Atlantis: The Antedeluvian WorldDonnelly, Ignatius
History
Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World
Donnelly, Ignatius
Atlantis (Legendary place); Deluge; Ethnology
Dr. Lund, a Swedish naturalist, found in the bone caves of Minas-Geraes,
Brazil, ancient human bones associated with the remains of extinct
quadrupeds. "These skulls," says Lund, "show not only the peculiarity of
the American race but in an excessive degree, even to the entire
disappearance of the forehead." Sir Robert Schomburgh found on some of
the affluents of the Orinoco a tribe known as Frog Indians, whose heads
were flattened by Nature, as shown in newly-born children.
In the accompanying plate we show the difference in the conformation of
the forehead in various races. The upper dotted line, A, represents the
shape of the European forehead; the next line, B, that of the
Australian; the next, C, that of the Mound Builder of the United States;
the next, D, that of the Guanche of the Canary Islands; and the next, E,
that of a skull from the Inca cemetery of Peru. We have but to compare
these lines with the skulls of the Egyptians, Kurds, and the heroic type
of heads in the statues of the gods of Greece, to see that there was
formerly an ancient race marked by a receding forehead; and that the
practice of flattening the skull was probably an attempt to approximate
the shape of the head to this standard of an early civilized and
dominant people.
Not only do we find the same receding forehead in the skulls of the
ancient races of Europe and America, and the same attempt to imitate
this natural and peculiar conformation by artificial flattening of the
head, but it has been found (see Henry Gillman's "Ancient Man in
Michigan," "Smithsonian Report," 1875, p. 242) that the Mound Builders
and Peruvians of America, and the Neolithic people of France and the
Canary Islands, had alike an extraordinary custom of boring a circular
bole in the top of the skulls of their dead, so that the soul might
readily pass in and out. More than this, it has been found that in all
these ancient populations the skeletons exhibit a remarkable degree of
platicnemism, or flattening of the tibiæ or leg bones. (Ibid., 1873,
p. 367.) In this respect the Mound Builders of Michigan were identical
with the man of Cro Magnon and the ancient inhabitants of Wales.
The annexed ancient Egyptian heads, copied from the monuments, indicate
either that the people of the Nile deformed their heads by pressure upon
the front of the skull, or that
EGYPTIAN HEADS.
there was some race characteristic which gave this appearance to their
heads. These heads are all the heads of priests, and therefore
represented the aristocratic class.
The first illustration below is taken from a stucco relief found in a
temple at Palenque, Central America. The second is from an Egyptian
monument of the time of Rameses IV.
The outline drawing on the following page shows the form of the skull of
the royal Inca line: the receding forehead here seems to be natural, and
not the result of artificial compression.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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