Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886)

I read the University of Michigan copy of Hyde Clarke’s reprint. The title page gives the full title, Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America, by Hyde Clarke, V.P.R.Hist.S., reprinted from the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886. The next leaf says printed by Spottiswoode and Co., New-Street Square, London. The cover carries the shelf mark GN 751 C598, and the first page of the paper carries the library number 425308. The paper was read in June 1885. The title page year is 1886, so I treat the book as public domain and put his own sentence under a date, a place, or an event.

Page numbers below are the printed numbers of this reprint. The title page and the printer’s leaf have no numbers. The first page of the paper also prints no number. The next page is numbered 4, so that opening is page 3, and from there the printed number is seven less than the file page. The text runs through page 47. The last line of this copy breaks off at the syllable “lan-”. There is no further text leaf.

I will set his verdict, his place-names, and the writers he answers beside Timaeus and Critias and beside Atlantis, the Antediluvian World, which he names. I will not bring in Mu, or any Atlantic writer he does not name.

The book at a glance

• Title: Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America.
• Author: Hyde Clarke, V.P.R.Hist.S.
• Edition I read: Reprinted from the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886. Printed by Spottiswoode and Co., New-Street Square, London. Read June 1885. Nine numbered sections. This copy’s text is printed from page 3 through page 47, and it stops mid-word.
• What he claims: He will not rest the case on Plato as chief or sole authority. He throws out a sunken Atlantic continent and the mud that is said to have blocked the ocean. He keeps ships, currents, and an intercourse old enough to belong to gesture language and then to speech. Plato’s island, larger than Libya and Asia, he reads as America. Atlantis or Atalantis he takes as the title of the great King of the West, not the name of the land. The head seat was possibly in the Caribbean Sea, and it may be in St. Domingo. The mud story he explains as the Sargosso Sea. Town names on both sides of the ocean are, for him, one plan and one epoch.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• The verdict on the legend. The sinking and the mud are the legendary part. The practical part is an old knowledge of America, kept in the doctrine of the Four Worlds and in Plato’s longer account. Intercourse was by vessels, not by a land bridge (pp. 13, 16, 17, 18).
• The king, not the island. Atlantis or Atalantis appears to him as the title of the king rather than of his dominions, and later he takes it instead of the name Atlas (pp. 17, 38).
• Where he puts the seat. Possibly the Caribbean, and it may be St. Domingo. At that epoch the kingdoms of Mexico, of the Mayas, of the Chibchas, and of Peru must already have existed. Columbus may have been on the ancient route (pp. 24, 25).
• The Four Worlds. Europe, Asia, and Africa on the north of one side, an Austral continent to the south, and on the other side a northern and a southern continent for the Americas, with the Atlantic and the Pacific between them. Crates of Pergamos, 160 B.C. The Inca empire he calls Tavintinsusu, or Four Quarters of the World (pp. 7, 8).
• The place-names he prints here. From Donnelly, out of Short, with the Armenian column from Ptolemy: Chol and Cholula, Coluae and Coluacan, Zuivana and Zuivan, Cholima and Colima, Zalissa and Xalisco. He says the names are on one plan, of one epoch, and uniformly distributed. Palestine he matches with Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and Spain, and he calls the early population of Palestine Turanian, of Khita class, not Semitic (p. 10). The longer town lists he sends the reader to his own 1875 and 1877 books. He does not reprint them here.
• The bull and lion cities. A list of the form Tarakona, with bull or lion or both: Acanthus, Knidos, Tarraco, Dyrrhacchium, Atrax, Taurini, Citium, Catana, Panticapaeum, Cibyra (Kibura), Cyzicus (Kuziku), Syracusa, Khios, Morgantia, then Messana, Tarsus, Carthago, Sardis, Segesta, Suessa, and Samos (pp. 39, 40).
• The writers he answers. Plato, used for material and not as sole authority. Grote, who gives the island in his Plato without an opinion, and who follows the mud, sands, shallows, fogs, and sea-weed in his History of Greece. Donnelly, whose geological Atlantis he says does not account for the archaeological and linguistic facts. The Marquis de Nadaillac, who wants a physical connection and cave men of the Dordogne, and whose book excludes Atlantis. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article “Atlantis, Atalantis, or Atlantica,” which he calls orthodox and fallacious. Darwin on Oceanic Islands, and A. R. Wallace on Island Life, as the demolition of the continent. Park Harrison on a Pacific route, which he will not make the main route. Dr. Latham and Stephen Powers on Gallinomero and Khwakhlamayo as Chinese. Professor Flower, who sends the Eskimos from Asia eastward, not from Europe to Greenland (pp. 6, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21).

I. Investigations as to American and other Origins

The question he has been on for some years is whether the populations and civilisations of the New World were born there, or brought from the other hemisphere.

They refer to the questions whether the populations and civilisations of the New World are there born and indigenous, or whether they are imported from the other hemisphere, and therefore in no respect distinct.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 3

He will not say that no race is autochthonous or purely American. He will say that many populations are immigrants and many are mixed, and that America did not differ, in the incidents of its origin, from other regions. He names Professor Daniel Wilson, Dr. Hayden and his colleagues at the Smithsonian, Professor A. Graham Bell, and Professor John Campbell of Montreal.

The migration he sketches first is earlier than speech. Gesture language in America is still, he says, more extended than anywhere else. Colonel Mallery has made it a branch of the United States ethnological work. Clarke’s own example from the Old World is the gesture language of the mutes of the seraglio at Constantinople, which he takes as a self-sufficient system and as a survival of the classic mimes. Mythology, symbology, and culture already existed in gesture, and speech was built on them. Ideographs and hieroglyphs belonged to that epoch and were afterwards applied to speech. A character of double lines for “son” and “river” he ties to Mallery’s sign for offspring, made with two hands. Picture writings may still exist on rocks in America, as in Guiana, derived from carvings of the kind he recognises in the caves of Dordogne, with survivals among the Indians.

On the route, he rejects a solely Pacific passage, and he rejects China as the necessary source. Behring’s Straits he accepts for the community of type and language of the Esquimos and other northern populations of America and Asia. Mr. Park Harrison has worked the Pacific case, and Mr. Donnelly in the Atlantis has followed points of community between the hemispheres. Clarke says that evidence does not establish a supremacy for transmission from Asia across the Pacific. Alexander von Humboldt showed a common origin for the Mexican zodiac and the Chinese, which does not prove an origin from China. Dr. Latham and others dwell on the Gallinomero and Khwakhlamayo languages of the north-west coast and Chinese, in Stephen Powers, Atlantic Monthly, March 1874. Clarke calls that an isolated fact, and the words not peculiar to Chinese. His own earlier conclusion in Khita and Khita Peruvian Epoch, at p. 68, he now calls erroneous on the Pacific, though the Four Worlds are described in that same place. Migrations across the Pacific did take place. They were not the main or exclusive route.

The key, for him, is the doctrine of the Four Worlds, taught in the school of Pergamos in Asia Minor, neglected by the mass, and still alive in classic and Christian times down to Columbus, whose discoveries effaced it, and to which the old record led if it did not inspire them.

