ATLANTIS RECONSTRUCTED.
The farther we go back in time toward the era of Atlantis, the more the
evidences multiply that we are approaching the presence of a great,
wise, civilized race. For instance, we find the Egyptians, Ethiopians,
and Israelites, from the earliest ages, refusing to eat the flesh of
swine. The Western nations departed from this rule, and in these modern
days we are beginning to realize the dangers of this article of food, on
account of the trichina contained in it; and when we turn to the Talmud,
we are told that it was forbidden to the Jews, "because of a small
insect which infests it."
The Egyptians, the Ethiopians, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, and others
of the ancient races, practised circumcision. It was probably resorted
to in Atlantean days, and imposed as a religious duty, to arrest one of
the most dreadful scourges of the human race--a scourge which continued
to decimate the people of America, arrested their growth, and paralyzed
their civilization. Circumcision stamped out the disease in Atlantis; we
read of one Atlantean king, the Greek god Ouranos, who, in a time of
plague, compelled his whole army and the armies of his allies to undergo
the rite. The colonies that went out to Europe carried the practice but
not the disease out of which it originated with them; and it was not
until Columbus reopened communication with the infected people of the
West India Islands that the scourge crossed the Atlantic and "turned
Europe," as one has expressed it, "into a charnal-house."
Life-insurance statistics show, nowadays, that the average life and
health of the Hebrew is much greater than that of other men; and he owes
this to the retention of practices and beliefs imposed ten thousand
years ago by the great, wise race of Atlantis.
Let us now, with all the facts before us, gleaned from various sources,
reconstruct, as near as may be, the condition of the antediluvians.
They dwelt upon a great island, near which were other smaller islands,
probably east and west of them, forming stepping-stones, as it were,
toward Europe and Africa in one direction, and the West India Islands
and America in the other. There were volcanic mountains upon the main
island, rising to a height of fifteen hundred feet, with their tops
covered with perpetual snow. Below these were elevated table-lands, upon
which were the royal establishments. Below these, again, was "the great
plain of Atlantis." There were four rivers flowing north, south, east,
and west from a central point. The climate was like that of the Azores,
mild and pleasant; the soil volcanic and fertile, and suitable at its
different elevations for the growth of the productions of the tropical
and temperate zones.
The people represented at least two different races: a dark brown
reddish race, akin to the Central Americans, the Berbers and the
Egyptians; and a white race, like the Greeks, Goths, Celts, and
Scandinavians. Various battles and struggles followed between the
different peoples for supremacy. The darker race seems to have been,
physically, a smaller race, with small hands; the lighter-colored race
was much larger--hence the legends of the Titans and Giants. The
Guanches of the Canary Islands were men of very great stature. As the
works of the Bronze Age represent a small-handed race, and as the races
who possessed the ships and gunpowder joined in the war against the
Giants, we might conclude that the dark races were the more civilized,
that they were the metal-workers and navigators.
The fact that the same opinions and customs exist on both sides of the
ocean implies identity of origin; it might be argued that the fact that
the explanation of many customs existing on both hemispheres is to be
found only in America, implies that the primeval stock existed in
America, the emigrating portion of the population carrying away the
custom, but forgetting the reason for it. The fact that domestic cattle
and the great cereals, wheat, oats, barley, and rye, are found in Europe
and not in America, would imply that after the population moved to Atlantis
from America civilization was developed in Atlantis, and that in the
later ages communication was closer and more constant between Atlantis
and Europe than between Atlantis and America. In the case of the bulky
domestic animals, it would be more difficult to transport them, in the
open vessels of that day, from Atlantis across the wider expanse of sea
to America, than it would be to carry them by way of the now submerged
islands in front of the Mediterranean Sea to the coast of Spain. It may
be, too, that the climate of Spain and Italy was better adapted to the
growth of wheat, barley, oats and rye, than maize; while the drier
atmosphere of America was better suited to the latter plant. Even now
comparatively little wheat or barley is raised in Central America,
Mexico, or Peru, and none on the low coasts of those countries; while a
smaller quantity of maize, proportionately, is grown in Italy, Spain,
and the rest of Western Europe, the rainy climate being unsuited to it.
We have seen (p. 60, ante) that there is reason to believe that maize
was known in a remote period in the drier regions of the Egyptians and
Chinese.
As science has been able to reconstruct the history of the migrations of
the Aryan race, by the words that exist or fail to appear in the kindred
branches of that tongue, so the time will come when a careful comparison
of words, customs, opinions, arts existing on the opposite sides of the
Atlantic will furnish an approximate sketch of Atlantean history.
