Prehistoric Structures of Central America Part 1

Prehistoric Structures of Central America.

by Martin Ingham Townsend.

INTRODUCTION.

It was not a long period after 1492, when the great Italian navigator with his Spanish crew made their first discoveries upon the central portion of America, that the Europeans, who had followed the footsteps of Christopher Columbus, began to fall in with structures of great magnitude and architectural beauty scattered widely throughout Mexico, Guatemala and Yucatan, &c.; and when the conquest of Peru was achieved, artificial highways and water courses were found there, such as could have owed their existence to no people but one with advanced knowledge of science as well as of the arts of civilized life. No people existed then upon this continent capable of doing the work which so astonished the world.

Thinking men and dreaming men have, from the earliest of these discoveries, been busying themselves to find out when, and by what people, these early monuments to human efforts were constructed.

Norwegian discoverers and Welsh emigrants have been pressed into the service. Our own Donnelly has changed the place where G.o.d and history had located the origin of the human race in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, to a suppositious island in the Atlantic Ocean, and led out the nations of the earth from there to Asia, Africa and western Europe, until he had no further need of the island and then sunk it in "the bottom of the sea."

A whole people have been pressed into the service of explaining this mystery. The convenient "Lost ten tribes of the House of Israel" have been set to do this work, as their fathers were compelled to "make brick without straw" in the Land of Egypt, and then suffered to escape to some land where search for them would be in vain.

The following treatise is written for the purpose of showing--

FIRST.--That the lands where these structures exist were known to commercial people and to many of the scholars of the countries about the Mediterranean Sea for at least a thousand years before the Christian Era.

SECOND.--That these discoveries were made by the people of Phnecia, originally located on the eastern border of the Mediterranean Sea, and by their colonies settled about Carthage in Africa, and throughout Spain and Portugal up to the Ebro; and who traversed every ocean almost as thoroughly as have their Anglo Saxon successors for the past four hundred years.

THIRD.--That the origin of the people who made these structures is shown, to absolute certainty, by the character of the architecture and by the character of the religious belief exhibited upon the temples which were erected to Baal, or Moloch, i. e. the Sun, who was their G.o.d, who was wors.h.i.+ped by the immolation of their infant children upon his altars.

This is proven as fully by the carvings and frescoes in Mexico and Guatemala, and by the stone circle of Sill.u.s.tani, in the high country of Peru, and the figures inscribed upon the great entrance to the cemetery of Tiahuanuco in the same region, as if a thousand witnesses arose from the dead and testified before us.

PREHISTORIC CENTRAL AMERICA AND PERU.

THE ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN SCHOLARS KNEW OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE WESTERN CONTINENT.

In the earlier existence of the Greek and Roman peoples, knowledge was extremely limited. These peoples were without any mode of perpetuating or transmitting knowledge until the days, a little more than a thousand years before the Christian Era, when Cadmus brought from Phnecia the letters which had been invented and adopted there for the representation and expression of articulate sounds; and by the combination of these letters to transmit and perpetuate human ideas. There is scarce a race of savages in our day where the ma.s.s of the body politic are as profoundly ignorant as were the great body of the Greek people a thousand years before Christ.

Even those men who made such acquisitions of knowledge as were possible in that day, could only learn from the lips of their imperfectly trained teacher, and by travel to those countries which the barbarous condition of the world allowed them to visit; and even after the learned men of the Greek Islands came to know the power of letters, how small must have been the amount of knowledge existing in the world, and how slow must have been its spread amongst the untaught commonalty of the then Greek world? In the day when the Phnician s.h.i.+p Argo made a voyage to Colchis, at the east end of the Black Sea, it so fired the imagination of the Greek poets that they dreamed of the voyage and composed poems about it for centuries.

Indeed it was not until the Romans, just before the Christian Era, had subdued all the borders of the historic Mediterranean Sea, that free intercourse amongst the inhabitants prevailed. Up to that period every people, as a rule, carefully guarded all knowledge of their own wealth, and of their own acts and possessions from the rest of mankind, instead of making public expositions to attract the attention of the outside world to their useful achievements, and they sometimes pa.s.sed laws for inflicting the severest punishments upon citizens who should reveal to the outside world the locations, nature, or extent, or value of their possessions.

Still, we glean from the ancient writers the following announcements.

1. That ancient book ent.i.tled "The Book of Wonders," ascribed to Aristotle, contains the following: "When the Carthagenians, who were masters of the western ocean, observed that many traders and other men, attracted by the fertility of the soil and the pleasant climate, had fixed there their homes, they feared that the knowledge of this land should reach other nations, a great concourse to it of men from the various lands of the earth would follow, that the conditions of life, then so happy on that island, would not only be unfavorably affected, but the Carthagenian Empire itself suffer injury, and the dominion of the sea be wrested from their hands; and so they issued a decree that no one, under penalty of death, should thereafter sail thither." This pa.s.sage is quoted, not merely with a claim that it refers to the Continent of America, but for the purpose of showing how carefully the Phnician people, whether Asiatic, Carthagenian, or Spanish, guarded from the great world the foreign discoveries which they had made, and where their kindred were enjoying prosperity; and to enable us to see how little likely their discoveries would be to come to the knowledge of the great ma.s.s of mankind.