It is, however, this doctrine of the Four Worlds which shows that the Atlantic was equally well known as lying between the eastern hemisphere and the Americas.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 7

Crates of Pergamos maintained the system in 160 B.C. Clarke cites Reinaud, Journal Asiatique, vol. i., new series, 1863, p. 140, and a reference in Virgil’s Aeneid. He has a tradition of an imperial title, Monarch of the Four Worlds, offered to Augustus by flatterers, and he connects that with Mr. George Smith’s statement that Agu, an ancient king in Babylonia, called himself King of the Four Races. The empire of the Incas was called Tavintinsusu, or Four Quarters of the World, as stated by Prescott, Conquest of Peru, book i., chapter ii., quoting Ondegarde and Garcilasso.

Europe, Asia, and Africa were one continent on the northern portion of one side of the earth, the chief error being the southern limit of Africa. South of that was an Austral continent, Australasia and Australia. On the other side, a northern continent and a southern continent represented the Americas. Oceans from pole to pole, the Atlantic and the Pacific, were supposed to be divided between north and south by a belt of ocean. North and South America are so thinly joined that they are nearly divided. The legend perhaps referred to portages across the isthmuses. He takes the delineation as too close to be accidental, and as derived from intercourse and observation. The knowledge was not wholly lost. It is shown by the legend of Atlantis.

In 1874 he read a paper to the Anthropological Institute. In 1875 it appeared as Researches in Prehistoric and Protohistoric Comparative Philology, Mythology, and Archaeology in connection with the Origin of Culture in America (London, N. Trubner and Co.). Tables there showed words in North America, Central America, South America, North Africa, West Africa, Australasia, Asia, India, Caucasia, and Europe. He now withdraws two conclusions: that languages are to be classified in families, and that the families can be arranged in time by development. The true solution, found later, is that all languages are of common origin, but of varied distribution. Fear of the Atlantic route had leaned him then toward the Pacific. Culture, as he now has it, reached the Atlantic shores of the Old World as well. One table in that 1875 book compared river names in New Granada with India, Italy, and other South American rivers, and a short list of mountain names. He does not print those names again here. Of town names he says a copious enumeration was given. William von Humboldt led him into topographical nomenclature. The names, carried out on a large scale, are on one plan, therefore of one epoch, and uniformly distributed.

What had disturbed him was the supposed Semitic population in Palestine. In his papers the Palestine names were identical with Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and Spain. The evidence of Genesis, he says, is that the early population of Palestine was not Semitic but Turanian, allied to the populations of Khita class. The same class of town names he later traced largely in West and Central Africa. The date of the names cannot yet be clearly defined, so his tables are formed on the ancient names and the American names. One group is the ancient cities of Genesis. Another he quotes from Mr. Donnelly, out of Short’s North Americans of Antiquity, p. 497, the Armenian cities taken from Ptolemy.

Armenian	Central America
Chol	Cholula
Coluae	Coluacan
Zuivana	Zuivan
Cholima	Colima
Zalissa	Xalisco

The Armenian Coluae is printed with the ae as one letter. He says some of these are in his own lists with wider illustrations, and also examples of the conversion of sc and sh into ss. The footnote points to his paper in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement for June 1871, p. 176, “On the Relations of Canaanite Exploration to Prehistoric Classic Archaeology,” as the first large tables of these comparative town names.

From that he formulates the proposition that ends on the next page. Culture and the settlement of towns in America were coeval with the same events in the eastern hemisphere, and the historical relations were of the same class. For convenience he styled the populations and languages Khita and Khita Peruvian. In 1877 he reviewed the subject before the Royal Historical Society, published as The Khita and Khita Peruvian Epoch (London, N. Trubner and Co.). This paper is a continuation and a correction of that essay. The earlier work rested on his publications from 1863: Asia Minor (1863), the Khita inscriptions (1871), and Palestine (1879). The Hamath or Khita inscriptions gave him a connection of some Chinese characters as ideographs, since adopted, he says, by M. Terriens, and a connection of characters in Egyptian, cuneiform, and Chinese. The Etruscan language, one connected with Atlantis, he had dealt with so as to show that the words belonged to the general body of language. The town names of the east of America, and the linguistic tables, he leaves in that book. He does not repeat them.

II. Relations of Central America and Africa

He was still hesitating about an absolute identity of culture in the two hemispheres when a paper in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society for 1875 corrected him. Professor W. M. Gabb, who died shortly after, wrote “The Indian Tribes and Languages of Costa Rica,” on tribes that had escaped Chevalier de Scherzer and Mr. Thos. Belt.

The languages are Bribri, Cabecar, Tiribi, Terraba, and Branca, the whole population speaking them being 1,226.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 12

Compared with Old World vocabularies, the words were traced particularly with Africa. Animal names he can identify are tapir and elephant, monkey, leopard and tiger, deer, bird, macaw and parrot, snake, alligator, lizard and iguana, frog, butterfly. Other words he examined: arrow, bow, knife, calabash, pot, bed, door, house, cotton, leaf, tree, forest, rope, maize, drum, chair, sand, skin, navel, smoke, coal, salt, rain, dew, day, night, god, devil. The same names for elephant extend from Central America to Japan. His former explanations in the 1875 philology, p. 26, were incomplete and erroneous. An animal name may be the same word as a limb or a weapon. The main relation is numerical series in symbology, which he calls the foundation of mythology, astrology, and ancient philosophy.

Dr. Tylor, Early History, p. 312, cites Humboldt, Vue des Cordilleres, on the Mexicans retaining traditions of the elephant, “a myth of observation.” In Bribri the Old World elephant names in three forms are preserved. In Guarani, of Brazil, the name tapir is an Agaw word for cow. He cites his own Comparative Grammar of Egyptian, Coptic, and Ude, p. 20 (Trubner, 1873). For the elephant name to be introduced from Africa into America and given to the New World representative, there must have been intercourse in the epoch of speech, carried on across the Atlantic. Had there been the supposed Bridge of Atlantis, there would have been the same animals on both sides, tapirs in Africa and elephants in America, and that was not the case.

We may dispose of the communication by the sunken continent and accept that by vessels across the wide ocean, carried in paths to and fro by the currents.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 13

He does not adopt all the supposed elephant forms in American sculpture. Mr. H. Wetherbee Henshaw, Animal Carvings from the Mounds of the Mississippi Valley (Washington, 1883), disposes of the hypothetical elephant there.

Gabb’s memoir describes the theology of the Bribri: one God, whose chief name is Sibu, symbolised throughout the universe. Clarke says Gabb’s descriptions give the true explanation of fetishism, and he notes that this differs from Professor Max Muller’s lecture on Fetishism. The name Sibu, Siva, or Saba is frequent in mythology, and as a root it runs through African vocabularies. His own paper was Serpent and Siva Worship and Mythology in Central America, Africa, and Asia (Trubner, 1876). No North American language yet examined has yielded so much as the Bribri.

Another title of the Supreme Being, which he thinks became a matter of sectarianism, appears as Woden, Widen, Odin, Wuotan, and possibly as Buddha. The Buddha link was the opinion of Sir William Jones, adopted by Humboldt. In the present day the name is widely represented in Africa. It is best known from the Vaudoux or Vudu mysteries in Sir Spencer St. John’s book on Hayti, and from Mr. C. E. Leland on the mysteries in the United States. Leland is right, Clarke says, to identify the word as Woden. Vudu is also recognisable in Mexican history as Votan. M. de Charency, Bulletin de l’Athenee Orientale, 1885, p. 375, and Humboldt, Vue des Cordilleres, p. 148 of the 1816 edition, take Votan and Woden as the same. The rites of Sibu and Vudu have the same basis as the Eleusinian and other ancient mysteries. The serpent is a common emblem. In Hayti the rites degenerate into orgies accompanied with cannibalism. With the mysteries go secret meetings, initiations, degrees, ceremonies, signs, and symbolic language, what is understood as free masonry, in Africa and also in Australasia. The societies are kept secret. Africa is the great centre.