The people had attained a high position as agriculturists. The presence
of the plough in Egypt and Peru implies that they possessed that
implement. And as the horns and ox-head of Baal show the esteem in which
cattle were held among them, we may suppose that they had passed the
stage in which the plough was drawn by men, as in Peru and Egypt in
ancient times, and in Sweden during the Historical Period, and that it
was drawn by oxen or horses. They first domesticated the horse, hence
the association of Poseidon or Neptune, a sea-god, with horses; hence
the race-courses for horses described by Plato. They possessed sheep,
and manufactured woollen goods; they also had goats, dogs, and swine.
They raised cotton and made cotton goods; they probably cultivated
maize, wheat, oats, barley, rye, tobacco, hemp, and flax, and possibly
potatoes; they built aqueducts and practised irrigation; they were
architects, sculptors, and engravers; they possessed an alphabet; they
worked in tin, copper, bronze, silver, gold, and iron.
During the vast period of their duration, as peace and agriculture
caused their population to increase to overflowing, they spread out in
colonies east and west to the ends of the earth. This was not the work
of a few years, but of many centuries; and the relations between these
colonies may have been something like the relation between the different
colonies that in a later age were established by the Phoenicians, the
Greeks, and the Romans; there was an intermingling with the more ancient
races, the autochthones of the different lands where they settled; and
the same crossing of stocks, which we know to have been continued all
through the Historical Period, must have been going on for thousands of
years, whereby new races and new dialects were formed; and the result of
all this has been that the smaller races of antiquity have grown larger,
while all the complexions shade into each other, so that we can pass
from the whitest to the darkest by insensible degrees.
In some respects the Atlanteans exhibited conditions similar to those of
the British Islands: there were the same, and even greater, race
differences in the population; the same plantation of colonies in
Europe, Asia, and America; the same carrying of civilization to the ends
of the earth. We have seen colonies from Great Britain going out in the
third and fifth centuries to settle on the shores of France, in
Brittany, representing one of the nationalities and languages of the
mother-country--a race Atlantean in origin. In the same way we may
suppose Hamitic emigrations to have gone out from Atlantis to Syria,
Egypt, and the Barbary States. If we could imagine Highland Scotch,
Welsh, Cornish, and Irish populations emigrating en masse from England
in later times, and carrying to their new lands the civilization of
England, with peculiar languages not English, we would have a state of
things probably more like the migrations which took place from Atlantis.
England, with a civilization Atlantean in origin, peopled by races from
the same source, is repeating in these modern times the empire of Zeus
and Chronos; and, just as we have seen Troy, Egypt, and Greece warring
against the parent race, so in later days we have seen Brittany and the
United States separating themselves from England, the race
characteristics remaining after the governmental connection had ceased.
In religion the Atlanteans had reached all the great thoughts which
underlie our modern creeds. They had attained to the conception of one
universal, omnipotent, great First Cause. We find the worship of this
One God in Peru and in early Egypt. They looked upon the sun as the
mighty emblem, type, and instrumentality of this One God. Such a
conception could only have come with civilization. It is not until these
later days that science has realized the utter dependence of all earthly
life upon the sun's rays:
"All applications of animal power may be regarded as derived directly or
indirectly from the static chemical power of the vegetable substance by
which the various organisms and their capabilities are sustained; and
this power, in turn, from the kinetic action of the sun's rays.
"Winds and ocean currents, hailstorms and rain, sliding glaciers,
flowing rivers, and falling cascades are the direct offspring of solar
heat. All our machinery, therefore, whether driven by the windmill or
the water-wheel, by horse-power or by steam--all the results of
electrical and electro-magnetic changes--our telegraphs, our clocks, and
our watches, all are wound up primarily by the sun.
"The sun is the great source of energy in almost all terrestrial
phenomena. From the meteorological to the geographical, from the
geological to the biological, in the expenditure and conversion of
molecular movements, derived from the sun's rays, must be sought the
motive power of all this infinitely varied phantasmagoria."
But the people of Atlantis had gone farther; they believed that the soul
of man was immortal, and that he would live again in his material body;
in other words, they believed in "the resurrection of the body and the
life everlasting." They accordingly embalmed their dead.
The Duke of Argyll ("The Unity of Nature") says:
"We have found in the most ancient records of the Aryan language proof
that the indications of religious thought are higher, simpler, and purer
as we go back in time, until at last, in the very oldest compositions of
human speech which have come down to us, we find the Divine Being spoken
of in the sublime language which forms the opening of the Lord's Prayer.
