Table of Contents
From the book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
Ignatius Donnelly opens Part V, Chapter X of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) with one question.
We come now to another question: "Did the Aryan or Japhetic race come from Atlantis?"
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), Part V, Chapter X, "The Aryan Colonies from Atlantis"
Donnelly asks whether the Aryans came from Atlantis.
The full chapter is on The Aryan Colonies from Atlantis. This page follows the first steps of his argument.
The argument from Genesis
Donnelly reads the Aryans as the Japhetic race. Japheth was a son of Noah and escaped the Deluge with him. If the tradition of Genesis is true, Donnelly concludes, the Aryans came from the drowned land, which for him is Atlantis.
He then names the peoples that Genesis gives as the descendants of Japheth.
According to Genesis, the descendants of the Japheth who escaped out of the Flood with Noah are the Ionians, the inhabitants of the Morea, the dwellers on the Cilician coast of Asia Minor, the Cyprians, the Dodoneans of Macedonia, the Iberians, and the Thracians. These are all now recognized as Aryans, except the Iberians.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), Part V, Chapter X
Donnelly counts all of Japheth’s peoples as Aryans, except the Iberians.
Genesis itself gives names, not peoples. The list of the sons of Japheth is in the Table of Nations, see Genesis 10.
The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.
Genesis 10:2, King James Version
Genesis names seven sons of Japheth.
By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.
Genesis 10:5, King James Version
From these sons came the island and coastal nations, each with its own language.
Javan is the usual Hebrew name for the Ionians. The step from these names to the peoples in Donnelly’s list is his own reading.
Winchell, Rawlinson and one first language
Donnelly then quotes Alexander Winchell’s Preadamites, page 43. Winchell writes that non-Biblical sources confirm that the Japhethites, the Indo-Europeans or Aryans, first lived in one country with the Hamites and the Semites. He cites Rawlinson, who found Aryan roots mixed with Presemitic ones in old Assyrian inscriptions. Winchell adds that the exact region of this common home has not been found.
Donnelly then refers back to his chapter on Peru. There, he says, he showed that the languages of the Hamites, Semites and Japhethites are all varieties of one original speech.
Last, he notes that popular opinion makes Armenia the centre of the Aryan migrations in the Historical Period. Mount Ararat, where the ark is said to have rested, is in Armenia too.
Reading it today
Donnelly wrote in 1882. The word “Aryan” in his chapter comes from the racial theories of the 19th century, which are now outdated. Modern linguistics also does not support one shared first language for the Hamitic, Semitic and Japhetic languages. There are linguistic connections among the Indo-European languages.
For the later, Theosophical meaning of the word, see Aryan Race and Transition of the Atlantean into the Aryan root race.
