The History of Atlantis (1926)

I read Lewis Spence’s The History of Atlantis (Rider, London, 1926) for the claims a later writer can check. The pages below record what he says happened, where he puts it, whom he names, and which custom he ties to which people. The quotes are short excerpts from that edition, for review and study. I paraphrase the rest. Where he states a date, a place, or an event I would set beside another author, his own sentence is set under the summary.

Spence signs the preface from 66 Arden Street, Edinburgh. The title page names his earlier books The Problem of Atlantis, Atlantis in America, and The Gods of Mexico. The standard notice of his life gives 1874 to 1955, and dates those two Atlantis books to 1924 and 1925. I use the dates only for the life.

The book at a glance

• Title: The History of Atlantis.
• Edition I read: London, Rider & Co., Paternoster Row. Printed by Purnell and Sons, Paulton, Somerset. Sixteen full-page plates.
• Length: chapters from page 1 to the culture-complex chapter, which starts on page 218. A catalogue record of the 1926 book gives x, 238 pages, plus the plates.
• What he claims: a real Atlantic land, west of Gibraltar, broken into islands and sunk about 9600 BC. Cro-Magnon and Azilian people are its migrants. What is left is not a set of ready-made colonies, but one group of customs on both sides of the ocean.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

These are the claims I would take to Donnelly, Scott-Elliot, Plato, and the archaeologists Spence names. The chapter notes below give the pages and the names.

• Site, last phase. From about 23,000 BC to about 9600 BC. Close to the Strait of Gibraltar, west to the 45th meridian, and from nearly latitude 45 north to about latitude 22. The Azores are the northern edge. The Canaries are the south-eastern edge. Area about 2,650,000 square miles. A second island-mass, Antillia, lay in the West Indies and lasted longer (pp. 64, 71, 74).
• Dates of the migrations. Aurignacian or Cro-Magnon flight toward Europe about 25,000 years ago, after a shock he places about 22,000 years ago. Solutrean tools in Spain and France about 16,000 years ago. A Magdalenian flight about 14,000 BC. An Azilian entry into Atlantis from North Africa about 10,500 BC, and an Azilian entry into Europe about 10,000 BC, which he matches to Plato’s invaders (pp. 75 to 86, 108 to 109).
• Population of the early island. About 350,000 people on 2,650,000 square miles, from one family of six on each forty square miles (p. 88).
• Peoples he equates. Cro-Magnon with the Aurignacians and with the Cyclopes. Azilians with proto-Iberians, with Plato’s later Atlanteans, and with the Guanches. Basque, in his reading of Ripley and Farrar, as a possible remnant of the Atlantic language. Poseidon as an Azilian priest-king from the Atlas region of North Africa (pp. 84, 107 to 108).
• Kings. Plato’s ten sons, named below. Diodorus’s line: Uranus, then Saturn, then a human Jupiter. Albion for Britain, Iberius for Ireland, Atlas for the island, all sons of Poseidon in the notice he takes from Pomponius Mela (pp. 17, 103, 137).
• Name. He derives Atlantis from Welsh Llyn Llion, by way of Lyonesse (p. 137).
• Bull. A six-year rite of ten kings and ten bulls, which he then finds in Aurignacian caves, in Osiris-Apis by about 3000 BC, in Crete, and in British bull-baiting (pp. 23, 180 onward).
• Later survival. He is not sure the whole land sank in 9600 BC. He tries a higher culture about 5000 BC, a Cabiri cult from an Atlantis still there about 3000 BC, and a final disappearance before regular Mediterranean shipping, about 2000 BC (pp. 210 to 212).
• What he withdraws. Ready-made colonies in Egypt, North Africa, and America. In their place, a slow spread of mummification, witchcraft, the pyramid, head-flattening, the couvade, three-pointed stones, cataclysm stories, tattooing, the thunder-stone, and the Great Hand (p. 218).

For Plato’s own text, see Timaeus & Critias. For other sites, see Where Was Atlantis.

Preface (p. vii)

He wants the word history because a history should aim at what he calls fundamental truth. He also says the account will have gaps.

Such an account, I am the first to admit, must have as many lacunae as it has facts, and must rely in large measure upon analogy and often upon pure surmise.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), Preface, p. vii

The findings he flags as new, against his own earlier Atlantis books, are these. The Atlantis story painted on the peplum of Pallas at the Athenian festival is older than Plato by more than a century. Plato’s Egyptian sources were real, and Plato himself visited Egypt. He has a new account of an Atlantean invasion of Europe, a tighter site for the island, and a larger British and Irish folklore case. He identifies Lyonesse with Atlantis, and he groups Atlas with the British gods Albion and Iberius. The case he most wants accepted is the culture-complex: one set of customs in western Europe, on the Atlantic islands, and in eastern America.

Chapter I. Introductory (p. 1)

His working rule is analogy. If Italy had sunk after Rome, documents and colonies would remain, and the soil would not. Atlantis, as he dates it, sank nearly nine thousand years before Rome was founded, and the soil is under the sea. He treats the decipherment of hieroglyphs and cuneiform, and Schliemann at Troy, as cases where a hunch came before the proof. He denies that Plato’s narrative is an allegory. The test he sets himself is whether Plato’s geography, customs, and religion can be matched with neighbouring regions. He says the study is still in an “alchemical” stage, and that the wildest guess can come as near the target as the most cautious statement when the material is this thin.

Chapter II. Plato, in Spence’s own compilation (p. 7)

He does not print Jowett and leave it. He builds one English account from Jowett’s Dialogues, R. D. Archer-Hind, the Abbé Jolibois (Dissertation sur l’Atlantide, Lyons, 1846), and P. Negris (La question de l’Atlantis de Platon, Athens archaeological congress, 1905). He says this is a compilation of translations, not a new translation, and that he has left out no important fact.

These are the figures and names in that compilation. I give them as he gives them, so they can be set beside the Greek and beside Jowett.

The gods divided the earth. Poseidon received Atlantis and had children by a mortal woman. The coast was not mountainous. In the middle was a plain. About six miles from the plain stood a low mountain, home of the autochthon Evenor, his wife Leucippe, and their daughter Cleito. Poseidon married Cleito, ringed the mountain with two mounds and three sea-filled ditches, and put two springs there, one hot and one cold. Navigation was still unknown. He had five pairs of male twins and divided the island into ten parts. The eldest, Atlas, was king of the whole island, and the ocean takes its name from him. His twin was Gadir in the Atlantean tongue and Eumolus in Greek. Gadir’s share was the end of the island nearest the Pillars of Hercules, later called Gadiric. The other sons are Amphisus and Eudemon, then Mneseus, Autochthonus, Elassippus, Mestor, Azaes, and Diaprepus. Their line held the ocean islands and the parts near Egypt and Tyrrhenia for several centuries.

The island’s metal, next to gold, is orichalcum, which he glosses as mountain copper. It had timber, tame and wild herds, and many elephants, fed in marsh, lake, river, plain, and mountain. Among the fruits is one with a hard rind, giving meat, drink, and ointment. He later says this can only be the coconut.

The harbour canal through the land zones was three hundred feet wide, about a hundred feet deep, and about sixty miles long, fit for the largest ships. A trireme could pass from one sea zone to the next. The sea zones were about 1,800 feet (548 meters), 1,200 feet (365 meters), and 600 feet (182 meters) wide. The palace island was five stadia, about 1,000 yards, across. The stone was white, black, and red. The outer wall was coated with brass, the inner with tin, the citadel with orichalcum. The temple of Poseidon was about 600 feet (182 meters) long and, in his words, three acres square, roofed with ivory, gold, silver, and orichalcum. Poseidon stood in a chariot of winged horses, with a hundred Nereids on dolphins. A circular hippodrome near the middle of the central island was 600 feet (182 meters) across. The great canal through the plain ran more than 1,000 miles (1609 kilometers) and took the mountain streams. The soil gave two harvests a year. The island looked south. The plain furnished 60,000 men-at-arms. The country was split into cantons of about twelve miles square. The chief of each canton, in the royal portion only, had to furnish ten chariots, each with two horses and two riders and a driver, ten heavy infantry, two archers, two slingers, three stone-shooters, and four sailors, toward a fleet of 20,000 vessels. The other nine parts had their own military system.

On government he writes that each of the twelve kings was absolute in his own island, under laws cut on an orichalcum column in the temple of Poseidon. Every six years they met, brought in ten bulls, and each king vowed to offer one to Poseidon without iron. They killed the bulls at the column, passed the limbs through the fire, poured the blood on the column, and later splashed blood from gold cups on the fire, swearing to judge by the engraved laws.

Chapter III. Classical and modern writers (p. 24)

This chapter is his shelf of earlier accounts. From the ancient side he takes Diodorus Siculus on Amazons and Atlanteans, Theopompus, a list of kings, Strabo’s island of Meropis, a continent called Saturnia, Marcellus, and a notice in Arnobius. From the modern side, starting in the sixteenth century, he takes Olivier, Rudbeck, Bailly, the Comte de Corli, Voltaire, Delisle de Sales, and Bartoli, the theory that Atlantis was America, and the maps and arguments of Kircher, Ginguené, Buffon, and de la Borde. One plate is Bory de Saint-Vincent’s map of Atlantis. He returns to several of these men when he fixes his own site in Chapter V.