In 1875 he also published “Prehistoric Names of Weapons,” after a note on the terms for “arrow” read to the British Association in 1873. The North and South American evidence was set in parallel columns. In the 1875 philology, p. 32, he treated the common distribution of tribal names. The word “man” is the basis of many tribal names. Two tribes of the same name need have no ethnological connection. The likeness depends on the original distribution of the words for “man” at the diffusion of speech. The Rev. Professor John Campbell of Montreal has worked these tribal and eponymous distinctions, and Clarke calls his works indispensable for American ethnology.

III. Legend of Atlantis and of the Four Worlds

The legend has occupied many and, he thinks, has never received full consideration. It is in Plato’s dialogue called Timaeus. Imagination has fastened on the part that is purely legendary, which may be said to be purely supposititious. The account of the Four Worlds has been treated in the same way. What has been seized is that Plato states that Atlantis suddenly disappeared and sank beneath the sea, and that the Atlantic Sea is impassable and impenetrable, with a quantity of mud in the way, the fact being the direct reverse.

Mr. Cs. Mijatovich, Minister of Servia and member of the Academy of Belgrade, pointed him to the impediment of the Sargosso Sea, Mar de Sargoço, or Sea of Weeds. The ancients reached the Canary or Fortunate Islands. A vessel that reached the Sea of Weeds might bring back the mud story, the navigators thinking the weeds grew at the bottom, in mud. The story got tacked on to the tradition of Atlantis. Columbus’s soundings may first have been to know whether he was in a region of mud. Once he knew he was not, he could accept an open ocean, already confirmed in another direction by Vasco de Gama.

Grote, in the third volume of his Plato, p. 297, in the chapter (xxxv.) on Kritias, gives the island and its history without expressing any opinion. In the third volume of his History of Greece, the eighteenth chapter, on Phoenicians, he takes up the ocean no longer navigable beyond a certain point, from mud, sands, shallows, fogs, or accumulations of sea-weed. He quotes Skylax, c. 109: beyond Kerne the sea is no longer navigable, from shallows and mud and sea weed. He quotes the Timaeus and the Kritias. He calls attention to Rufus Festus Avienus, Descriptio Orbis Terrae, v. 57, and Ora Maritima, v. 406 to 415, and again v. 115 to 130.

Exsuperat autem gurgitem fucus frequens.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 16

The sense of that line, as he prints it, is that weed stands thick over the water. Aristotle, Meteorolog. ii. 3, 14, is referred to for the dead calm, mud, and shallows of the external ocean. Seneca, Suasoriar. i. 1, is also adduced by Grote. Grote follows Von Humboldt on the terrors that beset the followers of Columbus and on the passage of the Sea of Sargosso.

The effective reason for the end of the intercourse is the one he accepts: the great King of the West was defeated in the sea fight in the Mediterranean, and his power was utterly broken.

Atlantis or Atalantis, as will be hereafter explained, appears to have been the title of the king rather than of his dominions.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 17

The tale of colonisation is curious in its institutions. The generation of five pairs is a common legend of exogamous communities, and in Atlantis the eldest son also receives his mother’s inheritance, a trait of mother right. Plato did not invent matriarchy and exogamous marriages, or such details of institutions dying out among the Hellenes. The footnote is R. H. Man on the Andaman (London, 1885): the Supreme Being, Pulga, created five pairs of elephants, or races of mankind, in those small islands, with separate languages.

Elephants may be regarded as tapirs, horses as llamas.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 17

Tapir names represent elephant names, and llama, vicuna, and paca represent horse names of the Old World. The vicuna is printed with the n as a tilde. The great fact remains that intercourse across the Atlantic did take place, for language and other ideas were transmitted from side to side.

Of the many treatises, the last is Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (New York and London), in a popular form. The author works out his theory on a geological Atlantis suddenly disappearing. Clarke says this does not account for the archaeological and the linguistic facts, many of which the American author adduces. The concurrent opinion of geologists is that the main forms of the Atlantic Ocean and of the American continent were given at a most ancient geological epoch, not in any modern epoch of which man has cognisance by tradition or history. So far from a large continent or large mass of islands being depressed into the Atlantic, volcanic action even in our time has been throwing up islands from the bottom. Except the Bermudas, which are of coral origin, all the islands in the Atlantic are the result of volcanic eruption, continuing to our own day.

In 1811 a new island was temporarily formed off St. Michael, in the Azores, in the same way as takes place in the Mediterranean and other seas.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 18

A few years after, another formation was thrown up. The operations are on a small scale, and in few cases permanent. They do not alter the main features or provide for the creation of an Atlantis or its destruction. A review in the St. James’s Gazette of June 20, 1882, said the geological theory had long ago been exploded. It was demolished by Mr. Darwin in his chapter on Oceanic Islands, and the same fate was destined for it by Mr. A. R. Wallace in Island Life.

There is no evidence that such a continent ever did exist, nor is it even possible that it could.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 18

No fossil or living remains of indigenous mammals or terrestrial vertebrates of any kind are to be found. The fauna and flora of the islands are strictly oceanic.

Dr. Andree, of Leipsic, quoted in Nature, June 1885, p. 110, is of opinion that iron was not known in America other than meteoric iron in pre-Columbian times. He dwells chiefly on the absence of iron in graves of Peru and Chili, and considers that the great monuments were erected either with bronze (chumpi) or stone tools. He allows that the Americans knew how to work gold, silver, tin, copper, and quicksilver, but thinks they could not forge iron. He says they had a word (panilgue) for iron, but this he considers meant metals in general. Iron tools are not generally found anywhere, but they are asserted to have been discovered in the North American mounds, and we have to wait for further discoveries. Mr. St. John V. Day, of Edinburgh, wrote on the antiquity of iron-working and is engaged on a new edition. Clarke had long since put forth the same statement, particularly for the Chalybes and the metal-working tribes of Asia Minor. Dr. Percy, as president of the Iron and Steel Institute, renewed opinions to a like effect.

The Marquis de Nadaillac, who has given much attention to Central America, published this year Prehistoric Intercourse between Europe and America (London, Murray, 1885), with numerous illustrations. Like Donnelly, he is a full believer that the intercourse took place and that the resemblances can only by a physical connection be explained. He looks to prehistoric intercourse and the passage of cave men like those of the Dordogne. He or his translator has completely excluded all reference to the Atlantis. Clarke finds the compilation useful for the illustrations, though most are too small for detailed study. Nadaillac has made no real progress in decipherment and devotes too much attention to French descriptions.

Professor Flower, late President of the Anthropological Institute, spoke on the Eskimo question in a discussion on Laplanders at the Institute on June 9, 1885. He is remodelling craniology. Long and short skulls are no longer specific distinctions. On the skulls of the Eskimos in Asia and America, he considered it inadmissible, in the present state of evidence, that the Eskimos can have gone from Europe to Greenland. They proceeded from Asia eastward. Their present racial characteristics he treats as modified by the populations they passed through, from Central to Northern Asia.

