V.
Deductions.
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We now proceed to discuss the relation of the Mound-builders to the inhabitants of Atlantis, or their immediate neighbors, the Egyptians. Dr. Waitz, in his “Anthropology of Primitive Peoples,” observes: “The first elements of civilization, as far as history reaches, always appear as communicated from one people to another; and of no people can it be proved how, where and when they have become civilized by their own inherent power.” Now, Winchell in his genealogical charts, represents the entire peopling of the Pacific Slope from Alaska to Chili by Mongoloid branches, and the world knows that the civilization of the Chinese is and has always been a petrified fossil. The race is absolutely devoid of civilizing qualities. Their state is founded upon the worship of the shades of their ancestors. Their exalted egotism has for ages resisted every attempt to force advancement among them, and the only thing that we can call development among them is atavism.
To say that such a people gave rise to the Esquimaux, is to verify all history; to say that they are the source of the Astec civilization and Inca sun-worship, is to perpetuate an anthropological paradox.
Empiricism alone holds but a secondary place in establishing scientific truth, and all à priori reasoning must hold precedence, when analogy and affinity would supplement the existing links of discontinued evidence.
Separated by a channel only fifty miles wide, we may with justice assume that the civilization of Atlantis and Egypt was very similar. Egypt is the only land of the ancient world where pyramids are found. On a direct line of the trade winds, in Yucatan, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the Ohio Valley, we find other pyramids. In Egypt we find the temple emblazoned with hieroglyphics chiseled in the solid rock, describing the history of one of the oldest civilizations in the world. In Uxmal, Mexico, Copan and Palenque are tablets, friezes, bas-reliefs, facades and hieroglyphics; though inferior to the Egyptians’ in mimetic art, still of the highest order, considering this to be the product of the Neolithic Age.
The Egyptians were the only people of the Old World who embalmed their dead. According to the French historian, Lucien Bart, the Zapotecs and Chichimecs of the Mexican Valley embalmed their chiefs, and if we may believe this author, the caves of the Cordilleras are vast museums, as full of interest as the catacombs of Rome.
That the Americans mummified their dead, is proven by mummies having been found in Peru and the northwestern part of Patagonia. Dr. Aq. Reid has found others which prove the relation of Peruvian civilization to that of Patagonia.
One of these mummies has been deposited in the museum of Ratisbon, Bavaria, and another was sent to the Smithsonian Institute. (vid. Aq. Reid, Smithsonian Annual Report, 1862, pp. 87, 426.) This mummy led to the remark of Alexander Winchell: “The humid atmosphere of Patagonia leads to the inference that the mummification of the dead was practiced under the influence of some controlling motive, which must have been inherited from ancestors dwelling in a more propitious clime, and from which even the dripping meteorology of Patagonia was insufficient to eradicate.” The Egyptians were accurate astrologers and astronomers. They accurately calculated eclipses and the reappearances of stars whose reappearance would require over a thousand years, and the pyramids are set to the cardinal points. Less than a hundred years ago, the great Calendar Stone of the Astecs was dug up, in the City of Mexico. It is of a solid piece of porphyry, and weighs fifty tons. It was brought many leagues, across a broken country, without beasts of burden, and Bustamente states that ten thousand men were employed in its transportation. The Calendar Stone was buried when Cortez sacked the city of Tenochtitlan, and in itself constitutes a history. From it we learn that the Astecs were astrologers, astronomers, and calculated eclipses, and knew the solstices of the sun. They divided the year into eighteen months of twenty days each, and like the ancient Egyptians, had five complementary days to make out the three hundred and sixty-five, and every fifty-two years they threw in twelve and one-half days for leap year. Like the Persians and Egyptians, a cycle of fifty-two years, or “an age,” was represented by a serpent, so prominent in ancient mythology. Their astrological year was divided into months of thirteen days each, and there were thirteen years in their indications, which contained each three hundred and sixty-five periods of thirteen days. It is also curious, that their number of lunar months of thirteen days, contained in a cycle of fifty-two years, with the intercalation of thirteen (twelve and one-half) days, should correspond exactly with the number of years in a great Sothic period of the Egyptians, viz:—fourteen hundred and ninety-one.
Is it reasonable to suppose that this strange affinity with Egyptian civilization was accidental? or that a Turanian branch independently evolved itself into a counterpart of Hamitic Berbers? Hardly.