Chapter IV. How he tests the sources (p. 39)

He answers the readers who call Plato’s story a noble lie. Archer-Hind thought it impossible to decide whether Plato invented the whole tale or brought home an Egyptian legend. Spence quotes Plato, through his own compilation, that the story is “strange, yet perfectly true,” and he quotes Socrates in the Timaeus that it is no fictitious tale but a true history. He says the younger Critias’s great-grandfather had a written account, and that this Critias, on a genealogy in Proclus, was a first cousin of Plato’s mother. Ast and Kleine thought this Critias was the man who first brought the tradition from Egypt. Plutarch, he says, confirms that Solon meant to write an Atlantis poem and was too old to finish it. Martin, in his Dissertation sur l’Atlantide (p. 323), judged that Plato tried to carry out the plan of his kinsman Solon.

On the Egyptian visit he cites Plutarch, Life of Solon, chapter 26, and De Iside et Osiride, chapter 10: Solon spoke with the priest Sonchis at Sais. Clement of Alexandria gives Sonchis as the name of the priest who taught Pythagoras. Proclus says Plato himself talked with Pateneit at Sais, Ochlapi at Heliopolis, and Ethimon at Sebennytus, and that Pateneit is the priest of the Timaeus. Crantor, who died thirty-three years after Plato, said the Egyptian priests showed the Greeks columns on which the history of Atlantis was inscribed.

He uses the history of Sais to explain why Greeks would have heard the story. Sais was richest between 697 and 524 BC. Psammetichus held the throne with Greek mercenaries, educated his sons in Greek, and drew Greeks to the capital. Sais and Athens both worshipped Neith, identified with Athene, and from that came the story that Cecrops the Saite led a colony to Athens. A Greek quarter stood in Sais. Spence’s point is that if the priests told Solon a false Atlantis, thousands of other Greeks in Sais could have denied it in Athens.

He then matches Plato’s date to archaeology. The invasion at about 9600 BC agrees, he says, with the entry of the Azilian-Tardenoisian peoples, ancestors of the Iberians, into Europe. Plato’s tributary lands, “Libya as far as Egypt, and Europe to the borders of Etruria,” are the regions where he says the proto-Iberians settled most firmly. He grants there was no Athens in 9600 BC. The date is thousands of years before the First Dynasty, and the older finds on the site of Athens are a little Neolithic pottery. What he keeps is a folk memory of natives resisting proto-Iberian hordes.

The peplum is his main argument that the story is older than Plato. A scholiast says the Athenian victory over the Atlanteans was shown on the robe dedicated at the Lesser Panathenaea. He dates that festival to at least 125 years before Plato. Athene, enemy of Poseidon, fought him for Athens. He reads the robe as a folk memory of that war, and he quotes Philip Smith, in the article “Atlantis” in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, that the legend is also found in forms which do not seem copied entirely from Plato. He adds Strabo’s quotation of Poseidonius: it is more reasonable to believe Atlantis existed and sank than to say its inventor made it disappear.

He takes a paper in The Occult Review for September 1923 as a further Greek trace. Odysseus’s wanderings are one long struggle with Poseidon. On Ogygia, Calypso, daughter of Atlas, holds him, and Athene protects him. So Athene stands twice against the Atlantic side: against Poseidon, and against Atlas’s daughter.

On the shoals left by the sinking island he cites Scylax of Caryanda, in the Periplus, roughly Plato’s contemporary: Cerne, twelve days’ coasting beyond the Pillars, where the sea is no longer navigable for shoals, mud, and seaweed a palm wide and sharp at the points. Himilco, about 500 BC, as repeated by Festus Avienus in the fourth century AD, met weeds, shallows, calms, and a fog-bound sea with little depth. Aristotle, Meteorologica, calls the sea beyond the Pillars muddy, shallow, and almost windless. Spence treats that as seamen’s information, because Aristotle had been Plato’s pupil. Later, the Arabic writer Edrisi tells of the Magrurin, Moorish sailors of Lisbon, sometime between the eighth and twelfth centuries, who met an impassable stretch and turned, apparently reaching a Canary island. The Pizigani map of 1367 warns against the unnavigable ocean beyond the Azores, where the Sargasso begins.

On names, he notes that Critias says the priests of Sais had already given the Atlantean names an Egyptian form, and that he had to turn them into Greek. Spence cannot see an Egyptian equivalent for Poseidon or for Atlas. The only name he thinks survives in something like an Atlantean form is Gadir, equated with the country of Cadiz, the Fretum Gaditanum. That, for him, puts the Spanish and Atlantean coasts close together.

Two Platonic details get an African reading. Elephants in the marshes, and the hard-rind fruit, which he says can only be the coconut, give the island an African climate, close to that of the Canaries. He does not treat the late elephant in southern Europe as proved. He does treat a late elephant in a warmer, African Atlantis as reasonable.

The bull sacrifice, he says, fits the early Aegean civilisation of Spain and southern France, and he reads the Spanish bullfight and English bull-baiting, still semi-religious into the early eighteenth century, as the last of an Azilian rite. He refuses the allegory of the Persian war. An island and a maritime empire do not map onto that war. Plato died with the account unfinished, which Spence takes as a sign that it was not a tidy political invention.

Diodorus, he says, puts an Atlantic region on the west coast of Africa, bordering the ocean, not clearly an island. The island Hesperia of the Amazons fits Plato’s site better, except that it has no corn. It is volcanic, full of earthquakes, fruit trees, and herds of sheep and goats, as the Canaries still are. He reads the Amazons as Azilians: inventors of the bow, hair dressed on the crown, and an appearance their enemies took for womanish, as in the cave paintings. Diodorus’s report that an Atlantic tract was swallowed by the sea shows, for Spence, that nearly four hundred years after Plato the belief was still current. Poseidonius, backed by Strabo, already treated earth-changes as a reason not to call Plato fiction.

He uses Azilian burials with the face turned west as a sign that the west was holy, and he offers the war of the gods and the Titans as the mythological origin Philip Smith had asked for.

On the date, he rejects F. Butavand, La Véritable Histoire de l’Atlantide. Butavand said the nine is impossible in an octonal count, and that Eudoxus of Cnidus reduced Critias’s nine thousand years to nine thousand months, which would put the founding of Atlantis about 1400 BC, near the Nineteenth Dynasty. Spence says he can find no basis for the octonal argument, that Egyptian chronology was decimal, and that swapping months for years is an old dodge.

Chapter V. Where he puts the island (p. 52)

He builds the site from geologists, then from animals, then from the shape of the Atlantic floor.

Pierre Termier, Director of Science of the Geological Survey, is his main geological witness. Termier describes a volcanic band about 1,875 miles (3017 kilometers) broad, taking in Iceland, the Azores, the Canaries, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands, and he treats Plato’s account as highly probable. The Azores, for Termier, are what is left of collapsed volcanic lands. Professor Schuchert answers that the Azores are true volcanic and oceanic islands. Professor Scharff, in “Some remarks on the Atlantis Problem,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, volume 24, 1902, argues that Madeira and the Azores were connected with Portugal, and that the larger mammals reached the islands by land, not as cargo. Edward Hull, The Sub-Oceanic Physiography of the North Atlantic, calls the Azores the peaks of a continent submerged in the Pleistocene, and adds an Antillean ridge that once shut the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico off from the Gulf Stream. Hull says he read that from Admiralty soundings. Spence adds Sir William Dawson: the Atlantic bed has risen and sunk many times since the last Ice Age.

That an Atlantean continent at one time occupied the present oceanic gulf between Europe and America is a scientific truth now accepted by geologists of all shades of opinion, and the only question of debate which still remains has reference to the precise period in geological history at which this continent flourished.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 53

His own conclusion from that evidence is a land still partly there about 9600 BC, a remnant of the African shelf opposite the mouth of the Mediterranean, with lesser islands toward Europe, Africa, and perhaps Britain.

He prints W. H. Babcock’s objection from Legendary Islands of the Atlantic, page 19. A Miocene or Pleistocene land-mass is not Plato’s island. What is wanted is a large, organised, human society between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago, not a land-bridge and not a seaward extension of Africa. Spence answers that he has not piled up proofs of just any Atlantic land, and that in his earlier books he took Atlantean society to be comparatively primitive. He also quotes, and italicises, Babcock on Gettysburg Bank: if that bank has sunk steadily at two feet a century, it was a considerable island above water in the period the priests of Sais were talking about. Babcock still says such banks would not be vast.

The soundings he uses are those of the Hydra, the Porcupine, and the Challenger. He describes one great bank beginning near Ireland, crossed by the fifty-third parallel, running south to embrace the Azores, and on toward French Guiana and the mouths of the Amazon and the Pará. He puts the top of this ridge some 9,000 feet (2743 meters) above the bed of the Atlantic.

