Onffroy de Thoron (1869): Solomon’s Voyages to the Amazon — Ophir, Tarshish and Parvaim (English Translation)

In 1869 the French explorer Onffroy de Thoron argued, in the journal of the Geneva geographical society, that the ships of Solomon and Hiram sailed across the Atlantic and up the Amazon, and he placed Ophir, Tarshish and Parvaim in its upper basin. I find that striking next to the Ofir harbor city on the Great River in The Chronicle of Akakor, which was told a century later. He also opens by calling the Atlanteans the elders of the Phoenicians in the art of navigation. Below is my full translation of his article; for more on the biblical voyages see Tarshish.

Source: Onffroy de Thoron, « Antiquité de la navigation de l’Océan. Voyage des vaisseaux de Salomon au fleuve des Amazones », Le Globe. Revue genevoise de géographie, vol. 8, 1869, pp. 167–205. Persée.

Antiquity of Ocean Navigation: Voyages of Solomon’s Ships to the River of the Amazons

I

Before giving the proofs that the ships of Solomon and Hiram made several voyages to the river of the Amazons, it is necessary first to show that the peoples of the most remote antiquity knew America. The Bible tells us that the Phoenicians knew every sea; but this people came much later than the Atlanteans, who were their elders in the art of navigation and who possessed numerous fleets in the Atlantic Ocean.

Alongside the historical facts handed down to us by the ancient authors, which we will summarize in this Memoir, we will show how useful philology is to history and geography, since with the help of this precious auxiliary we have succeeded in discovering the traces of the navigation of the Phoenicians and the Hebrews in the time of Solomon, and in fixing the geographical positions of Parvaïm, Ophir and Tarschisch.

In Plato’s dialogues the Timaeus and the Critias we have Egyptian traditions that go back before the cataclysm of Atlantis; they reach back to the invasion of our continent by the Atlantean peoples. The Egyptian priests who instructed Solon told him in great detail everything about the sea power of the Atlanteans, their invasion and their destruction. Critias was Plato’s ancestor, and Plato wrote his dialogues after drawing on several authentic sources. So it is that, through Solon and Critias, Plato first gives the position of the great island of Atlantis in the Ocean, opposite the strait of Gades, or of Hercules; then he points out, beyond this island, the many islands that we call the Antilles; behind these, he says, lies the great mainland: “what has just been called the mainland,” says Critias, “is a true continent.” There, then, is America! And so that no one can doubt it, Plato adds that behind this mainland lies the great sea: that is indeed the great Ocean [the Pacific]. It follows from these traditions that before the Phoenicians, the two oceans and America were known to the Atlanteans and the Egyptians.

To this antiquity belongs that of the Phrygians, the only people whom the Egyptians acknowledged to have an antiquity able to rival their own. Now, according to Aelian (Hist. 3), Theopompus, the Greek poet and historian, relates that Silenus taught Midas, king of Phrygia, that beyond and far from Asia, Europe and Libya (Africa), which, he says, are properly speaking islands, there exists a true and single continent of immense extent, inhabited by the Meropians. Theopompus calls this fourth continent Meropis;¹ it is ruled, he says, by Merope, daughter of Atlas, king of Libya. Atlas reigned 3,210 years ago, and his daughter, 3,129 years ago, was a contemporary of Hercules, Theseus and Laomedon, that is, about 50 years before the taking of Troy.

The Kichua language, the language of the Antis of equatorial America, gives us the etymology of Merope: Marop is the genitive of maro, “earth”; she is of the land of the Meropians, or “born of the earth,” that is, autochthonous, an expression that corresponds to the Greek ghé, ghénès. Queen Merope thus took her name or nickname from the country called Meropis. Atlas, an Egypto-Libyan name, has its root in the Egyptian atl, “country,” together with the Egypto-Kichua particle as, which is affirmative and marks stability. Atlas therefore means “of the country,” that is, native, born in the country, although he was a descendant of the Atlanteans, as were his subjects settled in Libya. They came from the country of Atlantis, a name the Greeks brought back from the Egyptians; now, in the language of the latter, anti means “the high valleys,” and Atl-antis “country of the high valleys.” Anti is precisely the name of the Andes of equatorial America, and their peoples still bear the name of Antis.

Silenus, describing the vast continent ruled by Merope, speaks of the large animals seen there, of the great cities, and of the customs and laws of its inhabitants, and he adds that they possess much gold and silver. Such an account can only refer to America.

Part of the language of the Antis is found in the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian monuments, and also in ancient Greek.² Apart from the philological proofs we possess, which show the relations between the peoples of the two great continents in the highest antiquity, we would point out that the ancient Egyptians always represented themselves in their wall paintings as belonging to the red, beardless race: now, the native Americans are the only peoples who are beardless and red in color, and their type is precisely the one seen in the oldest sculptures of Egypt. Putting this ethnographic fact together with the philological proofs and the common idiom, it becomes evident that the main element of the great invasion of the Atlanteans, which spread at once through Libya as far as Egypt, and through Europe as far as Tyrrhenia and even Greece, was supplied by the inhabitants of the high valleys of equatorial America, in league with those of the island of Atlantis. Critias relates that the Athenians held out against an infinite multitude of armed enemies who had set out from the Atlantic sea. He also records the coalition of the kings of the vast empire of the Atlanteans, including those of the part of the mainland (of America) that was under their rule. According to Plato, the naval forces of the Atlanteans numbered several thousand ships; even allowing for exaggeration, we have in the accounts just cited the proofs that the Ocean was navigated by peoples whose antiquity goes back beyond the cataclysm of Atlantis, and we have the certainty that the peoples of the two great continents knew each other perfectly well before the Phoenician era. The ancient Egyptians and the Pelasgians were in reality nothing but Atlanto-Americans.³ In these few words we have given the key to the origins of history, to bring it out of its obscurity; by placing ourselves at an entirely new point of view, it will be easy to make the sequence of events appreciated and understood in its natural order; and the movements of peoples across seas and continents in a relatively primitive age are also of interest to geography in its various aspects.

R. Festus Avienus, who translated several Greek works in the fourth century, states that beyond the Ocean there are lands and the shores of another world.

Diodorus of Sicily, 45 years before the Christian era, wrote a great number of books on the various peoples of the world; in his writings he clearly depicts America under the name of an island, because he did not know its extent and shape: the word island was often used by the writers of antiquity for any territory whatever; thus, as we saw above, Silenus calls Europe, Asia and Africa islands. In Diodorus’s account there is no mistaking it when he describes the island we are speaking of.

