The Antediluvian World

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"Some stones have recently been discovered in Hierro and Las Palmas
(Canary Islands), bearing sculptured symbols similar to those found on
the shores of Lake Superior; and this has led M. Bertholet, the
historiographer of the Canary Islands, to conclude that the first
inhabitants of the Canaries and those of the great West were one in
race." (Benjamin, "The Atlantic Islands," p. 130.)

12. How comes it that that very high authority, Professor Retzius
("Smithsonian Report," 1859, p. 266), declares, "With regard to the
primitive dolichocephalae of America I entertain a hypothesis still more
bold, namely, that they are nearly related to the Guanches in the Canary
Islands, and to the Atlantic populations of Africa, the Moors, Tuaricks,
Copts, etc., which Latham comprises under the name of
Egyptian-Atlantidae. We find one and the same form of skull in the
Canary Islands, in front of the African coast, and in the Carib Islands,
on the opposite coast, which faces Africa. The color of the skin on both
sides of the Atlantic is represented in these populations as being of a
reddish-brown."

13. The Barbarians who are alluded to by Homer and Thucydides were a
race of ancient navigators and pirates called Cares, or Carians, who
occupied the isles of Greece before the Pelasgi, and antedated the
Phoenicians in the control of the sea. The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg
claims that these Carians were identical with the Caribs of the West
Indies, the Caras of Honduras, and the Gurani of South America. (Landa's
"Relacion," pp. 52-65.)

14. When we consider it closely, one of the most extraordinary customs
ever known to mankind is that to which I have already alluded in a
preceding chapter, to wit, the embalming of the body of the dead man,
with a purpose that the body itself may live again in a future state. To
arrive at this practice several things must coexist:

a. The people must be highly religious, and possessed of an organized
and influential priesthood, to perpetuate so troublesome a custom from
age to age.

b. They must believe implicitly in the immortality of the soul; and this
implies a belief in rewards and punishments after death; in a heaven and
a hell.

c. They must believe in the immortality of the body, and its
resurrection from the grave on some day of judgment in the distant
future.

d. But a belief in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of
the body is not enough, for all Christian nations hold to these beliefs;
they must supplement these with a determination that the body shall not
perish; that the very flesh and blood in which the man died shall rise
with him on the last day, and not a merely spiritual body.

Now all these four things must coexist before a people proceed to embalm
their dead for religious purposes. The probability that all these four
things should coexist by accident in several widely separated races is
slight indeed. The doctrine of chances is all against it. There is here
no common necessity driving men to the same expedient, with which so
many resemblances have been explained; the practice is a religious
ceremony, growing out of religious beliefs by no means common or
universal, to wit, that the man who is dead shall live again, and live
again in the very body in which he died. Not even all the Jews believed
in these things.

If, then, it should appear that among the races which we claim were
descended from Atlantis this practice of embalming the dead is found,
and nowhere else, we have certainly furnished evidence which can only be
explained by admitting the existence of Atlantis, and of some great
religious race dwelling on Atlantis, who believed in the immortality of
soul and body, and who embalmed their dead. We find, as I have shown:

First. That the Guanches of the Canary Islands, supposed to be a remnant
of the Atlantean population, preserved their dead as mummies.

Second. That the Egyptians, the oldest colony of Atlantis, embalmed
their dead in such vast multitudes that they are now exported by the ton
to England, and ground up into manures to grow English turnips.

Third. That the Assyrians, the Ethiopians, the Persians, the Greeks, and
even the Romans embalmed their dead.

Fourth. On the American continents we find that the Peruvians, the
Central Americans, the Mexicans, and some of the Indian tribes, followed
the same practice.

Is it possible to account for this singular custom, reaching through a
belt of nations, and completely around the habitable world, without
Atlantis?

15. All the traditions of the Mediterranean races look to the ocean as
the source of men and gods. Homer sings of

"Ocean, the origin of gods and Mother Tethys."

Orpheus says, "The fair river of Ocean was the first to marry, and he
espoused his sister Tethys, who was his mothers daughter." (Plato's
"Dialogues," Cratylus, p. 402.) The ancients always alluded to the ocean
as a river encircling the earth, as in the map of Cosmos (see page 95
ante); probably a reminiscence of the great canal described by Plato
which surrounded the plain of Atlantis. Homer (Iliad, book xviii.)
describes Tethys, "the mother goddess," coming to Achilles "from the
deep abysses of the main:"

"The circling Nereids with their mistress weep,
And all the sea-green sisters of the deep."