2. Let us look for a moment at some of the things which the ancient Greek and Latin authors have said indicating their knowledge of the existence of a western continent. Crates, a commentator on Homer, is quoted by authority of Strabo, a very learned author of the century before Christ, as saying that Homer means in his account of the western Ethiopians the inhabitants of the Atlantis or the Hesperides, as the unknown world of the west was then variously called.

3. Pliny also 6: 31-36, locates the western Ethiopians somewhere in the Atlantic. This shows that Crates and Pliny believed that the great poet Homer believed in the existence of a great continent on the western sh.o.r.e of the Atlantic ocean.

4. Plato says in his Timaeus, Chapter VI.: "The sea" (the Atlantic ocean), "was indeed navigable and had an island fronting the mouth which you in your tongue call the Pillars of Hercules, and this island is larger than Libya and Asia put together, and there is a pa.s.sage hence for travelers of that day to the rest of the islands, as well as from those islands to the whole opposite continent that surrounds the real sea.[TN-1]

5. Humboldt quotes that Anaxagoras, who was born five hundred years B. C., and was a most eminent Greek philosopher, speaks of the grand division of the world beyond the ocean.

6. Aelian in his Variae Historiae, Book 3, Chapter 18, cites Theopompus, an eminent Greek historian, born about three hundred years B. C., as stating that the Meropians inhabit a large continent beyond the ocean, in comparison with which the known world was but an island.

7. Aristotle says in Chapters 84 and 85: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules, they say that an inhabited island was discovered by the Carthagenians, which abounded in forests and navigable rivers and fruits of all kinds, distant from the continent many days' sail. And while the Carthagenians were engaged in making voyages to this land, and some had even settled there on account of the fertility of the soil, the Senate decreed that no one thereafter, under penalty of death, should voyage thither." Aristotle was born three hundred and eighty-four years before Christ.

8. Diodorus of Sicily, who lived in the century preceding the Christian Era, says in his Book 5,--19 and 20, that it was the "Phnicians instead of the Carthagenians who were cast upon a most fertile island opposite Africa, where the climate was that of perpetual spring, and that the land was the proper habitation for G.o.ds rather than men."

He speaks of the continent, however, at length and with great detail, enumerating its fertile valleys and navigable rivers, its rich and abundant fruits and supply of game, its valuable forests and its genial climate.

9. Pliny quotes Statius Sebosus, in his volume 2, page 106, Bohn, as saying that _the two Hesperides are forty-two days' sail from the coast of Africa_.

THE PHNICIAN PEOPLE WERE EQUAL TO THE DISCOVERIES ON THE WESTERN CONTINENT, IF WE JUDGE THEM BY WHAT THEY ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISHED.

The prophet Isaiah, writing soon after seven hundred and fifty years before Christ, in the twenty-third chapter of his prophecy, gives us a pretty good idea of the unlimited commerce and the unlimited prosperity of the merchants of Tyre. Among other things he says the following, speaking of the City "_Whose antiquity is of ancient days_." He calls the City "The Crowning City," "whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honorable of the earth." The wealth and luxury of Tyre was eternally injurious to the Jewish people from the time of their return from Egypt to Canaan to the carrying away of Israel to Babylon in the later days. The Jewish husbandman, dazzled by the luxuries of Tyre and Sidon, was affected as those in more moderate circ.u.mstances are in later days, by the manners and customs of their rich neighbors, and were building groves in high places under which to wors.h.i.+p, as did the priests of Baal in Palestine, and under the oaks in the northwest of Europe, where they acquired the name of Druids. They forsook the G.o.d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and wors.h.i.+pped Baal and Ashtaroth and Astarte, the Phnician Venus.

They even sacrificed their children to Moloch, the relentless fire G.o.d, as Baal appeared in his sterner characteristics. But upon the loss of wealth which Phnicia sustained in the wars with Nebuchadnezzar and subsequently with Alexander, the Phnicians ceased to be conspicuously wealthy and luxurious, and Israel was left to wors.h.i.+p that G.o.d who called their father Abraham from upper Chaldea, and who afterwards brought him out of the "House of Bondage" in Egypt after having been four hundred years enslaved there.

We have now glanced at the widespread influence of the Phnician people over the borders of the Mediterranean sea and over the west and northwest of Europe.

Let it be remembered that what we have said upon this subject is founded upon authentic evidence from ancient history and modern fact.

