THE PERUVIAN COLONY.
If we look at the map of Atlantis, as revealed by the deep sea
soundings, we will find that it approaches at one point, by its
connecting ridge, quite closely to the shore of South America, above
the mouth of the Amazon, and that probably it was originally connected
with it.
If the population of Atlantis expanded westwardly, it naturally found
its way in its ships up the magnificent valley of the Amazon and its
tributaries; and, passing by the low and fever-stricken lands of Brazil,
it rested not until it had reached the high, fertile, beautiful, and
healthful regions of Bolivia, from which it would eventually cross the
mountains into Peru.
Here it would establish its outlying colonies at the terminus of its
western line of advance, arrested only by the Pacific Ocean, precisely
as we have seen it advancing up the valley of the Mississippi, and
carrying on its mining operations on the shores of Lake Superior;
precisely as we have seen it going eastward up the Mediterranean, past
the Dardanelles, and founding Aryan, Hamitic, and probably Turanian
colonies on the farther shores of the Black Sea and on the Caspian. This
is the universal empire over which, the Hindoo books tell us, Deva
Nahusha was ruler; this was "the great and aggressive empire" to which
Plato alludes; this was the mighty kingdom, embracing the whole of the
then known world, from which the Greeks obtained their conception of the
universal father of all men in King Zeus. And in this universal empire
Señor Lopez must find an explanation of the similarity which, as we
shall show, exists between the speech of the South American Pacific
coast on the one hand, and the speech of Gaul, Ireland, England, Italy,
Greece, Bactria, and Hindostan on the other.
Montesino tells us that at some time near the date of the Deluge, in
other words, in the highest antiquity, America was invaded by a people
with four leaders, named Ayar-manco-topa, Ayar-chaki, Ayar-aucca, and
Ayar-uyssu. "Ayar," says Señor Lopez, "is the Sanscrit Ajar, or aje, and
means primitive chief; and manco, chaki, aucca, and uyssu, mean
believers, wanderers, soldiers, husbandmen. We have here a tradition of
castes like that preserved in the four tribal names of Athens." The
laboring class (naturally enough in a new colony) obtained the
supremacy, and its leader was named Pirhua-manco, revealer of Pir, light
(p[~u]r, Umbrian pir). Do the laws which control the changes of language,
by which a labial succeeds a labial, indicate that the Mero or Merou of
Theopompus, the name of Atlantis, was carried by the colonists of
Atlantis to South America (as the name of old York was transplanted in a
later age to New York), and became in time Pérou or Peru? Was not the
Nubian "Island of Merou," with its pyramids built by "red men," a
similar transplantation? And when the Hindoo priest points to his sacred
emblem with five projecting points upon it, and tells us that they
typify "Mero and the four quarters of the world," does he not refer to
Atlantis and its ancient universal empire?
Manco, in the names of the Peruvian colonists, it has been urged, was
the same as Mannus, Mann, and the Santhal Maniko. It reminds us of
Menes, Minos, etc., who are found at the beginning of so many of the Old
World traditions.
The Quichuas--this invading people--were originally a fair skinned race,
with blue eyes and light and even auburn hair; they had regular
features, large heads, and large bodies. Their descendants are to this
day an olive-skinned people, much lighter in color than the Indian
tribes subjugated by them.
They were a great race. Peru, as it was known to the Spaniards, held
very much the same relation to the ancient Quichua civilization as
England in the sixteenth century held to the civilization of the empire
of the Cæsars. The Incas were simply an offshoot, who, descending from
the mountains, subdued the rude races of the sea-coast, and imposed
their ancient civilization upon them.
The Quichua nation extended at one time over a region of country more
than two thousand miles long. This whole region, when the Spaniards
arrived, "was a populous and prosperous empire, complete in its civil
organization, supported by an efficient system of industry, and
presenting a notable development of some of the more important arts of
civilized life." (Baldwin's "Ancient America," p. 222.)
