The Discoveries of America to the Year 1525

by Arthur James Weise

“‘It was ordered for the men on the plain fit for military service that each individual leader should have an allotment of land; each allotment amounting in extent to a hundred stadia; the whole number of allotments being sixty thousand. It is said that many men from the mountains and other parts of the country were assigned, according to their dwellings and villages, certain tracts by their respective leaders. Each leader was required to furnish for war the sixth part of a war-chariot (to make the number of ten thousand), two riding horses, and a two-horse chariot without a driver’s seat, having a mounted charioteer to guide the horses, with another rider to dismount and fight at the side of them; also two heavy-armed men, two archers, two slingers, three light-armed soldiers, the same number of stone-shooters and javelin-men, besides four seamen to make up the crews of one thousand two hundred vessels. Thus were the military affairs of this city arranged. Respecting those of the nine other allotments, there were different regulations, which it would be too tedious to narrate.

“‘The following were the systems of official services and honors: Each of the ten kings ruled supreme over the people and the laws in his own allotment and over his own city, constraining and punishing whom he pleased.[23] As the law was handed down to them, the government and commonwealth in each allotment were regulated by the injunctions of Poseidon. Inscriptions [of this law] were made by the first [kings] on a column of orichalcum which was placed in the centre of the island, in the temple of Poseidon, where the kings consulted together every fifth year, (which they afterward changed to every sixth year,) each king representing at these meetings the entire kingdom and its subdivisions. The kings, when they were assembled, deliberated on matters respecting the common weal, and inquired what transgressions each had committed, and each respectively rendered his decision. Before they sat in judgment they gave one another pledges, according to the following custom: The ten, when they were assembled in the temple, after invoking the god to receive their sacrifice propitiously, went swordless, with staves and nooses, among the bulls grazing within the temple inclosure, and the bull they took they brought to the column and slaughtered it, the head of the bull being under the inscriptions. Besides the laws on the column, there was a malediction written containing denunciations of evil on the disobedient. When, therefore, in compliance with their laws, they sacrificed and burned all the limbs of the bull, they filled a goblet with the blood of the animal, and threw the remainder into the fire, in order to purify the column. Afterward dipping from the goblet with golden cups, they poured libations of blood on the fire, and swore to do justice according to the laws on the column, to punish any one who had previously transgressed them, besides swearing that they themselves would never afterward willingly transgress the inscribed laws, or rule or obey any ruler governing otherwise than according to his father’s laws. Then after invoking these denunciations on themselves and their descendants, and after drinking from the cup and depositing it in the temple of the god, and sitting the necessary time at supper, they, as soon as it was dark and the fire of the sacrifice had ceased to burn, dressed themselves in beautiful dark-blue robes, and sat down on the ground, near the embers of the sacrifice, over which they had sworn. All the fire in the temple having been extinguished for the night, they then mutually judged one another respecting any accusation of transgressing the laws. After their acts of judgment were ended, and daylight had come, they inscribed their decisions on a golden tablet and deposited it and their dresses in the temple as memorials. There were also many other special laws respecting the privileges of the kings. The principal ones were that they should never wage war upon one another, that all should lend their aid when any attempt was made in their cities to destroy the royal race, that they should consult together as their ancestors had done respecting the right course to be pursued in war and in other matters, and that they should allot the government of the empire to the Atlantic race. They did not allow the king, however, any authority to put to death any of his kinsmen, unless the execution was approved by more than five of the ten.’”[24]

The priest also related that it was “about nine thousand years ago that war was proclaimed between those dwelling outside the Pillars of Hercules and all those within them.”[25] Athens “was the leader of the latter people and directed the operations of the war, and the kings of the Atlantic island were the commanders of the forces of the former.”[26]

“‘But in a later age,’ said the priest, ‘by extraordinary earthquakes and deluges, bringing destruction in a single day and night, the whole of your formidable race was at once sunk under the earth, and the Atlantic island in like manner plunged beneath the sea and concealed from view; therefore that sea is, at present, neither passable nor to be traced out, being blocked up with a great depth of mud made by the sunken island.’”[27]

The history of the Atlantic people as it was known to the ancient Egyptians ends with this catastrophe. The inference of the priest that the mud of the submerged island made the Atlantic impassable is seemingly an assertion without any basis of fact. Had he said that the submergence of some of the islands west of the Pillars of Hercules obliterated the marked sea-path between the continents of the two hemispheres, this statement would have strictly accorded with what he had said before, that “sea-faring men, at that time, could pass from it [the Atlantic island] to the other islands, and from them to the opposite continent.”[28] The disappearance of the islands, in sight of which seamen had steered their galleys, at once isolated the peoples of the two hemispheres. Thus it happened, in the course of centuries, that the aborigines of America passed out of the recollection of the inhabitants of the so-called Old World as an early-known people.

The writer of the first book of the Bible relates that when “Yahveh saw the wickedness of man was great upon the earth and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart only evil continually, ... it repented him of having made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. And Yahveh said, ‘I will exterminate man whom I have created from the surface of the ground.’”[29] The information contained in these words of the learned Hebrew so closely correspond to that imparted to Solon by the Egyptian priest concerning the subsequent degeneracy of the primitive people of the earth, that it would seem as if it had been derived from the same source. “‘For many generations,’ said the priest, ‘so long as the god-nature continued in them, they remained obedient to the laws and were happily influenced by it. But when the divine nature became extinct by the dominance and constant ascendency of the human, and the habits of men overpowered them, ... they deported themselves in an unbecoming way.... Therefore, Zeus, the god of gods, who rules justly and searches out such things, perceiving an illustrious people miserably depraved, and intending to inflict punishment on them that they might become better fitted to command their appetites and passions, collected all the gods into their own most holy habitation, which, being in the centre of the universe, commands a view of all things having a part in generation; and having assembled them, he said....’”[30]

An inscription on the interior walls of the tomb of Seti I. of Egypt contains a statement concerning a council of the gods held to consider what punishment should be visited upon the depraved descendants of the god Râ, which is similar to the declaration of the last clause of Plato’s unfinished dialogue.[31] Lenormant, commenting upon the information contained in the inscription, remarks:

“The Egyptians admitted a destruction of the primitive men by the gods on account of their rebellion and sins. This event was recorded in a chapter of the sacred books of Tahout,—certain hermetic books of the Egyptian priesthood,—that had been graven on the walls of one of the most isolated rooms of the burial crypts of King Seti I., at Thebes. The text of it has been published and translated by Edward Naville.[32]

“The scene is placed at the end of the reign of the god Râ.... Incensed by the wickedness and the crimes of the men whom he had begotten, the god summons the other gods to consult with them in the utmost secrecy, ‘in order that mankind might not know it, and that their hearts might not be dismayed.’