Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History: An address, delivered before the New York Historical; Society, at its forty-second anniversary, 17th November 1846 — John Shaqi
Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History: An address, delivered before the New York Historical; Society, at its forty-second anniversary, 17th November 1846Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe
History
Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History: An address, delivered before the New York Historical; Society, at its forty-second anniversary, 17th November 1846
Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe
America -- Antiquities; Indians -- Origin
When we turn our view from this ancient centre of Indian power, to the
latitudes of the American Republic, we find the territory covered, at
the opening of the sixteenth century, with numerous tribes, of divers
languages, existing in the mere hunter state, or at most, with some
habits of horticulture superadded. They had neither cattle nor arts.
They were bowmen and spearmen--roving and predatory, with very little,
if any thing, in their traditions, to link them to these prior central
families of men, but with nearly every thing in their physical and
intellectual type, to favor such a generic affiliation. They erected
groups of mounds, to sacrifice to the sun, moon and stars. They were,
originally, fire-worshippers. They spoke ONE general class of
transpositive languages. They had implements of copper, as well as of
silex, and porphyries. They made cooking vessels of tempered clay. They
carved very beautiful and perfect models of birds and quadrupeds, out
of stone, as we see in some recently opened mounds. They cultivated the
most important of all the ancient Mexican grains, the zea mays. They
raised the tobacco plant, to be offered, to their Gods, as
frankincense. They used the Aztec drum in their religious ceremonies
and war dances. They employed the very ancient Asiatic art of recording
ideas, by means of representative devices. They believed in the
oriental doctrines of transformation, and the power of necromancy.
Their oral fictions on this head, are so replete with fancy, that they
might give scope to the lyre of some future western Ovid. They held,
with Pythagoras, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. They
believed, indeed, in duplicate souls. They believed with Zoroaster, in
the two great creative and antagonistical principles of Ormusd and
Ahriman, and they had THEN, and have STILL, an influential and powerful
order of priests, who uphold the principles of a sacred fire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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