They visited the Azore Islands, west of Gibraltar, out in the Atlantic ocean, and as we learn by Chateaubriand’s Outretombe, Phœnician coin in the last century was found scattered in the soil of these Islands. A man who carries his eyes about him will rarely enter a large Irish assembly, or an assembly of Canadian Frenchmen whose blood comes principally from Bretagne, without noticing here and there a swarthy complexion surrounding intensely bright flashing eyes which speak of Spain and Carthage and the blood of warmer climes.
About one thousand years before Christ, Solomon, the Prince of Israel, resolved to build a temple to the God of Abraham which should exhibit on Mount Zion architectural skill and beauty such as the world had never seen. The construction of that erection was intrusted entirely to the people of Phœnicia; everything was perfected at Tyre so completely that “no hammer or instrument of iron sounded upon the building” after its component parts reached the Mount of God. Even the basins that were to be used in the Lord’s house were constructed by the artizans of Phœnicia.
IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE EXISTING UPON THE WESTERN CONTINENT SHOWING OR TENDING TO SHOW WHENCE THE PEOPLE WHO ERECTED THE PREHISTORIC STRUCTURES ON THE WESTERN CONTINENT CAME?
FIRST.
The soil, climate and productions of the Peninsula of Yucatan, and that part of Mexico and Guatemala where these prehistoric remains are found, are precisely what are described by the European writers who speak of the beauty, the loveliness and the grandeur of the Hesperides and the homes founded by eastern adventurers beyond the western ocean.
SECOND.
The prehistoric structures found in those regions and in neighboring regions are all built on plans and patterns borrowed from lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea, although the structures seem to have followed verbal descriptions rather than exact mechanical patterns.
All of these structures north of Panama seem to have been erected for public purposes, and probably in connection with the offices of some form of religion; and every structure of them, of which any appreciable portion is standing, is built upon or in connection with pyramids as perfectly pyramidal and regularly constructed as were the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Most of these pyramids, however, are mere earth mounds, instead of being constructed of brick or stone as were those upon the banks of the Nile. Let us refer to a few of the localities where these pyramidal structures are most conspicuous.
At Copan, situate at the western border of Honduras, and by the side of the river Copan, is a large enclosure, some two miles in extent, bounded upon the one side by the Copan river, on the bank of which are walls of beautiful cut and fitted stone rising to the height of fifty to one hundred feet, designed to keep the earth upon that side of the river from being carried away by floods. This river at this place constitutes one side of a tract of land laid out nearly in a square, along the outer sides of which, at regular intervals, are constructed, and still remaining, a very large number of pyramids made of hewn stone evidently designed to outline this extended sacred field.