The Origin of the Mound BuildersCoffin, Alfred Oscar
History
The Origin of the Mound Builders
Coffin, Alfred Oscar
Indians of Mexico -- Antiquities; Mexico -- Antiquities; Mound-builders
Diodorus Siculus relates:—“Over against Africa lies a very great island,
in the vast ocean, many days’ sail from Libya westward. The soil there
is very fruitful, a great part whereof is mountainous, but much likewise
champaign, which is the most sweet and pleasant part, for it is watered
by several navigable streams, and beautiful with many gardens of
pleasure, planted by divers sorts of trees and an abundance of orchards.
The towns are adorned with many stately buildings and banqueting-houses,
pleasantly situated in the gardens and orchards.”
Theopompos, who wrote in the fourth century B.C., tells substantially
the same story, which was given by Silenus to the ancient king Midas,
recorded by Aristotle. The Gauls possessed traditions on this subject,
which were collected by the Roman historian Timagenes, who lived in the
first century before Christ. This record states that three distinct
peoples dwelt in Gaul (France): (1) The indigenous population, (2) The
invaders from a distant island (Atlantis), (3) The Aryan Gauls.
Marcellus, also, in a book on the Ethiopians, speaks of seven islands
lying in the Atlantic Ocean near Europe, which we may undoubtedly
identify with the Canaries; but he adds: “The inhabitants of these
islands preserve the memory of a much greater island, Atlantis, which
had, for a long time, exercised dominion over the smaller ones.”
Now all these ancient writers clearly state that a continent existed
west of Africa, which was destroyed by a great cataclysm. The tribes in
Central America and Mexico, in Venezuela, British and Dutch Guiana,
distinctly describe these cataclysms, one by water, one by fire, and a
third by winds. Catlin, in his “Lifted and Subsided Rocks of America,”
describes the tradition of such a cataclysm.
The Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, in his “Quatre Lettres sur le Mexique,”
and “Sources de l’Histoire Primitive du Mexique,” has translated the
“Teo Amoxtli,” which is the Toltecan mythological history of the
cataclysm of the Antilles. The festival of “Izcalli” was instituted to
commemorate this terrible calamity, in which “princes and people humbled
themselves before the Divinity, and besought him not to renew the
frightful convulsions.”
It is claimed that, by this catastrophe, an area larger than France
became engulfed, including the Lesser Antilles, the extensive banks at
their eastern extremity, the peninsulas of Yucatan, Honduras and
Guatemala, and the great estuaries of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of
Mexico. With Yucatan and Guatemala went down the splendid cities of
Palenque and Uxmal, and others whose sites and inhabitants are now in
the ocean bed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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