Atlantis: The Antedeluvian WorldDonnelly, Ignatius
History
Atlantis: The Antedeluvian World
Donnelly, Ignatius
Atlantis (Legendary place); Deluge; Ethnology
"The struggle lasted many years, all the might which the Olympians could
bring to bear being useless, until, on the advice of Gæa, Zeus set free
the Kyklopes and the Hekatoncheires" (that is, brought the ships into
play), "of whom the former fashioned thunder-bolts for him, while the
latter advanced on his side with force equal to the shock of an
earthquake. The earth trembled down to lowest Tartarus as Zeus now
appeared with his terrible weapon and new allies. Old Chaos thought his
hour had come, as from a continuous blaze of thunder-bolts the earth
took fire, and the waters seethed in the sea. The rebels were partly
slain or consumed, and partly hurled into deep chasms, with rocks and
hills reeling after them."
Do not these words picture the explosion of a mine with a "force equal
to the shock of an earthquake?"
We have already shown that the Kyklopes and Hekatoncheires were probably
great war-ships, armed with some explosive material in the nature of
gunpowder.
Zeus, the king of Atlantis, was known as "the thunderer," and was
represented armed with thunder-bolts.
Some ancient nation must, in the most remote ages, have invented
gunpowder; and is it unreasonable to attribute it to that "great
original race" rather than to any one people of their posterity, who
seem to have borrowed all the other arts from them; and who, during many
thousands of years, did not add a single new invention to the list they
received from Atlantis?
Iron.--have seen that the Greek mythological legends asserted that
before the submergence of the great race over whom their gods reigned
there had been not only an Age of Bronze but an Age of Iron. This metal
was known to the Egyptians in the earliest ages; fragments of iron have
been found in the oldest pyramids. The Iron Age in Northern Europe far
antedated intercourse with the Greeks or Romans. In the mounds of the
Mississippi Valley, as I have shown, the remains of iron implements have
been found. In the "Mercurio Peruano" (tom. i., p. 201, 1791) it is
stated that "anciently the Peruvian sovereigns worked magnificent iron
mines at Ancoriames, on the west shore of Lake Titicaca." "It is
remarkable," says Molina, "that iron, which has been thought unknown to
the ancient Americans, had particular names in some of their tongues."
In official Peruvian it was called quillay, and in Chilian panilic. The
Mound Builders fashioned implements out of meteoric iron. (Foster's
"Prehistoric Races," p. 333.)
As we find this metal known to man in the earliest ages on both sides of
the Atlantic, the presumption is very strong that it was borrowed by the
nations, east and west, from Atlantis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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