The prehistoric structures found in those regions and in neighboring
regions are all built on plans and patterns borrowed from lands
bordering the Mediterranean Sea, although the structures seem to have
followed verbal descriptions rather than exact mechanical patterns.
All of these structures north of Panama seem to have been erected for
public purposes, and probably in connection with the offices of some
form of religion; and every structure of them, of which any appreciable
portion is standing, is built upon or in connection with pyramids as
perfectly pyramidal and regularly constructed as were the pyramids of
ancient Egypt. Most of these pyramids, however, are mere earth mounds,
instead of being constructed of brick or stone as were those upon the
banks of the Nile. Let us refer to a few of the localities where these
pyramidal structures are most conspicuous.
At Copan, situate at the western border of Honduras, and by the side of
the river Copan, is a large enclosure, some two miles in extent, bounded
upon the one side by the Copan river, on the bank of which are walls of
beautiful cut and fitted stone rising to the height of fifty to one
hundred feet, designed to keep the earth upon that side of the river
from being carried away by floods. This river at this place constitutes
one side of a tract of land laid out nearly in a square, along the outer
sides of which, at regular intervals, are constructed, and still
remaining, a very large number of pyramids made of hewn stone evidently
designed to outline this extended sacred field.
This field within, is ornamented with a wealth of statuary, monuments
and figures of idols, practically inconceivable in amount; but we count
this statuary of no importance now, as we are confining our attention to
the tendency of this prehistoric people to erect pyramids. For a fuller
account of this locality we refer to Stephens' Travels in Central
America, Chiapas and Yucatan, Vol. 1, Chap. 8.
At Santa Cruz Del Quiche, within the State of Chiapas, Mexico, there
exists a pyramid erected for defensive purposes, constructed of earth
and terraced as it rises, of enormous proportions; upon its top is a
regular fortification upon the top of which rises a pyramidal temple
above the fortification. This structure is particularly described by
Stephens in the work above quoted, in his second volume, chapter 10,
page 161, &c.
At Occasingo in Chiapas, there is a conspicuous pyramid constructed of
earth, of somewhat exalted proportions, upon the top of which is a small
pyramidal temple having over its porch the ornamentation which is so
common upon the temples of ancient Egypt, and occasionally seen in the
land of Phoenicia, to wit: a winged globe wrought in stone. The globe
itself has become loosened, and has dropped from its place upon the
front of the temple but still rests upon the ground before it, while the
wing to which it was attached remains in place upon the temple as
perfect as when it was first wrought. For a description of these works
at Occasingo, see Stephens' second volume, chapter 15, page 258, &c.
The same sort of pyramidal structures remain in admirable preservation
conspicuous at Palenque, in Chiapas, where an immense pyramid still
exists standing in great perfection with an elegant temple upon its top.
Pyramidal structures and shapings are found everywhere at Palenque. See
Stephens' Work, above quoted, vol. 2, chap. 20, page 337, &c.
At Uxmal, also in Chiapas, we have another exhibition of pyramidal
structures with temples upon their tops. We refer again to the same work
of Stephens, vol. 2, chap. 25, page 420, &c.
These remains, to which we have referred, have far greater importance in
our investigation than can be attached to the mere building of pyramidal
structures. The wealth of sculpture found at the places referred to is
immensely great and deserves the attention of scholars and thinking men
to an extent greater than we can now devote to them.
In our view, the people who erected those structures possessed a
knowledge and civilization far in advance of the population that
surrounded them, and that the surrounding populations to a great degree
imitated their examples and adopted their religion.
That, as we believe, led to the construction at Cholula, a little town
now of ten thousand inhabitants, fifteen miles from Puebla, on the road
leading from Vera Cruz to Mexico, on the plains of Anahuac, at the
height of 6912 feet above the sea, of that immense pyramid of earth
still standing, 177 feet in height, measuring 1445 feet on either side,
and ascended by 120 steps.
There are two other pyramids at Otumba, seven leagues north-east of the
City of Mexico, and in the language of the aboriginal inhabitants,
called, one "The House of the Sun," and the other, "The House of the
Moon." The House of the Sun is 680 feet square at the base, and 221 feet
high.
On the top of this there was originally erected a great statue of the
sun. The other pyramid is much smaller but rises to the height of 144
feet, and on its top was a statue of the moon. Upon the plain about
these structures are a number of smaller pyramids not necessary to be
described.--The sides of all the pyramids here constructed correspond
with the cardinal points of the compas.[TN-4] The pyramids that we have
referred to are all patterned after those constructed upon the banks of
the Nile, and are all found about the west border of Yucatan, about the
north border of Guatamala[TN-5] and south of the centre of the great
Republic of Mexico.