On animals he follows Scharff, T. V. Wollaston (Testacea Atlantica, London, 1878), Simroth, Kobelt, and von Ihering. The reptiles of the Atlantic islands are almost entirely European. One North African lizard is allied to a Chilean form. The burrowing Amphisbaenidae are confined to America, Africa, and the Mediterranean. Wollaston thought the islands were pieces of a land that had once been continuous. Simroth, from the slugs of Spain, Portugal, North Africa, and the Canaries, wanted a broad land-link lasting into recent times. Kobelt, who had mocked the Atlantis theory, later read the land shells of Europe and of the West Indies and Central America as an Old World to New World connection broken only near the end of the Tertiary. Von Ihering said no malacologist could explain the continental molluscs on the islands except by travel on land. Sixty per cent of Canary butterflies and moths are Mediterranean, and twenty per cent of those are also American. The crustacean genus Platyarthrus has three species in western Europe and North Africa, one in the Canaries, and one in Venezuela. Fresh-water decapods on the two sides of the Atlantic are, for Scharff, almost enough by themselves to prove a former Africa to South America link. Snails that die in seawater occur in Europe, America, and the Canaries. Spence notes the other school, which brings Old World animals to America by the Bering Strait, and says that route is harder to believe than an Atlantic bridge.

The Azores were officially found in 1439, and were named from the hawks. Hawks imply mice, rats, and young rabbits. He says a Spanish friar’s book of 1345 already names the islands, and a Venice atlas of 1385 names Capraria, the goat island, now São Miguel; Columbia, the dove island, now Pico; Li Congi, rabbit island, now Flores; and Corvi Marini, the sea-crow island, now Corvo. Those names, given before the official discovery, are his evidence that goat and rabbit were already there and had come from Europe by land.

He reprints the conclusions of his earlier book, and they are the timetable I use when I compare him with other site-writers.

A continent once filled most of the North Atlantic and a large part of the South Atlantic. It changed shape many times. In the Miocene it was still continental. Toward the end of the Miocene it broke up. Two large islands remained. One, Atlantis, stood a short distance from the mouth of the Mediterranean. The other, Antillia, stood in the present West Indies. An island chain joined them. Both lasted into the late Pleistocene. About 25,000 years ago, at the start of the post-glacial, Atlantis broke further. The final disaster was about 10,000 BC. Antillia lasted much longer and still shows in the West Indies.

Two of these, considerably larger in area than any of the others, were situated (a) at a relatively short distance from the entrance to the Mediterranean; and (b) in the region of the present West India Islands. These may respectively be called Atlantis and Antillia.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 64

That these two island-continents and the connecting chain of islands persisted until late Pleistocene times, at which epoch (about 25,000 years ago, or the beginning of the Post-Glacial epoch) Atlantis seems to have experienced further disintegration. Final disaster appears to have overtaken Atlantis about 10,000 B.C. Antillia, on the other hand, seems to have survived until a much more recent period, and still persists fragmentally in the Antillean group or West India Islands.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 64

He then refuses to make the whole Sargasso Sea the island, while still tying the weed to the wreck. The Sargasso, at five per cent weed, covers at least 3,000,000 square miles, from longitude 30 to the Antilles and from latitude 40 to latitude 20. The wider region of weed, still water, and warm water at all depths is at least 5,400,000 square miles, a little under half of Europe. The weed is Sargassum bacciferum, Gulf weed, with berry-like bladders, torn from the American coast and piled in the Atlantic whirl. He reports the Arcturus expedition under William Beebe as having brought up glass, volcanic rock, and sponge from the bed, and as still asking whether the weed grows in place or is only drifted. Lieutenant J. C. Soley and the United States Hydrographic Office say the weed gathers where the surface water has no steady direction, especially in the triangle of the Azores, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands, and west to the 70th meridian, and that it has not been shown to stop modern ships. Spence answers that galleys and small sailing ships are not steamers. Maury, about 1850, still described the weed as thick enough to look walkable and as slowing ships. Plato’s sands over the buried isle are, for Spence and for Babcock, the same reputation of a hard sea.

His own last-phase map is the one to quote. Plato’s island was larger than Libya and Asia, and Asia in Plato’s time means Asia Minor. Spence turns that into about 2,650,000 square miles, some 350,000 less than Australia. If it lay in front of the Spanish and African coasts, close enough for a Gadiric district, it reached west at least to longitude 45, and from nearly latitude 45 north to about latitude 22. That box takes in the Azores, the Canaries, and much of the Sargasso, though not the thickest weed, and it sits on the banks around those islands. The Canaries are the south-eastern corner, because any farther and the land would touch Africa. The Azores are the northern limit of the island proper. The whole Sargasso may match an older, larger Atlantis. The last phase, the one with people, runs from 23,000 BC to about 9600 BC.

This, of course, refers, as I have said, to the "last phase" of Atlantis, from 23,000 B.C. to about 9600 B.C., when it became finally submerged, according to Plato.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 71

He rejects two published maps. Scott-Elliot’s Poseidonis, in The Story of Atlantis, and Gattefossé’s Tertiary map in La Vérité sur l’Atlantide put the land too far from the Spanish and African coast. Plato says the island lay before the mouth of the strait, and Aristotle and Scylax put the sands at that mouth, so the debris had to come from a land close to Gibraltar. Bory de Saint-Vincent, using Plato and Diodorus, is closer, but Spence wants the island farther north, facing the strait and “under Mount Atlas,” as Diodorus has it, and nearer the Gadiric part of Spain. Butavand’s book of 1925 puts Atlantis inside the strait, on the old coast of Tunis and Tripoli, with Plato’s outer sea as the Tyrrhenian, and with islands off Tripoli as the islands Proclus placed next to Atlantis. Spence calls the hydraulics ingenious and the result, which even pulls in the crossing of the Red Sea, no help to a clear study.

He ends on the name. Atlantis is the possessive of Atlas. Skeat derives Atlantic from Mount Atlas, and Atlas from a Sanskrit root tal, to bear. He notes the island Atalanta near Euboea, broken from the mainland by the earthquake of 426 BC, the year before Plato was born, so Plato knew a small island with a similar story. Homer calls the outer sea Oceanus. Plato already calls it Atlantic. The sentence he wants remembered is this.

We may then conclude that the island-continent of Atlantis at the time of its submergence extended from a point close to the entrance to the Mediterranean to the 45th parallel of longitude, and from north to south, nearly from the 45th parallel of latitude to about the 22nd parallel of latitude.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 74

Chapter VI. Cro-Magnon and Azilian as his two races (p. 75)

Plato’s invaders “marched in wanton insolence upon all Europe and Asia together, issuing yonder from the Atlantic Ocean.” Spence dates that march roughly to 9640 BC and asks whether any real movement fits it.

Plato tells us that at a date which we may roughly take to be 9,640 years before Christ a host of invaders "marched in wanton insolence upon all Europe and Asia together, issuing yonder from the Atlantic Ocean."

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 75

He uses the late-glacial stadia of Penck and Brückner, and he prints the names as the Buhl, the Gsnitch, and the Dorn. The end of the Dorn is about 7000 BC. The Buhl is about 20,000. The Gsnitch, between them, is about 10,000 BC, and that is the date he accepts for the Azilian-Tardenoisian arrival in Spain and southern France. In the geological papers those three stadia are usually spelled Bühl, Gschnitz, and Daun. The Abbé Breuil, he says, derives those people from circum-Mediterranean sources about 10,000 years ago.

The end of the Dorn stadium is roughly dated by Penck at about 7000 B.C., the Buhl, he would place about 20,000, and the Gsnitch between the two, or about 10,000 B.C. This latter is the accepted date for the arrival in Spain and Southern France of a race of men known as the Azilian-Tardenoisian.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 76

The Azilian name comes from the tunnel cave of Le Mas d’Azil, in the Ariège, dug by Édouard Piette. Nine strata lie on both banks of the river Arise. Piette found acorn stones, haws, sloes, hazelnuts, chestnuts, cherries, prunes, walnuts, and a handful of barley, so Spence calls them vegetarian and fruitarian, with some cultivation. The paper he cites for Piette is Hiatus et lacune, in the Bulletin de la Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris, series IV, volume VI, page 235. More than a thousand flat harpoons of stag horn, and necklaces of Mediterranean and Atlantic shells, make them maritime. The famous pebbles are painted red with iron peroxide mixed with resin: vertical strokes, circles, crosses, zigzags, ladders, and forms like the letter E. Piette thought of an alphabet or of a school. Others thought of game pieces, or of Australian churingas. Breuil and Obermeier compared them with paintings in Spanish caves and read them as human figures worn down by long use into signs. Macalister, in his Text-book of European Archaeology, page 531, calls them soul-houses for the dead.

Spence’s Azilian map is northern Spain at Castello and Valli, the Landes, the Haute Pyrenees, and the Ariège, then Britain: Yorkshire, Durham, the Oban cave dug in 1894, and a shell-mound on Oronsay with flat harpoons and shells of deep-sea crabs. The tiny flints, usually under an inch, take their name from Fère-en-Tardenois in the Aisne. He thinks they were fish-hooks. They belong more strictly to the Capsian, named from Capsa or Gapsa in Tunis, which reached Spain before the Azilians. Macalister ties the Spanish wall paintings at Alfera and Cogul to the Capsian, makes Capsian art the parent of the Azilian pebbles, and makes the Capsian people the bringers of the bow into Europe. Osborn calls both Azilian harpoon-makers and Tardenoisian flint-workers fisher-folk. Breuil sees the earliest phase in North Africa and south-western Europe.

Spence’s step is that this culture did not grow in Spain. It arrived, in thousands, and it broke the older Aurignacian or Cro-Magnon culture. Those earlier people are his “Athenians.”