Besides Donnelly and Nadaillac, the Literary Journal of New York for August 1884 had a bibliography by Mr. Paul Barron Watson of the pre-Columbian discoveries of America. His first class was the Chinese (499 A.D.), Northmen (1000 to 1347), Arabs (circ. 1125), Welsh (1170), Venetians (1380), Portuguese (1463), Poles (1476), Martin Behaim (1483), Cousin of Dieppe (1488). The materials of this essay are not embraced by Mr. Watson.

Plato we have to consider on account of the extent to which he supplies material, but not as the chief or sole authority.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 20

The doctrine of the Four Worlds, and of Atlantis as one of them, was dealt with by many writers of antiquity. Plato deals at greater length with Atlantis, and he does not touch the greater question.

The article “Atlantis, Atalantis, or Atlantica,” in the third volume, p. 27, of the Encyclopaedia Britannica then in course of publication, abstracts Plato and sums the popular view among scholars. The account, if not entirely fictitious, belongs to the most nebulous period of history. The story may embody some popular legend, and the legend may have settled on certain historical circumstances, but what these were it is impossible now to determine. Clarke’s answer is that this judgment may be admitted as orthodox, and that it involves many fallacies, not the least at the close. That many persons have reached contradictory opinions does not prove the problem insoluble. The function of Gibbon, of Grote, of Niebuhr, and of other great authorities has been to destroy what has been received as history where it is unsound, and to examine the popular legend for the historical circumstances under it.

IV. Atlantis in the Timaeus

In the Timaeus, printed with the ae as one letter, Plato first refers to the history of Atlantis, given as a distinct tradition handed down from Solon, to whom he was related. Clarke says the dialogue and the Critias may be consulted in any translation, or more conveniently in Donnelly’s Atlantis. Critias relates that Solon brought a history from Egypt. Solon had a contest with an Egyptian priest at Sais on the ancient annals of Athens. The priest said the real annals were more illustrious than Solon supposed, and embraced the greatest action the state ever achieved. The priest’s speech, as Clarke prints it, says Solon is unacquainted with the noble race who once inhabited the country, from whom the present state is descended, only a small remnant remaining, the posterity for many generations having died without the power of speech through letters. Long before the chief deluge a city of Athenians existed, regulated by the best laws, whose deeds and institutions were the most excellent under heaven.

Clarke takes this as the previous Iberian, Khitoid, or pre-Hellenic epoch, when Athens and the other cities of the ancient world were founded and received their names. In Egypt these matters would be better understood. In Athens the old languages had died out and the ancient literature was extinct. Rome, like Babylon and Nineveh, remained under the spell of Turanian religion and science, Etruscan keeping its vitality there as Akkad did. The sentence on Akkad breaks in the print at “as Akkad did in the last” and is not finished on the page I have. Etruria remained a compact state long after the Aryan military adventurer had got possession of Rome. Nothing of that kind stood in the neighbourhood of Athens in Plato’s time, though Lydia was an example in Asia, and many populations were barbarous-speaking down to a late age. In the Hellenic peninsula the Hellenes cleared out the tribes. Their language spread into Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace. Athens received immigrants, but the Hellenic dialect held the preponderance.

In Egypt, resort of Hellenes and of mercenaries from western Asia, the Iberian relationships were better understood, the more so because the Egyptians had held possessions in Syria. The priest’s teaching indicates not Athens solely, though Athens was a great city in the Iberian epoch, but the Iberian races and states, and the empire of the great King of the East. The priest says the law paid attention to wisdom from the first, and to the universe, including divination and medicine. From those divine things the enquiry proceeds to human affairs. Clarke calls this a truthful picture of the protohistoric epoch of culture, from which the Egyptian, the Assyrian, and the Hellenic proceeded.

The writings record many mighty deeds, and one above the rest: a prodigious force the city once overcame, when a mighty warlike power, rushing from the Atlantic Sea, spread itself with hostile fury over all Europe and Asia. Clarke says we must not understand the force as derived solely from outside the Mediterranean. The Atlantic power held the western countries of Europe and Africa. The Semitic migration, which did not affect Hellas or Italia, but did Cyprus, Carthage, and Spain, probably helped to close the Mediterranean to the Atlantic king. Hellas and Italia became the seat of the Aryan rivalries, and offered less to the Phoenician and Punic pirates than Hispania, divided, like all Iberian countries, into petty principalities of mixed populations. The fall of the Atlantic king and the loss of his dominions would have affected their cohesion. Similar conditions influenced Gaul and the Britains. They fell a prey to the Celtic invasions. Some states of Iberian origin lingered, and their power and wealth declined.

Plato says the Atlantic Sea was then navigable, an observation Clarke says is to be kept in mind, and that it had an island fronting the strait.

This island, he says, was larger than Libya and Asia put together, a description well beseeming America.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 24

Plato, as Clarke prints him, says there was a passage for travellers of that day to the rest of the islands, and from those islands to the whole opposite continent that surrounds the real sea. What is within the mouth appears to be a bay with a kind of narrow entrance. That sea is a true sea, and the land that entirely surrounds it may really and truly be called a continent. Clarke calls this a correct description. The point to note is the acknowledgment of a free navigation in ancient times.

In that Atlantic island a powerful league of kings subdued the entire island, many other islands, and parts of the continent, and subjected the inland parts of Libya as far as Egypt, and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.

My comment on this is that the head seat of the great king was possibly in the Caribbean Sea; it may be in St. Domingo.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 24

At the Spanish invasion this island was under the Caribs, whose language is traced there. The relics of the former civilisation in this and the other islands were lost. What is further to be found in America of the ancient occupation, time alone can show.

At that ancient epoch the great kingdoms of Mexico, of the Mayas, of the Chibchas, of Peru, must already have existed.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 25

It may be that the voyage of Columbus was on the ancient route. A statement he thinks safer than the rest assigned the great king parts of Africa, including the coast, and of Europe, which embraced Hispania and most probably Gaul and Britain.

Plato’s collected force undertook at one blow to overawe “your country” and “ours” and all the land within the mouth. Clarke puts his own queries in brackets: Europe, and Egypt. By comparison with the other passage this is indistinct, because it is already stated that the great King of the West held dominion up to Tyrrhenia. The priest then praises the virtue and strength of Solon’s state, sometimes leading the Greek nation, sometimes left by the defection of the rest, still prevailing, raising the trophy, keeping from slavery those not yet enslaved, and ensuring liberty for all who live within the Pillars of Hercules.

The continuation, as Clarke prints it, is violent earthquakes and deluges, desolation in a single day and night, the warlike race merged under the earth, and the Atlantic island plunged beneath the sea and disappeared, whence the sea is neither navigable nor to be traced, blocked by the great depth of mud which the subsiding island produced. He puts his own query mark after “mud.”

V. The Description in the Critias

The Critias is the real continuation of the Timaeus, and the text has come down imperfect. Grote, in the third volume of his Plato, is doubtful whether Plato finished or meant to finish the dialogue. The part that concerns Clarke begins with the date of the war.

First of all, then, let us recollect that it is about 9,000 years since war was proclaimed between those dwelling outside the Pillars of Hercules and all those within them, which war we must now describe.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 26

Of the inner party, this city, which Clarke glosses as Athens, was the leader. Of the outer party, the kings of the Atlantic island, once larger than Libya and Asia, now sunk by earthquakes, a mass of impervious mud. The dialogue then gives a mythical history of the ancient Athenians. Critias says expressly that Solon turned the native names of the Atlantis into their Greek meanings, which Clarke takes as in favour of a statement really adopted from abroad.

