|
|
History of Atlantis by Lewis Spence
Index | Chapter: 1 | 2 |3 | 4 |5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |9 | 10 |11 | 12 |13 | 14 |15 | 16
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY
A HISTORY OF ATLANTIS must differ from all other histories, for the fundamental reason that it seeks to record the chronicles of a country the soil of which is no longer available for examination to the archaeologist. If, through some cataclysm of nature, the Italian peninsula had been submerged in the green waters of the Mediterranean at a period subsequent to the fall of Rome, we would still have been in possession of much documentary evidence concerning the growth and ascent of the Roman Empire. At the same time, the soil upon which that empire flourished, the ponderable remains of its civilisation and its architecture, would have been for ever lost to us save as regards their colonial manifestations. We should, in a great measure, have been forced to glean our ideas of Latin pre-eminence from those institutions which it founded in other lands, and from those traditions of it which remained at the era of its disappearance among the unlettered nations surrounding it.
But great as would be the difficulties attending such an enterprise, these would, indeed, be negligible when compared with the task of groping through the mists of the ages in quest of the outlines of chronicle and event which tell of a civilisation plunged into the abysses of ocean nearly nine thousand years before the foundation of the Eternal City. Before a task so stupendous the student of history might well stand dismayed. A sunken Rome, an earthquake-shattered Athens, would have bequeathed a thousand corroborative documents. Had Babylon or the entire Egyptian valley sunk out of sight a thousand years before the birth of Christ they would still have left behind them the witness of their trade with the Mediterranean, their pottery and other artifacts would have been found in Crete and Cyprus. Even so, let it be remembered, that the very site of Nineveh was forgotten, that until a century ago only the barest outlines of Babylonian and Egyptian history were known to us, that their written hieroglyphs were undecipherable. Is it too much to expect, then, that an archaeology which has been equal to the task of reconstructing the details of civilisations over which time had cast a depth of shadows profound as that of ocean, should not be competent to approach the discussion of the more tangled problems connected with the recon- struction of the history of a continent which has been submerged for twice as long as ancient Egypt endured?
It is here that it becomes necessary to say something regarding the writer's own views on the subject of historical science. It must be manifest how great a part inspiration has played in the disentangling of archaeological problems during the past century. By the aid of inspiration, as much as by that of mere scholarship, the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the cuneiform script of Babylon were unriddled. Was it not inspiration which unveiled to Schliemann the exact site of Troy before he excavated it? Inspirational methods, indeed, will be found to be those of the Archaeology of the Future. The Tape-Measure School, dull and full of the credulity of incredulity, is doomed.
Analogy is the instrument of inspiration, and, if wielded truly, is capable of extraordinary results. Even now Archaeology and Folklore are almost entirely dependent for their results upon analogy. Only by comparison can we cast light upon the nature of unexplained customs and objects, and in this volume the analogical method will be largely employed because it provides us with a fitting probe by whose aid we may pierce the hard crusts of oblivion which have gathered around the facts of Atlantean history.
Facts! Are we in possession of any facts relating to Atlantis? Is the very title, A History of Atlantis, not an insult to the intelligence of most readers? If, on coming to the end of this book should he reach the end the reader cannot agree that a very fair case has been made out for the former existence of Plato's island-continent, he will at least admit that the mere interest of the subject is sufficiently intriguing to permit of hypotheses being erected in its favour. But that a basis of indisputable fact lies at the roots of the Atlantean theory the writer stoutly maintains, and he pleads that in face of such an array of testimony as he has brought together it is merely childish to refuse belief to the main details of Plato's story.
For that it is founded on material, historical or traditional evidence, of still more ancient provenance is manifest from the possibility of equating the statements made in it concerning the geography, customs and religion of Atlantis with those of neighbouring regions. It is possible to take Plato's account of Atlantis, piece by piece, and compare the statements made therein with similar historical and archaeological data, to the complete vindication of his narrative.
And let it be said at once that Plato did not intend his account of Atlantean affairs as allegorical or mythical. That ancient plea is completely disposed of elsewhere in this book. There is reason to regard his narrative as more definitely related to fact than, say, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Britonum, in which the pure ore of history is mingled with tradition. That he received it from an Egyptian source is undoubted, and there is no more reason to suspect the bona fides of his narrative than there is to doubt those of any other account of antiquity in which history shades off into tradition.
