clinging in his hair, Into her room, all wet and dripping, A drowned boy on his bosom bear. “Over Death Sea on a bridge of silver The child to his Father’s arms had passed! Heaven was nearer than Tir-na-n’oge, And the golden city was reached at last.”
CHAPTER VIII.
THE OLDEST SON OF NOAH.
That eminent authority, Dr. Max Mueller, says, in his “Lectures on the Science of Religion,”
“If we confine ourselves to the Asiatic continent, with its important peninsula of Europe, we find that in the vast desert of drifting human speech three, and only three, oases have been formed in which, before the beginning of all history, language became permanent and traditional—assumed, in fact, a new character, a character totally different from the original character of the floating and constantly varying speech of human beings. These three oases of language are known by the name of Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic. In these three centres, more particularly in the Aryan and Semitic, language ceased to be natural; its growth was arrested, and it became permanent, solid, petrified, or, if you like, historical speech. I have always maintained that this centralization and traditional conservation of language could only have been the result of religious and political influences, and I now mean to show that we really have clear evidence of three independent settlements of religion—the Turanian, the Aryan, and the Semitic—concomitantly with the three great settlements of language.”
There can be no doubt that the Aryan and another branch, which Mueller calls Semitic, but which may more properly be called Hamitic, radiated from Noah; it is a question yet to be decided whether the Turanian or Mongolian is also a branch of the Noachic or Atlantean stock.
To quote again from Max Mueller:
“If it can only be proved that the religions of the Aryan nations are united by the same bonds of a real relationship which have enabled us to treat their languages as so many varieties of the same type—and so also of the Semitic—the field thus opened is vast enough, and its careful clearing, and cultivation will occupy several generations of scholars.
And this original relationship, I believe, can be proved. Names of the principal deities, words also expressive of the most essential elements of religion, such as prayer, sacrifice, altar, spirit, law, and faith, have been preserved among the Aryan and among the Semitic nations, and these relics admit of one explanation only. After that, a comparative study of the Turanian religions may be approached with better hope of success; for that there was not only a primitive Aryan and a primitive Semitic religion, but likewise a primitive Turanian religion, before each of these primeval races was broken up and became separated in language, worship and national sentiment, admits, I believe, of little doubt. . . . There was a period during which the ancestors of the Semitic family had not yet been divided, whether in language or in religion. That period transcends the recollection of every one of the Semitic races, in the same way as neither Hindoos, Greeks, nor Romans have any recollection of the time when they spoke a common language, and worshipped their Father in heaven by a name that was as yet neither Sanscrit, nor Greek, nor Latin. But I do not hesitate to call this Prehistoric Period historical in the best sense of the word. It was a real period, because, unless it was real, all the realities of the Semitic languages and the Semitic religions, such as we find them after their separation, would be unintelligible. Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic point to a common source as much as Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin; and unless we can bring ourselves to doubt that the Hindoos, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Teutons derived the worship of their principal deity from their common Aryan sanctuary, we shall not be able to deny that there was likewise a primitive religion of the whole Semitic race, and that El, the Strong One in heaven, was invoked by the ancestors of all the Semitic races before there were Babylonians in Babylon, Phoenicians in Sidon and Tyrus—before there were Jews in Mesopotamia or Jerusalem.
The evidence of the Semitic is the same as that of the Aryan languages: the conclusion cannot be different….
“These three classes of religion are not to be mistaken-as little as the three classes of language, the Turanian, the Semitic, and the Aryan.
They mark three events in the most ancient history of the world, events which have determined the whole fate of the human race, and of which we ourselves still feel the consequences in our language, in our thoughts, and in our religion.”
We have seen that all the evidence points to the fact that this original seat of the Phoenician-Hebrew family was in Atlantis.
The great god of the so-called Semites was El, the Strong One, from whose name comes the Biblical names Beth-el, the house of God; Ha-el, the strong one; El-ohim, the gods; El-oah, God; and from the same name is derived the Arabian name of God, Al-lah.
Another evidence of the connection between the Greeks, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Atlanteans is shown in the name of Adonis.
The Greeks tell us that Adonis was the lover of Aphrodite, or Venus, who was the offspring of Uranus—”she came out of the sea;” Uranus was the father of Chronos, and the grandfather of Poseidon, king of Atlantis.
Now We find Adonai in the Old Testament used exclusively as the name of Jehovah, while among the Phoenicians Adonai was the supreme deity. In both cases the root Ad is probably a reminiscence of Ad-lantis.
There seem to exist similar connections between the Egyptian and the Turanian mythology. The great god of Egypt was Neph or Num; the chief god of the Samoyedes is Num; and Max Mueller established an identity between the Num of the Samoyedes and the god Yum-ala of the Finns, and probably with the name of the god Nam of the Thibetians.
That mysterious people, the Etruscans, who inhabited part of Italy, and whose bronze implements agreed exactly in style and workmanship with those which we think were derived from Atlantis, were, it is now claimed, a branch of the Turanian family.
“At a recent meeting of the English Philological Society great interest was excited by a paper on Etruscan Numerals, by the Rev. Isaac Taylor.
He stated that the long-sought key to the Etruscan language had at last been discovered. Two dice had been found in a tomb, with their six faces marked with words instead of pips. He showed that these words were identical with the first six digits in the Altaic branch of the Turanian family of speech. Guided by this clew, it was easy to prove that the grammar and vocabulary of the 3000 Etruscan inscriptions were also Altaic. The words denoting kindred, the pronouns, the conjugations, and the declensions, corresponded closely to those of the Tartar tribes of Siberia. The Etruscan mythology proved to be essentially the same as that of the Kalevala, the great Finnic epic.”