The gods distributed the whole earth into larger and smaller portions. Poseidon, taking as his lot the Atlantic island, begot children by a mortal woman and settled in a spot of the island. He became enamoured of the daughter of two aborigines. Clarke finds this a peculiarity, because we are led to believe that the real population of the earth was from Poseidon. It may be a vague admission of an aboriginal population brought under culture by the invading Iberians. Poseidon created two springs, one hot and one cold, which may become an identification of a site, and five pairs of male twins, to whom he gave kingdoms. The eldest was named Atlas. All these and their descendants dwelt for many generations and ruled in the sea of islands, and further extended their empire, as before said, to Egypt and Tyrrhenia. Clarke doubts that this means the King of the West held Egypt and Tyrrhenia. The historical meaning may be that he held the countries next Tyrrhenia and Egypt.

The sons of Atlas were the most distinguished. The eldest king always handed his power to his eldest son. Wealth was such as was never found among royal dynasties. Much came from foreign countries through their power. The greatest part was supplied by the island: ores dug solid or smelted, and especially the metal orichalcus, now known only by name, formerly of high celebrity, dug in many parts of the island, the most valuable metal then known except gold. The island produced wood for builders and food for tame and wild animals. Clarke reads the precious metals as a supply of which the King of the West would have the monopoly, and he points also to Aelian. The passage that has sealed the tradition as fable, and which he thinks may be evidence of the contrary, is the vast numbers of elephants. He interprets them as tapirs. There were abundant means of support for animals that feed in marshes and lakes, on mountains and plains. Fruits, vegetables, drinks, meats, and ointments are given in rhetorical detail, and “certain dainty fruits for dessert.”

The inhabitants erected temples, royal habitations, ports and docks over the whole region, and of similar works there are remains enough in America. Gold and silver were largely used. Warm baths are specified, and separate baths for women. The troublesome passage is an arena for horses, and riding horses for soldiers.

There is a possibility that the details as to the establishment of war chariots may belong to the European and not to the American dominions of the great king, and in such case a connection may be suggested between such war chariots and those encountered by Julius Caesar in Britannia.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 28

The docks were full of triremes and carried on a large trade with all parts, meaning of Atlantis. Of their polity, none of the ten states were to engage in war with each other. They were to combine against any city breaking out in sedition or trying to destroy the royal race. They held from immemorial custom a common assembly, assigning the empire to the Atlantic race. They did not allow the king to put to death any of his kinsmen unless approved by more than half of the ten. Where the writer suggests that a diminution of public virtue caused the fall, Clarke will no longer follow him. The continuation of the dialogue is missing, and no manuscript has yet been found under the circumstances stated.

VI. Other Traditions

Mythological fables connected with Atlas and the Atlantides or Pleiades possibly refer to the traditions recorded by Plato. Atlas is among the earliest men and leaders, son of Japetus and brother of Prometheus. Some say he was a son of Asia, daughter of Oceanus. In the division of the world he received the western portion, including Mauritania. Hesperus, a son of Atlas, represented the west and the islands of the Hesperides. The several islands were symbolised as the Pleiades. He is also represented as possessing Italy, which, according to the account in Plato, appears to have been included in the domains of the Atalantis. Hesiod places the Hesperides at the western extremity of the earth. The continent of Atalantis, according to Plato, abounded in gold, and the chief feature in the legend of the Hesperides is the tree that produces golden apples.

Mythology, like Plato, represents contests between the east and west, Libya and Atalantis. Busiris, king of Egypt, carried off the Hesperides, and they were recovered by Hercules. On the other hand a Hercules invaded the Hesperides and carried off the gold. Orion also attacked the Atlantides.

Donnelly, in Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, p. 27, collected passages, though he treats them as confirmatory of a submerged land. An extract preserved in Proclus, from a work now lost, mentions islands in the exterior sea, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Clarke’s footnote says it is quoted by Boeckh in his Commentary on Plato, and in Diedrich Muller, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum. In one of these islands the inhabitants preserved from their ancestors a remembrance of Atlantis, an extremely large island, which for a long time held dominion over all the islands of the Atlantic Ocean. Clarke’s opinion is that this is a reference to one of the Canary or Fortunate Islands, and is to be taken as evidence.

Aelian, in the Varia Historia, as Donnelly cites him, related an interview between Midas, king of Phrygia, and Silenus. Silenus reported a great continent beyond the Atlantic, larger than Asia, Europe, and Libya put together. A race called Meropes dwelt there and had extensive cities. They were persuaded that their country always was a continent. Gold and silver were so plentiful that they were esteemed no more than iron in Asia. Out of curiosity some crossed the ocean and visited the Hyperboreans. Clarke takes this as the Asiatic chain of tradition, in concurrence with the school of Pergamos. Silenus and Midas are only Greek phrases for a tradition of the pre-Hellenic period.

The regions where the tradition would be preserved would be Britain, Gaul, Spain, Etruria, the Canaries, Mauritania, Egypt, and Asia. The old Greeks and Romans had no intercourse with the Britains, and afterwards the Celtic invasion broke the chain of Iberian knowledge, unless the teaching of the monk Vergilius is in point. Before the Celts, the Phoenicians had done the same in Gaul. In Hispania the historical influences can be traced, as in Mauritania. The Aryan Romans learned little from the Etruscans before the national decadence. Hellas early fell under the Aryans. The legend was preserved in the Canaries (Proclus), in Ireland (Vergilius), in Italy (Cicero), in Egypt (Plato), and in Asia (Aelian). In the Greek and Roman period these localities were separated and gave no combined evidence.

Donnelly, p. 28, quotes Diodorus Siculus: the Phoenicians discovered a large island in the Atlantic, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, several days’ sail from the coast of Africa. The soil was fertile. The scenery had rivers, mountains, and forests. The inhabitants retired in summer to magnificent country-houses in beautiful gardens. Fish and game were abundant, the climate delicious, and the trees bore fruit at all seasons. Clarke says this may be some Carthaginian ship driven over the ocean and got back as best it could. It does not represent regular Phoenician or Carthaginian intercourse. A Phoenician inscription reputed to have been found in Brazil a few years ago could not be authenticated, and was pronounced spurious.

Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, c. 6, refers to habitable continents. Macrobius, commenting on the Somnium, discusses four great islands, two in the north and two in the south hemisphere. Except the two dialogues of Plato, Clarke has not verified the quotations himself. For the Somnium he quotes Forbiger, Handbuch der alten Geographie, vol. ii. Von Humboldt dealt with the statement and, like Clarke, considers it to represent the regions of the world, and that Columbus was influenced by this reasoning. Humboldt, Kritische Untersuchungen, i. 119, 168. In the discussion Mr. Fyfe differed from Humboldt, and considered that Columbus was more under the influence of Christian cosmogony than of classic. One problem Columbus had to solve was whether it was true, as alleged in Plato, that the Atlantic was blocked with mud. When he had ascertained that it was not, he was in a position to look out for his two continents. He may have thought, as the tradition stated, that the two continents were separated at the equator, and that he would find an open channel to Cathay. At that time the Latin writers could be examined, and the fall of Constantinople had driven Greeks into Italy. Greek books were bought. All that had been written as to the four worlds was within the ken of Columbus.

