we cannot remember that the origin of all the great food-plants, such as wheat, oats, barley, rye, and maize, is lost in the remote past; and that all the domesticated animals, the horse, the ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and the hog had been reduced to subjection to man in ages long previous to written history, without having the conclusion forced upon us irresistibly that beyond Egypt and Greece, beyond Chaldea and China, there existed a mighty civilization, of which these states were but the broken fragments.
CHAPTER X.
THE ARYAN COLONIES FROM ATLANTIS.
We come now to another question: “Did the Aryan or Japhetic race come from Atlantis?”
If the Aryans are the Japhetic race, and if Japheth was one of the sons of the patriarch who escaped from the Deluge, then assuredly, if the tradition of Genesis be true, the Aryans came from the drowned land, to wit, Atlantis. According to Genesis, the descendants of the Japheth who escaped out of the Flood with Noah are the Ionians, the inhabitants of the Morea, the dwellers on the Cilician coast of Asia Minor, the Cyprians, the Dodoneans of Macedonia, the Iberians, and the Thracians.
These are all now recognized as Aryans, except the Iberians.
“From non-Biblical sources,” says Winchell, “we obtain further information respecting the early dispersion of the Japhethites or Indo-Europeans—called also Aryans. All determinations confirm the Biblical account of their primitive residence in the same country with the Hamites and Semites. Rawlinson informs us that even Aryan roots are mingled with Presemitic in some of the old inscriptions of Assyria. The precise region where these three families dwelt in a common home has not been pointed out.” (“Preadamites,” p. 43.) I have shown in the chapter in relation to Peru that all the languages of the Hamites, Semites, and Japhethites are varieties of one aboriginal speech.
The centre of the Aryan migrations (according to popular opinion) within the Historical Period was Armenia. Here too is Mount Ararat, where it is said the ark rested—another identification with the Flood regions, as it represents the usual transfer of the Atlantis legend by an Atlantean people to a high mountain in their new home.
Now turn to a map: Suppose the ships of Atlantis to have reached the shores of Syria, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, where dwelt a people who, as we have seen, used the Central American Maya alphabet; the Atlantis ships are then but two hundred miles distant from Armenia.
But these ships need not stop at Syria, they can go by the Dardanelles and the Black Sea, by uninterrupted water communication, to the shores of Armenia itself. If we admit, then, that it was from Armenia the Aryans stocked Europe and India, there is no reason why the original population of Armenia should not have been themselves colonists from Atlantis.
But we have seen that in the earliest ages, before the first Armenian migration of the historical Aryans, a people went from Iberian Spain and settled in Ireland, and the language of this people, it is now admitted, is Aryan. And these Iberians were originally, according to tradition, from the West.
The Mediterranean Aryans are known to have been in Southeastern Europe, along the shores of the Mediterranean, 2000 B.C. They at that early date possessed the plough; also wheat, rye, barley, gold, silver, and bronze.
Aryan faces are found depicted upon the monuments of Egypt, painted four thousand years before the time of Christ. “The conflicts between the Kelts (an Aryan race) and the Iberians were far anterior in date to the settlements of the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, and Noachites on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea.” (“American Cyclopaedia,” art.
Basques.) There is reason to believe that these Kelts were originally part of the population and Empire of Atlantis. We are told (Rees’s “British Encyclopaedia,” art. Titans) that “Mercury, one of the Atlantean gods, was placed as ruler over the Celtae, and became their great divinity.” F. Pezron, in his “Antiquity of the Celtae,” makes out that the Celtae were the same as the Titans, the giant race who rebelled in Atlantis, and “that their princes were the same with the giants of Scripture.” He adds that the word Titan “is perfect Celtic, and comes from tit, the earth, and ten or den, man, and hence the Greeks very properly also called them terriginae, or earth-born.” And it will be remembered that Plato uses the same phrase when he speaks of the race into which Poseidon intermarried as “the earth-born primeval men of that country.”
The Greeks, who are Aryans, traced their descent from the people who were destroyed by the Flood, as did other races clearly Aryan.
“The nations who are comprehended under the common appellation of Indo-European,” says Max Mueller—”the Hindoos, the Persians, the Celts, Germans, Romans, Greeks, and Slavs—do not only share the same words and the same grammar, slightly modified in each country, but they seem to have likewise preserved a mass of popular traditions which had grown up before they left their common home.”
“Bonfey, L. Geiger, and other students of the ancient Indo-European languages, have recently advanced the opinion that the original home of the Indo-European races must be sought in Europe, because their stock of words is rich in the names of plants and animals, and contains names of seasons that are not found in tropical countries or anywhere in Asia.”
(“American Cyclopaedia,” art. Ethnology.) By the study of comparative philology, or the seeking out of the words common to the various branches of the Aryan race before they separated, we are able to reconstruct an outline of the civilization of that ancient people. Max Mueller has given this subject great study, and availing ourselves of his researches we can determine the following facts as to the progenitors of the Aryan stock: They were a civilized race; they possessed the institution of marriage; they recognized the relationship of father, mother, son, daughter, grandson, brother, sister, mother-in-law, father-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law, and had separate words for each of these relationships, which we are only able to express by adding the words “in-law.” They recognized also the condition of widows, or “the husbandless.” They lived in an organized society, governed by a king.
They possessed houses with doors and solid walls. They had wagons and carriages. They possessed family names. They dwelt in towns and cities, on highways. They were not hunters or nomads. They were a peaceful people; the warlike words in the different Aryan languages cannot be traced back to this original race. They lived in a country having few wild beasts; the only wild animals whose names can be assigned to this parent stock being the bear, the wolf, and the serpent. The name of the elephant, “the beast with a hand,” occurs only twice in the “Rig-Veda;”
a singular omission if the Aryans were from time immemorial an Asiatic race; and “when it does occur, it is in such a way as to show that he was still an object of wonder and terror to them.” (Whitney’s “Oriental and Linguistic Studies,” p. 26.) They possessed nearly all the domestic animals we now have—the ox and the cow, the horse, the dog, the sheep, the goat, the hog, the donkey, and the goose. They divided the year into twelve months. They were farmers; they used the plough; their name as a race (Aryan) was derived from it; they were, par excellence, ploughmen; they raised various kinds of grain, including flax, barley, hemp, and wheat; they had mills and millers,
