Table of Contents
The Basques inhabit the western Pyrenees region straddling Spain and France.
Basque myths blend biblical genealogies, oral folklore, and pre-Christian beliefs. Key themes include origins tied to Noah’s descendants, earth-centered deities like Mari, giants (jentilak or mairu), and nature spirits. Many were preserved through 19th–20th century folklore collections, especially by anthropologist José Miguel de Barandiarán.
Bloodtype
A people apart
Michael Le Flem, in Visions of Atlantis. He writes that the Basques are easy to place on a map but hard to explain in history. Scientists looked at their language and blood type and concluded that they are a distinct people, unrelated to the Indo-Europeans.
The Basques are easy to define geographically, but impossible to account for historically. Where they came from nobody knows. Evidently, they wandered into the Pyrenees millennia ago. It was in matters of language and blood type that scientists came to the conclusion that the Basques were a distinct people totally unrelated to the Indo-Europeans who dominated the rest of Europe.
Visions of Atlantis
Language
Their language, Euskara, is a language isolate with no proven relation to any other living language. This linguistic uniqueness has fueled rich mythological traditions linking them to ancient, pre-Indo-European origins.
The Legend of Euskara as the Original Human Language
One of the most distinctive Basque origin myths claims that Euskara is the primordial language spoken in Eden, predating the confusion of tongues at Babel. This idea positions the Basques as direct heirs to humanity’s earliest speech. In the Bible that confusion comes after the Flood, when the sons of Noah spread over the earth and the Tower of Babel was left unfinished.
A language from Adam and Eve
Dolores Cannon heard the same legend and wrote it down in The Starcrash Legend. She recalls that the Basques say they lived in the Pyrenees long before other Europeans came. Their legends claim Adam and Eve spoke their language, and that a son of Noah settled in the mountains before Babel.
I remembered hearing about the Basque people who claim they have lived in the Pyrenees Mountains thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. Their origin has long been a mystery, even to themselves, primarily because their language is unlike any other verbal communication on Earth. Their legends claim it was spoken by Adam and Eve, and that one of the sons of Noah settled in the mountains before the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel.
The Starcrash Legend – Dolores Cannon
So in her telling the language came first, with Adam and Eve, and a son of Noah carried it into the mountains before Babel.
This view was notably promoted by Abbot Dominique Lahetjuzan (1766–1818), who derived names like “Eve” from Basque terms such as emak obe (“better to give”). Later works echoed this, portraying Euskara as the lingua adamica, the Adamic language that survived unchanged.
The Lady of Elche
The Lady of Elche is a limestone bust found on 4 August 1897 at La Alcudia, an archaeological site on a private estate (1.24 miles) south of Elche, in the province of Alicante. Wikipedia describes it as generally known as an Iberian artifact from the 4th century BC. It is in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain in Madrid. The large wheel-like coils on each side of the face are called rodetes. Elche is near the Mediterranean coast, while the Basque provinces lie on the Bay of Biscay. The bust belongs to Iberian culture and I am not calling it Basque.
I put it here for one comparison. The Hopi hairstyle called poli’ini, the “butterfly whorls”, was traditionally worn by unmarried Hopi women, according to the Arizona State Museum. Seen from the side, each woman has a large round coil against the cheek. That is a visual likeness and nothing more, because the rodetes are carved stone and the whorls are hair. I do not know of a documented link. The Hopi account I follow is Oswald White Bear Fredericks’ crossing from Kásskara to a rising land in the east, on What Was the Lost Continent of Mu?. In Plato’s Timaeus (see Timaeus & Critias), Atlantis rules parts of Libya as far as Egypt and parts of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. Plato does not name Iberia.
Tubal: Biblical Ancestor of the Basques and Iberians
A central biblical-derived myth traces Basque (and broader Iberian) ancestry to Tubal, a grandson of Noah. This legend provided ancient prestige in a Christian Europe where noble lineages were often linked to scriptural figures. It explains both settlement and the preservation of the Basque language.
Tubal appears in the Bible’s Table of Nations (Genesis 10) as a son of Japheth. Post-Flood, Noah divided the continents: Asia to Shem, Africa to Ham, and Europe to Japheth. Japheth then assigned regions to his sons, for example Magog to Scandinavia (linked to the Goths), Javan to Greece, and Tubal to the Iberian Peninsula, including the Pyrenees.
This framework assumes every nation descends from a single progenitor. Early sources like Flavius Josephus (1st century CE) connected Tubal to the “Thobelites” (called Iberes in his time), though it’s unclear if this referred to Spanish Iberians or Caucasian ones. By the 4th–7th centuries, writers like Saint Jerome and Isidore of Seville firmly linked Tubal to the Iberians/Spaniards.
The myth gained prominence in early modern Spanish historiography for establishing antiquity and nobility. It appears in works by Esteban de Garibay (16th century) and Augustin Chaho (19th century). Toponymy (place-name evidence), such as links to Tobolsk in Russia, was sometimes used to support similar claims elsewhere.
Basque names
Names that sound like Atlantis
Michael Le Flem, in Visions of Atlantis. He says Basque names sound closer to the indigenous languages of the Americas than to Indo-European ones. He also finds them close to the Atlantean names in Edgar Cayce’s past-life readings.
Names in the Basque Country, like Antxone, Aitor, Arrixaka, Ihintza, Itzal, Elixane, Maialen, Mitxoleta, Nekane, Txori, Zeltzin, Urraca, or Yanamari, sound not only alluring and exotic, but closer to indigenous Mexican, and South and Central American languages than to any of the Indo-European language families. They also appear very similar to numerous names ascribed to Edgar Cayce’s clients when describing their past life incarnations in Atlantis: Asamee, Ajahel, Assha, Asmen-n, Alenor, Ax-Tell, Esselme, Iltar, On-Xo, or Ilax, to name a handful.
Visions of Atlantis
Other Key Basque Myths
Basque mythology – Atlantis connection?
Lamiak are mythical female beings closely linked to rivers, springs, and fountains
Mari, Supreme Deity: Goddess of Nature, Weather, and Justice
