Images de page
PDF
ePub

Antilles, and the coast of Honduras, where Carib tribes still exist. These Caras, once neighbors of the Mayas, extended their conquests from the frontiers of Mayach throughout the southern continent; to the river Plata, east of the Andes; to Chile, west of that chain of mountains. It would indeed be very difficult to explain the striking similarity of aboriginal names of places and tribes still used in the countries known to-day as Venezuela and Colombia, and those of localities on the shores of the Mediterranean, and of the people who dwelt in them, except through the intimate relationship of the Carians of Asia Minor and the Caras of the "Lands of the West." Their names are not only similar, but, on both sides of the Atlantic, were synonymous of "man," par excellence, of eminent warrior," endowed with great dexterity and extraordinary power.1 When the Spaniards landed for the first time in America, the Caribs of the islands of St. Vincent and Martinique were cannibals, and the terror of their neighbors.

Lastly, according to Max Müller, Philip of Theangela, a Carian historian, says that the idiom of the Carians was mixed with a great number of Greek words. But Homer represents them among the earliest inhabitants of Asia Minor and of the Grecian peninsula,3 anterior, consequently, to the Hellenes, who in their intercourse with them would naturally have made use of many words of their language that afterward became engrafted on that of the Greeks themselves.

For the present we shall depart from the eastern shores of

' Rochefort, Histoire Naturelle et Morale des Antilles, p. 401. D'Orbigny, L'Homme Americain, vol. ii., p. 268. Alcedo, Diccionario Geografico é Historico de las Indias Occidentales.

2 Max Müller, Fragments, Hist. Græc, vol. iv., p. 475.

[blocks in formation]
[graphic][subsumed]

THE NEW YORK

AND

the Mediterranean and from Egypt, which we shall revisit later on. Before returning to Mayach let us again ask, This perfect identity of Maya, Hindoo, Chaldean, and Egyptian cosmogonic notions; these Maya words that form the names of places, nations, and gods, descriptive of their attributes or characteristics, in India, Chaldea, Phoenicia, and Egypt-are they mere coincidences?

5

VI.

In our journey westward across the Atlantic we shall pass in sight of that spot where once existed the pride and life of the ocean, the Land of Mu, which, at the epoch that we have been considering, had not yet been visited by the wrath of Homen, that lord of volcanic fires to whose fury it afterward fell a victim. The description of that land given to Solon by Sonchis, priest at Sais; its destruction by earthquakes, and submergence, recorded by Plato in his "Timæus," have been told and retold so many times that it is useless to encumber these pages with a repetition of it. I shall therefore content myself with mentioning that the ten provinces which formed the country,' that Plato says Kronos divided among his ten sons, were thickly populated, and that the black race seems to have predominated. We shall not tarry in Zinaan, "the scorpion," longer than to inquire if, perchance, the Egyptian goddess Selk, whose title was "the great reptile," directress of the books, whose office was principally in the regions of the

1 Troano MS., part ii., plate v.

Plato, Timæus.

« PrécédentContinuer »