He takes the Aurignacians from Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age. Osborn calls them Palaeolithic Greeks, with an instinct for proportion, and says their art is one continuous development, while their tools show invasion and trade. The type site is the grotto of Aurignac. The skeletons were traced by Édouard Lartet at Cro-Magnon, by Les Eyzies on the Vézère. Spence gives the average height as six feet one and a half inches, with relatively short arms and a very large brain-case. They reached Europe at the close of the Ice Age, roughly 25,000 years ago, and he says they wiped out the sparse Neanderthal population.

The average height of Crô-Magnon man was 6 feet (1.83 meters) 1½ inches, he had relatively short arms, a sign of high racial development, the brain-case being extraordinarily large in capacity. This race arrived in Europe at the close of the Ice Age, or roughly about 25,000 years ago, and seems to have practically wiped out the low and undeveloped human type, known as the Neanderthal, which it found in sparse possession.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 80

Their graves hold flints, pebbles, perforated shells, and teeth. Shell mantles covered the body. The flesh was taken off the bones and the bones were painted red. Macalister's reading, which Spence adopts, is that red paint was the nearest thing they had to mummification: the dead man was to live again in his own body. The art, horses, deer, bears, bison, mammoth, and human statuettes he takes as idols, lasted about 15,000 years, from 25,000 to 10,000 years ago, and its height was the Magdalenian. He says that in fluency this art beats Egyptian and Babylonian work of a comparable kind, so it must have been practised somewhere else for thousands of years before it appears, already mature, in the Dordogne and the Pyrenees.

Breuil’s invasions come either from the Mediterranean or from the Biscay coast, which Breuil calls Atlantic. Osborn says the early phases are missing in central and eastern Europe, so an eastern origin is unlikely, and that Aurignacian colonies ring the Mediterranean: North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Iberia, then southern France. In Tunisia he finds a primitive Aurignacian like the Abri Audi and like Châtelperron. The cave of Antelias in Syria, and stations in Phoenicia, also have Aurignacian deposits. The pure early industry is in the Dordogne and the Pyrenees. Macalister’s sentence is the one Spence leans on: the Cro-Magnon people fixed their special traits in some centre outside Europe before they entered the continent. Spence adds that the Spanish and French sites lie on the Biscay side, not on the south coast of Iberia.

The Guanches of the Canaries are his stranded Atlanteans. Their culture, he says, is Aurignacian, and Osborn, René Verneau, and Lord Abercromby support the relationship. Navigation had not been thought of, so Cro-Magnon man crossed a land-bridge about 25,000 years ago and was later cut off on the Canaries. He cannot have sailed from Europe to the islands, because in Europe he appears as a newcomer.

On language he cites W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe: the Basques may speak a tongue inherited from the Cro-Magnons. Osborn allows that the ancestors of the Basques might have conquered the Cro-Magnons and then taken their language. F. W. Farrar, Families of Speech, page 132, is quoted for the claim that Basque grammar resembles the languages of the American continent and those alone. J. L. Myres, in the Cambridge Ancient History, page 48, is quoted on the likeness of Aurignacian skulls in Europe to prehistoric skulls at Lagoa Santa in Brazil and at other points around South America. Spence’s conclusion is that Basque may be the last remnant of the language of Atlantis. He also notes that Cro-Magnon fishermen shared the Atlantean reverence for the bull and painted it on cave walls.

He refuses Macalister’s tentative Central African origin, because no signs of the culture have been found there. His own sequence is this. Cro-Magnon man was the first wave off an Atlantis breaking up in repeated shocks, across a land-bridge into France, Spain, and North Africa. The Azilians came later, by sea, after that bridge had gone. Oban shows deep-sea fishing. A chain of islands may still have helped them. He has argued the American overflow of the same race in Atlantis in America, and he does not repeat that case here.

Chapter VII. Life on the island, rebuilt from the European caves (p. 87)

He dates an Aurignacian Atlantis to about 26,000 years ago. The area is again 2,650,000 square miles, a little under Australia. Hunters, he says, can support only one family on forty square miles, and a family is at most six people, which gives him about 350,000 people.

The primitive family, for various reasons, can scarcely be estimated at more than six persons on an average, so that this would give us, roughly, a population of some 350,000 for Atlantis in Aurignacian times.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 88

He then raises the picture above hunting bands. Osborn, page 358, supplies the trades: chiefs, priests, medicine men, hunters, fishermen, flint-workers, hide-dressers, clothiers, ornament-makers, engravers, sculptors, and painters. Sacred caves were the centres of settlement. Heinrich Wenkel described the Aurignacian cave of Býčí skála in Moravia as a cult place of the dead, with human sacrifice at a chieftain's grave. Marett calls the cave of Niaux a sanctuary. The two bison statuettes in the far chamber of Tuc d'Audoubert are, for Spence, animal gods in a hidden room.

Dress, from European graves: hides of horse, cow, reindeer, wolf, and fox, with animal hair found by the dead. Ornaments: cuirasses, aprons, and head-fillets of the sea shell Nassa neritea, necklaces of drilled deer teeth and fish vertebrae, and egg-shaped beads of bone or reindeer horn. At Barma Grande a boy wore a crown of fish vertebrae and a collar of Nassa shells broken into groups by deer teeth. Tools: a flint knife with one edge trimmed and the other left sharp, a skin scraper, a burin for bone, horn, and ivory, and, for the first time, bone needles with eyes. Plato’s ivory in the temple of Poseidon, plus the elephants, means for Spence that Atlantis had mammoth ivory of its own.

The Solutrean stage, about 16,000 years ago, is his second wave from the same breaking island, and a higher one. Flints were made in quantity, which he reads as divided labour. Thick layers of horse bones mean horse-eaters, so wild horses in herds on Atlantean prairie or tundra. Hearth burials mean the dead were put in the huts they had lived in, so small stone houses, with the caves now kept as temples. The flints are the willow-leaf and laurel-leaf points. Bone-working drops away. He explains that by the failure of the mammoth-ivory supply, because Europe itself was not short of bone.

Between 16,000 and 11,000 years ago he has Atlantis invaded by a people like the Berbers: not Negroid and not Arab, but Iberian, tall, slender, high-featured, dark or brown-haired, grey-eyed or blue-eyed, armed with the bow, and like the Guanches, whom he calls in part their descendants. They came over the land-bridge from the African shelf, beat the remaining Aurignacians, and stayed until the last cataclysm drove them back to Europe and to Africa, where Diodorus gives them settlements. Giuseppe Sergi is his authority for calling the Iberians the Mediterranean race and for sending them into Britain, Ireland, France, and beyond. These Azilians are Plato’s mortal stock who diluted the “divine” Aurignacian line. They kept the caves as temples and kept the bull, but their faith was grosser and more magical. That is his reading of Plato’s moral decline.

He will not fix the year of the final sinking. The land was never wholly sunk. The Canaries and the Azores are the peaks still above water. He notes that the land link between Britain and the continent was cut only about three thousand years ago, with the English Channel over drowned forest, and he asks why Atlantis should not have lasted longer than Plato says. Judged only by the migrants, the culture is either a broken Aurignacian high point or a normal late Old Stone Age Azilian culture. He refuses to treat the art as a sudden savage invention.

Chapter VIII. The kings, and the dates he hangs on them (p. 101)

From Plato he has only the ten sons, and in this chapter he spells them Atlas, Gadir or Eumolus, Amphisus, Eudemon, Mnesus, Autochthonus, Elassipus, Mestor, Azaes, and Diaprepus. Chapter II prints Mneseus and Elassippus for the same two names. In other myths Atlas is the son of Iapetus and Clymene and the brother of Prometheus and Epimetheus, condemned to hold the sky. Homer makes him the bearer of the columns between heaven and earth. Spence calls him a sky-supporter, in the sense Eduard Seler used for Mexican myth, and he derives that image from Mount Atlas holding up the sky. Other writers make Atlas the king who first taught star-reading. He notes a Mount Atlas in Mauretania, one in Arcadia, and one in the Caucasus. The Pleiades, the Hyades, and the Hesperides are Atlas’s daughters.

Eumolus, or Eumolpus, otherwise known as Gadir, is the founder of the Eleusinian mysteries, and he ties the name to Cadiz and to the Fretum Gaditanum. Amphisus, Eudemon, and Mnesus do not appear elsewhere in classical myth. Autochthon means aboriginal, and Spence notes that the Greeks used it of Pelasgians. He cites Walters’s classical dictionary for a parallel with the Basques and the Welsh. Elassipus, Mestor, Azaes, and Diaprepus are otherwise unknown. He reminds the reader that the priest of Sais had already Egyptianised the names and Critias had Hellenised them, so the originals are lost.

Diodorus’s first king is Uranus, the sky god, father of Iapetus (whom Spence equates with biblical Japheth), of Oceanus, of the Cyclopes, and of the Giants. The Atlantean children Spence picks out are Basilea, which he says simply means queen, Rhea or Pandora, Atlas, Saturn, and Hesperus. The Atlantides become the Pleiades. A Jupiter who is not the Olympian god then takes the throne from his father Saturn with the help of the Titans.