Another part of the subject is the tradition, recorded by Plato, that the sun, moon, and stars once rose in the opposite quarter to what they now do. Mr. Haliburton, quoted from Canon Greswell, Fasti Catholici, i. 343, considers this a reference to the knowledge that the rising south of the equator had been seen and communicated. To the Tahitians the sun, moon, and stars rise on their right hand, as to us on the left. He cites Primitive Man, p. 21. In the discussion Mr. Collett referred to the importance of a tradition that the sun had been seen on the wrong side of the world.

Traditions of a lost world may refer to the cessation of correspondence with America. One among the Slavonic nations, mentioned by Mr. Mijatovich, is that there was once another world lost by conflagration. So was the world of Plato lost by volcanic influences, from which the Slavonic tale may have emanated. For the later period, St. Clement said in his Epistle to the Corinthians that there were other worlds beyond the ocean. Donnelly, Atlantis, p. 28. The Irish priest Vergilius in the eighth century taught in Germany that the earth is a globe, that there are antipodes, and that there may be population there. St. Boniface, the English apostle, complained. Pope Zachary declared it “perversa et iniqua doctrina,” contrary to the law of God. Clarke cites Hardouin, iii. 912, and a discussion in Notes and Queries for June 1885.

Irish and Salic legends may keep traces of the former epoch. Mr. Hector MacLean, of Islay, has had his attention called to probable Iberian survivals.

He informs me that in many of the folk tales of illiterate peasants Righ an Domhail, King of the World, is a common expression, as well in the Highlands as in Ireland.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 32

Heroes are lauded who fought with the King of the World and defeated him. There is frequent mention of Eilean Fomallach an Domhain, the island on the border of the world or in the farthest part of the world. On the disputed phrase Ceithir Ranna ruadh an Domhain, MacLean is inclined to suggest Lordship of the World. As Inis Fail, one of the names of Ireland, may mean King’s Island, MacLean regards this as a possible attribute of the last portion of the Iberian Kings of the West. The footnote says this would be conformable with the possibilities of the Pictish and Scottish relations in Ireland before the last stage of the kingdom in Britain.

The descriptions of the possessions of the Atalantis conform, he says, with what the great king needed for the occupation of America, and with the causes of the cessation. On account of the winds and currents, a foothold was necessary not only on the American shores but on this side of the Atlantic. Plato shows his ignorance of the real conditions, which Clarke takes as another circumstance in favour of the narrative. The account provides for the west shore of Africa and of Hispania, and it must be assumed, as a consequence, of the Britannic islands and possibly of the shores of Gaul. In the time of Julius Caesar, Aquitania was Iberian, but the coins show that the other parts of Gaul had been colonised by the Iberians. Clarke’s argument goes to the extent that the Belgians were to be regarded as Iberian. He points to his Mediterranean Populations. In Caesar’s time the Celtic races had become predominant in Gaul and the Britains, and had invaded Hispania and Belgium. After the decline of the great king, navigators who followed him to his vassal provinces would have no claim to a friendly reception. Step by step the Iberian vassal kings would fall into dissensions and become a prey to the Celts. The Celts, like the Hellenes, had no traditions of western intercourse to preserve.

The Atlantic has trade winds from east to west within 30 degrees north and south, not from west to east. Had America been first occupied across the Pacific from China, it might be supposed the population would then have opened intercourse eastward across the Atlantic. The wind is therefore in favour of a beginning from this eastern side. Humboldt thought it less dangerous to pass from the Canaries to America than to traverse one of the small lakes of Switzerland. The Spaniards called this part of the Atlantic El Golfo de las Damas, or the Ladies’ Sea, because the passage could safely be made in an open boat. Clarke sets that against the doubt that only modern decked ships can make the passage. Such vessels as the most ancient navigators possessed could accomplish it. He points to Hakluyt, and to men of his own day who have made the contrary and dangerous passage of the North Atlantic in open boats.

There is an equatorial current from the Canaries, south of the Sargosso Sea, to Guiana and the West Indies. Another, the main equatorial current, and much more favourable, passes from the Gulf of Guinea to South America. It is on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea that languages are found having affinity with those of Central America, though great displacements may have occurred, or the local races may always have been compressed on the ocean shores. The point at which the Guinea current is available is one of which the geographical knowledge of the ancient writers held cognisance. The footnote: the Mar de Sargoço region of the weed Fucus natans extends across the Atlantic from the 30 degree meridian to the Bahama Islands, between 36 degrees N. and 19 degrees N., being 1,200 miles (1931 kilometers) from north to south.

VII. Effect of the Revolution on East and West

The fall of the western Iberians must have had great results in the New World and the Old, and in the Old it paved the way for the epoch which Greeks, Romans, and ourselves looked on as the infancy of history. Of that history alone Herodotus was the father. Of the history before him we are only of late acquiring the rudiments, from excavations and the relics of Akkadians, Sumerians, Khitans, Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Etruscans, Cypriotes, and others still to come. To this indeterminate epoch, where there are some historical elements, as yet shapeless, he some years since applied the term protohistoric, and others adopted it. Prehistoric is not correct, he says, for the history there is better than is sometimes found of later periods. Prehistoric should be kept for what is before history.

The stoppage of the navigation would deprive the ten kingdoms of the Atlantic of their supply of trained Iberian civilians, warriors, navigators, and merchants, leaving the half-caste and native elements to acquire numerical preponderance. By the cessation of Iberian immigration would occur what happened in his own days by the rupture of intercourse with old Spain after the wars of independence. Indian blood assumed preponderance. The people still speak Spanish and observe outwardly the new religion, and the rulers of many republics are men of whole or half Indian blood. History repeats itself, and comparative history, neglected from incomplete knowledge, can explain what we regard as events.

After the dissolution of the empire of Atlantis the states, becoming independent, might retain the ancient culture for a longer or shorter period, but its ultimate extinction was certain. Official languages would linger and be superseded by those of the dominant tribes, which we find to be of the same real origin and mould as those of the Old World. New states would fall by diminished cohesion, and hold a more or less decided position of culture or of savagery. Where wild tribes overturned a kingdom and were overturned in turn, as in the later history of Mexico, mythology, not language and culture, would generally be affected. At the Spanish invasion the development would be very different from the Old World, except in Africa. Babylonia and Egypt had fallen for ages, their material existence annihilated by alien preponderance. America was protected from Semites and Aryans. There was no stage corresponding to the absorption of Babylonia by Assyrians and Persians, or of Egypt by Greeks and Arabs. In America the ancient culture languished, but it was more persistently maintained. This must be repeated of Africa.

In Europe the effects were more immediate and more complete. There must have been an epoch when the great King of the West was in harmony with the ruler of the east, for the coast dominions in Spain, Etruria, and Mauritania were as fully Iberian as those of the east. He had long since shown that the topographical names of Hispania are identically those of Italia, Hellas, Asia Minor, Palestine, and so on. After the severance, political hostility followed. The fall of the great King of the West weakened the conquerors and laid them open to the invaders behind them in the east. Support from the west, and naval aid, they could no longer obtain, and most probably some invasion by them of Hispania and other countries dissipated their local strength.

Phoenicia, according to the Bible an unsemitic country, fell under Semitic victors, taking their languages and religions. The Phoenicians then appear as traders and pirates in the Levant, in advance of the Aryans who had penetrated into Hellas. They occupied another Iberian country when they conquered but did not found Carthage, again at Massilia, in Gaul, and more particularly in Hispania. The Iberian races were deprived of power in Hispania, South Gaul, South Italia, Sicilia and the islands, Mauritania, and Hellas. Lydia was probably the last stronghold in western Asia, and that fell to the Persians. Etruria lingered and ultimately succumbed to the Aryan masters of Rome.

