The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studiesWilson, Daniel, Sir
History
The lost Atlantis, and other ethnographic studies
Wilson, Daniel, Sir
America -- Antiquities; Atlantis (Legendary place); Ethnology -- America; Indians of North America -- Antiquities
But, leaving the estimate of centuries out of consideration, in the
researches into the origin of the peculiar native civilisation of
America here referred to, the recently deciphered Akkad is accepted as
the typical language of the Sumerian class. This is assumed to have
started from High Asia, and to have passed on to Babylonia; while
another branch diffused itself by India and Indo-China, and thence, by
way of the islands of the Pacific, reached America. Hence, in an
illustrative table of Sumerian words arranged under four heads, as
Western, Indo-Chinese, Peruvian, and Mexican, etc., it is noted that
“while in some cases a root may be traced throughout, it will be seen
that more commonly the western and American roots or types, cross in the
Indo-Chinese region.” But another and older influence, related to the
Agaw of the Nile region, is also traced in the Guarani, Omagua, and
other languages of South America, indicating evidences of more remote
relations with the Old World, and with the African continent. This is
supposed to have been displaced by a Sumerian migration by which the
Aymara domination was established in Peru, and the Maya element
introduced into Yucatan. Those movements are assumed to belong to an era
of civilisation, during which the maritime enterprise of the Pacific may
have been carried on upon a scale unknown to the most adventurous of
modern Malay navigators, notwithstanding the essentially maritime
character by which the race is still distinguished. All this implies
that the highway to the Pacific was familiar to both continents; and
hence a second migration is recognised, in certain linguistic relations,
between the Siamese and other languages of Indo-China, and the Quichua
and Aztec of Peru and Mexico. But the problem of the origin of the races
of the western continent, and of the sources of its native civilisation,
is still in that preliminary stage in which the accumulation of
materials on which future induction may be based is of more value than
the most comprehensive generalisations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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