Atlantis: The Antedeluvian WorldDonnelly, Ignatius
History
Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World
Donnelly, Ignatius
Atlantis (Legendary place); Deluge; Ethnology
"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 archæology."
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.
Señor Vincente Lopez, a Spanish gentleman of Montevideo, in 1872
published a work entitled "Les Races Aryennes in Pérou," 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
"Señor 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. Señor 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, Señor Lopez may appear to contradict himself when he says
that Quichua is an agglutinative Aryan language. But he quotes Mr. Max
Müller'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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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