atlantis.”
Diodorus Siculus states that: “Over against Africa lies a very great island, in the vast ocean many days’ sail from Lybya westward. The soil there is very fruitful, a great part whereof is mountainous, but much likewise champaign, which is the most sweet and pleasant part, for it is watered by several navigable streams, and beautiful with many gardens of pleasure, planted by divers sorts of trees and an abundance of orchards. The towns are adorned with stately buildings and banqueting houses, pleasantly situated in the gardens and orchards.”
Theopompus who wrote in the fourth century B. C. tells substantially the same story, which was given by Silenus to the ancient King Midas, recorded by Aristotle.[B] The Gauls possessed traditions on the subject, which were collected by the Roman historian Timagenes, who lived in the first century, B. C. This record states that three distinct people dwelt in Gaul (France). 1, The Aborigines; 2, The invaders from a distant island, (Atlantis); 8, The Aryan Gauls. Marcellus also, in a book on the Ethiopians speaks of several islands lying on the Atlantic ocean near Europe, which we may undoubtedly identify as the Canaries; but he adds: “The inhabitants of these islands preserve the memory of a much greater island, Atlantis, which had for a long time exercised dominion over the smaller ones.”
Now, all these writers most positively state that an island did exist west of Africa, and was destroyed by a cataclysm. This island could not have been very far from the shores of America, for the tribes of Central America, in Mexico, in Venezuela and in British and Dutch Guiana, distinctly describe these cataclysms, one by water, one by fire and a third by winds.
Catlin, in his “Lifted and Subsided Rocks in America,” describes the traditions of such a cataclysm. The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, in his “Quatre Lettres sur La Mexique,” and his “Sources de l’Histoire Primitive du Mexique,” has translated the “Teo Amoxtli,” which is the Toltecan mythological history of the cataclysm of the Antilles. Catlin found the tradition of such a cataclysm among the Indians of North America. The Indians farther south state that the water was seen coming in waves like mountains from the east, and of the tens of thousands who ran for the high ground of the west, only one man, by one authority, and two by another, and seven by another, succeeded in reaching high ground, and from them sprang the present race of Indians. The tribes near the coast distinctly describe three cataclysms, water, fire, and winds, while those inland were sensible only of the flood of waters which ran to the base of the mountains.[C]
“From amidst the thunder and flames which came out of the sea, whilst mountains were sinking and rising, the terror-stricken inhabitants sought every expedient of safety. Some fled to the mountains, and some launched their rafts and canoes upon the turbulent waters, trusting that a favorable current might land them upon a hospitable shore, and thus in the elemental strife the ancient civilized people became widely dispersed.”[D]
“The festival of$1‘Izcalli’ was instituted to commemorate this terrible calamity, in which princes and people humbled themselves before the Divinity and besought Him not to renew the frightful convulsions.”
It is claimed that by this catastrophe, an area larger than the Kingdom of France became engulfed, including the Lesser Antilles, the extensive banks at their eastern base, which at that date were vast fertile plains, the peninsula of Yucatan, Honduras and Guatemala and the great estuaries of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. With the peninsula of Yucatan went down the splendid cities of Palenque, whose sites are now in the ocean bed as well as the bones of the inhabitants, and the continent has since risen sufficiently to restore the sites of a number of the ancient cities, but the people were blotted from the face of the earth. There is nothing more remarkable than the truthfulness of the traditions of North American Indians. For hundreds of years tradition has said that the Enchanted Mesa in New Mexico had been once inhabited, and during the present year, an expedition from the Smithsonian Institution explored the Mesa and verified the tradition.
In proof of the Cataclysm and submergence of Central America, our modern geographies tell us that Old Guatemala was destroyed by a water volcano in the sixteenth century, and again in the eighteenth by an earthquake. The sea shells on both sides the Isthmus of Panama are alike, and according to the law of the geographical distribution of animals, this could only have come about by the Isthmus having at one time been submerged, and remaining so long enough for the intermingling of species and being raised again, and the fossils on both sides support the hypothesis. The situation of Atlantis, west of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean, would be so near to Central America that any disturbance, like the one described by Plato, would be compelled to affect Central America in the manner described by the traditions of the natives.