He retells the Titan war as Atlantic history because the same names sit in both stories. Uranus imprisoned the Hundred-handed Briareus, Cottus, and Gyges, and the Cyclopes, in Tartarus. Gaea stirred the Titans. Cronus was raised, then swallowed his children except Zeus, hidden in a cave in Crete. Zeus freed the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handed, and the Titans were cast down. Spence’s point is that Diodorus did not invent the Titan war. A war in the Atlantic was already a tradition, and Greek myth put the origin of the gods, the mysteries, and culture in the west. Pomponius Mela says Albion, a Titan, son of Poseidon and tutelary god of Britain, was a brother of Atlas and, with Iberius, god of Ireland, fought Hercules for the western passage. Albion is the Alba behind the name Albany for Scotland. So the set is Albion for Britain, Iberius for Ireland, Atlas for a western land in the ocean.

His historical sketch, which he admits is full of gaps, runs as follows. Atlantis, nearly the size of Australia, held a tall race who by about 23,000 BC had a high art, cave temples painted with animal and half-human gods, huts and small stone or clay houses outside the caves, and social classes. About 22,000 years ago a seismic shock threw parts of the island into the sea. Many people crossed the land-bridge into Europe. They had avoided Europe while it was under Pleistocene ice. About 14,000 BC a second shock sent the Magdalenians to Europe with an art still sharper than the Cro-Magnon art that had declined in the colony. They then met a return of glacial cold. About 10,500 BC Poseidon and his Azilian proto-Iberians invaded Atlantis from North Africa.

By the aid of flint tools, as well as native genius, it has succeeded under the happy conditions of an environment unhampered by the Pleistocene ice, in developing an admittedly higher type of artistic effort at a period about 23,000 years or more before the Christian era.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 108

Then, some 22,000 years ago, its island-home is visited by a severe seismic cataclysm beneath the fury of which portions of the area are hurled into the sea.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 108

About 14,000 B.C. a second cataclysm occurs, and this compels large numbers of the Atlanteans (Magdalenians) to fly to the European area.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 109

Then, seemingly about 10,500 B.C., "Poseidon" and his Azilian Proto-Iberians invade Atlantis from the North African region.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 109

Poseidon, if read as a man, is the leader of that Azilian band, arriving some centuries before the Azilian raid on Europe, about a thousand years before the final sinking. By then the old Aurignacian culture on the island was almost dead. The Cyclopes of the Titan myth, tall, round-eyed, dressed in skins, and living in caves, are the remaining Cro-Magnons: large skull, high cheek-bones, huge eye-orbits. Poseidon married a native woman, cut canals, built a temple on a hill, and fathered twins who ruled the island and the surrounding isles and founded a caste and an ancestor cult. Herodotus, Book II, Chapter 40, is cited for the statement that the Greeks learned of Poseidon from the Libyans, who alone once had a god of that name.

Herodotus, Book II, Chapter XL, states that the Greeks received their knowledge of Poseidon from the Libyans (Africans) "by whom he has always been honoured, and were anciently the only people who had a god of that name."

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 108

Spence sends him from the Atlas region of North Africa to Atlantis, and later back into Europe and into Africa. The Azilians are Pelasgian in the sense of the early stone-building, mystery-bringing stock of Greece, the people of the Cabiri, and therefore Iberian.

He lines up other culture-heroes so the pattern can be checked. Hotu Motua of Easter Island, with followers, walls, shrines, statues, and taboo. The Creek Esaugetuh Emissee, Master of Breath, who came to the island Nunne Chaha in the waste of waters, built a house and a wall, and led the waters into channels. The Algonquin Manibozho, who carved land and sea. The Huron Tawiscara, who guided waters into channels. The Peruvian Pariacaca, who came to a hilly country, was reviled, sent a flood, and irrigated the maize of Choque Suso on condition she accept him, then turned her into a statue. Thonapa, angry at the pleasure-seeking people of Yamquisapa in Alla-suyu, drowned their city, destroyed a woman’s statue on the hill Cachapucara, and went into the sea.

These circumstances are almost paralleled by the legend of Hotu Motua, the culture-hero of Easter Island, in the Pacific, a locality which, like the Canaries, is obviously a remnant of a great sunken oceanic continent.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 109

The Creek Indians say that Esaugetuh Emissee, "the Master of Breath," came to the island Nunne Chaha, which lay in the primeval Waste of Waters, and built a house there.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 110

In *Atlantis in America*, pages 199 onward, he has already argued that Atlas and Quetzalcoatl are the same person. Poseidon, as father of Atlas, carries the same culture-hero traits, and Quetzalcoatl came to Mexico from somewhere in the Atlantic.

The contents add his own rule for this chapter: these figures were not gods, but men deified after death. Zeus’s displeasure and the end of Plato’s account are the home quarrels turned outward into the invasion of Europe.

Chapter IX. British and Irish names he equates with Atlantis (p. 122)

He treats Welsh and Irish submergence stories as memories of the same event, and he is specific about which text is early and which is late.

Edward Davies, Mythology of the British Druids, page 142, gives the Druid image of the deluge as a lake, Llyn Llion, whose waters burst and covered the earth, a punishment and also a washing of the world for the patriarch and his family. For the Welsh of the twelfth century, Spence says, that lake stood for the flood.

The Cantref y Gwaelod, the Lowland Hundred, is a different story, and he follows J. E. Lloyd and John Rhys on how it grew. The oldest poem is in the Black Book of Carmarthen (53b, 54a), about 1200. The plain of Gwyddno was drowned for pride, eating, and drinking. A girl, perhaps called Mererid, let a magic well overflow at a feast. The pedigrees of the saints, also about 1200, name five saints as sons of King Seithennin of that plain. Only in the third series of triads, in the sixteenth century, does Seithennin become one of the Three Arrant Drunkards, king of Dyfed, who in his cups let the sea over the patrimony of Gwyddno Garanhir, king of Ceredigion. Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt (1592 to 1667) first tied the tale to Sarn Badrig, St Patrick’s Causeway, the natural reef near Harlech, and read it as a sea wall. Lewis Morris added the open floodgates. Owen’s Cambrian Biography of 1803 made Seithennin the drunken lock-keeper. English readers then met the story in Thomas Love Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphin. The triads, as Davies quotes them, put sixteen cities in the hundred, the best in Wales except Caerleon upon Usk, in the time of Emrys, with the survivors reaching Ardudwy, Arfon, and Snowdon. Davies already refused this as history: Ptolemy’s Cardigan Bay has the same headlands and river mouths, and no ancient geographer names those sixteen cities. Spence’s use of the tale is not as sixth-century history. It is as a Welsh form of the Breton city of Ys, both drowned because the people were wicked, which is also Plato’s ending.

Lake Syfaddon in Brecknockshire, in Davies’s telling, covers a city whose people were too drunk and proud to house a king’s messenger. He saved a baby, left a glove in the cradle, and the city sank. The glove is the proof.

Avallon is his British Atlantis, and Avallach, king of the island, is Atlas in British form. On page 132 he names the parents Beli and Annu, and he reads them as Poseidon and Cleito. The revolving castle in the Welsh Seint Greal is the next exhibit. Peredur rides from forest to forest and sees a castle on level ground in a meadow, ringed by a large river, turning faster than the wind, with archers, horns that shake the ground, and lions in iron chains at the gates. Rhys equates it with the Grail castle of the Fisher King. Taliesin’s poem, in the Edward Williams text, puts the poet’s chair in Caer Sidi, where plague and age do not hurt, and where Manawydan and Pryderi are known. Three organs sing round a fire. Ocean’s streams run about its points, and an abundant well stands above it. The drink is sweeter than white wine. Caer Sidi means revolving place. Arthur and his companions left it at a deluge. Rhys’s banneu or ban, the points, links it for Spence to Benoic, the island kingdom of King Ban, and to four corners, which he sets beside the Isle of the Four Precious Walls in the Irish Voyage of Mael Dúin: walls of gold, silver, copper, and crystal meeting at the centre. Plato’s Atlantis has walls of gold, silver, and orichalcum or copper.

His six comparisons, on pages 133 and 134, are the list to reuse.

1. Peredur rides from forest to forest. Plato’s Atlantis is deeply forested.
2. The castle stands on level ground in a meadow. Atlantis stands on a level plain.
3. A large river flows round the castle. Plato’s plain is ringed by a fosse that takes the mountain streams and the canals.
4. Caer Sidi is the circular or revolving place. Atlantis is built in circles.
5. “The Spoils of the Deep” refuses to redeem the multitudes with trailing shields. Plato’s landowner must furnish the sixth part of a war-chariot, making 10,000 chariots, with horses, riders, a light chariot, heavy infantry, archers, slingers, stone-shooters, javelin-men, and four sailors toward 1,200 ships.
6. The multitude does not know the brindled ox with the thick head-band. Near Poseidon’s temple the sacred bulls are sacrificed by the ten kings, who put on azure robes and judge offenders. The bull cult is an aristocracy.

He notes that this military count is not the same as the levy in his own Chapter II. I leave both on the page so they can be checked.

Morgan le Fay is the Morgan who heals Arthur on Avallon, the Lady of the Lake, foster-mother of Lancelot, and the jailer of Merlin. The name means offspring of the sea. Welsh mor is the sea. He ties her to the sea Pliny describes, across which the dead go to the realm of King Cronus. The Celtic land of the dead is in the western ocean, which he reads as the old home of the ancestors.

