and ground their corn. The presence of millers shows that they had proceeded beyond the primitive condition where each family ground its corn in its own mill. They used fire, and cooked and baked their food; they wove cloth and wore clothing; they spun wool; they possessed the different metals, even iron: they had gold. The word for “water” also meant “salt made from water,” from which it might be inferred that the water with which they were familiar was saltwater. It is evident they manufactured salt by evaporating salt water. They possessed boats and ships. They had progressed so far as to perfect “a decimal system of enumeration, in itself,” says Max Mueller, “one of the most marvellous achievements of the human mind, based on an abstract conception of quantity, regulated by a philosophical classification, and yet conceived, nurtured, and finished before the soil of Europe was trodden by Greek, Roman, Slav, or Teuton.”
ANCIENT
EGYPTIAN
PLOUGH
And herein we find another evidence of relationship between the Aryans and the people of Atlantis. Although Plato does not tell us that the Atlanteans possessed the decimal system of numeration, nevertheless there are many things in his narrative which point to that conclusion “There were ten kings ruling over ten provinces; the whole country was divided into military districts or squares ten stadia each way; the total force of chariots was ten thousand; the great ditch or canal was one hundred feet deep and ten thousand stadia long; there were one hundred Nereids,” etc. In the Peruvian colony the decimal system clearly obtained: “The army had heads of ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. . . . The community at large was registered in groups, under the control of officers over tens, fifties, hundreds, and so on.” (Herbert Spencer, “Development of Political Institutions,” chap.
x.) The same division into tens and hundreds obtained among the Anglo-Saxons.
Where, we ask, could this ancient nation, which existed before Greek was Greek, Celt was Celt, Hindoo was Hindoo, or Goth was Goth, have been located! The common opinion says, in Armenia or Bactria, in Asia. But where in Asia could they have found a country so peaceful as to know no terms for war or bloodshed;—a country so civilized as to possess no wild beasts save the bear, wolf, and serpent? No people could have been developed in Asia without bearing in its language traces of century-long battles for life with the rude and barbarous races around them; no nation could have fought for ages for existence against “man-eating”
tigers, lions, elephants, and hyenas, without bearing the memory of these things in their tongue. A tiger, identical with that of Bengal, still exists around Lake Aral, in Asia; from time to time it is seen in Siberia. “The last tiger killed in 1828 was on the Lena, in latitude fifty-two degrees thirty minutes, in a climate colder than that of St.
Petersburg and Stockholm.”
The fathers of the Aryan race must have dwelt for many thousand years so completely protected from barbarians and wild beasts that they at last lost all memory of them, and all words descriptive of them; and where could this have been possible save in some great, long-civilized land, surrounded by the sea, and isolated from the attack of the savage tribes that occupied the rest of the world? And if such a great civilized nation had dwelt for centuries in Asia, Europe, or Africa, why have not their monuments long ago been discovered and identified? Where is the race who are their natural successors, and who must have continued to live after them in that sheltered and happy land, where they knew no human and scarcely any animal enemies? Why would any people have altogether left such a home? Why, when their civilization had spread to the ends of the earth, did it cease to exist in the peaceful region where it originated?
Savage nations cannot usually count beyond five. This people had names for the numerals up to one hundred, and the power, doubtless, of combining these to still higher powers, as three hundred, five hundred, ten hundred, etc. Says a high authority, “If any more proof were wanted as to the reality of that period which must have preceded the dispersion of the Aryan race, we might appeal to the Aryan numerals as irrefragable evidence of that long-continued intellectual life which characterizes that period.” Such a degree of progress implies necessarily an alphabet, writing, commerce, and trade, even as the existence of words for boats and ships has already implied navigation.
In what have we added to the civilization of this ancient people? Their domestic animals were the same as our own, except one fowl adopted from America. In the past ten thousand years we have added one bird to their list of domesticated animals! They raised wheat and wool, and spun and wove as we do, except that we have added some mechanical contrivances to produce the same results. Their metals are ours. Even iron, the triumph, as we had supposed, of more modern times, they had already discovered.
And it must not be forgotten that Greek mythology tells us that the god-like race who dwelt on Olympus, that great island “in the midst of the Atlantic,” in the remote west, wrought in iron; and we find the remains of an iron sword and meteoric iron weapons in the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, while the name of the metal is found in the ancient languages of Peru and Chili, and the Incas worked in iron on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
A still further evidence of the civilization of this ancient race is found in the fact that, before the dispersion from their original home, the Aryans had reached such a degree of development that they possessed a regularly organized religion: they worshipped God, they believed in an evil spirit, they believed in a heaven for the just. All this presupposes temples, priests, sacrifices, and an orderly state of society.
We have seen that Greek mythology is really a history of the kings and queens of Atlantis.
When we turn to that other branch of the great Aryan family, the Hindoos, we find that their gods are also the kings of Atlantis. The Hindoo god Varuna is conceded to be the Greek god Uranos, who was the founder of the royal family of Atlantis.
In the Veda we find a hymn to “King Varuna,” in which occurs this passage:
“This earth, too, belongs to Varuna, the king, and this wide sky, with its ends far apart. The two seas are Varuna’s loins; he is contained also in this drop of water.”
Again in the Veda we find another hymn to King Varuna: “He who knows the place of the birds that fly through the sky; who on the waters knows the ships. He, the upholder of order, who knows the twelve months with the offspring of each, and knows the month that is engendered afterward.”
This verse would seem to furnish additional proof that the Vedas were written by a maritime people; and in the allusion to the twelve months we are reminded of the Peruvians, who also divided the year into twelve parts of thirty days each, and afterward added six days to complete the year. The Egyptians and Mexicans also had intercalary days for the same purpose.
But, above all, it must be remembered that the Greeks, an Aryan race, in their mythological traditions, show the closest relationship to Atlantis. At-tika and At-hens are reminiscences of Ad, and we are told that Poseidon, god and founder of Atlantis, founded Athens. We find in the “Eleusinian mysteries” an Atlantean institution; their