The companions of Pizarro found everywhere the evidences of a
civilization of vast antiquity. Cieça de Leon mentions "great edifices"
that were in ruins at Tiahuanaca, "an artificial hill raised on a
groundwork of stone," and "two stone idols, apparently made by skilful
artificers," ten or twelve feet high, clothed in long robes. "In this
place, also," says De Leon, "there are stones so large and so overgrown
that our wonder is excited, it being incomprehensible how the power of
man could have placed them where we see them. They are variously
wrought, and some of them, having the form of men, must have been idols.
Near the walls are many caves and excavations under the earth; but in
another place, farther west, are other and greater monuments, such as
large gate-ways with hinges, platforms, and porches, each made of a
single stone. It surprised me to see these enormous gate-ways, made of
great masses of stone, some of which were thirty feet long, fifteen
high, and six thick."
The capital of the Chimus of Northern Peru at Gran-Chimu was conquered
by the Incas after a long and bloody struggle, and the capital was given
up to barbaric ravage and spoliation. But its remains exist to-day, the
marvel of the Southern Continent, covering not less than twenty square
miles. Tombs, temples, and palaces arise on every hand, ruined but still
traceable. Immense pyramidal structures, some of them half a mile in
circuit; vast areas shut in by massive walls, each containing its
water-tank, its shops, municipal edifices, and the dwellings of its
inhabitants, and each a branch of a larger organization; prisons,
furnaces for smelting metals, and almost every concomitant of
civilization, existed in the ancient Chimu capital. One of the great
pyramids, called the "Temple of the Sun," is 812 feet long by 470 wide,
and 150 high. These vast structures have been ruined for centuries, but
still the work of excavation is going on.
One of the centres of the ancient Quichua civilization was around Lake
Titicaca. The buildings here, as throughout Peru, were all constructed
of hewn stone, and had doors and windows with posts, sills, and
thresholds of stone.
At Cuelap, in Northern Peru, remarkable ruins were found. "They consist
of a wall of wrought stones 3600 feet long, 560 broad, and 150 high,
constituting a solid mass with a level summit. On this mass was another
600 feet long, 500 broad, and 150 high," making an aggregate height of
three hundred feet! In it were rooms and cells which were used as tombs.
Very ancient ruins, showing remains of large and remarkable edifices,
were found near Huamanga, and described by Cieça de Leon. The native
traditions said this city was built "by bearded white men, who came
there long before the time of the Incas, and established a settlement."
"The Peruvians made large use of aqueducts, which they built with
notable skill, using hewn stones and cement, and making them very
substantial." One extended four hundred and fifty miles across sierras
and over rivers. Think of a stone aqueduct reaching from the city of New
York to the State of North Carolina!
The public roads of the Peruvians were most remarkable; they were built
on masonry. One of these roads ran along the mountains through the
whole length of the empire, from Quito to Chili; another, starting from
this at Cuzco, went down to the coast, and extended northward to the
equator. These roads were from twenty to twenty-five feet wide, were
macadamized with pulverized stone mixed with lime and bituminous cement,
and were walled in by strong walls "more than a fathom in thickness." In
many places these roads were cut for leagues through the rock; great
ravines were filled up with solid masonry; rivers were crossed by
suspension bridges, used here ages before their introduction into
Europe. Says Baldwin, "The builders of our Pacific Railroad, with their
superior engineering skill and mechanical appliances, might reasonably
shrink from the cost and the difficulties of such a work as this.
Extending from one degree north of Quito to Cuzco, and from Cuzco to
Chili, it was quite as long as the two Pacific railroads, and its wild
route among the mountains was far more difficult." Sarmiento, describing
it, said, "It seems to me that if the emperor (Charles V.) should see
fit to order the construction of another road like that which leads from
Quito to Cuzco, or that which from Cuzco goes toward Chili, I certainly
think he would not be able to make it, with all his power." Humboldt
said, "This road was marvellous; none of the Roman roads I had seen in
Italy, in the south of France, or in Spain, appeared to me more imposing
than this work of the ancient Peruvians."
Along these great roads caravansaries were established for the
accommodation of travellers.
These roads were ancient in the time of the Incas. They were the work of
the white, auburn-haired, bearded men from Atlantis, thousands of years
before the time of the Incas. When Huayna Capac marched his army over
the main road to invade Quito, it was so old and decayed "that he found
great difficulties in the passage," and he immediately ordered the
necessary reconstructions.
