Table of Contents
Ignatius Donnelly argued in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) that the syllables Ad-, Atl- and At- in the oldest names of many peoples point back to Atlantis, which he also called “Ad-lantis”. This page follows his chapter on the Traditions of Atlantis (Part IV, Chapter I) and sets out his examples one people at a time. The links to Atlantis are Donnelly’s reading, not a settled fact.
The Arabians and the Adites
Among the Arabians, the first people of the land were the Adites, named after their founder Ad, the grandson of Ham. Donnelly thought the Adites were probably the people of Atlantis. He quotes Lenormant and Chevallier’s Ancient History of the East for the Arab tradition of Ad.
Arab tradition gives Ad an enormous family and a very long life.
He married a thousand wives, had four thousand sons, and lived twelve hundred years.
Lenormant and Chevallier, Ancient History of the East, vol. ii, p. 296, as quoted by Donnelly, Part IV, Chapter I
For more on these long lives, see Human lifespan declines.
Donnelly names the great king before the flood, in Muslim tradition, as Shedd-Ad-Ben-Ad, or Shed-Ad, “the son of Ad”. After Ad died, his sons Shadid and Shedad ruled in turn. Shedad is said to have conquered all of Arabia and Irak, and some Arab writers credit his campaigns with the Canaanite move into Syria and the Shepherd invasion of Egypt.
Shedad built a palace with columns and a great garden called Irem. The source calls it “a paradise that Shedad had built in imitation of the celestial Paradise”. Donnelly reads it as a copy of the palace and garden of Atlantis.
The Adites are remembered as giants who moved huge blocks of stone and raised great buildings. The Arabs called large ruins “buildings of the Adites” and still say “as old as Ad”. Their end came with a black cloud and a terrible hurricane that swept away everything, and only a few who had given up idolatry escaped. Donnelly also notes that their religion was mainly solar and that they “worshipped the sun from the tops of pyramids”.
The Hindus and Ad-ima
In Sanskrit, adim means “first”. In the Hindu story Donnelly cites (from a book called The Bible in India), the first man was Ad-ima and his wife was Heva. They lived on an island said to be Ceylon. They left it for the mainland, and then a great convulsion of nature cut them off from it for good. Donnelly saw a memory of the sinking of Atlantis here, and the names are close to Adam and Eve (see Eve).
The Persians and Mashab-Ad
Donnelly quotes Sir William Jones on the earliest Persian tradition.
Jones names Mashab-Ad as the first king of the world.
Moshan assures us that in the opinion of the best informed Persians the first monarch of Iran, and of the whole earth, was Mashab-Ad …
Sir William Jones, as quoted by Donnelly, Part IV, Chapter I
In the same passage, Mashab-Ad is the man left over from the last great cycle and so “the father of the present world”. He and his wife had many children. He planted gardens, made weapons, taught people to make clothing from fleece, built cities and palaces, and brought in arts and commerce.
The Aditya
In Hindu myth the Aditya are the oldest group of gods, the “sons of Aditi”. Donnelly, following Whitney’s Oriental and Linguistic Studies, notes that they are gods of light, that there are twelve of them, and that they ruled the twelve months of the year. Varuna, “the god of the ocean” in the Vedas, is one of them, and Donnelly matches him with the Greek Uranos. People prayed to the Aditya for purity and forgiveness rather than wealth or power. Donnelly saw “Ad-itya” as another echo of the Adites and of Atlantis.
The Chaldeans and the Ad-mi
Donnelly cites George Smith’s “Chaldean account of the Creation” (p. 78). Smith reported that the Babylonian tablets speak of an early dark race, the Zalmat-qaqadi, called Ad-mi or Ad-ami. They were the race “who had fallen”, set against the Sarku, the light race. Donnelly took the “fall” to mean their destruction by a flood. He adds that Genesis 5:2 says God “called their name Adam”, the name of a whole people.
Genesis gives Adam as the name of both man and woman.
Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
Genesis 5:2, KJV
Guatemala and Mexico
Across the ocean, the people of Guatemala said they came from a goddess called At-tit, “grandmother”, who lived four hundred years and first taught the worship of the true God. Donnelly cites Bancroft’s Native Races (vol. iii, p. 75).
The Mexican calendar stone, he says, shows the sun usually called tonatiuh, but called Atl-tona-ti-uh when it is the god of the Deluge. In Aztec tradition the fourth sun was Nahui-Atl, the Water Sun, ended by a flood (see The 5 Suns).
Donnelly’s conclusion
Donnelly ends the chapter by saying the “sons of Ad” stand at the root of the Hebrews, Arabians, Chaldeans, Hindus, Persians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Mexicans and Central Americans. For him, all of them traced their beginning back to “a dimly remembered Ad-lantis”. For his wider reading of Genesis, see Genesis: the history of Atlantis.