“It lies,” he says, “many days’ sail from Libya, towards the West. Its soil is fertile, of great beauty, and watered by navigable rivers.” This detail of navigable rivers can only apply to a continent, for no island of the Ocean has navigable rivers. Diodorus goes on to say: “One sees there sumptuously built houses”; now, we know that America possesses fine buildings in ruins, of the highest antiquity. “The mountainous region is covered with thick woods and fruit trees of every kind. Hunting supplies the inhabitants with many different animals; and the air is so temperate that the fruits of the trees and other produce grow in abundance almost all year round.” This picture of the country and climate by Diodorus fits equatorial America in every point. The historian then tells how the Phoenicians discovered this country. “The Phoenicians,” he says, “had set sail to explore the coast beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and while they were sailing along the coast of Libya they were driven by violent winds far out into the Ocean. Beaten by the storm for many days, they at last landed on the island we have spoken of. Having learned how rich the soil was, they made their discovery known to everyone. That is why the Tyrrhenians, who were powerful at sea, also wanted to send a colony there, but they were prevented by the Carthaginians, who feared that too many of their own citizens, drawn by the beauty of this island, would desert their homeland.”

In a work of Aristotle,⁴ he says that it was the fear of seeing the colonists throw off the yoke of the Carthaginian mother city and harm the commerce of the homeland that led the Senate of Carthage to decree the death penalty for anyone who tried to sail to this island. Aristotle also describes a fertile region, abundantly watered and covered with forests, which had been discovered by the Carthaginians beyond the Atlantic.

The Tyrians had founded Carthage 250 years before Solomon; and Strabo tells us that this Phoenician colony closed the strait of Gades to the Greeks to prevent them from sailing on the Ocean. But the Phoenician colonies in Numidia and along the African coast go back to 1490 years before our era. The Canaanites driven out by Joshua took ship for Mauretania, whose coasts are washed by the Mediterranean and the Ocean. Tingis (Tangier) was one of their landing places; for Procopius⁵ reports that in his day two columns could still be seen near this city, whose engraved inscriptions recorded that here were the peoples whom the usurper Joshua, son of Nave (Nun), had driven from their country. Sallust, in the Jugurtha, says that he took the following information from the archives of the kings of Numidia: “That Phoenicians, driven from their country, had come shortly after Hercules to found colonies on the coasts of Africa, where they built cities.” Following the Phoenicians’ example, the Carthaginians also founded several cities on the shores of Libya facing the Ocean. Hanno, a Carthaginian admiral, made a voyage from the strait of Gades to the entrance of the Arabian Gulf, sailing around Africa;⁶ he embarked 30,000 persons of both sexes on sixty ships to serve in founding these Carthaginian cities and colonies. The fleet of Carthage numbered two hundred ships, and at the time of the First Punic War it rose to five hundred vessels.

History is full of accounts proving that the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians frequented the Ocean. D. P. F. de Cabrera, of Guatemala, a man well versed in the facts of antiquity, asserts that the Carthaginians founded a colony in America during the First Punic War. Indeed, reading the accounts of the various chroniclers of the time of the conquest and the discoveries in America, one becomes certain that at various periods of antiquity this continent had been visited, and even invaded, by foreign peoples who came from the Old World. Apart from the traditions, the monuments bearing inscriptions and carvings in the hardest stone are proof that tools of iron and steel were used to make them; yet in no part of America has any trace of iron-making been found; copper alone was in use. Foreign artists and workmen, in particular the Cares [Carians], who are reported in America, must therefore have contributed to the building and decoration of the edifices admired there. For at least 3,500 years the Carians, or Cares, had been settled in the Cyclades and other islands of the Mediterranean, from which they set out to sail the Ocean; and Diodorus rightly says that in navigation the Carthaginians followed in the tracks of the Cares in the western seas. The Cares wore feathers in the manner of the Americans; moreover, they left their name and many archaeological traces in most of America; they even founded a dynasty of their race that reigned at Quito, capital of Ecuador.

Plutarch, in the treatise On the Spots in the Orb of the Moon [On the Face in the Moon], taking in the whole West beyond the Pillars of Hercules, relates that the continent where Merope reigned was visited by Hercules in an expedition he made towards the West, and that his companions there purified the Greek language, which was beginning to degenerate. Now, our studies in comparative philology have led us to discover that the Kichua language, the language of the Antis of equatorial and southern America, contains hundreds of Greek words. This fact confirms Hercules’s voyage to America.⁷

In a memoir to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres by M. E. Renan (vol. 23, read on 9 October 1857), that scholar “does not accept that Greece borrowed from the Phoenicians for its oldest cults, particularly for those that seem to have the deepest roots in Pelasgian soil. These myths,” he says, “appear in Hesiod and Homer as old traditions whose origin is unknown.” Now, we have discovered that the Pelasgian, Greek and Roman deities have their names, or their exact etymologies, in the Kichua language, from which it follows that they were brought over to our continent from equatorial America: we have recorded numerous examples in a special Memoir; and these are so many further proofs of the relations that had been established between the Old and the New World.

We could show, with examples drawn from history, the evident contact the peoples of the two great continents had with one another. Thus mythical genealogy teaches us that Inachus, who went to found a colony in Greece, was the son of Ocean, that is, that he had come across the Ocean.⁸ According to history, Belus, who went to found a colony at Babylon and to establish a priesthood on the Egyptian model, was born of Libya and Neptune, that is, he was the son of an African woman and of a man who had come across the Ocean. The cult of Belus, Bel or Baal, was originally identified with that of the Sun god: now, the same cult existed in America, and just as Belus was worshipped at Babylon, in Peru the Inca was worshipped as the descendant of the Sun. The New and the Old continents alike have pyramids, tumuli and Cyclopean buildings; and on both sides of the Ocean there are traditions of giants and of Amazons; mythological ideas and the study of the stars were identical in Asia, in Egypt and in America. As for the Hebrews in particular, a great many of their customs have been observed among the American peoples. The priestly dress and insignia of the latter were identical to those seen on the Egyptian monuments. Circumcision likewise existed in Egypt, in America and among the Hebrews; and what is remarkable is that the Hebrews performed this operation with a sharp stone, exactly like the Indians of equatorial America, although the Law did not prescribe to them the choice of instrument.

When the king of Portugal, Alfonso V, authorized the settlement of colonists in the Azores in 1461, there was found on the island of Cuervo [Corvo], the westernmost, a statue of a horseman who pointed to the West with his right hand, the direction of America. On the same rock out of which this statue was carved there was an inscription in characters unknown to the Portuguese.⁹ This statue, which is called Cadès or Catès, no doubt takes its name from the Kichua cati, “to follow”: it served as a guide to sailors.