It is not necessary, in a work of this kind, to give a detailed
description of the arts and civilization of the Peruvians. They were
simply marvellous. Their works in cotton and wool exceeded in fineness
anything known in Europe at that time. They had carried irrigation,
agriculture, and the cutting of gems to a point equal to that of the Old
World. Their accumulations of the precious metals exceeded anything
previously known in the history of the world. In the course of
twenty-five years after the Conquest the Spaniards sent from Peru to
Spain more than eight hundred millions of dollars of gold, nearly all of
it taken from the Peruvians as "booty." In one of their palaces "they
had an artificial garden, the soil of which was made of small pieces of
fine gold, and this was artificially planted with different kinds of
maize, which were of gold, their stems, leaves, and ears. Besides this,
they had more than twenty sheep (llamas) with their lambs, attended by
shepherds, all made of gold." In a description of one lot of golden
articles, sent to Spain in 1534 by Pizarro, there is mention of "four
llamas, ten statues of women of full size, and a cistern of gold, so
curious that it excited the wonder of all."
Can any one read these details and declare Plato's description of
Atlantis to be fabulous, simply because he tells us of the enormous
quantities of gold and silver possessed by the people? Atlantis was the
older country, the parent country, the more civilized country; and,
doubtless, like the Peruvians, its people regarded the precious metals
as sacred to their gods; and they had been accumulating them from all
parts of the world for countless ages. If the story of Plato is true,
there now lies beneath the waters of the Atlantic, covered, doubtless,
by hundreds of feet of volcanic débris, an amount of gold and silver
exceeding many times that brought to Europe from Peru, Mexico, and
Central America since the time of Columbus; a treasure which, if brought
to light, would revolutionize the financial values of the world.
I have already shown, in the chapter upon the similarities between the
civilizations of the Old and New Worlds, some of the remarkable
coincidences which existed between the Peruvians and the ancient
European races; I will again briefly, refer to a few of them:
1. They worshipped the sun, moon, and planets.
2. They believed in the immortality of the soul.
3. They believed in the resurrection of the body, and accordingly
embalmed their dead.
4. The priest examined the entrails of the animals offered in sacrifice,
and, like the Roman augurs, divined the future from their appearance.
5. They had an order of women vowed to celibacy--vestal virgins-nuns; and
a violation of their vow was punished, in both continents, by their
being buried alive.
6. They divided the year into twelve months.
7. Their enumeration was by tens; the people were divided into decades
and hundreds, like the Anglo-Saxons; and the whole nation into bodies of
500, 1000, and 10,000, with a governor over each.
8. They possessed castes; and the trade of the father descended to the
son, as in India.
9. They had bards and minstrels, who sung at the great festivals.
10. Their weapons were the same as those of the Old World, and made
after the same pattern.
11. They drank toasts and invoked blessings.
12. They built triumphal arches for their returning heroes, and strewed
the road before them with leaves and flowers.
13. They used sedan-chairs.
14. They regarded agriculture as the principal interest of the nation,
and held great agricultural fairs and festivals for the interchange of
the productions of the farmers.
15. The king opened the agricultural season by a great celebration, and,
like the kings of Egypt, he put his hand to the plough, and ploughed the
first furrow.
16. They had an order of knighthood, in which the candidate knelt before
the king; his sandals were put on by a nobleman, very much as the spurs
were buckled on the European knight; he was then allowed to use the
girdle or sash around the loins, corresponding to the toga virilis of
the Romans; he was then crowned with flowers. According to Fernandez,
the candidates wore white shirts, like the knights of the Middle Ages,
with a cross embroidered in front.
17. There was a striking resemblance between the architecture of the
Peruvians and that of some of the nations of the Old World. It is enough
for me to quote Mr. Ferguson's words, that the coincidence between the
buildings of the Incas and the Cyclopean remains attributed to the
Pelasgians in Italy and Greece "is the most remarkable in the history
of architecture."
OWL-HEADED VASES, TROY AND PERU
The illustrations on page 397 strikingly confirm Mr. Ferguson's views.