What happened in the Britains must be chiefly conjecture. The Iberians were severed from their allies, and their branches of gainful commerce were cut off. After a time the newer comers looked after these, and the tin trade more particularly attracted foreign cupidity. He points to his paper read before the Royal Historical Society on the Iberians in Britain. The power of the Celtic invaders was great enough to cover these secluded regions and to make the Celtic language ultimately universal. A footnote added since the paper was read: in September 1885 he sent the British Association a solution of the Picts, which brings the Iberian relations of Britain more prominently forward. Those who have given the Picts most attention, Dr. Skene, Professor Rhys, and Mr. Grant Allen, have concluded that they were non-Celtic and non-Aryan. Beda, contemporary of the Pictish kings, had informed us that a law of female succession prevailed. Dr. Skene found that of forty-two names about half belonged to the form Talargh, a quarter to Brude, and a quarter to Drust, and that no king succeeded his father. Clarke shows the kingly names to be Iberian. If an Iberian dynasty survived for a thousand years of our era, and within about four centuries of the rediscovery of America, a similar survival may have taken place in the New World. Talargh, Talargan, and its various forms he identifies in Pictish in that Association paper.

VIII. The Name Atalantis or Atlantis

The name Atalantis or Atlantis is by me taken as the name of the king and not as that of the land, and as the name of the king instead of Atlas.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 38

There is material enough to suggest the form Atalantis. Such a form brings it into conformity with mythological and historical surroundings.

In his work on the Khita or Hamath inscriptions, by some called Hittite, a term he says is calculated to mislead for characters found over western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, he gave much attention to the bilingual in Khita and Assyrian cuneiform, the boss or seal of Tarkhondemos or Tarkutimmi. The object has been fancifully treated, and various animal forms attributed to the rude figures. It is now recognised, as he stated in the Athenaeum in 1880, that they are identical with characters in the inscriptions of Hamath, Carchemish, Magnesia, Ninfi, and so on, and that the signification is the title of the king. From that point, he says, divergence into theory grows rife.

The characters are identical with two types on the coins of Sardis, the heads of a bull and a lion, and in an artistic form the figures of a bull and a lion. Sardis is close to the inscriptions of the pseudo-Sesostris and the Niobe, with his query, at Ninfi and Magnesia. On the boss the bull stands for Tara or Tar, and the lion for Kun or Ku. Timmi or Demos means offspring or children. His paper to the Royal Historical Society in 1882, “Early History of the Mediterranean Populations, &c., in their Migrations and Settlements,” at pp. 22, 24, and 25, remarks on the adoption of the head as the type of the animal. A footnote says the same is so in Mexican inscriptions, and now among the North American Indians, and that they are also found in Captain Gill’s Western China manuscripts in the British Museum, with his query Moso.

In that treatise are several examples of cities of the form Tarakona, having a bull or a lion, or both, as emblems. He prints them so:

Acanthus, Macedonia, bull and lion. Knidos, lion. Tarraco, Spain, bull. Dyrrhacchium, Illyria, bull. Atrax, Thessaly, bull. Taurini, Italy, bull. Citium, Cyprus, with deer in brackets, lion. Catana, Sicily, bull. Panticapaeum, printed with the ae as one letter, bull, lion. Cibyra (Kibura), Phrygia, bull, lion. Cyzicus (Kuziku), calf, lion. Syracusa, Sicily, bull. Khios, island, lion. Morgantia, Sicily, stag, lion.

Then, on the next page: Messana, Sicily, calf, lion. Tarsus, Cilicia, bull, lion. Carthago, Africa, goat, lion. Sardis, Lydia, bull, lion. Segesta, Sicily, stag, lion. Suessa, Campania, bull, lion. Samos, island, bull, lion.

Tara and kona are not the only words for bull and lion, nor are they always in that order. Sardis appears to be Sara, Sala, bull, and Di, Ti, lion, compared with Sura, Kusa. Acanthus is a-Kan-Tu.

The form Tarkon, separable in the Hamath inscriptions, and found with or without the characters he prints as two pairs of uprights, reading Timmi, Demos, has many examples. Tarku, with -timme, on the boss. Tarkondimotos, Tarkondemos, and Tarcodimatos, Cilician names quoted by Dr. Merdtmann. Adarkonim (1 Chron. xxix. 7; Ezra viii. 25, 26) and Darkamonim (Ezra ii. 69; Nehemiah vii. 70, 71), names given to foreign gold coins in the Bible. Tarquin, kingly title and royal name in Etruria and Rome. Dercennus, king of Latium, in the Aeneid, xi. 850, which may be an invention, but, like other words used by Virgil, seems modelled on an old form. Tarquitius, see Faunus and Dryope, Aeneid, x. 550. Tarchetius, king of Alba. Telegonus, a legendary king of Italy, and the same name set against Egypt. Telkhis, a king of Peloponnesus. Telkhines, chief of Rhodes. Darkuan is the word for king in the Kanyop language of Africa.

A footnote: the name Tarkondemos, or its local equivalent Dardanus, is found by him in the Hissarlik or Trojan inscriptions, discovered by Dr. Schliemann and read by Professor Gompers, of Vienna, as Tago or Tako in Cypriote characters. See his papers in the Athenaeum, July 25 and following, 1885, p. 112. The same interpretations he attaches to the only characters discovered by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenae.

The form is also in place-names. Besides Darkuan in Africa, the title Tarkhun is still preserved in Central Tartary. He quotes D’Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientale, p. 847: the title of a noble exempt from all kinds of taxes and from any contribution to the prince or general of plunder or booty made in war. The Rev. Dr. Koelle informs him that Zenker, in his Turkish Dictionary, explains the word as the title of a dignitary at the courts of the Tartar khans, with exemption from tribute, free access to the sovereign, and inviolability of person. Tarkhun was also applied to a tribe of Jaghata Turks. Mr. W. St. Chad Boscawen suggested to him in 1880 that Tirhakah is one of the forms of Tarkon.

Among the kingly names in the district of Sardis or Lydia he finds Candaules (Kandaules), Tantalus, and in the Troad Dardanus. On objects brought by Dr. Schliemann from the Troad he has found inscriptions which appear to represent the kingly title. Kandaules he treats as Kan-daures, so that Tara-kon or Dara-kon is reproduced. The individual called Kandaules is said to have been Myrsilus, so Kandaules may have been the kingly title. On the other side, in Kandaules, Tantalus, and Dardanus, he gets a form like A-tlantis, A-talantis, A-taranti. To this class perhaps belong Tyndarus, Codrus (Kodarus), Deukalion, and so on. The numerous kings who adopted the title of Tarkon differentiated themselves by dialectical distinctions and by reversing the syllables.

This title and its equivalents was the great and favourite title before the Semitic and Aryan epoch. The bull is made superior to the lion, probably because the original king of beasts was the elephant, not the lion. As the elephant died out in the northern countries he was replaced by the bull (aloph), the stag, and even the goat (tragos, which Mr. Basil Cooper supposes to be the true representative of the Tarkon). The words for elephant and king show some correspondence in the African languages. Whether the bull and lion were totems or standards is speculation. A survival of the tradition is the legendary throne of King Solomon. On the first step, the Rev. Dr. Lowy remarks, the bull and the lion held their place. On the bull side was the sheep, and on the lion’s the leopard and the cat, with the eagle and the sparrow-hawk.