Plato surrounds the great statue of Poseidon in Atlantis with the images
of one hundred Nereids.

16. in the Deluge legends of the Hindoos (as given on page 87 ante), we
have seen Manu saving a small fish, which subsequently grew to a great
size, and warned him of the coming of the Flood. In this legend all the
indications point to an ocean as the scene of the catastrophe. It says:
"At the close of the last calpa there was a general destruction, caused
by the sleep of Brahma, whence his creatures, in different worlds, were
drowned in a vast ocean. . . . A holy king, named Satyavrata, then
reigned, a servant of the spirit which moved on the waves" (Poseidon?),
"and so devout that water was his only sustenance. . . . In seven days
the three worlds" (remember Poseidon's trident) "shall be plunged in an
ocean of death." . . . "'Thou shalt enter the spacious ark, and continue
in it secure from the Flood on one immense ocean.' . . . The sea
overwhelmed its shores, deluged the whole earth, augmented by showers
from immense clouds." ("Asiatic Researches," vol. i., p. 230.)

All this reminds us of "the fountains of the great deep and the
flood-gates of heaven," and seems to repeat precisely the story of Plato
as to the sinking of Atlantis in the ocean.

17. While I do not attach much weight to verbal similarities in the
languages of the two continents, nevertheless there are some that are
very remarkable. We have seen the Pan and Maia of the Greeks reappearing
in the Pan and Maya of the Mayas of Central America. The god of the
Welsh triads, "Hu the mighty," is found in the Hu-nap-bu, the hero-god
of the Quiches; in Hu-napu, a hero-god; and in Hu-hu-nap-hu, in Hu-ncam,
in Hu-nbatz, semi-divine heroes of the Quiches. The Phoenician deity El
"was subdivided into a number of hypostases called the Baalim, secondary
divinities, emanating from the substance of the deity" ("Anc. Hist.
East," vol. ii., p. 219); and this word Baalim we find appearing in the
mythology of the Central Americans, applied to the semi-divine
progenitors of the human race, Balam-Quitze, Balam-Agab, and Iqui-Balam.

CHAPTER V.

THE QUESTION OF COMPLEXION.

The tendency of scientific thought in ethnology is in the direction of
giving more and more importance to the race characteristics, such as
height, color of the hair, eyes and skin, and the formation of the skull
and body generally, than to language. The language possessed by a people
may be merely the result of conquest or migration. For instance, in the
United States to-day, white, black, and red men, the descendants of
French, Spanish, Italians, Mexicans, Irish, Germans, Scandinavians,
Africans, all speak the English language, and by the test of language
they are all Englishmen; and yet none of them are connected by birth or
descent with the country where that language was developed.

There is a general misconception as to the color of the European and
American races. Europe is supposed to be peopled exclusively by white
men; but in reality every shade of color is represented on that
continent, from the fair complexion of the fairest of the Swedes to the
dark-skinned inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast, only a shade
lighter than the Berbers, or Moors, on the opposite side of that sea.
Tacitus spoke of the "Black Celts," and the term, so far as complexion
goes, might not inappropriately be applied to some of the Italians,
Spaniards, and Portuguese, while the Basques are represented as of a
still darker hue. Tylor says ("Anthropology," p. 67), "On the whole, it
seems that the distinction of color, from the fairest Englishman to the
darkest African, has no hard and fast lines, but varies gradually from
one tint to another."

And when we turn to America we find that the popular opinion that all
Indians are "red men," and of the same hue from Patagonia to Hudson's
Bay, is a gross error.

Prichard says ("Researches into the Physical History of Mankind," vol.
i., p. 269, 4th ed., 1841):

"It will be easy to show that the American races show nearly as great a
variety in this respect as the nations of the old continent; there are
among them white races with a florid complexion, and tribes black or of
a very dark hue; that their stature, figure, and countenance are almost
equally diversified."

John T. Short says ("North Americans of Antiquity," p. 189):

"The Menominees, sometimes called the 'White Indians,' formerly occupied
the region bordering on Lake Michigan, around Green Bay. The whiteness
of these Indians, which is compared to that of white mulattoes, early
attracted the attention of the Jesuit missionaries, and has often been
commented on by travellers. While it is true that hybridy has done much
to lighten the color of many of the tribes, still the peculiarity of the
complexion of this people has been marked since the first time a
European encountered them. Almost every shade, from the ash-color of the
Menominees through the cinnamon-red, copper, and bronze tints, may be
found among the tribes formerly occupying the territory cast of the
Mississippi, until we reach the dark-skinned Kaws of Kansas, who are
nearly as black as the negro. The variety of complexion is as great in
South America as among the tribes of the northern part of the continent."

