V.
Deductions.
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We now proceed to discuss the relation of the Mound-builders to the inhabitants of Atlantis, or their immediate neighbors, the Egyptians. Dr. Waitz, in his “Anthropology of Primitive Peoples,” observes: “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.” Now, Winchell in his genealogical charts, represents the entire peopling of the Pacific Slope from Alaska to Chili by Mongoloid branches, and the world knows that the civilization of the Chinese is and has always been a petrified fossil. The race is absolutely devoid of civilizing qualities. Their state is founded upon the worship of the shades of their ancestors. Their exalted egotism has for ages resisted every attempt to force advancement among them, and the only thing that we can call development among them is atavism.
To say that such a people gave rise to the Esquimaux, is to verify all history; to say that they are the source of the Astec civilization and Inca sun-worship, is to perpetuate an anthropological paradox.
Empiricism alone holds but a secondary place in establishing scientific truth, and all à priori reasoning must hold precedence, when analogy and affinity would supplement the existing links of discontinued evidence.
Separated by a channel only fifty miles wide, we may with justice assume that the civilization of Atlantis and Egypt was very similar. Egypt is the only land of the ancient world where pyramids are found. On a direct line of the trade winds, in Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the Ohio Valley, we find other pyramids. In Egypt we find the temple emblazoned with hieroglyphics chiseled in the solid rock, describing the history of one of the oldest civilizations in the world. In Uxmal, Mexico, Copan and Palenque are tablets, friezes, bas-reliefs, facades and hieroglyphics; though inferior to the Egyptians’ in mimetic art, still of the highest order, considering this to be the product of the Neolithic Age.
The Egyptians were the only people of the Old World who embalmed their dead. According to the French historian, Lucien Bart, the Zapotecs and Chichimecs of the Mexican Valley embalmed their chiefs, and if we may believe this author, the caves of the Cordilleras are vast museums, as full of interest as the catacombs of Rome.
That the Americans mummified their dead, is proven by mummies having been found in Peru and the northwestern part of Patagonia. Dr. Aq. Reid has found others which prove the relation of Peruvian civilization to that of Patagonia.
One of these mummies has been deposited in the museum of Ratisbon, Bavaria, and another was sent to the Smithsonian Institute. (vid. Aq. Reid, Smithsonian Annual Report, 1862, pp. 87, 426.) This mummy led to the remark of Alexander Winchell: “The humid atmosphere of Patagonia leads to the inference that the mummification of the dead was practiced under the influence of some controlling motive, which must have been inherited from ancestors dwelling in a more propitious clime, and from which even the dripping meteorology of Patagonia was insufficient to eradicate.” The Egyptians were accurate astrologers and astronomers. They accurately calculated eclipses and the reappearances of stars whose reappearance would require over a thousand years, and the pyramids are set to the cardinal points. Less than a hundred years ago, the great Calendar Stone of the Astecs was dug up, in the City of Mexico. It is of a solid piece of porphyry, and weighs fifty tons. It was brought many leagues, across a broken country, without beasts of burden, and Bustamente states that ten thousand men were employed in its transportation. The Calendar Stone was buried when Cortez sacked the city of Tenochtitlan, and in itself constitutes a history. From it we learn that the Astecs were astrologers, astronomers, and calculated eclipses, and knew the solstices of the sun. They divided the year into eighteen months of twenty days each, and like the ancient Egyptians, had five complementary days to make out the three hundred and sixty-five, and every fifty-two years they threw in twelve and one-half days for leap year. Like the Persians and Egyptians, a cycle of fifty-two years, or “an age,” was represented by a serpent, so prominent in ancient 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 curious, that their number of lunar months of thirteen days, contained in a cycle of fifty-two years, with the intercalation of thirteen (twelve and one-half) days, should correspond exactly with the number of years in a great Sothic period of the Egyptians, viz:—fourteen hundred and ninety-one.