Finally, let us not forget to point out how close the Cape Verde Islands are to the coast of Brazil, and the existence of the opposing equatorial currents, which make the crossing between the two great continents easy, going and returning: this fact is now fully established, and can be checked on the chart of the Ocean currents. Thus our citations prove that in antiquity, up to the fall of Carthage, 146 years before Christ, the Ocean had almost always been frequented, and that America was known to the seafaring peoples; and lastly, that easy communication has always existed between the two great continents by way of the trade winds and the equatorial currents, of which the Phoenician sailors had experience. We can now understand why Solomon asked Hiram for sailors to send his ships to Ophir and Tarschisch; and we will show that these famous places of the Bible, as well as Parvaïm, lay in the interior of the river of the Amazons.

The following chronology, from the cataclysm of Atlantis to Solomon, can be consulted with profit: to the dates before the Christian era we add the 1870 years since Christ. The cataclysm took place 5,178 years ago, in the time of Ogyges. The city of Sidon, nicknamed the city of fishermen, existed 4,800 years ago. Adopting Herodotus’s date, Tyre, which the Bible calls the Daughter of Sidon, was founded 4,620 years ago. The reign of Belus goes back 4,000 years. The flood that took place in the time of Phoroneus and Inachus, king of Argos, goes back 3,700 years: this Pelasgian king had come, according to history, across the Atlantic to Greece. The flood of Deucalion took place 3,399 years ago, according to the Parian Marble. The date of Cecrops II and of Atlas II, king of Mauretania, goes back 3,210 years. The reign of Merope in America and the expedition of Hercules to that continent across the western seas date from 3,129 years ago. According to Appian of Alexandria, Carthage was founded 3,130 years ago. The taking of Troy goes back 3,079 years, according to the Parian Marble. Finally, it is 2,880 years since the Temple of Solomon was founded and Hiram reigned as king of Tyre; and it was shortly after this same period, according to the work of Gosselin, that the Carthaginian admiral Hanno made his voyage around Africa.

Twelve years’ residence in equatorial and southern America gave me the opportunity to make a thorough study of the territories of Peru and Ecuador, and to carry out explorations and surveying operations there on various expeditions in order to map them. My map of equatorial America, which I published in Paris¹⁰ together with a volume of the same title, is the most complete in existence, while my fragments of the map of Peru are still unpublished. The map attached to this Memoir on the voyages of Solomon’s fleets will show only the geographical points that are indispensable and those that relate to my demonstration.

My historical discoveries were made easier by the study of the Kichua language, spoken in the Andes of Peru and Ecuador; I compiled a vocabulary of it on my excursions. Philologists would do well to obtain Tschudi’s Kichua vocabulary, which seemed to me the most complete of those printed to date, though it could be enlarged. Tschudi published at the same time, in Vienna, a Kichua grammar and a volume of ethnography. We take this opportunity to let philologists know that Kichua contains a large part of the dead languages of Asia, Egypt and Greece. This discovery is due to my persevering labors, and I point out this fact to philologists so that they may, like me, take a new path in their historical and linguistic research: they will arrive at results they are far from expecting.

II

When David died, he left Solomon, for the building of the Temple, 7,000 talents of silver and 3,000 talents of gold of Ophir. The old king had no ships sailing the outer seas; he therefore received the gold of Ophir through the trade of the Phoenicians, who, according to the Bible, knew every sea. To carry out his great projects, which required immense treasure, Solomon turned to Hiram; he managed to interest him in his undertakings and to conclude a firm alliance with him. Fear of arousing the jealous touchiness of the seafaring peoples of the Mediterranean was no doubt the reason that led Solomon to have the ships he intended for the voyages to Ophir built at Ezion-Geber, on the Red Sea. Hiram sent him experienced sailors, and, as will be seen further on, the Ophir fleet never returned to the Red Sea; it rounded the African cape to join, in the Atlantic Ocean, the fleet of Hiram, which came out of the Mediterranean.

Our discovery of the route that the ships of Solomon and of the king of Tyre followed across the Ocean, 2,880 years ago, to reach America, will be demonstrated in this Memoir beyond refutation. Neither the conjectures nor the more or less specious reasoning of certain scholars have, to this day, been able to tear away the veil covering the unknown route taken by the fleets of these kings, and none of them has been able to say precisely where Ophir, Parvaïm and Tarschisch lay. This question, often debated, was never solved by the most learned men who treated it, because their arguments, far from resting on a solid basis, relied on little more than hypotheses, and were moreover held back by mistaken beliefs about the navigation of the ancients. Since their research in every part of the Old World produced no plausible solution, we followed the opposite course, and it is in America itself, and in its least known part, that we discovered the famous places Ophir, Parvaïm and Tarschisch; at these very spots there are still various localities that have kept Hebrew names, while the names of the goods that the ships of Solomon and of his ally the king of Tyre brought back belong precisely to the language of the natives of the region those ships frequented: and these names, as the greatest philologists admit, belonged to a language other than Hebrew. Since our work has resulted in gathering numerous proofs and evident circumstances, accumulated at the places named, we can indicate where the goods imported to Jerusalem came from, as well as their names, which were taken from the Kichua language, the language of the Antis, still spoken in the upper basin of the river of the Amazons: we will also give their meanings and exact etymologies; as for the localities mentioned in this Memoir, we urge our readers to look up their position on the map we have made, so that our demonstration may be better understood.

Let us begin with Parvaïm. The examination of this word is important; by itself it is a whole revelation. In the second book of Chronicles [Paralipomenon], chapter III, verse 6, it is said that “Solomon adorned his house with fine precious stones, and that the gold was gold of Parvaïm.” This king therefore obtained gold from other places than Ophir and Tarschisch alone. Parvaïm is a corrupted pronunciation of Paruim, because the old Latin alphabet confused v and u, and because the iod, which is the vowel i, is often read with the pronunciation ai in Hebrew. But in the Hebrew text the gold of Paruim is written Zab-Paruim זהב פרוים;¹¹ in the Greek text of the Septuagint one likewise reads Paruim, and its version proves us entirely right here. The ending im ים marks the Hebrew plural; it is added to Paru because, as can be seen on our map, there are in the upper basin of the Amazons, in the eastern territory of Peru, two gold-bearing rivers, one named Paru, the other Apu-Paru, “the Rich Paru,” which join their waters at about 10° 30’ south latitude and then merge into the Ucayali, one of the great tributaries of the Amazons. Now, two rivers named Paru make precisely a plural and give the Paru-im of the Hebrews. Here, then, is one of the biblical places perfectly identified and discovered by us.¹² We make the following observations about Parvaïm. The first is that the two rivers Paru and Apu-Paru come down from the province of Carabaya, the richest in gold in Peru. The second is that one must not believe, despite the similarity of the names, that Peru comes from Paru. The empire of the Incas bore the name Tahuantinsuyu, that is, “the four united lands.” The name Peru is modern: Pizarro, on first reaching this part of the New World, arrived at Cape Biru, on the Pacific between the 8th and 9th degrees of south latitude; he gave the country he had just discovered the name Biru, and this became Piru; these names appear in the manuscripts and printed works of the first two centuries after the conquest of Peru. Montesinos, one of the Spanish chroniclers, supposed because of the abundance of gold taken out of Peru that Peru might be the Ophir of the Bible. But we would point out, first, that the name Ophir has nothing in common with Paruim or Parvaïm; and second, that Ophir, as can be seen on our map, is not in the territory of Peru but in the Brazilian and Colombian possessions.