Other drowned places he lists, because a reader may be collecting them: Llyn Tegid near Bala in Merioneth, of which Rhys says each mere was thought to cover a city whose bells can still be heard; the bells of Aberdyfi in the realm of Gwyddno; the Irish well of Lough Neagh, kept by a woman named Liban, which is Welsh Llion. The idiot of the Irish tale matches Seithennin. Malory’s Dame Lyonesse owns a castle perilous by the Isle of Avallon. Spence places her country on the west coast of Cornwall, under the sea between Lundy and the Isles of Scilly. Ptolemy’s name for Hartland Point, Herakleous Akron, is his evidence that a Hercules-hero, of the same class as Tristan or Lancelot, was already located there in the early Roman period.

The etymology is his own. Take Llyn Llion as a non-Welsh speaker would say it, Lin Lion, add a t and the Greek ending -is, and you get Linliontis, which he thinks could be smoothed into Atlantis. Or the two names share a root. He believes Atlantis is a Hellenised Celtic name.

Indeed, I believe the name Atlantis to be merely a Hellenized version of the Celtic Llyn Llion or Lyonesse, just such, indeed, as the Greeks would give to a Celtic name.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 137

Atlas is then the brother of Albion, both sons of Poseidon. Albion is the old god of Britain. With Iberius, god of Ireland, also a son of Poseidon, he fought the Greek hero near Arles, according to Pomponius Mela (p. 138).

According to Pomponius Mela, Albion with his brother Iberius (the god of Ireland) the sons of Poseidon, challenged and fought the Greek demi-god near Arles.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), pp. 137 to 138

Albany in Scotland keeps Alba. The set he wants is Albion (Britain), Iberius (Ireland), Atlas (Atlantis). He says a clan of ancestral figures does not attach some brothers to real islands and one brother to a merely imaginary one, and he points at the genealogies of the Old Testament, the Rig Veda, and the Eddas as the sort of lists in which that split does not occur.

Geryon is the Greek story he sets beside that family (pp. 138 to 139). Geryon ruled the island of Erytheia, beyond the Pillars of Heracles, in a healthy climate. He had three heads, and as many hands and feet, and herds of purple-red cattle grazing toward the Lands of the Sun in the west. Heracles sailed there in the golden bowl of the Sun, the vessel that was thought to float back east by night. He killed the dog Orthus and the herdsman Eurytion, then killed Geryon, and left with the cattle and with Geryon’s daughter in the same bowl. Spence sets the Irish Cuchulainn beside him. Cuchulainn carries off the cows and the daughter of King Mider of Inis Fer Falga, the Island of the Men of Falga. Both Geryon and Mider lived on Atlantic islands and owned sacred cattle, which is his link to the Atlantean bull.

He then quotes Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum. Demetrius, sent by the emperor to look at the islands around Britain, found many of them empty and named after gods and heroes. The people of the nearest island treated those islands as holy. After he arrived, hurricanes and fiery bolts struck, and they said one of the mighty had died. A great soul, they said, is like a lamp: to light it brings no danger, and to put it out grieves many and stirs the wind and the sea. Cronus, they said, sleeps on a farther island, with Briareus guarding him, and sleep is the bond forged for Cronus. Spence reads the empty islands, Man and Skye among the named ones, as the result of repeated volcanic or seismic shocks, and he reads the sleeping Cronus, with Rhys, as a parallel to Arthur asleep in Avallon. Nennius, in the same argument, has the giant Benlli resist St Germanus. Benlli’s court is burnt to ashes by fire from heaven. Benlli is also tied to Ynys Benlli, or Bardsey, where Merlin vanished in a house or a ship of glass, and that island too has been equated with Avallon (p. 141).

The Irish names on that page are these. The Formorians are the Domnu, people of the deep sea, or the Fomors, people of the under-sea country that had sunk. Like the Titans they are giants, and they make war on the gods, the Tuatha De Danann. The Fenians are tied to the region of the Pillars of Hercules. Fenius Forsa is the father of Nial, who married Scota, daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt. Fenius and his clan were banished from Egypt because they would not join the persecution of the Children of Israel. They stayed in Africa for forty-two years, passed through Canaan near the altars of the Philistines, and then passed between Rusicada and a hilly country. The sentence breaks off there.

Chapter X. The traditions he treats as the same story (p. 145)

He says Europe, Africa, and America were handled in The Problem of Atlantis and Atlantis in America, so this chapter is a summary. The European items he actually retells are these.

Spain’s Antillia, or Isle of Seven Cities, is a rectangular island on maps of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Toscanelli told Columbus to use it as a halfway house to the Indies. Roderick, last Gothic king of Spain, was said to wait there, like Arthur, until Spain needed him. Some writers made Antillia into Atlantis because both are four-sided. Humboldt’s correction, which Spence accepts, is that Plato gave the four-sided plan to one part of the island, not to the whole.

Timagenes, in the first century AD, preserved a Gallic tradition of invaders from a sunken island.

Brittany’s Ys, or Ker-Is, was ruled by Gradlon. He built a basin for the high tide, with a secret outlet and a key. His daughter Dahut, feasting with her lover, stole the key and opened the sluice. Spence puts the city where the Étang de Laval lies over the Bay of the Dead, or, in the other opinion, under the Bay of Douarnenez, with Gradlon’s palace of marble, cedar, and gold still there. At Quimper a statue of the king on the horse that saved him stands between the cathedral towers. It was damaged in the Revolution and restored. Gradlon was said to have brought the vine to Brittany. On St Cecilia’s Day a gold cup of wine was held to the statue’s lips, drunk by the offerer, and thrown to the crowd. Whoever caught it won two hundred crowns. Gradlon Meur, the Great, is a title Spence reserves for gods. He identifies Gradlon with Poseidon, first tamer of horses, shown on a horse or in a chariot, with a palace behind a dike and with gates on the sea-way.

The American summary, as his own contents list it, sets Plato beside Aztec stories of cataclysm, flood myths from Peru and Brazil, Brinton on the American deluge, a Mixtec legend, further Mexican myths, Tlaloc beside Poseidon, divine visitors among the Toltecs, and Quetzalcoatl as a culture-bringer from the west, compared with Atlas.

Chapter XI. Daily life in the last phase (p. 160)

He draws the last phase from Plato’s city and from the Azilian finds. The canals, the desert stretches, the circular city, and the pyramid as an Atlantic building form are Plato’s. Food, dress, and manners are the cave material of Chapters VI and VII. On writing he returns to the painted pebbles. He now says the Azilian “alphabet” is obviously picture-writing, and that there is no reason to deny picture-writing to Atlanteans. Manners in this late phase are the profligacy Plato describes, which he also finds remembered in early myth.

Chapter XII. The state (p. 175)

Each of the twelve kings was absolute in his own island, and bound to the laws on the orichalcum column.

We are told in the first place that each of the twelve kings of Atlantis was absolute in his own island, but that so far as their government was concerned they were almost completely tied down to the mere carrying out of the ordinances of the ancient Atlantean rulers engraven on the column of orichalcum in the temple of Poseidon.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 175

He compares those laws with the laws of the Medes and Persians in the Book of Kings, unchangeable because they were held to come from the gods. A law that cannot be altered, he says, stops political and economic advance. The six-year gap between meetings shows, for him, that the islands of the empire were not far apart. If they had been distant, the kings could not have used so rare a meeting as their way of refreshing the code. He also says this state does not match the governments of classical Greece and Rome. It does resemble Celtic rule in Gaul and Britain: religious, armed, and local under a common sacred law.

Chapter XIII. The bull, the pantheon, and the west (p. 180)

The rite is Plato’s. Every six years, before the court, ten bulls are brought in. Each king vows one to Poseidon, kills it without iron, and the kings pass the limbs of each bull through the fire. Spence sets a Mexican rite beside it, then the bulls painted in Aurignacian caves, then Egypt.

Bull worship in Egypt is early. He puts it by the Third Dynasty, about 3000 BC. Aelian carries it further back. Herodotus describes the Apis bull as black. The Egyptians held that the soul of Osiris passed into a bull, and that when that bull died a calf with the same marks had to be found. The dead Apis was embalmed. Worship of Serapis, or Osiris-Apis, then spread through Europe to Britain. He thinks it met an older British bull cult. The Welsh triads put bull sacrifice inside Druid ceremony. Pictish stones in Scotland cut the bull with other religious signs. Into the early seventeenth century, more than one Highland presbytery denounced peasant bull-sacrifice. Bull-baiting is the rite worn down into a sport. His conclusion is that bull worship from Britain to India had one origin, and that if the Aurignacians came from Atlantis they brought the bull with them. Spain, France, Britain, Crete, and Egypt are the chain.

He allows Greek colouring. In an early phase Dionysus is a bull. Euripides still shows bull-shaped Dionysus adored in Macedonia. In the Orphic mysteries the worshipper ate raw bull flesh before union with the god. Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, is his witness that a feast of raw flesh was traditionally part of the rite. Firmicus Maternus says the Cretans tear a live bull with their teeth and howl in the woods. Spence thinks Plato may have coloured the Atlantic sacrifice with what Athens knew of those mysteries.

The bull is Poseidon’s beast because Poseidon is earthquake and storm, and the bull stamps and bellows. He suggests Poseidon was once the bull itself.

