It is not necessary, in a work of this kind, to give a detailed description of the arts and civilization of the Peruvians.. They were simply marvellous. Their works in cotton and wool exceeded in fineness anything known in Europe at that time. They had carried irrigation, agriculture, and the cutting of gems to a point equal to that of the Old World. Their accumulations of the precious metals exceeded anything previously known in the history of the world. In the course of twenty-five years after the Conquest the Spaniards sent from Peru to Spain more than eight hundred millions of dollars of gold, nearly all of it taken from the Peruvians as “booty.” In one of their palaces “they had an artificial garden, the soil of which was made of small pieces of fine gold, and this was artificially planted with different kinds of maize, which were of gold, their stems, leaves, and ears. Besides this, they had more than twenty sheep (llamas) with their lambs, attended by shepherds, all made of gold.” In a description of one lot of golden articles, sent to Spain in 1534 by Pizarro, there is mention of “four llamas, ten statues of women of full size, and a cistern of gold, so curious that it excited the wonder of all.”
Can any one read these details and declare Plato’s description of Atlantis to be fabulous, simply because he tells us of the enormous quantities of gold and silver possessed by the people? Atlantis was the older country, the parent country, the more civilized country; and, doubtless, like the Peruvians, its people regarded the precious metals as sacred to their gods; and they had been accumulating them from all parts of the world for countless ages. If the story of Plato is true, there now lies beneath the waters of the Atlantic, covered, doubtless, by hundreds of feet of volcanic debris, an amount of gold and silver exceeding many times that brought to Europe from Peru, Mexico, and Central America since the time of Columbus; a treasure which, if brought to light, would revolutionize the financial values of the world.
I have already shown, in the chapter upon the similarities between the civilizations of the Old and New Worlds, some of the remarkable coincidences which existed between the Peruvians and the ancient European races; I will again briefly, refer to a few of them: 1. They worshipped the sun, moon, and planets.
2. They believed in the immortality of the soul.
3. They believed in the resurrection of the body, and accordingly embalmed their dead.
4. The priest examined the entrails of the animals offered in sacrifice, and, like the Roman augurs, divined the future from their appearance.
5. They had an order of women vowed to celibacy-vestal virgins-nuns; and a violation of their vow was punished, in both continents, by their being buried alive.
6. They divided the year into twelve months.
7. Their enumeration was by tens; the people were divided into decades and hundreds, like the Anglo-Saxons; and the whole nation into bodies of 500, 1000, and 10,000, with a governor over each.
8. They possessed castes; and the trade of the father descended to the son, as in India.
9. They had bards and minstrels, who sung at the great festivals.
10. Their weapons were the same as those of the Old World, and made after the same pattern.
11. They drank toasts and invoked blessings.
12. They built triumphal arches for their returning heroes, and strewed the road before them with leaves and flowers.
13. They used sedan-chairs.
14. They regarded agriculture as the principal interest of the nation, and held great agricultural fairs and festivals for the interchange of the productions of the farmers.
15. The king opened the agricultural season by a great celebration, and, like the kings of Egypt, he put his hand to the plough, and ploughed the first furrow.
16. They had an order of knighthood, in which the candidate knelt before the king; his sandals were put on by a nobleman, very much as the spurs were buckled on the European knight; he was then allowed to use the girdle or sash around the loins, corresponding to the toga virilis of the Romans; he was then crowned with flowers. According to Fernandez, the candidates wore white shirts, like the knights of the Middle Ages, with a cross embroidered in front.
17. There was a striking resemblance between the architecture of the Peruvians and that of some of the nations of the Old World. It is enough for me to quote Mr. Ferguson’s words, that the coincidence between the buildings of the Incas and the Cyclopean remains attributed to the Pelasgians in Italy and Greece, “is the most remarkable in the history of architecture.”
OWL-HEADED
VASES
,
TROY
AND
PERU
The illustrations on page 397 strikingly confirm Mr. Ferguson’s views.
“The sloping jambs, the window cornice, the polygonal masonry, and other forms so closely resemble what is found in the old Pelasgic cities of Greece and Italy, that it is difficult to resist the conclusion that there may be some relation between them.”
Even the mode of decorating their palaces and temples finds a parallel in the Old World. A recent writer says: “We may end by observing, what seems to have escaped Senor Lopez, that the interior of an Inca palace, with its walls covered with gold, as described by Spaniards, with its artificial golden flowers and golden beasts, must have been exactly like the interior of the house of Alkinous or Menelaus- “‘The doors were framed of gold,
Where underneath the brazen floor doth glass Silver pilasters, which with grace uphold Lintel of silver framed; the ring was burnished gold, And dogs on each side of the door there stand, Silver and golden.’”
“I can personally testify” (says Winchell, “Preadamites,” p. 387) “that a study of ancient Peruvian pottery has constantly reminded me of forms with which we are familiar in Egyptian archaeology.”
Dr. Schliemann, in his excavations of the ruins of Troy, found a number of what he calls “owl-headed idols” and vases. I give specimens on page 398 and page 400.
In Peru we find vases with very much the same style of face.
I might pursue those parallels much farther; but it seems to me that these extraordinary coincidences must have arisen either from identity of origin or long-continued ancient intercourse. There can be little doubt that a fair-skinned, light-haired, bearded race, holding the religion which Plato says prevailed in Atlantis, carried an Atlantean civilization at an early day up the valley of the Amazon to the heights of Bolivia and Peru, precisely as a similar emigration of Aryans went westward to the shores of the Mediterranean and Caspian, and it is very likely that these diverse migrations habitually spoke the same language.
Senor Vincente Lopez, a Spanish gentleman of Montevideo, in 1872
published a work entitled “Les Races Aryennes in Perou,” in which he attempts to prove that the great Quichua language, which the Incas imposed on their subjects over a vast extent of territory, and which is still a living tongue in Peru and Bolivia, is really a branch of the great Aryan or Indo-European speech. I quote Andrew Lang’s summary of the proofs on this point:
OWL-HEADED
VASE
,
TROY
“Senor Lopez’s view, that the Peruvians were Aryans who left the parent stock long before the Teutonic or Hellenic races entered Europe, is supported by arguments drawn from language, from the traces of institutions, from religious beliefs, from legendary records, and artistic remains. The evidence from language is treated scientifically, and not as a kind of ingenious guessing. Senor Lopez first combats the idea that the living dialect of Peru is barbarous and fluctuating. It is not one of the casual and shifting forms of speech produced by nomad races. To which of the stages of language does this belong—the agglutinative, in which one root is fastened on to another, and a word is formed in which the constitutive elements are obviously distinct, or the inflexional, where the auxiliary roots get worn down and are only distinguishable by the philologist? As all known Aryan tongues are inflexional, Senor Lopez may appear to contradict himself when he says that Quichua is an agglutinative Aryan language. But he quotes Mr. Max Mueller’s opinion that there must have been a time when the germs of Aryan tongues had not yet reached the inflexional stage, and shows that while the form of Quichua is agglutinative, as in Turanian, the roots of words are Aryan. If this be so, Quichua may be a linguistic missing link.