The nearest lands west of Africa, where Plato locates Atlantis, are the Canary Islands, the nearest being fifty miles from Africa, and the whole group extending three hundred miles, and are separated from the mainland by a channel more than five thousand feet deep. Of all the oceanic islands (not continental) discovered by Europeans, the Canaries alone were inhabited, Here they found the Guanches, now extinct, who at the time of their discovery were not aware that a continent existed in their neighborhood, for, on being asked by the missionaries how they came to this archipelago, they answered: “God placed us on these islands, and then forsook and forgot us.”
Now who were the Guanches? Their islands had never been connected with Africa, because the channel between them is a mile deep, and Wallace in his “Island Life” has proved that any island surrounded by water more than five thousand feet deep is of volcanic origin. If craniometry is a reliable science the Guanches were not savages, but superior to the Egyptians. According to Prof. Flower’s measurements, the skull of the English of low grade contains one thousand five hundred and forty-two cubic centimeters, the Guanches one thousand four hundred and ninety-eight, Japanese one thousand four hundred and eighty-six, Chinese one thousand four hundred and twenty-four, Italians one thousand four hundred and seventy-five, and the ancient Egyptians one thousand four hundred and sixty-four. That the remnant of a race found in mid-ocean should have a better developed brain than many continental nations, is significant, and if the Guanches were a part of the inhabitants of Atlantis, we can easily understand their ability to make war and subdue their neighbors as related by Plato.
The late Sir Anders Retzius, of Stockholm, the learned authority on craniometry says: “The Dolichocephali of America are nearly related to the Guanches of the Canary Islands, and to the Atlantic population of Africa,—Moors, Turaricks, Copts, etc.—and the same kind of skull is found in the Canary Islands in front of the African Coast, and on the Islands in the Caribbean Sea on the opposite coast which faces Africa. The color of the skin in the population on both sides of the Atlantic is reddish brown, resembling tanned leather; the hair is the same; the features of the face and the build of the frame as I am led to believe, presenting the same analogy.”[E]
And now as to their dispersion. When Columbus set sail from Palos in 1492, he steered direct for the Canary Islands for repairs, and when he left the Canaries, without any effort of his own, the trade winds carried his vessels straight to the West Indies, and these winds blow in this direction all the time. In December 1731 a ship started from Teneriffe with a cargo of wine for one of the western Canaries, and having only six men on board the ship became unmanageable, and the trade winds carried them straight to Trinidad on the Island of Cuba. While Atlantis was sinking, some of the inhabitants likely escaped on rafts and boats, and being exactly in the location whence Columbus and the Teneriffe ship were, they had nothing to do but to wait, and the trade winds would take them to the West Indices and Yucatan and Central America. We can now easily see why the oldest civilization of America is in Central America. Some of the immigrants stopped in the West Indies, for the aborigines Columbus found there spoke the same language as the Mayas and Caribs of Yucatan speak today. Some stopped in South America, for Dr. Lund, the Swedish naturalist, found in the bone caves of Minas Geraes, Brazil, human skulls identical with those of Mexico. This may possibly account for the superior civilization of Peru, where the ingrafted population would amalgamate with the native races and produce those wonderful paved roads the Spaniards found there.
Of course there will be objections to this hypothesis, and we will now proceed to answer the objections.
Dr. Waitz, in his “Anthropology of Primitive Peoples” says: “The first elements of civilization as far as history reaches, always appear as communicated from one people to another, and of no people can it be proved how, where and when they have become civilized by their own inherent power.”