Let us look for a moment now and see what these peoples accomplished through the waters of the Red sea and upon the waters easterly of the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. After Solomon had a.s.sociated with Hiram, King of Tyre, and Hiram, the son of Abif, the chief of the mechanics who built the temple, and become acquainted with the wealth brought home by Phnician s.h.i.+ps from the great outside world, his spirit of Jewish thrift was excited, and he determined to share in the profits of nautical adventures. In the first book of Kings, chapter 9, verses 26, 27 and 28, we find the following: "And King Solomon made a navy of s.h.i.+ps in Ezion Geber, which is beside Eloth, on the sh.o.r.e of the Red Sea, in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, s.h.i.+pmen who had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon.

"And they came to Ophir and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to King Solomon." In the 18th chapter of this book, 11th and 12th verses, we find the following: "And the navy also of Hiram that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees and precious stones, and the king made of the almug trees pillars for the house of the lord and for the king's house, harps also and psalteries for the singers. There came no such almug trees nor were seen unto this day."

In the Second of Chronicles, chapter 9, verses 10 and 11, we find the following: "And the servants also of Hiram and the servants of Solomon, which brought gold from Ophir, brought algum trees and precious stones, and the king made of the algum trees terraces to the house of the lord and to the king's palace, and harps and psalteries for the singers, and there were none such seen before in the land of Judah."

In Second Kings, chapter 10, verse 22, we find the following: "For the king had at sea a navy of Thars.h.i.+sh with the navy of Hiram. Once in three years came the navy of Thars.h.i.+sh bringing gold and silver, ivory and apes and peac.o.c.ks." This navy of Thars.h.i.+sh is beyond question the navy of big s.h.i.+ps manned by Jews and Phnicians, and the expression here used beyond question is used in the sense we should use in speaking of a navy of big s.h.i.+ps, or Baltimore Clippers.

In Second Chronicles, chapter 3, verse 6, we find the following: "And he garnished the house with precious stones for beauty, and the gold was gold of Parvaim."

We will not at the present time stop to ask where was Ophir, where was Parvaim, where did the sailors of Tyre, so skilled in navigation and so capable of navigating the western ocean, as we have seen them to be, as to make successful voyages over to the Orkneys, a distance of some four thousand miles from their homes, spend the three years during which they were absent on their voyages from the easterly gulf of the Red Sea? No Jewish lexicon tells us of almug or algum trees; no Hebrew writer undertakes to describe them. But that enterprising publicist, O'Donovan, who for the purposes of knowledge a few years ago traversed the Caucasus, crossed the Caspian sea and buried himself for two or three years among the still wild tribes of Turkestan, tells us that after his liberation from the Turks, and while traveling in eastern Persia towards the capital, he found a tree which attracted his attention because its fibre reminded him of that of the Lignum Vitae, which tree the natives called "The Yalgam." Here we have Solomon's algum tree with the name scarcely modified. Would it be the strangest thing that ever happened if these "yalgam," "almug," or "algum" trees, so beautiful as to be unequalled by anything known in Palestine, and for that reason set up as ornaments in G.o.d's house, should turn out in the day when all things become known to be rosewood and mahogany from the west coast of Central America, taken on board by Solomon's servants on their return from Parvaim or Peru and the old mines of Potosi, where they had gone for the gold which filled the coffers of Solomon. It may be said that such would be a long voyage; true, but not much longer than a voyage to the Orkneys. Authentic profane history tells us that between six and seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, Pharaoh Necho, King of Egypt, built a fleet in the Red Sea, manned it with Phnician sailors and sent them out upon the waters to discover the shape and dimensions of the continent of Africa. These sailors pa.s.sed down through the straits of Bab et Mandel and clear around the Cape of Good Hope and the continent of Africa more than two thousand years before Vasco Degama, and coming in through the straits of Gibraltar after an absence of about two years. Their food supply run low, their supply was mainly wheat, they tied up their s.h.i.+ps, landed, plowed the ground with sharpened sticks, cast their bread, not upon the waters, but upon the ground, and thus raised a new crop of wheat, preparing to supply their wants until they should return to Egypt, that eternal land of plenty.

It will be remembered that for centuries previous to the close of the Punic wars under Hannibal the Phnician people owned and controlled the whole north of Africa, west of Egypt, and the whole of Spain up to the Ebro, and the whole of Cyprus and a very large portion of Sicily, and that when the ancient writers, and even modern writers speak of Spain, the Carthagenians and northern Africa, they refer to the people who sprang from the commercial cities on the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Mediterranean sea, occupying a territory of not more than one hundred miles in extent north and south, and extending back into Syria not more than fifteen miles, whence all these people sprang, and applied to them the general term of Phnicians.

