Semites and Hamites; as, for instance, Sheba and Havilah; while the race of Mash, or Meshech, is classed among the sons of Shem and the sons of Japheth. In fact, there seems to be a confusion of Hamitic and Semitic stocks. “This is shown in the blending of Hamitic and Semitic in some of the most ancient inscriptions; in the facility of intercourse between the Semites of Asia and the Hamites of Egypt; in the peaceful and unobserved absorption of all the Asiatic Hamites, and the Semitic adoption of the Hamitic gods and religious system. It is manifest that, at a period not long previous, the two families had dwelt together and spoken the same language.” (Winchell’s “Pre- Adamites,” p. 36.) Is it not more reasonable to suppose that the so-called Semitic races of Genesis were a mere division of the Hamitic stock, and that we are to look for the third great division of the sons of Noah among the Turanians?
Francis Lenormant, high authority, is of the opinion that the Turanian races are descended from Magog, the son of Japheth. He regards the Turanians as intermediate between the white and yellow races, graduating insensibly into each. “The Uzbecs, the Osmanli Turks, and the Hungarians are not to be distinguished in appearance from the most perfect branches of the white race; on the other hand, the Tchondes almost exactly resemble the Tongouses, who belong to the yellow race.
The Turanian languages are marked by the same agglutinative character found in the American races.
The Mongolian and the Indian are alike in the absence of a heavy beard.
The royal color of the Incas was yellow; yellow is the color of the imperial family in China. The religion of the Peruvians was sun-worship; “the sun was the peculiar god of the Mongols from the earliest times.”
The Peruvians regarded Pachacamac as the sovereign creator. Camac-Hya was the name of a Hindoo goddess. Haylli was the burden of every verse of the song composed in praise of the sun and the Incas. Mr. John Ranking derives the word Allah from the word Haylli, also the word Halle-lujah. In the city of Cuzco was a portion of land which none were permitted to cultivate except those of the royal blood. At certain seasons the Incas turned up the sod here, amid much rejoicing, and many ceremonies. A similar custom prevails in China: The emperor ploughs a few furrows, and twelve illustrious persons attend the plough after him.
(Du Halde, “Empire of China,” vol. i., p. 275.) The cycle of sixty years was in use among most of the nations of Eastern Asia, and among the Muyscas of the elevated plains of Bogota. The “quipu,” a knotted reckoning-cord, was in use in Peru and in China. (Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. v., p. 48.) In Peru and China “both use hieroglyphics, which are read from above downward.” (Ibid.) “It appears most evident to me,” says Humboldt, “that the monuments, methods of computing time, systems of cosmogony, and many myths of America, offer striking analogies with the ideas of Eastern Asia—analogies which indicate an ancient communication, and are not simply the result of that uniform condition in which all nations are found in the dawn of civilization.” (“Exam. Crit.,” tom. ii., p. 68.) “In the ruined cities of Cambodia, which lies farther to the east of Burmah, recent research has discovered teocallis like those in Mexico, and the remains of temples of the same type and pattern as those of Yucatan. And when we reach the sea we encounter at Suku, in Java, a teocalli which is absolutely identical with that of Tehuantepec. Mr.
Ferguson said, ‘as we advance eastward from the valley of the Euphrates, at every step we meet with forms of art becoming more and more like those of Central America.’” (“Builders of Babel,” p. 88.) Prescott says:
The coincidences are sufficiently strong to authorize a belief that the civilization of Anahuac was in some degree influenced by that of Eastern Asia; and, secondly, that the discrepancies are such as to carry back the communication to a very remote period.” (“Mexico,” vol. iii., p.
418.)
“All appearances,” continues Lenormant (“Ancient History of the East,”
vol. i., p. 64), “would lead us to regard the Turanian race as the first branch of the family of Japheth which went forth into the world; and by that premature separation, by an isolated and antagonistic existence, took, or rather preserved, a completely distinct physiognomy. . . . It is a type of the white race imperfectly developed.”
We may regard this yellow race as the first and oldest wave from Atlantis, and, therefore, reaching farthest away from the common source; then came the Hamitic race; then the Japhetic.
CHAPTER IX.
THE ANTIQUITY OF SOME OF OUR GREAT INVENTIONS.
It may seem like a flight of the imagination to suppose that the mariner’s compass was known to the inhabitants of Atlantis. And yet, if my readers are satisfied that the Atlantean, were a highly civilized maritime people, carrying on commerce with regions as far apart as Peru and Syria, we must conclude that they possessed some means of tracing their course in the great seas they traversed; and accordingly, when we proceed to investigate this subject, we find that as far back as we may go in the study of the ancient races of the world, we find them possessed of a knowledge of the virtues of the magnetic stone, and in the habit of utilizing it. The people of Europe, rising a few centuries since out of a state of semi-barbarism, have been in the habit of claiming the invention of many things which they simply borrowed from the older nations. This was the case with the mariner’s compass. It was believed for many years that it was first invented by an Italian named Amalfi, A.D. 1302. In that interesting work, Goodrich’s “Life of Columbus,” we find a curious history of the magnetic compass prior to that time, from which we collate the following points: “In A.D. 868 it was employed by the Northmen.” (“The Landnamabok,” vol.
i., chap. 2.) An Italian poem Of A.D. 1190 refers to it as in use among the Italian sailors at that date. In the ancient language of the Hindoos, the Sanscrit—which has been a dead language for twenty-two hundred years—the magnet was called “the precious stone beloved of Iron.” The Talmud speaks of it as “the stone of attraction;” and it is alluded to in the early Hebrew prayers as Kalamitah, the same name given it by the Greeks, from the reed upon which the compass floated. The Phoenicians were familiar with the use of the magnet. At the prow of their vessels stood the figure of a woman (Astarte) holding a cross in one hand and pointing the way with the other; the cross represented the compass, which was a magnetized needle, floating in water crosswise upon a piece of reed or wood. The cross became the coat of arms of the Phoenicians—not only, possibly, as we have shown, as a recollection of the four rivers of Atlantis, but because it represented the secret of their great sea-voyages, to which they owed their national greatness.
The hyperborean magician, Abaras, carried “a guiding arrow,” which Pythagoras gave him, “in order that it may be useful to him in all difficulties in his long journey.” (“Herodotus,” vol. iv., p. 36.) The magnet was called the “Stone of Hercules.” Hercules was the patron divinity of the Phoenicians. He was, as we have shown elsewhere, one of the gods of Atlantis—probably one of its great kings and navigators.
The Atlanteans were, as Plato tells us, a maritime, commercial people, trading up the Mediterranean as far as Egypt and Syria, and across the Atlantic to “the whole opposite continent that surrounds the sea;” the Phoenicians, as their successors and descendants, and colonized on the shores of the Mediterranean, inherited their civilization and their maritime habits, and with these that invention without which their great voyages were impossible. From them the magnet passed to the Hindoos, and from them to the Chinese, who certainly possessed it at an early date.