In foot-note of p. 107 of vol. iii. of "U. S. Explorations for a
Railroad Route to the Pacific Ocean," we are told,

"Many of the Indians of Zuni (New Mexico) are white. They have a fair
skin, blue eyes, chestnut or auburn hair, and are quite good-looking.
They claim to be full-blooded Zunians, and have no tradition of
intermarriage with any foreign race. The circumstance creates no
surprise among this people, for from time immemorial a similar class of
people has existed among the tribe."

Winchell says:

"The ancient Indians of California, in the latitude of forty-two
degrees, were as black as the negroes of Guinea, while in Mexico were
tribes of an olive or reddish complexion, relatively light. Among the
black races of tropical regions we find, generally, some light-colored
tribes interspersed. These sometimes have light hair and blue eyes. This
is the case with the Tuareg of the Sahara, the Afghans of India, and the
aborigines of the banks of the Oronoco and the Amazon." (Winchell's
"Preadamites," p. 185.)

William Penn said of the Indians of Pennsylvania, in his letter of
August, 1683:

"The natives . . . are generally tall, straight, well-built, and of
singular proportion; they tread strong and clever, and mostly walk with
a lofty chin. . . . Their eye is little and black, not unlike a
straight-looked Jew. . . . I have seen among them as comely
European-like faces of both sexes as on your side of the sea; and truly
an Italian complexion hath not much more of the white, and the noses of
several of them have as much of the Roman. . . . For their original, I
am ready to believe them to be of the Jewish race--I mean of the stock
of the ten tribes--and that for the following reasons: first, in the
next place, I find them to be of the like countenance, and their
children of so lively a resemblance that a man would think himself in
Duke's Place or Berry Street in London when he seeth them. But this is
not all: they agree in rites, they reckon by moons, they offer their
first-fruits, they have a kind of feast of tabernacles, they are said to
lay their altars upon twelve stones, their mourning a year, customs of
women, with many other things that do not now occur."

Upon this question of complexion Catlin, in his "Indians of North
America," vol. i., p. 95, etc., gives us some curious information. We
have already seen that the Mandans preserved an image of the ark, and
possessed legends of a clearly Atlantean character. Catlin says:

"A stranger in the Mandan village is first struck with the different
shades of complexion and various colors of hair which he sees in a crowd
about him, and is at once disposed to exclaim, 'These are not Indians.'
There are a great many of these people whose complexions appear as light
as half-breeds; and among the women particularly there are many whose
skins are almost white, with the most pleasing symmetry and proportion
of feature; with hazel, with gray, and with blue eyes; with mildness and
sweetness of expression and excessive modesty of demeanor, which render
them exceedingly pleasing and beautiful. Why this diversity of
complexion I cannot tell, nor can they themselves account for it. Their
traditions, so far as I can learn them, afford us no information of
their having had any knowledge of white men before the visit of Lewis
and Clarke, made to their village thirty-three years ago. Since that
time until now (1835) there have been very few visits of white men to
this place, and surely not enough to have changed the complexions and
customs of a nation. And I recollect perfectly well that Governor Clarke
told me, before I started for this place, that I would find the Mandans
a strange people and half white.

"Among the females may be seen every shade and color of hair that can be
seen in our own country except red or auburn, which is not to be found.
. . . There are very many of both sexes, and of every age, from infancy
to manhood and old age, with hair of a bright silvery-gray, and in some
instances almost perfectly white. This unaccountable phenomenon is not
the result of disease or habit, but it is unquestionably an hereditary
characteristic which runs in families, and indicates no inequality in
disposition or intellect. And by passing this hair through my hands I
have found it uniformly to be as coarse and harsh as a horse's mane,
differing materially from the hair of other colors, which, among the
Mandans, is generally as fine and soft as silk.

"The stature of the Mandans is rather below the ordinary size of man,
with beautiful symmetry of form and proportion, and wonderful suppleness
and elasticity."

Catlin gives a group (54) showing this great diversity in complexion:
one of the figures is painted almost pure white, and with light hair.
The faces are European.

GOVERNOR AND OTHER INDIANS OF THE PUEBLO OF SAN DOMINGO, NEW MEXICO.