It will be well to remember that the mountains and plains of North
America cover millions of square miles north and east of the country
where these pyramids have been constructed, and that those mountains and
plains are covered in many places with earth mounds of an almost
inconceivable variety of forms, and yet the form of the pyramid seems
to be utterly unknown on the Western Continent, except in the narrow
region that we have delineated. We might, perhaps, be justified in
asking: From what people on earth could this building of pyramids be
copied except from those dwelling upon the banks of the Nile?
THE RELIGIOUS BELIEF OF THE PEOPLES WHO CONSTRUCTED THE WONDERFUL
PREHISTORIC TOWERS AND TEMPLES UPON THE CONTINENT OF AMERICA.
They were the worshipers of Baal, the god worshiped by the Phoenicians,
and paid their devotions to him with the same rites that they practiced
wherever their influence was effective.
It will be remembered that Baal was supposed to exist and was worshiped
as a being of biform existence. In his beneficent qualities, as the sun,
he was supposed to be the author and sustainer of all life and the
fountain of all pleasures. In his sterner character wherein he was known
as Moloch or Molech, by the children of Israel, he was the most cruel,
stern, relentless monster that the imagination of man ever depicted, and
his votaries everywhere sought to conciliate him by presenting him with
the most horrid scenes of human agony. Attempts were everywhere made to
conciliate him by laying human captives upon his altar, and for want of
captives taken in war, such peaceful citizens as the priests saw fit to
select.
Human victims were constantly dying upon a thousand altars not only in
Phoenicia, but in all western and north-western Europe.
It was firmly believed by the votaries of Moloch that he could be most
readily conciliated by the offering of children upon the altars, that he
most especially delighted in the sacrifice of the first born of every
family. Men thus offering "the fruit of their bodies for the sin of
their souls." Early in the history of this worship it was deemed
sufficient if children passed through the fires without the destruction
of their lives, but down the ages it came to be believed, that if a
family would secure the favor of this deity, the oldest child of each
union must be actually roasted to conciliate favor. Even good old
Abraham who had been called from upper Chaldea to receive all the land
of Israel for him and his seed forever, conceived the idea that God
required the roasting of the son of Sarah upon the hill of Zion, and
never relented until a ray of common sense enlightened his intellectual
vision, after he had actually bound Isaac to the altar.
We have referred to the beautiful monuments that still exist at Uxmal,
Palenque, Occasingo, Queche and Otumba, and to the temples and monuments
still standing there. Upon all these beautiful structures are engraved
in the living stone, or wrought in stucco, most striking representations
of the sun with a huge priest on either side, standing with arms
outstretched each holding in his hands a naked child offering it to the
relentless deity. The practice of burning human beings as offerings to
the sun existed very extensively down to the date of the Spanish
conquest. Showing that the same so-called religion which prevailed in
western Europe before the Roman conquest, was still paramount and
terribly enforced among these settlers in America, though so far removed
from the parent stock. We have spoken thus far of American remains which
are found north of the Isthmus of Panama, but there are still existing,
in the old land of Peru, structures which for thousands of years have
been telling the story of their origin.
There are all over this land of Peru remains not of palaces and temples,
but of roads and water-courses showing a mechanical skill such as
perhaps cannot be found in any part of the earth elsewhere as existing
as early as these must have been constructed.
The people who did this work are absolutely extinct. Many have supposed
that in the population of Central America there is still a remainder of
the blood of the people who once dwelt there, thus rendering the local
inhabitants in some degree superior to the aboriginal Indians of that
country. Not so in Peru. It is only from the structures which we find
and the conditions which attend them that, any evidence is found that
there ever was in Peru, any people superior to the dull Indians of the
mountains.
The traditions of the country speak of one Manco Capac appearing in the
country at some indefinite period, and that he and his family
descendants were rulers for a long course of time, ruling and
controling[TN-6] the business and social life of the population of Peru.
That blood had been long extinct before the Spanish conquest.
Let us see for a moment whether anything remains to show what were the
religious ideas of Manco Capac, and those coming with and descended from
him. We find abundant remains of structures and carved columns in the
almost desert regions of Atacama, in the high lands of what is now
Bolivia, between Peru and Chili, between twelve and thirteen thousand
feet above the level of the sea. These structures and carved monuments
are largely gathered about the lake of Titicaca. At Sillustani on a
promontory extending into that lake, is constructed a stone circle as an
outdoor temple, standing more perfect to-day than Stonehenge or
Stennes, or the structures at Carnac in Bretagne. It is undoubtedly an
outdoor temple for the worship of the sun. See Squires' Travels in the
Lands of Incas, page 384, &c.