"The sloping jambs, the window cornice, the polygonal masonry, and other
forms so closely resemble what is found in the old Pelasgic cities of
Greece and Italy, that it is difficult to resist the conclusion that
there may be some relation between them."
Even the mode of decorating their palaces and temples finds a parallel
in the Old World. A recent writer says:
"We may end by observing, what seems to have escaped Señor Lopez, that
the interior of an Inca palace, with its walls covered with gold, as
described by Spaniards, with its artificial golden flowers and golden
beasts, must have been exactly like the interior of the house of
Alkinous or Menelaus--
"'The doors were framed of gold,
Where underneath the brazen floor doth glass
Silver pilasters, which with grace uphold
Lintel of silver framed; the ring was burnished gold,
And dogs on each side of the door there stand,
Silver and golden.'"
"I can personally testify" (says Winchell, "Preadamites," p. 387) "that
a study of ancient Peruvian pottery has constantly reminded me of forms
with which we are familiar in Egyptian archæology."
Dr. Schliemann, in his excavations of the ruins of Troy, found a number
of what he calls "owl-headed idols" and vases. I give specimens on page
398 and page 400.
In Peru we find vases with very much the same style of face.
I might pursue those parallels much farther; but it seems to me that
these extraordinary coincidences must have arisen either from identity
of origin or long-continued ancient intercourse. There can be little
doubt that a fair-skinned, light-haired, bearded race, holding the
religion which Plato says prevailed in Atlantis, carried an Atlantean
civilization at an early day up the valley of the Amazon to the heights
of Bolivia and Peru, precisely as a similar emigration of Aryans went
westward to the shores of the Mediterranean and Caspian, and it is very
likely that these diverse migrations habitually spoke the same language.
Señor Vincente Lopez, a Spanish gentleman of Montevideo, in 1872
published a work entitled "Les Races Aryennes in Pérou," in which he
attempts to prove that the great Quichua language, which the Incas
imposed on their subjects over a vast extent of territory, and which is
still a living tongue in Peru and Bolivia, is really a branch of the
great Aryan or Indo-European speech. I quote Andrew Lang's summary of
the proofs on this point:
OWL-HEADED VASE, TROY
"Señor Lopez's view, that the Peruvians were Aryans who left the parent
stock long before the Teutonic or Hellenic races entered Europe, is
supported by arguments drawn from language, from the traces of
institutions, from religious beliefs, from legendary records, and
artistic remains. The evidence from language is treated scientifically,
and not as a kind of ingenious guessing. Señor Lopez first combats the
idea that the living dialect of Peru is barbarous and fluctuating. It is
not one of the casual and shifting forms of speech produced by nomad
races. To which of the stages of language does this belong--the
agglutinative, in which one root is fastened on to another, and a word
is formed in which the constitutive elements are obviously distinct, or
the inflexional, where the auxiliary roots get worn down and are only
distinguishable by the philologist? As all known Aryan tongues are
inflexional, Señor Lopez may appear to contradict himself when he says
that Quichua is an agglutinative Aryan language. But he quotes Mr. Max
Müller's opinion that there must have been a time when the germs of
Aryan tongues had not yet reached the inflexional stage, and shows that
while the form of Quichua is agglutinative, as in Turanian, the roots of
words are Aryan. If this be so, Quichua may be a linguistic missing link.
"When we first look at Quichua, with its multitude of words, beginning
with hu, and its great preponderance of q's, it seems almost as odd as
Mexican. But many of these forms are due to a scanty alphabet, and
really express familiar sounds; and many, again, result from the casual
spelling of the Spaniards. We must now examine some of the forms which
Aryan roots are supposed to take in Quichua. In the first place, Quichua
abhors the shock of two consonants. Thus, a word like ple'w in Greek
would be unpleasant to the Peruvian's ear, and he says pillui, 'I sail.'