The rivers Paru and Apu-Paru bound, to the south and west, an ancient empire named Inin, which today exists only in legend: it is marked on the maps of some missionaries, the most detailed of which is that of Father Sobreviela. Inin is a Hebrew name derived from inini or inéni, “who is convinced.” These Hebrew terms correspond to the Kichua inin, “he has faith, he is a believer.” Thus the empire of Inin is indeed “the empire of the Believer, or of the faith.” Here, then, in America, is a name with an entirely Eastern stamp. This empire is further bounded on the south by the Rio Beni and on the east by the Rio Cayari, which today is called by the Portuguese name “Madeira.” Beni בני is a Hebrew and Arabic name meaning “sons, people of a sect or tribe.” Caiari is formed from the Hebrew כה ca, “courage, resolution,” and from יארי iari, “river”: “the river of Resolution.”¹³ Among the rivers that flow from south to north across the empire of Inin is the Hutaî or Jutahi;¹⁴ now, the Hebrew term huta חוטא means “transgressor”; hi, î or y is a native word meaning “water, river”: Hutaî, “river of the transgressor.” This name, as can be seen, fits well by contrast with the empire of the Believer. The Hutaî has as a tributary a river named Omara: is this not the Jewish or Arabic name Omar אומר, the transgressor perhaps?

But here is the crowning point of so many coincidences relating to the empire of Inin: the river of the Amazons, from the mouth of the Ucayali to that of the Rio Negro, still bears the name Solimoes or Solimoens; this is nothing more nor less than the corrupted name of Solomon, given to the river of the Amazons by the fleet of the great king that took possession of it: in Hebrew שלימה Solima, and in Arabic Soliman. Now, the chroniclers of the conquest of the river of the Amazons report that west of the province of Pará there was a large tribe named Soliman,¹⁵ the name the river bore; for in America watercourses take the names of the tribes that live on them. The Portuguese also made it Solimao, because they are in the habit of replacing a final n with the vowel o. Does it not become more and more evident that Solomon’s fleet reigned supreme on the waters of the Amazons, and that it was this fleet that founded the Empire of the Believers, or of Inin, within the limits we have described? This Hebrew-Phoenician colony lasted a fairly long time; for the triennial voyages of the ships of Solomon and Hiram were repeated several times; it was probably only left to its fate under the reign of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, at a time when the all-powerful Carthaginians allowed no other nation to leave the Mediterranean. That is why Jehoshaphat tried to send a fleet from the Red Sea to these same regions, fitted out jointly with Ahaziah [Ochosias], king of Israel; but a terrible storm destroyed it completely.

Let us pass on to Ophir, a place so praised for its riches. We should recall that some philologists have thought they could establish the name Abiria as the Ophir of the Bible. But we will draw attention to the following facts. First, the name Abiria is the Latin translation of the Greek name Sabéiria, Σαβειρία [Sabeiria], taken from Ptolemy’s Geography, book VII, chapter 1. The translator’s liberty is as great as it is blameworthy. Second, Sabéiria lay in the western part of India called Indo-Scythia. But it is acknowledged that India, particularly its western part, never produced gold for trade; on the contrary, the Egyptians and Arabs brought their gold there to exchange it for woollen and cotton cloth. Thus the hypothesis that Sabéiria was the Ophir of the Bible falls of itself.

M. Étienne Quatremère, in his Memoir on the Land of Ophir,¹⁶ says that the name of Ophir remained unknown to the Greek and Latin writers; he refutes the hypotheses of the various scholars and geographers who have treated this question; he does not accept that Ophir was located on the Arabian Gulf, in Arabia Felix, or in any part of India; he does not even accept that it could have been in Ceylon, Sumatra, Borneo or any other point of the Far East, for the very simple reason, he says, that the ships of Solomon and Hiram took three years on each voyage. But M. Quatremère himself falls into the error of those he opposes, since he places Ophir at Sofala on the east coast of Africa. It cannot be accepted that the voyage of fleets setting out from the Red Sea or the Mediterranean for Sofala would have been longer than the voyage to the islands of the Far East; voyages to Sofala would therefore not explain the three years of each absence of the two kings’ ships. Nevertheless, in support of his hypothesis, M. Quatremère does not hesitate over his means: thus, not finding peacocks in Africa, he would have the birds called tukiim in the Bible be parakeets or guinea fowl. M. Quatremère’s argument is therefore weak, and his unfounded hypotheses give no likelihood to the existence of Ophir in the region of Sofala.

To understand what Ophir was, one must look for the meaning of the name; but first of all it is necessary to make sure how it is written in Hebrew characters. In chapter X of the first book of Kings, verse 11, it is written in Hebrew in two ways, אפיר Apir and אופיר Aypir. In chapter IX of Kings, verse 28, the name is written אופירה Aypira: this last, accusative form of Aypir has become a nominative; but aypira is only a mispronunciation of Yapura, a great tributary of the Amazons, or Rio Soliman, through a transposition of letters, as for example the Kichua yura, “foliage,” becomes urya in Basque; a vessel, in Kichua kirau, in Chaldean kiura; dirty, in Kichua millay, in Hindustani maila; cooking pot, in Kichua paila, in Persian piala, etc. The same goes for changes of vowels: thus the Kichua for air, huayra, becomes huira in Lapp, haïri in Georgian, haiar in Chaldean, oyar in Syriac, aer in Greek and Latin; the number one, in Kichua huc, in Hindustani hec, in Bulgarian hic, in Telugu hac; tongue, in Kichua kalu, in Mongol kélé, in Siberian kil, in Finnish kiéli; a child, in Kichua churi, in old Egyptian chiru, and in Egypto-Coptic chiri. Thus these examples of interchange and substitution of vowels do not alter the meaning of words, and nothing prevents the Aypira of the Bible from having come from the river name Yapura. This latter name is made up of Y, which means “water,” and Apura, which is the name Apira or Apir: “water or river of Apir, or of Ophir.” This famous place is therefore found and clearly identified, and, despite a distance of 2,880 years, the name has suffered only the alteration of one vowel, Yapura instead of Yapira, and this among savage tribes who today do not speak the Kichua of the Antis.¹⁷ In his Voyage au Brésil et aux Amazones [Journey in Brazil and to the Amazons], M. Agassiz writes Hyapura.