From the authorities we have quoted we think there can be no doubt but that here and there a learned man among the Greek scholars had come to believe that some eastern navigator had discovered a western world exceedingly productive and beautiful, and that a population of eastern origin had sprung up and existed in the lands so discovered.

IF THE WESTERN CONTINENT HAD REALLY BEEN DISCOVERED ACCIDENTALLY, OR OF SET PURPOSE, WHAT EASTERN NATION WOULD BE MOST LIKELY TO HAVE BEEN THE DISCOVERERS OF THIS WESTERN WORLD.

Nineveh and Babylon are never spoken of as having sent even a keel boat out upon the seas. Egypt has been called the "Cradle of The Arts" and the "Birthplace of Science and Civilization," but Egypt never attained the maritime power or skill to enable her to navigate the waters of the Mediterranean beyond the mouths of her eternal river.

Greece, afterwards so celebrated for science, art and philosophy, was at the day of which Homer sung, a mere a.s.sociation of savage groups, engaged in wars instead of seeking commercial profits in distributing the products of civilized life among the nations of mankind.

And Romulus and Remus had not yet emerged from the sheep folds upon the Italian hills. But very early in the history of the world, and as students of history believe, earlier than the call of Abraham, the interests of mankind had called into existence along the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Mediterranean Sea an active and intelligent population which had engaged in commerce as a means of subsistence, and were carrying it on with such success as was possible in the then condition of the world of mankind. A civilization had sprung up at a very early period along the banks of the united rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, and from the Persian gulf to Nineveh and Nimroud, where was produced a great variety of articles of necessity and luxury unknown to the rest of the world.

We all understand the story told of Aehan, who secreted in the floor of his tent a Babalonish garment about fourteen hundred years before the Christian era, while Israel was battling against Ai[TN-2] See Joshua, Chap. 8. The children of j.a.phet had pa.s.sed up through Persia to the Caucasus, and from the Caucasus around the Black Sea to the waters of the Danube and the Grecian Islands. The luxuries produced in the valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris, called Mesopotamia, furnished a ready basis for a successful commerce across the desert by the way of Damascus to the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean; and it was by this means that a commerce sprang up along these sh.o.r.es such as the world had never seen, and which rendered the people resident there the leaders in all the arts of life, including the art of navigation, throughout the then known world, a result but twice paralleled on earth, once in the middle ages at Venice and once in our own age at our magical Chicago. This enabled this people to become the leaders of their race down to about six hundred years before Christ, when there came that terrible war wherein Nebuchadnezzar, by besieging Tyre, caused "every head of that people to become bald and every shoulder to become pealed."[TN-3] Tyre subsisted after the siege of Nebuchadnezzar, but Tyre never attained again the prosperity or influence which she possessed at the commencement of this memorable siege. She had before this time planted two hundred and fifty cities upon the north coast of Africa, including the celebrated city of Carthage. She had settled and occupied two hundred cities in the territory of Spain, and for centuries occupied the whole of that country up to the Ebro. The Jewish historians speak of Spain as Thars.h.i.+sh. Greek writers speak of Spain as Tartesus. Jewish historians and prophets speak of the s.h.i.+ps of Thars.h.i.+sh as the most magnificent sea-going crafts known to the world, as we for half of a century boasted of our Baltimore Clipper. Her sailors pa.s.sed beyond the Pillars of Hercules and pa.s.sed up the northwest coast of France and established their religion, the wors.h.i.+p of Baal, or the sun, among the simple people of Bretagne so firmly and universally that at this day at Carnac, in the Morbihan, there stand more Phnician funereal monuments of unknown antiquity than can be found together in any form of religion in any other portion of the world's surface. They discovered tin in the Scilly Islands, off the coast of Cornwall, and wrought those mines for centuries. Those Islands were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as the Ca.s.siterrides, or Tin Islands. They worked both tin and copper mines in Cornwall, and made profits on the sale of the products throughout the known world. They pa.s.sed up the British channel and through the German Ocean, and in the immense sand dunes at the mouth of the Baltic discovered and utilized that beautiful product of the primeval forests called amber, which they dug from the sand hills. They took with them their priests (the priests of Baal) and introduced the wors.h.i.+p of the sun, and made that wors.h.i.+p paramount and universal in England, Ireland and Scotland, as well as in Bretagne and the northwest of France. So thoroughly has the religion of Baal been fastened upon the peoples of these regions that portions of them at this day salute the arrival of the Summer Solstice, June twenty-fourth, with burning fires, the precise meaning of which is forgotten, but through those fires in all the early portions of the present century the inhabitants have jumped with their little ones in their arms, as the phrase goes, on Saint John's eve, "for luck." The wizard of the north, Sir Walter Scott, in his song ent.i.tled "Hail to the Chief," in the Lady of the Lake, has the following when speaking of "Clan Alpines Pine":