The plu, again, in pluma, a feather, is said to be found in pillu, 'to
fly.' Quichua has no v, any more than Greek has, and just as the Greeks
had to spell Roman words beginning with V with Ou, like
Valerius--Ou?ale'rios--so, where Sanscrit has v, Quichua has sometimes
hu. Here is a list of words in hu:
+----------------------+----------------------------+
| QUICHUA. | SANSCRIT. |
+----------------------+----------------------------+
| Huakia, to call. | Vacc, to speak. |
+----------------------+----------------------------+
| Huasi, a house. | Vas, to inhabit. |
+----------------------+----------------------------+
| Huayra, air, au?'ra. | Vâ, to breathe. |
+----------------------+----------------------------+
| Huasa, the back. | Vas, to be able (pouvoir). |
+----------------------+----------------------------+
"There is a Sanscrit root, kr, to act, to do: this root is found in more
than three hundred names of peoples and places in Southern America. Thus
there are the Caribs, whose name may have the same origin as that of our
old friends the Carians, and mean the Braves, and their land the home of
the Braves, like Kaleva-la, in Finnish. The same root gives kara, the
hand, the Greek xei'r, and kkalli, brave, which a person of fancy may
connect with kalo's. Again, Quichua has an 'alpha privative'--thus
A-stani means 'I change a thing's place;' for ni or mi is the first
person singular, and, added to the root of a verb, is the sign of the
first person of the present indicative. For instance, can means being,
and Can-mi, or Cani, is 'I am.' In the same way Munanmi, or Munani, is
'I love,' and Apanmi, or Apani, 'I carry.' So Lord Strangford was wrong
when he supposed that the last verb in mi lived with the last patriot in
Lithuania. Peru has stores of a grammatical form which has happily
perished in Europe. It is impossible to do more than refer to the
supposed Aryan roots contained in the glossary, but it may be noticed
that the future of the Quichuan verb is formed in s--I love, Munani; I
shall love, Munasa--and that the affixes denoting cases in the noun are
curiously like the Greek prepositions."
The resemblance between the Quichua and Mandan words for I or
me--mi--will here be observed.
Very recently Dr. Rudolf Falb has announced (Neue Freie Presse, of
Vienna) that he has discovered that the relation of the Quichua and
Aimara languages to the Aryan and Semitic tongues is very close; that,
in fact, they "exhibit the most astounding affinities with the Semitic
tongue, and particularly the Arabic," in which tongue Dr. Falb has been
skilled from his boyhood. Following up the lines of this discovery, Dr.
Falb has found (1) a connecting link with the Aryan roots, and (2) has
ultimately arrived face to face with the surprising revelation that "the
Semitic roots are universally Aryan." The common stems of all the
variants are found in their purest condition in Quichua and Aimara, from
which fact Dr. Falb derives the conclusion that the high plains of Peru
and Bolivia must be regarded as the point of exit of the present human
race.
[Since the above was written I have received a letter from Dr. Falb,
dated Leipsic, April 5th, 1881. Scholars will be glad to learn that Dr.
Falb's great work on the relationship of the Aryan and Semitic languages
to the Quichua and Aimara tongues will be published in a year or two;
the manuscript contains over two thousand pages, and Dr. Falb has
devoted to it ten years of study. A work from such a source, upon so
curious and important a subject, will be looked for with great interest.]
But it is impossible that the Quichuas and Aimaras could have passed
across the wide Atlantic to Europe if there had been no stepping-stone
in the shape of Atlantis with its bridge-like ridges connecting the two
continents.
It is, however, more reasonable to suppose that the Quichuas and Aimaras
were a race of emigrants from Plato's island than to think that Atlantis
was populated from South America. The very traditions to which we have
referred as existing among the Peruvians, that the civilized race were
white and bearded, and that they entered or invaded the country, would
show that civilization did not originate in Peru, but was a
transplantation from abroad, and only in the direction of Atlantis can
we look for a white and bearded race.
In fact, kindred races, with the same arts, and speaking the same tongue
in an early age of the world, separated in Atlantis and went east and
west--the one to repeat the civilization of the mother-country along the
shores of the Mediterranean Sea, which, like a great river, may be said
to flow out from the Black Sea, with the Nile as one of its tributaries,
and along the shores of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf; while the
other emigration advanced up the Amazon, and created mighty nations upon
its head-waters in the valleys of the Andes and on the shores of the
Pacific.