We said above that in chapter X of the first book of Kings, Ophir in Hebrew is Apir. Now, this word belongs to the Kichua language, and the mine workers of the whole Andean cordillera and of the upper basin of the Amazons bear the name Apir or Apiri, and in some places Yapiri. Here, then, is the origin of the Hebrew Apir, or of the Ophir of the Latin text. Apir or Apiri refers to the miners and to the places they dig, while Aypir, Aypira or Yapura indicate that they work in the water where the gold is washed. To pin down the district of Ophir itself more precisely, let us return to the river Yapura and look at it on the map. On its left bank a mountain is marked; it is also on the map of Father Fritz, formerly a missionary in those parts.¹⁸ M. de La Condamine used this map on his voyage down the Amazons, and in his Relation he says, speaking of this mountain, that it contains a prodigious quantity of gold. From it flows the river Rio del Oro, whose native name is Ikiari; this name is contracted from the Hebrew יקיר ikir, “precious,” and יארי iari, “river”: “the precious river.” It runs from south to north and flows into the lake of Yumaguari; now, yuma, “native gold,” is a native word, joined to the two Hebrew words גו gu, “center,” and הרי ari, “cavity.” The lake of Yumaguari therefore has for its name “Cavity, center of native gold.” The Yapura itself comes down from the rich mountains of Popayán, a province of Colombia; and one of its gold-bearing tributaries is named Masaî or Masahi. Masaî is again a name derived from the Hebrew מאשר masar, “rich,” to which the native word î, “water,” has been added. This river therefore bears the name of “the Rich Water.”¹⁹ The Hebrews gave the name masaroth to consecrated treasures. On the course of the Yapura there is a waterfall which the Spanish call “el Salto Grande”; but its true name, kept by the natives, is Uacari or Acari;²⁰ an expression they usually apply to the places on this river where there is an abrupt rise in the ground. Now, in Hebrew Uacarit ואכרית or Acarit אכרית means “raised, lifted up.” Here, then, is a series of Hebrew words and names that strengthen our proofs regarding the region of Ophir, and it is indeed the one crossed by the Rio Yapura. Several other highly significant names confirm our opinion further: thus one finds there the river Catuaiari, from the Kichua catu, “market,” and the Hebrew aiari, “river”: “the river of the market”; the place name Macapiri, from the Kichua words maca, “plate,” and apiri, “of the miners”;²¹ one also finds there the names of the tribes Apanos, “the carriers,” Marukéuinis, “the breakers or crushers of earth,” and the Apapuris, “the carriers of travelers.” As we have already said, the natives of the Yapura who have passed down these names know neither Kichua nor Hebrew; this is one more proof that in antiquity, on the banks of the Yapura, the Antis peoples met the Hebrews and the Phoenicians.²² In the face of so many significant coincidences, of these Hebrew names, among which are Apiri or Ophir and the name Y-Apura, “the river of Ophir,” and of the prodigious wealth in gold observed by M. de La Condamine near the river of Solomon and the empire of Inin, or of the Believer, we can fix the limits of the region of Ophir: it lies in Colombian and Brazilian territory, in a triangle formed on one side by the Colombian mountains of Popayán and Cundinamarca as far as the lake of Yumaguari, whose waters feed one of the tributaries of the Orinoco;²³ on another by the Rio Ikiari as far as the gold-bearing mountain from which that river descends; and by the Rio Yapura. The disappearance of the fleets of Solomon and Hiram for three years on each voyage they made is now explained, since they lay at anchor in the river that bore the great king’s name. If these long stays, repeated several times, had taken place at some point of the Old World, tradition or history would not have failed to hand it down.

The various triennial voyages, except one, do not relate to Ophir, for all of them were made to Tarschisch. David received the gold of Ophir through the Phoenicians, and the fleet built under Solomon for the same destination left the Red Sea, but never returned to it; it joined up in the Atlantic with Hiram’s fleet, which came out of the Mediterranean, and after the single voyage they made together to Ophir, they took the name of fleet of Tarschisch according to the Hebrew text, and the name of fleet of Africa according to the Chaldean text. Various causes seem to have led to the abandonment of Ophir. One need only glance at the map to see that the Rio Yapura has several ill-defined mouths that easily become blocked by drifting timber: this must have been a source of difficulty and confusion for navigators who ventured into that labyrinth. Second, the Spanish and Portuguese found that a stay on the Yapura was very unhealthy. Third, exploring the river of the Amazons further west, the Hebrews and Phoenicians found fine gold there in very great abundance and easier to work than at Ophir. Fourth, upriver they had a good climate and easier navigation. Fifth, by drawing nearer to the Antis, a half-civilized and hard-working people, they could make good use of them and obtain provisions for their ships. Finally, in this upper region of the Amazon basin they found silver and the other goods that the fleets brought back to Joppa (Jaffa) for Jerusalem; the names of these goods, which are in the Hebrew text of the Bible, belonged to the language of the Antis, as will be seen below.

We have just said that nearer to the Antis fine gold was very abundant; indeed, for about two centuries the Spanish had the gold-bearing sands of the Upper Amazon washed, and their richness does not seem to have diminished; for today an Indian with a wooden plate can collect up to sixty francs’ worth of fine gold in an hour.²⁴ It is evidently this region that in Solomon’s time received the name of Tarschisch תרשיש: for the etymology of this name is taken from the Kichua language, which is that of the Antis. Tar-schisch comes from tari, “to discover,” and chichiy, “to gather fine gold.” Tarschisch is therefore the place where fine gold is discovered and gathered. The abandonment of Ophir, the nearness of Parvaïm, which also had to be abandoned since it lay so far inland, the facilities offered by the new discoveries, and the etymology of Tarschisch are a combination of circumstances that fix the region where Tarschisch lay. Finally, let us say that this name has its etymology in no other language than Kichua. To go to Tarschisch, the Bible tells us, the prophet Jonah took ship at Joppa: so it was to undertake the navigation of the Atlantic; otherwise he would have taken ship on the Red Sea.

Here is what verse 22 of chapter X of Kings says: “At sea, Solomon had a fleet of Tarschisch with the fleet of Hiram. Once every three years the ships of Tarschisch came, bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks.” Chronicles confirms these triennial voyages, saying, book II, chapter IX, verse 21: “The ships went to Tarschisch for the king, with the servants of Hiram: once every three years the ships of Tarschisch came.”

We would point out that the voyage to Ophir under Solomon brought him only 420 talents of gold, according to chapter IX of the first book of Kings, and that Chronicles, book II, chapter IX, verse 10, completes this account by saying: “The servants of Hiram and of Solomon, who brought the gold of Ophir, brought algum and precious stones.” The woods called algum must necessarily have been unloaded at Joppa, which is very close to Jerusalem. Chapter X, verse 11, of the first book of Kings says: “And also the fleet of Hiram, which brought the gold of Ophir, brought in a great quantity of almug trees and precious stones.” We would observe that on this voyage the allied fleets brought back from Ophir two kinds of wood, the algum and the almug, but that there is no further mention of wood on the voyages to Tarschisch, for which gold and silver were the chief motive.