If this be true, then the ancient Mexican must have learned civilization from some other people, and we know the red Indian had none to spare. Winchell in his genealogical charts, represents the entire peopling of the Pacific Slope from Alaska to Chili by Mongoloid branches. The world knows that Mongolian civilization has always been fossilized and the race is absolutely devoid of civilizing qualities. Their state is founded upon the worship of their ancestors, and their exalted egotism has for ages resisted every attempt to force advancement among them. To say that the Mongols crossed Behring Strait and gave origin to the Esquimaux is entirely compatible, for the Esquimaux are just about the calibre a Chinese colony of that date would produce. To say that Mongols are the source of Aztec civilization and Inca sun-worship is to propound an anthropological paradox. From Alaska to the ancient confines of Mexico, there is not one stone left to acknowledge the hundreds of years of Esquimo and Indian occupancy, so we cannot expect light from that source.
Separated from Africa by a channel only fifty miles wide, we may with justice assume that the civilization of the continent of Atlantis and that of Egypt was very similar. Egypt is the only land of the ancient world where pyramids are found, and on a direct line with the trade winds we find pyramids in Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. In Egypt we find the temples emblazoned with hieroglyphics chiseled in the solid rock, describing one of the oldest civilizations in the world. In Uxmal, Mexico, Palenque and Copan are tablets, friezes, bas-reliefs, facades and hieroglyphics, though inferior to the Egyptian in mimetic art, still of the highest order, considering this to be the product of the neolithic age, and the length of time since the separation from the home roof-tree. The Egyptians were the only ones of the ancient people who embalmed their dead. According to the French Historian, Lucien Biart, the Zapotecs and Chicimecs of the Mexican Valley embalmed their chiefs, and if we may believe this same author, the caves of the Cordilleras are vast museums as full of interest us the catacombs of Rome. That the Americans mummified their dead is proved by mummies having been found in Peru and in the northwestern part of Patagonia. Dr. Aq. Ried, the discoverer, has deposited one in the museum of Ratisbon, Bavaria, and another was sent to the Smithsonian Institution.[F]
This mummy led to the remark of Professor Alexander Winchell in his “Pre-Adamites.” “The humid atmosphere, unlike that of Peru, leads to the inference that the mummification of the dead was practiced under some controlling motive which must have been inherited from ancestors dwelling in a more propitious clime, and which even the dripping meteorology of Patagonia was insufficient to eradicate.”
The Egyptians were accurate astrologers and astronomers. They accurately calculated the eclipses and the reappearance of stars whose journey would require over a thousand years, and the pyramids are set to the cardinal points in Egypt and in Mexico. In the City of Mexico is the great calendar stone of solid porphyry weighing fifty tons. It was brought many leagues across a broken country, without beasts of burden, and Bustamente states that a thousand men were employed in its transportation. From it we learn that the Aztecs or Toltecs were astronomers and astrologers and calculated eclipses and knew the solstices of the sun. They divided the year into eighteen months of twenty days each, and, like the Egyptians, had five complementary days to make out the three hundred and sixty-five, and every fifty-two years they added thirteen (twelve and a half) days for a leap year to make the solar and civil years agree. Like the Persians and Egyptians, a cycle of fifty-two years or “An Age,” was represented by a serpent, so prominent in mythology. Their astrological year was divided into months of thirteen days each, and there were thirteen years in their indications, which contained each, three hundred and sixty-five periods of thirteen days.
It is also worthy of note that their number of lunar months of thirteen days was contained in a cycle of fifty-two years, with the intercalation of thirteen days (twelve and a half,) should correspond exactly with the number of years in a great Sothic Period of the Egyptians, viz. 1461. Is it reasonable to suppose that this strange affinity with Egyptian civilization was accidental, or that a Turanian people independently evolved itself into a counterpart of Hamitic Berbers? The stone is not modern; it is not written in Aztec characters but in Toltec, a people whom the Aztecs supplanted, and they claimed that the knowledge was not original with them, but acquired from the Mayas who had preceded them in Yucatan. The ideographic paintings of the Aztecs preserve traditions of the creation of the world, a universal flood, the confusion of tongues and the dispersion of man; and that a single man and woman saved themselves in a boat which landed at Mount Colhuacan, and that all their children were born deaf and remained so until a dove, one day, from the top of a tree, taught them each in a different tongue.