On the coins adarkonim and darkemonim, great discussion has taken place, recorded by Mr. Madden in the fourth chapter of his work on the coins of the Jews in the Numismata Orientalia. The general impression has been that the coin was the daric of Darius. Madden has given reasons to doubt this. A passage of the scholiast on Aristophanes, Eccl. 602, in Harpocration, and Suidas’ word which Clarke prints in Greek, says, in Clarke’s report of Madden, that the dareikoi were named not from Dareios, father of Xerxes, but from some other more ancient king. Madden notes that Mr. Head particularly rejects this as unworthy of credit. Clarke, on the evidence of this paper, takes the quotation in Harpocration as a real historical condition. Coinage appears to have originated in Asia Minor, bearing the title or emblems of the Tarkon, and in a later stage it is represented by coins of Sardis.

With this point the date of the events of Atalantis may have some connection. In America a community of symbolism, character, and ornament with the Old World may be traced, but there is no such development as the coinage and standards of the Mediterranean. A crescent and star suggest Byzantium, as an owl is accepted for Athens. The footnote says that what perhaps more than anything else suggests a community of ideas between east and west is in the observations on the measurement of American buildings published by Mr. Flinders Petrie and Mr. R. P. Greg. Shells or cowries were an early form of money, in the opinion of many. The inscribed and sculptured whorls found by Dr. Schliemann he has taken as a further form of money. The lumps of metal first coined at Sardis bear the same symbols as the spindle whorls. See his Athenaeum paper on “Darics and Darkomenim,” June 27, 1885, p. 830.

Using this adoption of gold, silver, and bronze coins as a distinctive historic epoch, the alleged naval conflict of east and west, and the severance of intercourse, must have taken place anterior to it.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 43

Mr. Donnelly, Atlantis, p. 445, describes a coin of Palenque with a serpent and eagle. Whether this is a coin is uncertain, but the serpent and eagle are found in America, as on Mediterranean coins.

Upon the eastern territories of the King of Atlantis, in Mauritania, Mr. R. G. Haliburton, Q.C., of Toronto, is now engaged in researches and has discovered many interesting facts. Clarke does not give those facts here.

IX. Origin and Distribution of the American and other Languages

Without the Davenport, the Brazilian, the Phoenician, and other controverted specimens, there is a large number of American rock inscriptions, particularly those of Guiana, which show affinities with those of the Old World. The inscriptions of Yucatan and Lake Titicaca, as well as the Mexican characters, even in the present state of knowledge, suggest a common origin with the east, through an independent development.

A popular example is the Mexican use of “tooth” for “mountain.” The same is in Old World symbology. Tooth, mountain, arrow, and similar forms were arranged in series, and in speech represented by dentals. Another correspondence is the Mexican astrological figure of the human body, each limb and member represented by a zodiacal sign or numeral, many of which can be traced in languages or symbols of the Old World. He cites Karl Faulmann, Geschichte der Alphabete, p. 217 (Vienna, 1880). Dr. Tylor has illustrated systems of numeration by touching features of the face.

Observations of Mr. Alfred R. Wallace in Nature in 1881 (vol. xxiv. p. 244) gave him the key to the connection of characters and speech, after papers to the British Association, the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and the Anthropological Institute. Ancient characters for a round object, eye, sun, moon, mouth, are round as ideographs, and the sounds are of the same class, in this case labials. He had long supposed they turned on the eye as a central type. Wallace said that when we name the mouth or lips we use labials, for teeth and tongue dentals, for the nose and things relating to it nasal sounds, and that this is remarkably constant in most languages, civilised and savage. Wallace’s examples were from Australia. Clarke’s familiar English types are mouth, tooth, nose. That incident alone would give a very small stock of language. To him, with the materials in hand, it showed that the old Chinese round characters were allied to mouth, and therefore labials, and only secondarily to eye. He showed how speech and characters were formed in an article in Nature, at p. 380. Ancient and modern syllabaries and alphabets can generally be recognised as ideographic and phonetic in relation to the law of classification. Some interesting examples connect with America, for which there is no space now. Character is strictly in psychological connection with speech.

Going again over Colonel Mallery, gesture, speech, and character are connected, and speech is in succession to gesture, not precedent to it. Many characters that are not strictly ideographic in writing belong in origin to gesture. Dr. Carl Abel, just beginning to attract attention in Germany and England, found in ancient Egyptian and Coptic that the same or similar sounds had opposite meanings, affirmative or negative, and then the same facts, less strongly, in other languages he knows. Clarke’s explanation is the original relationship of speech to gesture, where the meaning of a sign depends on the significant gesture, affirmative or negative. Hence in some languages adjectives are made not-good, not-great, not-black. The explanatory tones of Chinese may be due to the same origin. He points again to his Comparative Grammar of Egyptian, Coptic, and Ude.

In gesture the real centre is the lower part of the body, and the effective application of speech, labials for instance, is due to the transposition of the centre to the mouth. Labial sounds, m, b, w, and so on, are applied to round characters and to ideas of a round object, but from the beginning of speech a cause of disturbance was introduced. Labial forms are generally regarded as female and the nasal as male, but a labial may be displaced. A common type for the eyes is labial, but in American languages at present a nasal or dental may be more prominent. Under symbolism the two eyes are distinctly male and female, with separate names, hence dissyllable names for the eyes. Under male and female languages, separate words used by males and by females, as found in America, interference will be observed. The general law is that the labial, nasal, and dental were applied according to certain psychological considerations.

The foundation of speech, which must have taken place in the eastern world and been transmitted to America, is not due to one primeval language in the accepted sense, but to relations among all languages, and particularly those of the western hemisphere to those of the eastern, attributed to one law and not to one type. If we take labials we do not find one labial dominating. The labial may be m, b, w, z, f, and so on, as if a law had been given that the round forms were to be represented by a labial. Grimm’s law has been used to treat such forms as degradations in series. On careful observation many existing forms are aboriginal, and they must come under Dr. Tylor’s doctrine of differentiation. There is no opportunity here, perhaps no necessity, for developing all of this, but we get a consistent explanation of the distribution and coincidences of speech, of gesture, and of characters, as bases for historical research.

By the founders of speech these new speech languages were distributed in America, and the suggestion is that such intercourse had already taken place equally in the epoch of gesture language. The effect of introducing speech was a psychological revolution. This appears in the legends either as the creation of man or as the second creation of man, and in the legend of the ark when new men were carried over the waters, commonly called the deluge legend.

In many traditions we find these bearded white men coming by sea, introducing speech and other arts, and founding kingdoms or being treated as divine personages.

Hyde Clarke. Examination of the Legend of Atlantis in Reference to Protohistoric Communication with America (1886), p. 47

The rapidity and completeness of the occupation, and the reduction of so many thousand tribes, must have depended not on warlike conquests but upon the divine influence of speech, introduced by missionaries and emissaries.

One of the most interesting examples is Tierra del Fuego. The missionaries have lately put into print one of the three languages, the Yahgan, spoken by a few hundred savages. On examining the vocabulary, as he stated at the last meeting of the British Association (1883), most of the words can be sharply identified with those of West Africa, and further they can be compared with the word that this copy breaks at “lan-”. The reprint ends there.