If one sums up what the commentators have said about the name Tarschisch, some have supposed that it meant the sea; others thought it might be Tarsus, a city of Cilicia; some have named Carthage and others Gades; but none of these places produced gold, silver or precious stones, any more than peacocks or apes. Some have maintained that Tarschisch could only be on the coast of the East Indies, which is plainly impossible, since Jonah, to go there, far from taking ship on the Red Sea, went to take ship at Joppa, and since, moreover, Hiram’s fleet came out of the Mediterranean. Finally, other commentators have said that Tarschisch might be a port on the west coast of Africa; but Africa has no peacocks; and the boldest have allowed that it might be an island of the Ocean. These last came a little closer to the truth, but they did not dare to have well-equipped fleets cross the Ocean completely, even though those fleets set out to accomplish voyages of three years. Apart from the proofs of navigation we gave in the introduction to this Memoir, we take this opportunity to remind all those who are under the influence of such a mistaken idea about crossing the Ocean that in 1867 some Americans crossed it at its greatest width, some in a small boat and others on a raft, from New York. And one need only glance at a map of the world to be convinced that the distance from Cape Verde to Brazil is half the distance between New York and the British Isles.

The whole body of facts relating to Tarschisch, as much as its very name, places it near the Antis, west of Ophir, in the richest part of the Amazon basin. Thus the region of Tarschisch lies where we have marked it on our map.

Let us now examine some of the names of the goods that the ships of Solomon and Hiram brought back from their triennial voyages; for, except for the gold, silver and precious stones, known to the Hebrews before these voyages, the other articles imported to Jerusalem arrived there with names belonging to a foreign language; and these foreign names evidently came from the place the imported articles came from. Let us speak first of the precious, fragrant woods that have been thought to be sandalwood. In the first book of Kings, chapter X, verse 11, it is said that Hiram’s ships brought gold from Ophir and a great quantity of almug trees, a name whose plural is almughim אלמגים. Almug may derive from the Hebrew word ala אלה, “hard wood or consecrated wood,” and from the Kichua word mucki, “fragrant,” “smell,” whose verb is muka, “to smell”; or else its etymology lies in the two Kichua words alli, “good, excellent,” and mucki, “fragrant, or smell.” Almug is therefore “wood of good smell,” and it was of this wood, according to the Bible, that Solomon had the pillars of the Temple of Jerusalem made. It seems that the Tyrian ships were the only ones that brought this wood; if it is sandalwood, we can affirm that there is a great deal of it in the Upper Amazon. In the book of Chronicles, chapter IX, verse 10, we read: “The servants of Hiram and of Solomon, who brought the gold of Ophir, brought algum and precious stones,” from which it follows that this second kind of wood was brought by both fleets. In the Hebrew text it is called in the plural algumim אלגומים, and since this name was not understood by the commentators, they translated it into Latin as ligna hebeni, ligna thyina and ligna coralliorum [ebony wood, thyine wood, coral wood]. Its etymology lies in the Hebrew ala אלה, “wood,” and in the Kichua kumu, “curved”; or else in the Kichua words alli, “good,” and kumu, “curved”: the algum or algumim are therefore “the curved woods” or “the good curves.” The use of the almug for the pillars explains to us that of the algum for the arches between these pillars and for the vaults of the Temple.

The celebrated philologist Max Müller says that one of the many names given to sandalwood in Sanskrit is valguka. This valguka, he says, is clearly the name that the Jewish and Phoenician merchants corrupted into algum and that the Hebrews changed into almug. Had that been so, the Hebrew text would have given it only the name adopted by the Hebrews. Comparing this Sanskrit term with the true and expressive etymologies of almug and algum, drawn from the Kichua al’mucki and al-kumu, Max Müller’s valguka is not admissible and did not undergo the two transformations he supposes; besides, for all his Sanskrit learning, he will never be able to find Ophir, or the gold of Ophir, in Malabar, the part of India he points to; our demonstration has already proved this.

The fleet of Tarschisch also brought Solomon birds called tuki, plural tukiim תוכיים: this is the name that has generally been translated as peacock. We would point out first that equatorial America possesses several varieties of peacocks and turkeys; they are native to it and live there in the wild. We name these two kinds of birds here because both have the same manner of behaving: they puff themselves up with pride, spread their plumage and fan their tails.

Anyone who has seen turkeys fan their tails knows that at that moment tuk (touk) is a somewhat muffled and quite peculiar sound these birds make to get themselves admired. Well! This tuk is precisely the origin of tuki, a Kichua word meaning “puffed up with pride, proud.” Turkeys and peacocks are the proud birds, or simply tukiim, “the proud ones,” as the Bible calls them. Among the varieties of peacocks of Ecuador and Guiana is the one called ocko in those countries; now, by a singular parallel with the epithet “proud” taken from tuki, we find likewise that the Greek ogkos, “proud,” is also taken from the American peacock ocko. This small detail is not without interest, for we said in the introduction to this Memoir that the Greek language has part of its origins in America, particularly in the Kichua language.

Alongside the truth of our etymology, since the biblical tuki is a Kichua word, we will set those of certain philologists that Max Müller has put forward; for they have supposed that tuki was derived from tôgei, “that which hangs,” a word belonging to the Tamil language, and they have also supposed the word sigi, which is even further from tuki, and which they have tried to derive from the Sanskrit sikhin, “crest.” To crown the implausibility, Dr. Gundert, who has devoted himself to the study of the Dravidian languages, sets out to derive tôgei from to or tu, and arbitrarily adds gnu as a second base in order to form tongu, from which he derives tongal, a Tamil word supposed to mean “a peacock’s tail.” What efforts, what ingenious combinations and forced transitions! Only philologists of reputation can allow themselves such things. We will never have the boldness to put forward such etymologies: fortunately, the clarity and precision of Kichua keep us from such a pitfall.

In his Lectures on the Science of Language,²⁵ the philologist Max Müller tells us that the apes brought to Solomon were called by the Hebrews koph, plural kophim קפים: he could have read kop and kopim;²⁶ and he adds that this name did not belong to their language and has its etymology in no Semitic language. We would point out that kop is written with only two consonants, קף, and that if, instead of inserting the vowel o, he had inserted a, he would have had kap and in the plural kapim, which is the true pronunciation; he would then have found, alongside these words, the Sanskrit kapis, “ape.” However, the Hebrews did not go to Sanskrit for the name of the apes that arrived from Tarschisch. Kap and kapim have their etymology in the Kichua kapi, “to grip firmly with the hand,” an action quite peculiar to the ape, done in the manner of man, which is what strikes one most about it. This origin of kapim is quite evidently American. A point of the island of Santa Catarina, near the coast of Brazil, bears the name of Kapi; in the interior of the Amazons, one of its tributaries that flows in near Pará is called Rio Kapim (river of the Apes), and going up the river one finds the island of Kapim; one can see that the Hebrew form has been preserved in these names.²⁷ As for the occurrence of the word kapis in Sanskrit, it is explained by the fact that we have noted five hundred words of the Hindustani language²⁸ in Kichua, and that they have the same meanings in both languages. This is not the place to go into any explanation of the presence of Kichua in the East Indies; we will content ourselves with saying that we are at this moment preparing a work in which, to general astonishment, it will be shown that the Aryans and their Sanskrit language have their cradle in America: we have the philological, ethnographic and historical proofs.