All Aztec traditions, without exception, insist that they came from a far-off island called “Azatlan” (probably Atlantis.) Dr. Lapham, in his “Antiquities of Wisconsin,” claims that the Aztecs were identical with the Mound-builders, and locates Azatlan in Wisconsin, on account of the large number of effigy mounds there; and Dr. Foster in his “Prehistoric Races” pictures these mounds called Azatlan; but the Aztec painting published by Gemelle Carera in his Giro del Mondo, has hieroglyphics representing their departure from Azatlan in canoes and on rafts, after their confusion of tongues, and a teocalli, or temple by the side of a palm tree, of which neither condition can be true of Wisconsin.
Max Muller, the greatest authority on philology, says that of all indices to the mysteries of the ancient world, language is the most satisfactory, and the only evidence worth listening to with regard to ante-historic periods. If we class the languages of the world into groups according to cognation, we find the Aryan languages comprising the Indian, Persian (Sanskrit), Hellenic, Latin group (Italian, Wallacian, Provencal, French, Portugese and Spanish), Slavonic (Russian), Teutonic (English), and the Keltic or Welsh, of which the oldest is the Sanskrit and Zend. The Semitic group comprises the Hebrew, Phœnician, Assyrian and Arabic, while the Babylonian and Chinese stand alone. The Aryan and Semitic form a class known as the inflectional, and are the only languages of the world that are adapted to and possess a literature, and that have advanced the progress of the world in religion, arts or sciences. Though springing from a common center, they have grammatical structures that prevent the one being derived from the other. The Semitic branched southward and westward, and was the language of the Chaldee, Arab, Hebrew and Egyptian, the latter sometimes classed as Hamitic. The Chinese is an organic language, monosyllabic, and destitute of all grammar. The nouns have no number, declension or cases, and the verbs are without conjugation through moods, tenses and persons. All Mongoloid that reached America must have done so by Behring Strait, and all such races, or descendants of such races, would undoubtedly have kept a trace of their parental language. If the Aztecs were derived from Mongoloids, we should expect a monosyllabic language, but on the contrary, the Aztec language has more diminutives and augmentatives than the Italian, and its substantives and verbs are more numerous than in any other language.
Another proof of its wealth is, that when missionaries first went among them, they found no trouble in expressing abstract ideas like religion, virtue, etc. The consonants most used are l, t, x, z; next the sound of tl and tz. L is of most frequent occurrence, but is never found at the beginning of a word. The Aztec language, sweet and harmonious to the ear, has no sharp or nasal sounds; the penultimate of most of its words is long. The language is rich, exact and expressive, as is proven in the “Natural History” by Dr. Hernandez, who describes twelve hundred plants, two hundred birds, many quadrupeds, reptiles, insects, metals, etc., and was able to call each by a separate name, given by the Indians. Poets and orators there were by the hundred, and their written inaugurals make as interesting reading as we hear from many of our legislators, many of which were translated by the French scholar, Lucien Biart, who died since these pages were begun.
If Max Muller is correct, then there can be no kinship between the Mongols and Aztecs, and if they ever had communication with other people, it must have been from the east. The Sanskrit word for God, is Devan; the Latin, Deus; the Greek, Oeoo; and the Aztec, Teotl. This similarity of sound and spelling might be purely accidental, and on the other hand, it might have something of a long kinship to identify it. The Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of souls was a ruling passion with the Aztec. This may have been the fruition of all polytheistic religions, or it might have been the retention of primordial culture, for we know the Egyptian embalmed his dead, lest the dissolution of the body would destroy the soul also.