This, taken by itself, might not prove to a certainty that this outdoor
temple was for the worship of the sun, but at Tiahuanuco, in the same
work, at page 288 to 292 inclusive, we have the whole story told as
plainly as it could be in a thousand printed volumes. Over the entrance
to a cemetery is a carved monolith, or single stone, on which is the
following described carving: Centrally over the gateway upon this
monolith is a well carved figure of the sun, and upon the right hand and
the left hand and below, are sculptured some fifty figures of beings
with human bodies, and the wings of angels as imagined and represented
in western Asia and in Europe. Half of the angels have human bodies,
angel wings and the heads of hawks. The Romans and the Greeks held
Mercury to be the god of eloquence and of wisdom.
Instead of furnishing him with the wings of the Asiatic angel, they
clothed his head in a cap close to the ears with wings extended from the
ears, and with other wings extended from his ankles.
It will be remembered that when Paul and Barnabas were upon their great
mission through Asia Minor, preaching the gospel, the people became very
much excited at Paul's preaching at Lystra and Derbe, and believing that
the gods themselves had come to them, they called Barnabas, Jupiter, and
the orator Paul, Mercurius. See acts of the Apostles, Chap. 14, 12th
verse.
In the Egyptian economy, Thoth was worshiped as the god of wisdom and
eloquence, and represented as possessing a human body with a hawk's
head. Both regions representing the hawk as the embodiment of wisdom
among the feathered creation. Here, at Tiahuanuco, we have the Greek and
Egyptian god of wisdom, furnished with the wings of the Asiatic angel,
and standing in eternal attendance upon the Phoenician sun god. All
these figures are perfect, as showing the ideas and intentions which led
to their construction, yet indicating in the roughness of the work that
they had been constructed by one who was without exact measurements,
probably without patterns, and without the means of obtaining either
measurements or patterns. In this cemetery at Tiahuanuco, one will find
a hundred structures so like the round towers upon the south coast of
Ireland as strongly to awaken one's attention. So that, Manco Capac and
his descendants were not only sun worshipers but very strongly imbued
with the ideas which originated in the eastern and southern coasts of
the Mediterranean sea.
Thus we have seen that the prehistoric people who built the structures
in Central America and Mexico, which have in these later days filled the
civilized world with wonder and admiration, were constructed by a people
whose knowledge of science and the arts had reached the same point of
advancement as had been reached upon the banks of the Nile, and in the
cities of Phoenicia, for at least a thousand years before the Christian
era. That in the erection of these structures they had implicitely[TN-7]
followed the patterns, even to their ornamentation, of structures and
ornaments then known and adopted in ancient Egypt. That their religious
beliefs were identical with those which prevailed among the Phoenician
people upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean sea, upon the coast
of north-western Africa and throughout the entire west and north-western
portions of Europe. They were sun worshipers, offering infants and full
grown human victims to appease the wrath and conciliate the favor of
their god. And we have farther seen that that strange people called the
Incas, built outdoor temples of standing stones, and upon the entrance
to their cemeteries engraved the effigies of the same god worshiped in
Central America, and in so large a portion of the eastern world.
So we think we may say, with entire confidence, that it was known to
many learned men in ancient times that there were settlements upon the
continent of America, and that the dreams of the Western Islands of the
Blest, and of the gardens of the Hesperides, rested upon most
substantial facts. Modern scholars, looking at the matter casually, have
allowed themselves to conclude that, because these discoveries were made
at a very early period in the history of the world, by a people who were
unable to build their ships according to the rules of modern science,
and were compeled[TN-8] to navigate stormy oceans without the aid of
steam, and probably without the aid of the mariner's compass, could
never have navigated wide seas and stormy oceans.
But how baseless this idea is found to be, when we come to see how
easily and successfully the Phoenician people traversed northern,
western and eastern oceans, and brought home the products of the whole
world to enrich themselves and the peoples among whom Providence had
fixed their destinies! And how strangely such a suggestion sounds when
addressed to the understanding of peoples who have seen again and again
the boisterous Atlantic traversed from continent to continent by three
men, two men, and even a single man, in an open boat! So that the origin
of this people, who were so conspicuous at one time in Central America,
is certainly found to have been of the Phoenicians from Tyre, Sidon or
Aridas or from Tharshish or Carthage or the settlements towards the
west. The settlement of these countries must have been very early, and
their location must have been guarded by all the pains and penalties so
graphically described in the ancient authors which we have quoted.