Among the precious goods brought back by the fleets of Solomon and Hiram is ivory, which is designated in the Bible by two names, Schan-abim שנהבים and Karnot-schan קרנות שן. Max Müller further observes that abim has no derivation in Hebrew; but he supposes that the word could be a corruption of the Sanskrit ibha preceded by the Semitic article; and on this hypothesis he thinks that abim must have, like ibha, the meaning of elephant. The word schan is indeed used in Hebrew for “tooth.” But its origin is American; this is what we see in the Amazon basin, where in the Tupi language, the general language of Brazil, “tooth” is expressed by schan, shaina, shène and sahn; among the Panos they say schaina and schaila; in the Puri dialect, scheh and isché; in Botocudo, schoun and dschoun. But if schan really is Hebrew, its presence among the tribes of the Amazons, who have preserved it, would be one more proof that Tarschisch was on this river and that the Hebrews sought ivory there, which is found there in the fossil state: and fossil ivory is the kind most commonly used in the arts. Six varieties of fossil elephants have already been discovered in America, but we do not know whether these pachyderms were all wiped out in a cataclysm or whether some still existed in Solomon’s time; in any case, fossil ivory was in a better state of preservation 2,880 or 3,000 years ago. As for abim, it is not a corruption of the Sanskrit ibha: it is the Egyptian word ab, “elephant,” put into the plural by the Hebrews; there is a correlation between the Egyptian ab, aba and the Kichua apa, “to carry,” apac, “the carrier”: in Egyptian abah or apah, and in Kichua apa, mean “burden.” The name of the elephant, which is the carrying animal par excellence, may have its origin as much in Kichua as in Egyptian: besides, we have already stated that a great many Kichua words are in the ancient hieroglyphic language of the Egyptians and that, through the Atlanteans, they share a common origin.

We said above that in the Bible ivory is also called karnotschan, “horns of teeth.” Such poverty of expression leads one to believe that Kichua again plays the leading part here. Indeed, we would point out that under the first Hebrew letter of karnotschan a kamets has been placed, a Masoretic sign that gives the K (Hebrew koph) the sound of the vowel a; now, since we are permitted to reject this conventional sign, which does not exist in ancient Hebrew, we are free to substitute i for a. Then, instead of karnotschan we get kirnotschan. In that case we divide the word as follows, kir-notschan, derived from the Kichua kiru, “tooth,” and notchischan, contracted to notschan, “which is pointed”: kirnotschan, “the pointed tooth.” Thus it is not certain that any Hebrew word was used to designate ivory. The Hebrews could have seen elephants at the time of their servitude in Egypt and in Babylon; but in Judea elephants were seen only 165 years before Christ: we are referring to the elephants belonging to Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, when he came to give battle to the Jewish people, a battle in which the valiant Eleazar, one of the brothers of Judas Maccabeus, perished under the king’s elephant.

To sum up: after relying on the historians to show that the peoples of antiquity sailed the Ocean and knew America, we have just shown that the foreign words mixed into the text of the Bible, which designate the goods brought back by the fleets of the two kings, were taken from the Kichua language, the language of the Antis of equatorial and southern America. We have also shown that Hebrew words, carried into this part of America, became mixed with the native dialects, or else have been preserved there intact. This exchange of words between nations of the two continents is the proof that the Hebrews and Phoenicians went to the river of the Amazons, which received from these navigators the name of Solomon. The empire of Inin, or of the Believer, the positions we have given for Parvaïm, Ophir and Tarschisch, and the names and particular features attached to several localities and rivers form such a series and such a body of facts, grouped in a single region, that the evidence for our discovery is palpable and incontestable. We therefore owe it to the Kichua language that we have rediscovered the route followed 2,880 years ago by the fleets of Hiram and Solomon: it is Kichua that gives away the secret of their navigation and explains their absences of three years on each voyage, by letting us know that they lay peacefully at anchor in the waters of the Amazons.

For the satisfaction of our readers, we will add in closing a few observations on the Antis and their language. The migration of this people from Asia to America took place some centuries before the Flood, since they took part in the invasion of the Atlanteans before the cataclysm; moreover, under the Incas, instead of writing, the Antis used quipos, or knotted cords, a practice that existed among the Tibetans and the Chinese up to the time of the emperor Fohi [Fu Xi], 600 years before the Flood. These facts prove the great antiquity of the settlement of the Antis in the cordilleras of equatorial and southern America and in the upper basin of the Amazons. This primitive nation has been preserved from invasion and from all destruction by the great altitude and harshness of the territory it inhabits, by a thousand leagues of virgin forest separating it from the Atlantic, and on the western side by formidable mountains and the immensity of the great Ocean. The Kichua language, still spoken by three million natives, is written with only fourteen letters: one can see, then, that its wholly primitive character has undergone little alteration. Sanskrit, on the contrary, being written with 39 characters, leads us to suppose that in perfecting itself it took over many foreign roots that did not exist in it originally and whose pronunciation had to be preserved: be that as it may, a primitive language cannot have 39 characters. Under the Incas, the Kichua language was spoken from the second degree of north latitude to the thirty-fifth degree of south latitude; and in breadth, that is, from the Pacific eastward, it was hardly spoken beyond five hundred kilometres; whereas in older times it was in use along the river of the Amazons as far as twelve hundred and fifteen hundred kilometres from the Pacific.

Let us end with one last observation: Humboldt and Klaproth quite wrongly gave the name Quichean [quichéenne] to the Kichua language; in fact, one of the dialects of Mexico, which bears the name Quiché, has no relation to the language of the Antis; and it is to the Mexican Quiché, as will readily be understood, that the term Quichean ought to apply. The purpose of our observation is to prevent any confusion between our modest work and the learned writings of M. Brasseur de Bourbourg on the history, archaeology and dialects of Mexico.

Onffroy de Thoron.