Tradition, it is now being recognised, is, if used with sufficient safeguards, quite as capable of furnishing the historian with trustworthy data as the best attested documentary evidence. Within recent years we have seen the figure of our British Arthur, once dim and mysterious, slowly emerge from the mists of legend and take on the qualities and appearance of humanity. The writer can remember when Menes, the first King of the First Dynasty of Egypt, was regarded as purely mythical, whereas he is now known to have existed and to have had fairly numerous forerunners. Even in the month in which these lines are written comes extraordinary evidence from Syria of the discovery of a sculptured head of Christ dating from the second century, and of the finding in the Russian Cyrillic versions of Josephus of a pen-picture of the great Founder of Christianity, which together completely destroy the arguments of those who have sought to prove the mythical character of our Redeemer. During this month, too, it has been conclusively prayed that the bodies of Peter and Paul actually rest beneath the pavement of St. Peter's at Rome. We all recall the manner in which we laughed at Sir Harry Johns tone's "mythical" okapi, before it was found, killed and stuffed for exhibition, and how we sneered at Mr. Hesketh Pritchard's giant sloth until that notable traveller discovered its stable and a large piece of its skin in Patagonia. All these were "traditions" to some, truths to others.
The bare idea of an Atlantis as described by Plato has been met with derision by generations of archaeologists, simply because no direct documentary evidence relating to its existence survived. But can one reasonably expect direct documentary evidence of a civilisation which totally disappeared more than eleven thousand years ago? It is manifest that another kind of proof than the documentary must be drawn upon to justify the existence of such a culture. Do we find in the countries which must have been contiguous to Atlantis the vestiges of such civilisation as Plato only too briefly outlines? It is the purpose of this book to try to prove that we do. In the final chapter it will be shown that what the writer has called "the Atlantean complex" displays an association of custom, rite and tradition which, as regards its amalgam of peculiar conditions, is displayed in no other part of the globe save that which stretches between the shores of Western Europe and Eastern America. On the coastal tracts of these countries and in their insular outposts can be traced a cultural complex, the separate existence of which clearly demonstrates that it must have emanated from some region in the Atlantic which now no longer exists.
It is, the writer is convinced, by such a treatment of the Atlantis tradition that its verity will ultimately be justified. The Atlantean theory has received considerable damage from the wild assertions of enthusiasts, and perhaps from the frequently over-enthusiastic efforts of the writer himself. But to approach it as certain archaeologists approach, say, the problems of pre-history, is to adopt a method extraordinarily vain and futile, for, as has already been said, it is only by the aid of imagination and inspirational processes that a problem of such peculiarity and extraordinary complexity can ever be unravelled. Great archaeological discoveries on land are frequently made by accident, as in the case of the epoch-making finds at Cro-Magnon and Mas d'Azil. But to wait upon the ocean to disgorge her secrets is to wait upon eternity. Let not the archaeologist then, professional or otherwise, look with too unfriendly an eye upon a quest which has yet to grope among methods, and hazard many a folly and many a piece of empiricism ere it discover the instruments peculiarly applicable to its needs. No scientist now sneers at what may seem the crazy methods by which generations of alchemists built up chemical science and steered it to a safe haven among the exact sciences, and it is freely admitted that we are still in the "alchemical" stage of Atlantean archaeology. The professional archaeologist may encounter a hundred things he dislikes and contemns in this history. He may, and probably will, deny it the very name of history. If he does so, I will not feel at all discountenanced, because I am persuaded that the wildest guess often comes as near the target as the most cautious statement when one is dealing with profundities. Not that I desire to multiply or encourage the haphazard method in the particular sphere of Atlantean archaeology, but that I greatly sympathise with that friend of Edison's who, on being told by the inventor that there was no solvent for uric acid, returned to his laboratory, mixed all the drugs it contained with the obnoxious poison and found that eleven of them did dissolve it!
So much for method. We have now to consider the narrative of Plato concerning Atlantis, and then to compare it with other and later classical allusions to the mysterious island-continent in the Atlantic.