The date in absolute chronology of the oldest Vedic literature does not
seem to be known. Professor Max Müller, however, considers that it may
possibly take us back 5000 years.... All we can see with certainty is
that the earliest inventions of mankind are the most wonderful that the
race has ever made.... The first use of fire, and the discovery of
the methods by which it can be kindled; the domestication of wild
animals; and, above all, the processes by which the various cereals were
first developed out of some wild grasses--these are all discoveries with
which, in ingenuity and in importance, no subsequent discoveries may
compare. They are all unknown to history--all lost in the light of an
effulgent dawn."
The Atlanteans possessed an established order of priests; their
religious worship was pure and simple. They lived under a kingly
government; they had their courts, their judges, their records, their
monuments covered with inscriptions, their mines, their founderies,
their workshops, their looms, their grist-mills, their boats and
sailing-vessels, their highways, aqueducts, wharves, docks, and canals.
They had processions, banners, and triumphal arches for their kings and
heroes; they built pyramids, temples, round-towers, and obelisks; they
practised religious ablutions; they knew the use of the magnet and of
gunpowder. In short, they were in the enjoyment of a civilization nearly
as high as our own, lacking only the printing-press, and those
inventions in which steam, electricity, and magnetism are used. We are
told that Deva-Nahusha visited his colonies in Farther India. An empire
which reached from the Andes to Hindostan, if not to China, must have
been magnificent indeed. In its markets must have met the maize of the
Mississippi Valley, the copper of Lake Superior, the gold and silver of
Peru and Mexico, the spices of India, the tin of Wales and Cornwall, the
bronze of Iberia, the amber of the Baltic, the wheat and barley of
Greece, Italy, and Switzerland.
It is not surprising that when this mighty nation sank beneath the
waves, in the midst of terrible convulsions, with all its millions of
people, the event left an everlasting impression upon the imagination of
mankind. Let us suppose that Great Britain should to-morrow meet with a
similar fate. What a wild consternation would fall upon her colonies and
upon the whole human family! The world might relapse into barbarism,
deep and almost universal. William the Conqueror, Richard Coeur de Lion,
Alfred the Great, Cromwell, and Victoria might survive only as the gods
or demons of later races; but the memory of the cataclysm in which the
centre of a universal empire instantaneously went down to death would
never be forgotten; it would survive in fragments, more or less
complete, in every land on earth; it would outlive the memory of a
thousand lesser convulsions of nature; it would survive dynasties,
nations, creeds, and languages; it would never be forgotten while man
continued to inhabit the face of the globe.
Science has but commenced its work of reconstructing the past and
rehabilitating the ancient peoples, and surely there is no study which
appeals more strongly to the imagination than that of this drowned
nation, the true antediluvians. They were the founders of nearly all our
arts and sciences; they were the parents of our fundamental beliefs;
they were the first civilizers, the first navigators, the first
merchants, the first colonizers of the earth; their civilization was old
when Egypt was young, and they had passed away thousands of years before
Babylon, Rome, or London were dreamed of. This lost people were our
ancestors, their blood flows in our veins; the words we use every day
were heard, in their primitive form, in their cities, courts, and
temples. Every line of race and thought, of blood and belief, leads back
to them.
Nor is it impossible that the nations of the earth may yet employ their
idle navies in bringing to the light of day some of the relics of this
buried people. Portions of the island lie but a few hundred fathoms
beneath the sea; and if expeditions have been sent out from time to time
in the past, to resurrect from the depths of the ocean sunken
treasure-ships with a few thousand doubloons hidden in their cabins, why
should not an attempt be made to reach the buried wonders of Atlantis? A
single engraved tablet dredged up from Plato's island would be worth
more to science, would more strike the imagination of mankind, than all
the gold of Peru, all the monuments of Egypt, and all the terra-cotta
fragments gathered from the great libraries of Chaldea.
May not the so-called "Phoenician coins" found on Corvo, one of the
Azores, be of Atlantean origin? Is it probable that that great race,
pre-eminent as a founder of colonies, could have visited those islands
within the Historical Period, and have left them unpeopled, as they were
when discovered by the Portuguese?
We are but beginning to understand the past: one hundred years ago the
world knew nothing of Pompeii or Herculaneum; nothing of the lingual tie
that binds together the Indo-European nations; nothing of the
significance of the vast volume of inscriptions upon the tombs and
temples of Egypt; nothing of the meaning of the arrow-headed
inscriptions of Babylon; nothing of the marvellous civilizations
revealed in the remains of Yucatan, Mexico, and Peru. We are on the
threshold. Scientific investigation is advancing with giant strides. Who
shall say that one hundred years from now the great museums of the world
may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms, and implements from
Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of
its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the
human race, and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of
our day?
THE END.