Major James W. Lynd, who lived among the Dakota Indians for nine years,
and was killed by them in the great outbreak of 1862, says (MS. "Hist.
of Dakotas," Library, Historical Society, Minnesota, p. 47), after
calling attention to the fact that the different tribes of the Sioux
nation represent several different degrees of darkness of color:

"The Dakota child is of lighter complexion than the young brave; this
one lighter than the middle-aged man, and the middle-aged man lighter
than the superannuated homo, who, by smoke, paint, dirt, and a drying up
of the vital juices, appears to be the true copper-colored Dakota. The
color of the Dakotas varies with the nation, and also with the age and
condition of the individual. It may be set down, however, as a shade
lighter than olive; yet it becomes still lighter by change of condition
or mode of life, and nearly vanishes, even in the child, under constant
ablutions and avoiding of exposure. Those children in the Mission at
Hazlewood, who are taken very young, and not allowed to expose
themselves, lose almost entirely the olive shade, and become quite as
white as the American child. The Mandans are as light as the peasants of
Spain, while their brothers, the Crows, are as dark as the Arabs. Dr.
Goodrich, in the 'Universal Traveller,' p. 154, says that the modern
Peruvians, in the warmer regions of Peru, are as fair as the people of
the south of Europe."

The Aymaras, the ancient inhabitants of the mountains of Peru and
Bolivia, are described as having an olive-brown complexion, with regular
features, large heads, and a thoughtful and melancholy cast of
countenance. They practised in early times the deformation of the skull.

Professor Wilson describes the hair of the ancient Peruvians, as found
upon their mummies, as "a lightish brown, and of a fineness of texture
which equals that of the Anglo-Saxon race." "The ancient Peruvians,"
says Short ("North Americans of Antiquity," p. 187), "appear, from
numerous examples of hair found in their tombs, to have been an
auburn-haired race." Garcilasso, who had an opportunity of seeing the
body of the king, Viracocha, describes the hair of that monarch as
snow-white. Haywood tells us of the discovery, at the beginning of this
century, of three mummies in a cave on the south side of the Cumberland
River (Tennessee), who were buried in baskets, as the Peruvians were
occasionally buried, and whose skin was fair and white, and their hair
auburn, and of a fine texture. ("Natural and Aboriginal History of
Tennessee," p. 191.)

CHOCTAW.

Neither is the common opinion correct which asserts all the American
Indians to be of the same type of features. The portraits on this page
and on pages 187 and 191, taken from the "Report of the U. S. Survey for
a Route for a Pacific Railroad," present features very much like those
of Europeans; in fact, every face here could be precisely matched among
the inhabitants of the southern part of the old continent.

SHAWNEES.

On the other hand, look at the portrait of the great Italian orator and
reformer, Savonarola, on page 193. It looks more like the hunting
Indians of North-western America than any of the preceding faces. In
fact, if it was dressed with a scalp-lock it would pass muster anywhere
as a portrait of the "Man-afraid-of-his-horses," or "Sitting Bull."

SAVONAROLA.

Adam was, it appears, a red man. Winchell tells us that Adam is derived
from the red earth. The radical letters ADaM are found in ADaMaH,
"something out of which vegetation was made to germinate," to wit, the
earth. ADoM and ADOM signifies red, ruddy, bay-colored, as of a horse,
the color of a red heifer. "ADaM, a man, a human being, male or female,
red, ruddy." ("Preadamites," p.161.)

"The Arabs distinguished mankind into two races, one red, ruddy, the
other black." (Ibid.) They classed themselves among the red men.

Not only was Adam a red man, but there is evidence that, from the
highest antiquity, red was a sacred color; the gods of the ancients were
always painted red. The Wisdom of Solomon refers to this custom: "The
carpenter carved it elegantly, and formed it by the skill of his
understanding, and fashioned it to the shape of a man, or made it like
some vile beast, laying it over with vermilion, and with paint, coloring
it red, and covering every spot therein."

The idols of the Indians were also painted red, and red was the
religious color. (Lynd's MS. "Hist. of Dakotas," Library, Hist. Society,
Minn.)

The Cushites and Ethiopians, early branches of the Atlantean stock, took
their name from their "sunburnt" complexion; they were red men.

The name of the Phoenicians signified red. Himyar, the prefix of the
Himyaritic Arabians, also means red, and the Arabs were painted red on
the Egyptian monuments.

The ancient Egyptians were red men. They recognized four races of
men--the red, yellow, black, and white men. They themselves belonged to
the "Rot," or red men; the yellow men they called "Namu"--it included
the Asiatic races; the black men were called "Nahsu," and the white men
"Tamhu." The following figures are copied from Nott and Gliddon's "Types
of Mankind," p. 85, and were taken by them from the great works of
Belzoni, Champollion, and Lepsius.