The pantheon he builds for cross-reference is small. Atlas and his brother Titans are the tutelary gods of Britain and Ireland, Albion and Iberius. An invasion of Olympus by Titan gods from the west is an allegory of a western religion entering the Mediterranean. The memory of Atlas and of his island is the memorial of that religion. The western ocean was holy to Mediterranean peoples. They placed the Fortunate Islands and the Gardens of the Hesperides there. The dead in the west, he argues, are a memory of Atlantis, because people put paradise in the place they believe they came from.

He ties the pantheon to the constellations and finds a cosmic order in Plato, so Atlantic religion and astrology belong together. Direct proof that astrology began in the west is, he admits, hard. He cites the Druids of Britain and Ireland, and the Aztec tonalamatl. He says the word means a book of the day-signs, and he sets Aztec calendar gods beside members of his Atlantic pantheon. Quetzalcoatl, inventor of the Mexican system and a figure of western origin, is part of that equation. European giant-lore, Titans as earthquake powers, Azilian giant-worship, the battle of gods and Titans, and the ogre as a popular memory of Titan appetite all sit in the same chapter. Human sacrifice belongs with them. Druidism may be the last phase of an imported Atlantic religion. He ends by separating his case from Theosophical use of British lore.

Chapter XIV. Animals (p. 200)

He says animals are safer ground than kings, because the Azores and the Canaries are still above water and can be compared with western Europe and eastern America. Ice Age cold, in his view, did not rule the climate of Atlantis, though it affected the weather. After the Ice Age is the only phase he claims to describe.

He repeats the hawk argument. The name Azores means hawk islands. Hawks mean rodents, rabbits, rats, and mice, so that fauna belonged to the part of Atlantis the islands once were. The friar’s book of 1345 and the Venice atlas about forty years later, with Columbia for Pico, Capraria for São Miguel, Li Congi for Flores, and Corvi Marini for Corvo, show goat, dove, rabbit, and crow before the official discovery of 1439. Those species had been isolated from Europe and still needed a land route at some earlier time.

The contents of the chapter add the migrations of the eel, the lemming, and certain butterflies to and from the Atlantic area, and Plato’s elephants with Termier on the biology. He considers, and does not simply adopt, the claim that Atlantis was the cradle of all animal life.

Chapter XV. What he still calls colonies, and what he already doubts (p. 207)

He opens on the writers who sent colonies out at the moment of the fall. At least a score of them, he says, and in recent times especially Donnelly, Brasseur de Bourbourg, and Augustus Le Plongeon, all pressing an Egyptian connection. He quotes the March 1921 issue of Papyrus, the Theosophical journal in Egypt, for the strong form of that claim: Atlantis sent her children over the world, colonised Egypt, and built an Egyptian empire. He does not leave that sentence standing.

If the land sank about 9600 BC, colonial settlement in Europe ended then, and later Mediterranean spread is Azilian or Iberian spread. Iberian settlement from Spain to Egypt is, he says, not seriously denied. Sergi derived that race from western Africa, the Atlas region, whose people Diodorus and the Romans still called Atlanteans. Sergi includes ancient and modern Egyptians, Nubians, Abyssinians, Gallas, Somalis, Berbers, and Fulahs in the same western-African family, and he will not deny the Sahara a claim to be the cradle. Spence’s step is: if Azilians and Iberians were Atlantean stock, their slow movement along both Mediterranean shores, to Greece and Asia Minor on the north and to Egypt on the south, is the colony. A pre-dynastic Atlantean fleet landing in Egypt, as Le Plongeon has it, is the picture he rejects.

He is less sure about 9600 BC as the end of everything. A later piece of the land may have lasted, as he thinks Antillia lasted toward America. He calls this a notion, not a hypothesis, because he cannot find enough proof. Judged by the time Egyptian culture took to grow, a civilisation higher than the Azilian would sit somewhere about 5000 BC. The land must in any case have gone before regular Mediterranean shipping, about 2000 BC.

But did Atlantis finally sink in 9600 B.C. or thereabouts? Did not a considerable portion of her territory survive for many centuries subsequent to this date, and contrive to send out colonial and cultural influences to Europe, as Antillia seems to have done to barbarous America? I refer to it as a "notion," simply because I cannot find sufficient proof to exalt it into a definite hypothesis.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 210

The period possible for the existence of such a civilisation must naturally fall many centuries later than Plato's date of 9,600 B.C., to permit of the development of a civilization more advanced than the Azilian, and, judging from the analogy of the growth of Egyptian culture, it will not be exceeding probability to place it somewhere about 5000 years B.C.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 210

And it is obvious in any case that Atlantis itself must have finally disappeared before the period in which vessels were regularly engaged in Mediterranean commerce, say about 2,000 B.C.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), pp. 210 to 211

At first I was under the impression that the myth referred to the entrance of the Azilian peoples to the Mediterranean, but chronological reasons seem to militate against such a presumption, and it appears much more probable that it is connected with a cultural invasion from the west at a much later period, say some 3000 years B.C.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 211

The Cabiri are his evidence for that later wave. They are twin brothers, later identified with Castor and Pollux. Dionysius of Halicarnassus calls them two youths armed with spears. Sanchuniathon says they were Carthaginian or African. The cult came from north-west Africa to Egypt and Greece, and was “delivered to the Egyptian Osiris.” Sanchuniathon makes them the inventors of boats, hunting, fishing, building, agriculture, writing, and medicine. A temple at Memphis was theirs. Spence first took the myth as the Azilian entry into the Mediterranean. The dates pushed him later: a cultured invasion from the west about 3000 BC, from an Atlantis still in existence, carried east by later Carthaginian influence into Greece and Asia Minor. North-west Africa itself, he says, has no record of a civilisation already supreme in architecture, agriculture, and writing, so the cult cannot have started there.

Crete is the other later colony. A writer in The Times of 14 February 1909 said Plato’s vanished island was the collapse of Knossos, after which Phoenicians replaced Cretan sailors in Egyptian ports. Spence answers that a collapse about 1200 BC would not, only six hundred years later, be told by Egyptian priests as a disaster of 9,000 years before. Early Minoan civilisation is about 3400 BC. The bull is sacred, and the great court at Knossos was used for bull fights or sacrifices. The Cretans were largely Iberian and had labyrinthine cave temples like the Aurignacians. Plutarch is his source for the labyrinth myth. For generations the winding cave of Gortyna, in a hill at the foot of Mount Ida, was taken as the lair of the Minotaur. Arthur Evans, digging Knossos from 1900, was inclined to identify the palace itself as the labyrinth, because of its passages and stairs. Spence still thinks the bull in a cave, shared with Spain or with Atlantis, is the older myth, and that Minoan civilisation was modelled on Atlantis rather than the other way round. The bull paintings in Cretan palaces resemble early Aurignacian work, and the link from Crete to Spain runs by the Balearic Islands.

Egypt, as a direct colony, he knows is unpopular. Le Plongeon’s Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx has the Maya princess Moo flee to Egypt after the sinking and found Egyptian civilisation. Chronology will not allow one princess to found both the Maya and Egypt. Any Atlantic influence in Egypt came by north-west Africa. Iberians were a large part of the Egyptian mixture and entered from the west. If they were Atlanteans, they brought the culture.

The cult he uses is Osiris. It is at Abydos in the First Dynasty, and Pyramid Texts push it earlier. Budge calls it Libyan or North African. Parts of the Book of the Dead were in use at least four thousand years before Christ, already tied to mummification. As embalming grew more complex, the book became necessary for entry into the afterlife. Many of its texts are older than the First Dynasty. By 3300 BC the copyists could barely follow passages. One text was “discovered” in the First Dynasty and was then referred to a date Spence equates with 4266 BC. Budge’s sentence, which he adopts, is that the earliest form of the work is contemporary with the start of the civilisation called Egyptian in the Nile valley. Spence’s own step is that the book is a Neolithic survival of the Aurignacian rite of keeping the body so it can live again. Macalister on the red bones is quoted again: red is the colour of living health. Egyptian mummification is that rite elaborated. Egyptians painted the faces of gods red and put red on the cheeks of mummies. The custom, he says, spread along the North African coast until the body, not only the bones, was painted, and a cult of embalming then runs from Egypt to Peru. Late Aurignacian corpses tied in leather bundles are the first stage.

Chapter XVI. The culture-complex, and the retreat from colonies (p. 218)

He withdraws the ready-made colony.

It is, indeed, extremely improbable that Atlantis actually founded anything in the nature of a colony.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 218

What replaces it is a slow penetration east and west from the sunken land. The clearest traces, he says, are on the coasts, not in the interiors. A culture-complex is a group of practices that travel together. His group runs from the shores of western Europe to eastern America, including the islands between, and it also shows strongly in North Africa, Egypt, Mexico, Central America, and Peru. He says he has not found this same set together anywhere else. That, for him, is the proof of a lost oceanic link.

The chief elements are mummification, witchcraft, the pyramid, head-flattening, the couvade, three-pointed stones, and traditions of cataclysm.

The principal elements which distinguished the Atlantean culture-complex are the practice of mummification, the practice of witchcraft, the presence of the pyramid, head-flattening, the couvade, the use of three-pointed stones, the existence of certain definite traditions of cataclysm, and several other minor cultural and traditional evidences.

Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis (1926), p. 219

He then adds tattooing, the thunder-stone, the sacred pick or hammer, and the Great Hand.

Mummification starts, in his account, with the Aurignacians of Spain and France, and reaches a later stage in the Canaries. Alonso de Espinosa, a friar of the sixteenth century, describes a caste of embalmers who, like those of Egypt, were outcasts. The body was filled out with melted mutton grease, grass seed, stones, and pine bark, dried in the sun, sewn into sheepskin, and enclosed in pine bark. Distinguished dead were placed in wooden sarcophagi carved in one piece in the shape of the body, like Egyptian mummy cases. Dressed skins were wound round the body as linen bands were wound in Egypt. The first cut was made with a stone knife. Canary mummies, he says, resemble those of Peru. In the Antilles the art continues. Mexican and Maya manuscripts show mummies. He finds the organs treated alike in Maya and Egyptian practice. Peru embalmed widely. The Osiris myth, the god found in a trunk, sits in the same discussion.

Witchcraft, as a cult rather than as stray magic, he derives from the same Atlantic area. He connects it with the early treatment of the dead that grew into mummification. The Canaries, as the last remnants of the land, are his test. He describes priestesses who went into the sea as a sacrifice to the water that would one day drown the islands, who baptised infants, as he says the priestesses of the Mexican Tlazolteotl did, and who lived under polyandry and female rule. In the Antilles he separates native practice from Obeah, which he calls African, but the presence of priestesses is enough for him to keep the islands inside the complex.

On the European and Mexican side (pp. 224 to 225) he treats a witches’ sabbath scene as part of the same cult. The Mexican witches, the ciuateteo, wander through the air, haunt crossroads, afflict children with paralysis, and use elf-arrows, as he says European witches did. Tlazolteotl, queen of the witches, rides a broom and wears the peaked hat, or stands by a house with an owl and with herbs hanging from the eaves. The Mexican witch flies on ointment and dances, and the old Spanish friars call them witches. European witches, he says, prized a piece of Egyptian mummy-flesh above other magical tools. In America the hands and fingers of dead women were used the same way. The Kwakiutl wizards of the north-west dried and roasted the skin and flesh of a dead man, pounded it, tied it in skin or cloth, squeezed it into a hollow human bone, and buried that bone in a miniature coffin. He says neither system looks like the mainly male sorcery cults of Asia. The old Aurignacian area of Europe was, in later times, one of the strongholds of witchcraft. The Gardens of the Hesperides and the Amazons of Hesperia are, for him, memories of a female cult, and so are the Guanche priestesses. He reads the Amazons as a warlike female cult, perhaps with cannibal leanings, and he compares them with the Amazons of Dahomey and with women warriors from the Huaxtec region, on the east coast of Mexico, who invaded the Mexican valley.

The pyramid, fully built or in an early form, appears with the other traits in Europe, in the Canaries as the dolmen, in the Antilles, in Mexico and Peru, and among the mound-builders of the Mississippi country.

Head-flattening is the trait he thinks too peculiar to have been invented twice. He finds it in the Aurignacian wall painting at Alpera (he had printed that painting site as Alfera on p. 78), among modern people of Biscay, in the Antilles, and among the Maya and the Aztecs. Sir Daniel Wilson reports Dr Foville, of the asylum of the Seine-Inférieure and of Charenton, on infants in France whose heads were still shaped by a headdress and bandages. One engraved skull could be mistaken for a Peruvian relic. The districts are Normandy, Gascony, the Limousin, and Brittany. The Basques, on the old Cro-Magnon ground, still deform the skull. Charlevoix says of the Antilles that mothers pressed the child’s head between their hands or between two small boards until the skull hardened in that shape. On the American mainland the cradle-board did the same work. The Maya pressed the forehead in infancy, which he reads in the sloping heads of their statues. He cannot find the practice in the Canaries, and he allows that it may have died out there.

Tattooing is argued from names and from pictures. Briton, Cruithne, and Pict were understood as painted or tattooed peoples. He uses coins of north-western France and Britain, and he links Iberians, Antillean tattooing, the Guetares of Costa Rica, and Maya practice. He finds no record of tattooing in the Canaries. His test is that the custom appears on three of the links of which Atlantis is the missing one.

The couvade, the father lying in at a birth, he finds among the Caribs and on the South American coast, and in Europe among peoples of the Mediterranean race, whom he connects with Atlantic immigrants. The thunder-stone, or elf-arrow, is a shared sign of storm and earthquake, sometimes wrapped like a mummy to keep it quiet. Three-pointed stones from the Antilles, one of the plates, he links to Atlas as the world-bearer and to Quetzalcoatl. The Great Hand, Huemac or the Maya Kab-ul, is the hand that holds the world-shaping hammer. He connects that figure with earthquake, with the Minotaur as the bull of Poseidon, and with the Canary priestesses who went into the sea.

He closes on the claim that Plato’s Atlantis and the myth of Quetzalcoatl both contain nearly the whole complex, and that both sides of the ocean and the island chains show it.

Where I leave the book

The survey of Plato and of the older literature, in Chapters II to IV, is a map of who said what, with his own mile-figures marked as his. The site box on page 74, the migration dates in Chapters VI to VIII, the British text list in Chapter IX, and the culture-complex in Chapter XVI are the findings I would actually carry into a comparison.

What I do not take as history is the narrative in which Saturn and Jupiter are kings, the Stone Age of Europe is relabelled as the Stone Age of Atlantis, and one list of customs proves a single motherland. He says the narrative rests on surmise. The preface says the same.

Where to read it

The 1926 text is out of copyright in the United States. Spence died in 1955, so the UK term of his life plus seventy years has also ended. Later reprints, including University Books and Citadel, added new prefaces. Their copyright covers that added matter. I used the 1926 Rider text.

A reprint that identifies itself as the 1926 book is on the Internet Archive: The history of Atlantis. That file is often the later Adventures Unlimited issue, and it is often lending-library only.

FAQ

Where did Lewis Spence place Atlantis?

In the last phase, from about 23,000 BC to about 9600 BC, from near the Strait of Gibraltar west to the 45th meridian, and from nearly latitude 45 north to about latitude 22. The Azores are his northern limit and the Canaries his south-eastern corner. Antillia, a second island-mass, lay in the West Indies and lasted longer. He does not put the royal city in the North Sea, and he does not say Atlantis was the Americas.

When did he think it sank?

He works with Plato’s long date, about 9600 BC, and he matches the Azilian arrival in Europe to about 10,000 BC. He also asks whether a remnant lasted until about 3000 BC, because of the Cabiri, and whether a higher-than-Azilian culture sat near 5000 BC. He says that later date is a notion he cannot prove. He wants the land gone before regular Mediterranean shipping, about 2000 BC.

How does he differ from Donnelly and from Scott-Elliot?

Donnelly’s Atlantic continent is the source of later civilisations by colony. Spence uses Donnelly, then in the last chapter gives up ready-made colonies in Egypt, North Africa, and America. Scott-Elliot’s Poseidonis, on the map in The Story of Atlantis, sits too far from Gibraltar for Spence’s reading of Plato, Aristotle, and Scylax. Spence’s own addition is the culture-complex.

Ten kings or twelve?

He names ten sons of Poseidon, five pairs of twins. In the same compilation, and again in the chapter on the state, he writes that each of twelve kings was absolute in his own island. In the British chapter he writes of ten kings sacrificing bulls. I leave all three statements standing. Plato’s Critias has ten.

Related on this site

1. Timaeus & Critias: Plato’s account. Spence’s Chapter II is his compilation of it, with his own mile-figures.
2. Where Was Atlantis: other proposed locations, including ones he rejects.
3. Ignatius Donnelly: the 1882 case for an Atlantic continent and for colonies, which Spence both uses and revises.
4. William Scott-Elliot: the Theosophical Story of Atlantis. Spence rejects the position of Poseidonis on that map.
5. The Story of Atlantis: Scott-Elliot’s book on this site.

Sources

The book

• Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis, Rider & Co., London, 1926. Printed by Purnell and Sons, Paulton, Somerset. Page numbers above refer to this edition. Preface signed from 66 Arden Street, Edinburgh.

Life

• James Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence, 1874 to 1955. The Problem of Atlantis, 1924, and Atlantis in America, 1925, are the earlier books named on his title page. I use the dates for the life only.

Plato, in the translations he says he collated

• Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato. R. D. Archer-Hind. Abbé Jolibois, Dissertation sur l’Atlantide, Lyons, 1846. P. Negris, La question de l’Atlantis de Platon, Athens, 1905. His Chapter II is that collation, not a Greek text I reproduce here. The Greek dialogues are discussed on Timaeus & Critias.

Geology, biology, and archaeology as he cites them

• Pierre Termier. Charles Schuchert. R. F. Scharff, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, volume 24, 1902. Edward Hull, The Sub-Oceanic Physiography of the North Atlantic. W. H. Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic. T. V. Wollaston, Testacea Atlantica, 1878. Henry Fairfield Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age. R. A. S. Macalister, Text-book of European Archaeology. Henri Breuil. Édouard Piette on Mas d’Azil.

Britain

• Edward Davies, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids. John Rhys. J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales. The Black Book of Carmarthen. Pomponius Mela on Albion and Iberius.