The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
in the chain of evidence of ancient migration from Asia to America; as is proved by its practice in some of the islands of the Pacific, as described by Dr. Pickering,[2] and since abundantly confirmed by the forms of Kanaka skulls. By following up the traces of this strange custom, perpetuated among the tribes on the Pacific coasts both of Northern and Southern America to our own day, we thus once more retrace the steps of ancient wanderers, and are carried back to centuries when the Macrocephali of the Euxine attracted the observant eye of Hippocrates, and became familiar to Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela.
But the wanderings among the insular races of the Pacific are not limited to such remote eras. Later changes are also recorded by other evidence. The direct relationship of existing Polynesian languages is not Mongol but Malay; but this is the intrusive element of a time long subsequent to the growth of characteristic features which still perpetuate traces of Polynesian and American affinities. The number and diversity of the languages of the continent of America, and their essentially native vocabularies, prove that the latter have been in prolonged process of development, free from contact with languages which appear to have been still modelling themselves according to the same plan of thought in many scattered islands of the Pacific.
The remarkable amount of culture in the languages of some of the barbarous nations of North America, traceable, apparently, to the important part which the orator played in their deliberative assemblies, has not unnaturally excited surprise: but in any attempt to recover the history of the New World by the aid of philology we must deal with the languages of its civilised races. Among those the Nahuatl or Aztec has been appealed to; and the Mayas have been noted as a lettered people whose hieroglyphic records, and later transcripts of written documents, are now the object of intelligent investigation both by European and American philologists. The Maya language strikingly contrasts, in its soft, vocalic forms, with the languages of nations immediately to the north of its native area. It is that which, according to Stephens, was affirmed to be still spoken by a living race in a region beyond the Great Sierra, extending to Yucatan and the Mexican Gulf. Others among the cultured native languages which seem to invite special study are the Aymara and the Quichua. Of these, the latter was the classical language of South America, wherein, according to its native historians, the Peruvian chroniclers and poets incorporated the national legends. It may be described as having occupied a place under Inca rule analogous to that of the Norman French in England from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. To those ancient, cultured languages of the seats of an indigenous civilisation, and with a literature of their own, attention is now happily directed. The students of American ethnology begin to realise that the buried mounds of Assyria are not richer in discoveries relative to the ancient history of Asia than are the monuments, the hieroglyphic records, and the languages of Central America and Peru, in relation to a native social life which long flourished as a product of their own West. To this occidental Assyria we have to look for an answer to many inquiries, especially interesting to the intrusive occupants of the western continent. If its architecture and sculpture, and the hieroglyphic records with which they are enriched, are modifications of a prehistoric Asiatic civilisation, it is here that the evidence is to be looked for; and if the arts of the sculptor and architect were brought to the continent of America by wanderers from an Asiatic fatherland, then those of the potter and of the metallurgist will also prove to be an inheritance from the old Asiatic hive of the nations.
From the evidence thus far adduced it appears that ethnically the American is Mongol, and by the agglutinative element in many of the native languages may be classed as Turanian. The Finnic hypothesis of Rask, however much modified by later reconsideration of the question of the origin of the Aryans, as well as the European melanochroic Metis of Huxley, pertains to a prehistoric era of which the Finns and the Basques are assumed to be survivals; and to that elder era, rather than to any date within the remotest limits of authentic history, the languages of America seem to refer us in the search for any common origin with those of the eastern hemisphere. But a zealous comparative philologist, already referred to, has sought for linguistic traces of relationship between the Old and the New World which, if confirmed, would better harmonise with the traditions of intercourse between the maritime nations of the eastern Mediterranean and a continent lying outside of the Pillars of Hercules. In his investigations he aims at determining the relations of the Aztec or Nahuatl culture and language to those of Asia. Humboldt long ago claimed for much of the former an Old World derivation. It seems premature to attempt to deduce any comprehensive results from the meagre data thus far gathered. But the author of The Khita and Khita-Peruvian Epoch, in tracing the progress of his Sumerian race, assigns an interval of 4000 years since their settlement in Babylonia and India. In like manner, on the assumption of their migration from a common Asiatic centre, which the division of Western and Eastern Sumerian in pronouns and other details is thought to indicate, Peru, it is conceived, may have been reached by a migratory wave of earlier movement, from 4000 to 5000 years ago. Mr. Hyde Clarke indeed conceives that it is quite within compass that the same great wave of migration which passed over India and Babylonia, continued to propagate its centrifugal force, and that by its means Peru was reached within the last 3000 years. But, whatever intercourse may possibly have then been carried on between the Old and the New World, it must be obvious, on mature reflection, that so recent a date for the peopling of South America from Asia is as little reconcilable with the very remote traces of linguistic affinity thus far adduced, as it is with any fancied relationship with a lost Atlantis of the elder world. The enduring affinities of long-parted languages of the Old World tell a very different tale. With the comparative philologist, as with the archæologist, time is more and more coming to be recognised as an all-important factor.
But, leaving the estimate of centuries out of consideration, in the researches into the origin of the peculiar native civilisation of America here referred to, the recently deciphered Akkad is accepted as the typical language of the Sumerian class. This is assumed to have started from High Asia, and to have passed on to Babylonia; while another branch diffused itself by India and Indo-China, and thence, by way of the islands of the Pacific, reached America. Hence, in an illustrative table of Sumerian words arranged under four heads, as Western, Indo-Chinese, Peruvian, and Mexican, etc., it is noted that “while in some cases a root may be traced throughout, it will be seen that more commonly the western and American roots or types, cross in the Indo-Chinese region.” But another and older influence, related to the Agaw of the Nile region, is also traced in the Guarani, Omagua, and other languages of South America, indicating evidences of more remote relations with the Old World, and with the African continent. This is supposed to have been displaced by a Sumerian migration by which the Aymara domination was established in Peru, and the Maya element introduced into Yucatan. Those movements are assumed to belong to an era of civilisation, during which the maritime enterprise of the Pacific may have been carried on upon a scale unknown to the most adventurous of modern Malay navigators, notwithstanding the essentially maritime character by which the race is still distinguished. All this implies that the highway to the Pacific was familiar to both continents; and hence a second migration is recognised, in certain linguistic relations, between the Siamese and other languages of Indo-China, and the Quichua and Aztec of Peru and Mexico. But the problem of the origin of the races of the western continent, and of the sources of its native civilisation, is still in that preliminary stage in which the accumulation of materials on which future induction may be based is of more value than the most comprehensive generalisations.
The vastness of the American twin continents, with their Atlantic and Pacific seaboard reaching from the Arctic well-nigh to the Antarctic circle, furnishes a tempting stimulus to theories of migration on the grandest scale, and to the assumption of comprehensive schemes of international relation in prehistoric centuries. But they are not more substantial than the old legend of Atlantis. The best that can be said of them is that here, at any rate, are lines of research in the prosecution of which American ethnologists may employ their learning and acumen encouraged by the hope of yet revealing a past not less marvellous, and possessing a more personal interest, than all which geology has recovered from the testimony of the rocks. But before such can be more than dimly guessed at, the patient diligence of many students will be needed to accumulate the needful materials. Nor can we afford to delay the task. The Narraganset Bible, the work of Eliot, the apostle of the Indians, is the memorial of a race that has perished; while other nations and languages have disappeared since his day, with no such invaluable record of their character. Mr.