In later ages so desirous were the Egyptians of preserving, the
aristocratic distinction of the color of their skin, that they
represented themselves on the monuments as of a crimson hue--an
exaggeration of their original race complexion.

In the same way we find that the ancient Aryan writings divided mankind
into four races--the white, red, yellow, and black: the four castes of
India were founded upon these distinctions in color; in fact, the word
for color in Sanscrit (varna) means caste. The red men, according to the
Mahabharata, were the Kshatriyas--the warrior caste-who were afterward
engaged in a fierce contest with the whites--the Brahmans--and were
nearly exterminated, although some of them survived, and from their
stock Buddha was born. So that not only the Mohammedan and Christian but
the Buddhistic religion seem to be derived from branches of the Hamitic
or red stock. The great Manu was also of the red race.

THE RACES OF MEN ACCORDING TO THE EGYPTIANS.

The Egyptians, while they painted themselves red-brown, represented the
nations of Palestine as yellow-brown, and the Libyans yellow-white. The
present inhabitants of Egypt range from a yellow color in the north
parts to a deep bronze. Tylor is of opinion ("Anthropology," p. 95) that
the ancient Egyptians belonged to a brown race, which embraced the
Nubian tribes and, to some extent, the Berbers of Algiers and Tunis. He
groups the Assyrians, Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks, Romans,
Andalusians, Bretons, dark Welshmen, and people of the Caucasus into one
body, and designates them as "dark whites." The Himyarite Arabs, as I
have shown, derived their name originally from their red color, and they
were constantly depicted on the Egyptian monuments as red or light
brown. Herodotus tells us that there was a nation of Libyans, called the
Maxyans, who claimed descent from the people of Troy (the walls of Troy,
we shall see, were built by Poseidon; that is to say, Troy was an
Atlantean colony). These Maxyans painted their whole bodies red. The
Zavecians, the ancestors of the Zuavas of Algiers (the tribe that gave
their name to the French Zouaves), also painted themselves red. Some of
the Ethiopians were "copper-colored." ("'Amer. Cyclop.," art. Egypt, p.
464.) Tylor says ("Anthropology," p. 160): "The language of the ancient
Egyptians, though it cannot be classed in the Semitic family with
Hebrew, has important points of correspondence, whether due to the long
intercourse between the two races in Egypt or to some deeper ancestral
connection; and such analogies also appear in the Berber languages of
North Africa."

These last were called by the ancients the Atlanteans.

"If a congregation of twelve representatives from Malacca, China, Japan,
Mongolia, Sandwich Islands, Chili, Peru, Brazil, Chickasaws, Comanches,
etc., were dressed alike, or undressed and unshaven, the most skilful
anatomist could not, from their appearance, separate them." (Fontaine's
"How the World was Peopled," pp. 147, 244.)

Ferdinand Columbus, in his relation of his father's voyages, compares
the inhabitants of Guanaani to the Canary Islanders (an Atlantean race),
and describes the inhabitants of San Domingo as still more beautiful and
fair. In Peru the Charanzanis, studied by M. Angraud, also resemble the
Canary Islanders. L'Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg imagined himself
surrounded by Arabs when all his Indians of Rabinal were around him; for
they had, he said, their complexion, features, and beard. Pierre Martyr
speaks of the Indians of the Parian Gulf as having fair hair. ("The
Human Species," p. 201.) The same author believes that tribes belonging
to the Semitic type are also found in America. He refers to "certain
traditions of Guiana, and the use in the country of a weapon entirely
characteristic of the ancient Canary Islanders."

When science is able to disabuse itself of the Mortonian theory that the
aborigines of America are all red men, and all belong to one race, we
may hope that the confluence upon the continent of widely different
races from different countries may come to be recognized and
intelligently studied. There can be no doubt that red, white, black, and
yellow men have united to form the original population of America. And
there can be as little doubt that the entire population of Europe and
the south shore of the Mediterranean is a mongrel race--a combination,
in varying proportions, of a dark-brown or red race with a white race;
the characteristics of the different nations depending upon the
proportions in which the dark and light races are mingled, for peculiar
mental and moral characteristics go with these complexions. The
red-haired people are a distinct variety of the white stock; there were
once whole tribes and nations with this color of hair; their blood is
now intermingled with all the races of men, from Palestine to Iceland.
Everything in Europe speaks of vast periods of time and long, continued
and constant interfusion of bloods, until there is not a fair-skinned
man on the Continent that has not the blood of the dark-haired race in
his veins; nor scarcely a dark-skinned man that is not lighter in hue
from intermixture with the white stock.

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