Aryan faces are found depicted upon the monuments of Egypt, painted four thousand years before the time of Christ. “The conflicts between the Kelts (an Aryan race) and the Iberians were far anterior in date to the settlements of the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, and Noachites on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea.” (“American Cyclopaedia,” art.
Basques.) There is reason to believe that these Kelts were originally part of the population and Empire of Atlantis. We are told (Rees’s “British Encyclopaedia,” art. Titans) that “Mercury, one of the Atlantean gods, was placed as ruler over the Celtae, and became their great divinity.” F. Pezron, in his “Antiquity of the Celtae,” makes out that the Celtae were the same as the Titans, the giant race who rebelled in Atlantis, and “that their princes were the same with the giants of Scripture.” He adds that the word Titan “is perfect Celtic, and comes from tit, the earth, and ten or den, man, and hence the Greeks very properly also called them terriginae, or earth-born.” And it will be remembered that Plato uses the same phrase when he speaks of the race into which Poseidon intermarried as “the earth-born primeval men of that country.”
The Greeks, who are Aryans, traced their descent from the people who were destroyed by the Flood, as did other races clearly Aryan.
“The nations who are comprehended under the common appellation of Indo-European,” says Max Mueller—”the Hindoos, the Persians, the Celts, Germans, Romans, Greeks, and Slavs—do not only share the same words and the same grammar, slightly modified in each country, but they seem to have likewise preserved a mass of popular traditions which had grown up before they left their common home.”
“Bonfey, L. Geiger, and other students of the ancient Indo-European languages, have recently advanced the opinion that the original home of the Indo-European races must be sought in Europe, because their stock of words is rich in the names of plants and animals, and contains names of seasons that are not found in tropical countries or anywhere in Asia.”
(“American Cyclopaedia,” art. Ethnology.) By the study of comparative philology, or the seeking out of the words common to the various branches of the Aryan race before they separated, we are able to reconstruct an outline of the civilization of that ancient people. Max Mueller has given this subject great study, and availing ourselves of his researches we can determine the following facts as to the progenitors of the Aryan stock: They were a civilized race; they possessed the institution of marriage; they recognized the relationship of father, mother, son, daughter, grandson, brother, sister, mother-in-law, father-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law, and had separate words for each of these relationships, which we are only able to express by adding the words “in-law.” They recognized also the condition of widows, or “the husbandless.” They lived in an organized society, governed by a king.
They possessed houses with doors and solid walls. They had wagons and carriages. They possessed family names. They dwelt in towns and cities, on highways. They were not hunters or nomads. They were a peaceful people; the warlike words in the different Aryan languages cannot be traced back to this original race. They lived in a country having few wild beasts; the only wild animals whose names can be assigned to this parent stock being the bear, the wolf, and the serpent. The name of the elephant, “the beast with a hand,” occurs only twice in the “Rig-Veda;”
a singular omission if the Aryans were from time immemorial an Asiatic race; and “when it does occur, it is in such a way as to show that he was still an object of wonder and terror to them.” (Whitney’s “Oriental and Linguistic Studies,” p. 26.) They possessed nearly all the domestic animals we now have—the ox and the cow, the horse, the dog, the sheep, the goat, the hog, the donkey, and the goose. They divided the year into twelve months. They were farmers; they used the plough; their name as a race (Aryan) was derived from it; they were, par excellence, ploughmen; they raised various kinds of grain, including flax, barley, hemp, and wheat; they had mills and millers, and ground their corn. The presence of millers shows that they had proceeded beyond the primitive condition where each family ground its corn in its own mill. They used fire, and cooked and baked their food; they wove cloth and wore clothing; they spun wool; they possessed the different metals, even iron: they had gold. The word for “water” also meant “salt made from water,” from which it might be inferred that the water with which they were familiar was saltwater. It is evident they manufactured salt by evaporating salt water. They possessed boats and ships. They had progressed so far as to perfect “a decimal system of enumeration, in itself,” says Max Mueller, “one of the most marvellous achievements of the human mind, based on an abstract conception of quantity, regulated by a philosophical classification, and yet conceived, nurtured, and finished before the soil of Europe was trodden by Greek, Roman, Slav, or Teuton.”
ANCIENT
EGYPTIAN
PLOUGH
And herein we find another evidence of relationship between the Aryans and the people of Atlantis. Although Plato does not tell us that the Atlanteans possessed the decimal system of numeration, nevertheless there are many things in his narrative which point to that conclusion “There were ten kings ruling over ten provinces; the whole country was divided into military districts or squares ten stadia each way; the total force of chariots was ten thousand; the great ditch or canal was one hundred feet deep and ten thousand stadia long; there were one hundred Nereids,” etc. In the Peruvian colony the decimal system clearly obtained: “The army had heads of ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. . . . The community at large was registered in groups, under the control of officers over tens, fifties, hundreds, and so on.” (Herbert Spencer, “Development of Political Institutions,” chap.
x.) The same division into tens and hundreds obtained among the Anglo-Saxons.
Where, we ask, could this ancient nation, which existed before Greek was Greek, Celt was Celt, Hindoo was Hindoo, or Goth was Goth, have been located! The common opinion says, in Armenia or Bactria, in Asia. But where in Asia could they have found a country so peaceful as to know no terms for war or bloodshed;—a country so civilized as to possess no wild beasts save the bear, wolf, and serpent? No people could have been developed in Asia without bearing in its language traces of century-long battles for life with the rude and barbarous races around them; no nation could have fought for ages for existence against “man-eating”
tigers, lions, elephants, and hyenas, without bearing the memory of these things in their tongue. A tiger, identical with that of Bengal, still exists around Lake Aral, in Asia; from time to time it is seen in Siberia. “The last tiger killed in 1828 was on the Lena, in latitude fifty-two degrees thirty minutes, in a climate colder than that of St.
Petersburg and Stockholm.”
The fathers of the Aryan race must have dwelt for many thousand years so completely protected from barbarians and wild beasts that they at last lost all memory of them, and all words descriptive of them; and where could this have been possible save in some great, long-civilized land, surrounded by the sea, and isolated from the attack of the savage tribes that occupied the rest of the world? And if such a great civilized nation had dwelt for centuries in Asia, Europe, or Africa, why have not their monuments long ago been discovered and identified? Where is the race who are their natural successors, and who must have continued to live after them in that sheltered and happy land, where they knew no human and scarcely any animal enemies? Why would any people have altogether left such a home? Why, when their civilization had spread to the ends of the earth, did it cease to exist in the peaceful region where it originated?