The illustrations on page 397 strikingly confirm Mr. Ferguson’s views.
“The sloping jambs, the window cornice, the polygonal masonry, and other forms so closely resemble what is found in the old Pelasgic cities of Greece and Italy, that it is difficult to resist the conclusion that there may be some relation between them.”
Even the mode of decorating their palaces and temples finds a parallel in the Old World. A recent writer says: “We may end by observing, what seems to have escaped Senor Lopez, that the interior of an Inca palace, with its walls covered with gold, as described by Spaniards, with its artificial golden flowers and golden beasts, must have been exactly like the interior of the house of Alkinous or Menelaus- “‘The doors were framed of gold,
Where underneath the brazen floor doth glass Silver pilasters, which with grace uphold Lintel of silver framed; the ring was burnished gold, And dogs on each side of the door there stand, Silver and golden.’”
“I can personally testify” (says Winchell, “Preadamites,” p. 387) “that a study of ancient Peruvian pottery has constantly reminded me of forms with which we are familiar in Egyptian archaeology.”
Dr. Schliemann, in his excavations of the ruins of Troy, found a number of what he calls “owl-headed idols” and vases. I give specimens on page 398 and page 400.
In Peru we find vases with very much the same style of face.
I might pursue those parallels much farther; but it seems to me that these extraordinary coincidences must have arisen either from identity of origin or long-continued ancient intercourse. There can be little doubt that a fair- skinned, light-haired, bearded race, holding the religion which Plato says prevailed in Atlantis, carried an Atlantean civilization at an early day up the valley of the Amazon to the heights of Bolivia and Peru, precisely as a similar emigration of Aryans went westward to the shores of the Mediterranean and Caspian, and it is very likely that these diverse migrations habitually spoke the same language.
Senor Vincente Lopez, a Spanish gentleman of Montevideo, in 1872
published a work entitled “Les Races Aryennes in Perou,” in which he attempts to prove that the great Quichua language, which the Incas imposed on their subjects over a vast extent of territory, and which is still a living tongue in Peru and Bolivia, is really a branch of the great Aryan or Indo-European speech. I quote Andrew Lang’s summary of the proofs on this point:
OWL-HEADED
VASE
,
TROY
“Senor Lopez’s view, that the Peruvians were Aryans who left the parent stock long before the Teutonic or Hellenic races entered Europe, is supported by arguments drawn from language, from the traces of institutions, from religious beliefs, from legendary records, and artistic remains. The evidence from language is treated scientifically, and not as a kind of ingenious guessing. Senor Lopez first combats the idea that the living dialect of Peru is barbarous and fluctuating. It is not one of the casual and shifting forms of speech produced by nomad races. To which of the stages of language does this belong—the agglutinative, in which one root is fastened on to another, and a word is formed in which the constitutive elements are obviously distinct, or the inflexional, where the auxiliary roots get worn down and are only distinguishable by the philologist? As all known Aryan tongues are inflexional, Senor Lopez may appear to contradict himself when he says that Quichua is an agglutinative Aryan language. But he quotes Mr. Max Mueller’s opinion that there must have been a time when the germs of Aryan tongues had not yet reached the inflexional stage, and shows that while the form of Quichua is agglutinative, as in Turanian, the roots of words are Aryan. If this be so, Quichua may be a linguistic missing link.
“When we first look at Quichua, with its multitude of words, beginning with hu, and its great preponderance of q’s, it seems almost as odd as Mexican. But many of these forms are due to a scanty alphabet, and really express familiar sounds; and many, again, result from the casual spelling of the Spaniards. We must now examine some of the-forms which Aryan roots are supposed to take in Quichua. In the first place, Quichua abhors the shock of two consonants. Thus, a word like ple’w in Greek would be unpleasant to the Peruvian’s ear, and he says pillui, ‘I sail.’
The plu, again, in pluma, a feather, is said to be found in pillu, ‘to fly.’ Quichua has no v, any more than Greek has, and just as the Greeks had to spell Roman words beginning with V with Ou, like Valerius—Ou?ale’rios—so, where Sanscrit has v, Quichua has sometimes hu. Here is a list of words in hu:
----------------------------+ |
QUICHUA
. |
SANSCRIT
. |
----------------------------+ | Huakia, to call. | Vacc, to speak. |
----------------------------+ | Huasi, a house. | Vas, to inhabit. |
----------------------------+ | Huayra, air, au?’ra. | Va, to breathe. |
----------------------------+ | Huasa, the back. | Vas, to be able (pouvoir). |
----------------------------+
“There is a Sanscrit root, kr, to act, to do: this root is found In more than three hundred names of peoples and places in Southern America. Thus there are the Caribs, whose name may have the same origin as that of our old friends the Carians, and mean the Braves, and their land the home of the Braves, like Kaleva-la, in Finnish. The same root gives kara, the hand, the Greek xei’r, and kkalli, brave, which a person of fancy may connect with kalo’s. Again, Quichua has an ‘alpha privative’—thus A-stani means ‘I change a thing’s place;’ for ni or mi is the first person singular, and, added to the root of a verb, is the sign of the first person of the present indicative. For instance, can means being, and Can-mi, or Cani, is, ‘I am.’ In the same way Munanmi, or Munani, is ‘I love,’ and Apanmi, or Apani, ‘I carry.’ So Lord Strangford was wrong when he supposed that the last verb in mi lived with the last patriot