Translator’s note

• Source text. Translated from the 1869 printed text as scanned and OCR’d by Persée, checked against the page images where the OCR was garbled (dates, figures, Hebrew words and footnotes). No passage was illegible. The map the author mentions was not part of the scan and is not reproduced. I have kept his spellings Parvaïm, Tarschisch, Kichua (Quechua), Antis, Hutaî and Solimoes, and the Hebrew words as he prints them. The Hebrew for inini / inéni is not reproduced because the print is too small to read with certainty.
• Biblical references. He writes “Paralipomènes” for Chronicles and cites 2 Chronicles 3 as “chap. III, vol. 6”; I took “vol.” as a slip for verse. His “chap. IX of Kings, v. 28” is 1 Kings 9:28, and his quotations follow the Hebrew loosely, so I translated his French wording, not a standard English Bible.
• Dates. His “years ago” chronology counts back from 1870, as he says. The figures (5,178; 4,800; 3,700; 3,399, and so on) are his.
• Uncertain renderings. A few choices need noting: terre ferme is rendered “mainland”; la grande mer as “the great sea” (he means the Pacific); Traité des taches dans l’orbe lunaire is Plutarch’s On the Face in the Moon; “R. Festus Avienus” is kept as printed. In footnote 15 he calls L and R “labial” letters; I kept his word. Fohi is Fu Xi. “Cuervo” is the island of Corvo in the Azores.
• His etymologies (Kichua, Hebrew, Egyptian, Sanskrit and Greek) are translated as he gives them, without correction. Many would not be accepted by linguists today.

Footnotes

1. Midas, the first king of Phrygia, lived about 400 years before the flood of Deucalion, for Nannac, another king of Phrygia, who came before that event, is said by Suidas to have lived 300 years. The flood of Deucalion, which flooded Thessaly, took place, according to the Parian Marble, 1529 years before our era. If we allow that Silenus and Midas lived about 100 years before Nannac, that would be 3,800 years ago today, that is, a century before the flood of Inachus, king of Argos and father of Phoroneus. We conclude from this that at that time the American continent, or one of its parts, was called Meropis by the Phrygians, and that this name was also known among the Greeks. This name is, however, less ancient than that of Atlantis. ↩

2. In the abridged vocabulary of the Egyptologist Bunsen we have noted a great number of words taken from the Egyptian monuments that exist in Kichua with identical meanings. We also have several hundred Greek words that we have noted in Kichua; and we obtained a similar result by comparing Kichua with Hindustani. ↩

3. The Egyptians said they had received their gods from the Atlanteans; the invasion of Greek soil dates from the same period. Now, the Pelasgian myths and deities, which passed to the Greeks and the Latins and whose true origins and meanings we have discovered in the language of the Antis; the Cyclopean buildings made by the Pelasgians in Greece and Italy, which are identical to those seen among the Antis; the Greek word pelagios, which means seaman, and the name of the Ocean, which is pelagos; and still other reasons, all show the American origin of the Pelasgians called Cyclopes. That is why Homer says the Cyclopes were sons of Neptune and Amphitrite; and that is also why Herodotus tells us that Neptune was a deity of Pelasgian origin. ↩

4. De mirabilibus auscultationibus, chap. LXXXIV. ↩

5. Vandalic War, book II. ↩

6. Pliny, Natural History, book II. Capella, De rotunditate terrae. ↩

7. According to Plutarch, the origins of the Greeks would be in America: the results of our work prove him entirely right. ↩

8. Inachus did not come from Phoenicia, as some have believed: having come across the Ocean, he went to Egypt and Phoenicia to recruit colonists and settle with them in Argolis, where he founded Argos. Strabo regards him as a Pelasgian. ↩

9. Histoire générale des voyages, vol. 1. Edrisi, the Arab geographer, also mentioned this statue, as did several other writers of that century. ↩

10. Published by Mme veuve Jules Renouard, bookseller, rue de Tournon, Paris. ↩

11. Hebrew is read from right to left. ↩

12. Paru seems to be contracted from the ancient Egyptian pa-aru, “the river”; Paru means “river” among the Mayorunas of the Upper Amazon; but this word, which has fallen out of use among the peoples of the Andes (Antis), must in antiquity have belonged to Kichua: it is still found there in the corrupted forms palu or pelu, “river”; most of the headwaters of the great rivers are still called Pari there; in Kichua para means “rain”; and para in Tupi means “river.” In Tartar, parok is “torrent.” The Kichua verbs ara, ala, “to open a spring,” are the origin of ara, ari, aru, alu, elu, preceded by the Kichua article pay, which was contracted to pa, as in Egyptian. Palu gave rise to the Latin palus: sea, marsh, any body of water. ↩

13. We would note that the Spanish gave the Ucayali and the other rivers with white waters the name blanco, and the Portuguese the name branco; but this could not entitle M. Martius to give the name Cayari the sense of fluvius albus [white river], as he did in his glossary; neither Kichua nor Tupi nor any dialect of the Amazons can supply an etymology for Cayari in the sense of white river. Had one existed, M. Martius, who in his glossary ventured hundreds of improbable roots, would not have failed to give it for Cayari. ↩

14. The Spanish write Jutay, but it is known that they pronounce it Khutai or Hutai; with them the letter J is guttural and aspirated. Martius (Nomina locorum) also writes Jutahi. ↩

15. Picquet’s Dictionnaire géographique universel writes Soriman; but in Portuguese one says Solimao, Solimoes, Solimoens or Sorimoes indifferently, because in the American languages the labial letters L and R constantly assimilate: these variants can be seen in Martius’s Tupi vocabulary, page 525. ↩

16. Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. XV, part 2. ↩

17. In the dialects of the central Amazon basin, water and river are always hi, hy, i, y, yg, ig, igh, yh, hu, u, etc. We should also point out that in Hebrew the letters P and PH are represented by the same character, so that Ayphira or Aypira, Aphir or Apir are the same thing, and that the true pronunciation is not Ophir but Apir. ↩

18. This map is kept in the Bibliothèque Impériale in Paris. ↩

19. The elision of the consonant r is a frequent occurrence among American, Oceanian and African peoples; that is why one says Masaî for Masarî. ↩

20. See Martius’s glossary, Nomina locorum, page 434. ↩

21. Maca is a wooden plate used to wash gold and separate it from the sand. ↩

22. The Phoenicians and the Hebrews spoke the same language. ↩

23. Cundinamarca has monuments of antiquity that have not been studied, and from its mountains flow rivers whose names reveal the former presence of the Phoenicians or the Hebrews. ↩

24. Last year and this year we have seen the reports of officers of the Peruvian navy, which confirm the truth of this statement and name these very rich places where the trials were made before their eyes. ↩

25. Lecture V. ↩

26. We recall here that in Hebrew P and PH are the same letter. ↩

27. They can be seen on the hydrographic charts of Commander Tardy de Montravel, and on other maps as well. ↩

28. Hindustani is formed from Sanskrit, the Dravidian languages, Arabic and Persian: one might add, from Kichua. ↩