The greatest desecration that could befall the ancient Greeks and Romans was the refusal of burial, because the soul of him thus uncared for wandered thenceforth as a disembodied ghost.
We read in Homer’s Iliad how the dead Patroclus comes to the sleeping Achilles, and tries in vain to grasp him with loving arms, but the soul, like smoke, flits away below earth. How Hermotimos the seer used to go out of his body, till at last, the soul, coming back from a spirit journey, found that his wife had burnt his body on a funeral pile, and that he had become a bodyless ghost. How Odysseus visits the bloodless ghosts in Hades, and the shadows of the dead in Purgatory wondered to see the body of Dante there, which stopped the sunlight and cast a shadow.
How, in Virgil’s Æneid, the love-maddened Queen Dido could wish no greater curse to befall Æneas, than that his body should lie unburied on the plain, and even the old boatman, Charon, in Hades, refused to ferry across the River Styx the shades of any who lacked burial while on earth.
This idea of the phantom life of souls as shades and shadows, constitutes the higher philosophy of the transcendental metaphysics of the ancient Greeks, whose exponent was Pythagoras. Religious fervor was strong in the Aztec, and from his devotion to formality, Atlantis must have been the home of ceremonial religion. The words Atlas and Atlantic have no satisfactory etymology in any language known to Europe. These are not Greek and cannot be referred to any European language, but in the Nahuatl or Toltecan language we find the radical a, atl, which signifies water, man and top of the head. From these come a series of words, such as atlan, on the border of, or amid the water, from which comes the adjective Atlantic. Therefore the Atlantic Ocean must have received its name from the continent Atlantis before the cataclysm. We have also Atlaca, to combat, to be in agony. It also means to hurl, to dart from the water, and in the preterit makes Atlaz. From the island of Atlantis, the Atlas mountain in northern Africa would seem to the inhabitants to be hurled out of the water, hence its name was probably given by these same people, as the word occurs in no other language.
On the map of Mexico today are more than a hundred towns with the same combination of letters of atl or lan which shows that the combination is an essential part of the Aztec language. There are many traditions that are receiving light from the nineteenth century that crystalizes them into accepted history. For twenty-six centuries has the siege of Troy stood out in profile as the model epic of the world, but, on account of its antiquity, of doubted veracity. Now Dr. Schlieman’s excavations seem destined yet to find the funeral pyre of Patroclus, surrounded by the remains of Trojan captives. And even later, the French archaeologist M. Marcel Dieulafay has brought to light the ancient city of Susa, and we may even now behold the Palace of Artaxerxes Mnemon, whose foundations were laid by Xerxes I. 485 B. C.; and now after twenty-three centuries, the student may take his Bible in his hand, turn to the Book of Esther and read, while the guide in the ancient capital of Persia points to the spot where Mordecai sat, to that corner where Haman was hanged, and to this court where the lovely Esther was crowned queen, and whence the sorrowing Vashti departed, as the unfortunate Hebe, cup-bearer of Jove, before the victorious Ganymede.
Plato records the sad fate of Atlantis nearly five hundred years B. C., and Solom had recorded it in a poem two hundred years earlier. Plato says the expedition against Egypt took place during the reign of the Athenian Kings, Cecrops and Erectheus, and, according to the “Marble of Paros,” these Kings ruled 1582 B. C. and 1409 B. C., which is not a great deal earlier than the siege of Troy. Though this is very ancient history, we have as much right to believe Plato’s history as Homer’s, if it can be well established.
The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg is the greatest authority on the translation of Aztec literature, and he maintains that the oldest certain date in the Nahuatl or Toltecan language reaches back to 955 B. C., and as the Toltecs dwelt some time in the country of Zibalba before they dispossessed the Colhuas, their migration must have begun more than a thousand years B. C. The Colhuas were the remnant of those who had escaped the terrible calamity of Atlantis. To those who reject the theory here offered, I would say the field is large and inviting to any whose insight into the past can help solve the problems of the origin of the ancient Mexicans.