Intercourse with Central America from the east must have ceased before
the discovery of letters, for nowhere that we have discovered throughout
the extent of the American settlements has a letter been found of any
form whether Cuniform, Greek, Roman, Hebrew or Phoenician. These western
settlers must have been entirely ignorant of Egyptian hieroglyphics,
for the figures upon their walls show the invention of a system of
hieroglyphics more complicated than anywhere else discovered, and which
no Champollion has yet been able to translate. The human mind was not
dormant here but its discoveries are utterly lost to mankind. It will be
asked what has become of this Central American population who wrought
the works in question? This can only be answered from conjecture. The
number of actual settlers from the east were doubtless few. In erecting
the structures which have been so much admired and wondered at, they
doubtless used the labors of untold thousands of the aboriginal
inhabitants, appealing perhaps to their fears and desires to conciliate
the favor of that God, whose terrors made the Phoenecian priests such
an irresistable[TN-9] power over the nations in the west and north of
Europe.
But if for a moment superstition lost its terrors, this little flock of
more intelligent incomers were powerless to resist the avenging hands of
the million aboriginal barbarians. But we are not engaged in discussing
the mode in which this people became extinct, but choose to confine
ourselves to the questions, who were they, and where did they come from?
We say without hesitation, that when Columbus parted from Palos in
Spain, he sailed from a Phoenician city, in Phoenician vessels, manned
by Phoenician crews to rediscover worlds that the Phoenician ancestors
of these men had known and settled not less than three thousand years
before. We believe that traditions had always existed in Spain, whose
blood up to the Ebro is almost purely Phoenician, of these western
worlds discovered by their fathers. No nation north of Spain could be
induced to give any considerable attention to the arguments and
solicitations of Columbus. True, Ferdinand and Isabella were of northern
blood, red haired Goths, but their northern blood had been nourished for
a thousand years upon the hillsides of Northern Spain, and they had
become Spaniards in fact, with all Spanish beliefs and tendencies.
Beyond all question Columbus took into account the Norwegian and
Icelandic voyages and the voyage of Madoc with his Welsh brethren. But
Columbus knew that those voyages only claimed to relate to lands lying
west and north-west of the Straits of Gibraltar. But when Columbus
unfurled his sails outside these Straits, in latitude thirty-five, he
made no effort to find the lands claimed to have been discovered by the
Icelanders, Norwegians or Welsh, but directed his course to a point from
fifteen to twenty degrees farther south, and thus reopened to the
knowledge of the world what should have been the happy islands of the
west and the storied gardens of the Hesperides. We make no doubt that
the Incas of Peru were brought to that country by the ships of the same
Phoenician people. But the Incas were very few in number, and came to
Peru with mechanical knowledge and the knowledge of pottery far in
advance of that possessed by the settlers in Central America, and their
works initiated for the purpose of improving water courses and
constructing roads were far more beneficial to mankind than the temples
erected to Baal in Central America, although the Incas, though more
intelligent than the settlers in Central America, were not yet
emancipated from belief in that heathen god. Manco Capac, the first
Inca, may have been left, for aught we know, by Solomon's fleets from
Eziongeber, when in search of rosewood, mahogany, and gold, and may have
been one of those skilled mechanics that built Solomon's Temple, and
constructed the basins for it, and thus have become enlightened in
religious matters, although he had not yet advanced so far as to
entirely abandon the worship of Baal.
We are not unaware that Peruvian tradition introduces Capac into Peru at
a much later period, but no confidence can be placed in dates suggested
by a people utterly unacquainted with letters or figures, and we make no
suggestion as to the exact time when the first Inca showed himself in
Peru. It may be asked what we are to say in regard to the storied
Atlantis, and especially, what shall we say to the fancies of Ignatius
Donnelly, who has written such a beautiful romance in regard to that
island supposed by him to have existed, and have been the actual
birthplace of man. Our reply is that Central America was the only true
Atlantis; and that Atlantis sunk in the ocean only when its discoverers
became weakened in the face of the barbarous people who surrounded them
and lost their supremacy in the commercial world among the nations.
Beyond what was true of Central America, Atlantis was a dream of fancy
at an age of the world when fancy supplied the place of facts to an
uninstructed people.
* * * * *