Is it reasonable to suppose that this strange affinity with Egyptian civilization was accidental? or that a Turanian branch independently evolved itself into a counterpart of Hamitic Berbers? Hardly.
The ideographic paintings of the Astecs or Mound-builders preserve traditions of the creation of the world, a universal flood, confusion of tongues and dispersion of men, and that a single man and woman saved themselves in a boat which landed near Mount Colhuacan, and that all their children were born deaf, and remained so till a dove one day, from the top of a tree, taught them each in a different tongue. All Astec traditions, without exception, insist that they came from a far-off island called Aztlan (Atlantis). Dr. Lapham, in his “Antiquities of Wisconsin,” locates “Azatland” in Wisconsin, on account of the large number of effigy mounds found there, and Dr. Foster, in his “Prehistoric Races,” figures these mounds called “Azatland,” but the Astec painting published by Gemellé Carera, in his Giro del Mondo, has hieroglyphics representing their departure from Aztlan in canoes and on rafts, after the confusion of tongues, and a teocalli, or temple, by the side of a palm-tree. Now we all know palms do not grow in Wisconsin, but they do grow in Africa.
Max Müller, the world’s greatest authority in 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, Wallachian, Provencal, French, Portuguese 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 inorganic language, monosyllabic, and destitute of all grammar. The nouns have no number, declensions or cases, and the verbs are without conjugation through moods, tenses and persons. All Mongoloid races that reached North America must have done so by Behring’s Strait, and all such races or descendants would undoubtedly have a trace of their parental language. If the Mound-builders or Astecs were derived from Mongoloids, we should expect a monosyllabic language, but, on the contrary, “The Astec 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 Sanskrit word God is Devan; the Latin, Deus; the Greek, Θεός, and the Astec word is Teotl. Whether this similarity in sound and spelling was accidental or constitutional, I know not, but comparative philology recognizes radical rather than phonetic affinities.
The Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of souls was the ruling passion among the Astecs. Whether this was the fruition of all polytheistic religions, or the retention of primordial culture, I know not; but we know the Egyptians embalmed their dead, lest the dissolution of the body would destroy also the soul, and 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, who tries in vain to grasp him with loving arms, but the soul, like smoke, flits away below the earth. How Hermotimos, the seer, used to go out of his body, till at last, his 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.
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.
Forbearing to enter here upon the religious status of the Astecs, we turn again to their language. If we are to believe the highest authority on these subjects, we are ready to prove that the Atlas Mountains and Atlantic Ocean, while known to the Greeks a thousand years before Christ, still belong to the Nahuatl language in North America.
The words Atlas and Atlantic have no satisfactory etymology in any language in Europe or Asia, and we are certain no such roots are found in the Greek; but in the Nahuatl language we find their homes.
The consonants most used are l, t, x, z; next the sounds tl and tz; but l, the most frequent used, is never found at the beginning of a word.
The radicals a, atl, which signify water, atlan, on the border or amid the water, give us the adjective Atlantic, pertaining to the land, Aztlan (or Atlantis), in the midst of the water. We have also atlaca, to hurl or dart from the water, whose preterite makes atlaz. In the time of Columbus a city named Atlan existed on the Gulf of Darien, with a good harbor, but now it is only a small pueblo named Acla.
Undoubtedly we have reached the fountain-head. The nearest point of land from the Island of “Atlantis” was the Atlas Mountains, which at that distance would seem to be darted up from the water; from their Atlantis, in the midst of the water. One has but to look on the map of Mexico to-day, and see that my theory is supported by such words as Tlascoran, Tlascala, Tlatlanquitepec, Tlascopan, Tenochtitlan, Chialinitzla, Yxtacamaxtitlan, Popocatapetl, etc., and scores of others, which prove that those combinations of liquids and consonants are at home only in the Nahuatl countries; ergo, the Atlas Mountains and Atlantic Ocean and “Atlantis” were named by these people before their continent was destroyed.