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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 VI.
THE RACES OF ATLANTIS
IF we regard the Atlantean continent as a reality and not as a mythical or fictional region, and consider the account of it as given by Plato as enshrining an ancient folk-memory of events which actually occurred, we are faced with the necessity for proving not only by the facts of geology that it formerly existed, but that it was inhabited by men who had reached a fairly advanced type of civilisation. In view of the whole circumstances, and in a case where actual written records are not available, this is a task of no little difficulty and complexity, but I hope to be able to show that Plato's account fits in so accurately with the proven findings of modern archaeology and ethnology as to render it a matter of considerable risk altogether to deny it.
Plato tells us that at a date which we may roughly take to be 9,640 years before Christ a host of invaders "marched in wanton insolence upon all Europe and Asia together, issuing yonder from the Atlantic Ocean." Now did any such invasion actually occur about the period mentioned, and does anthropological science cast any light upon such an exodus or folk-movement?
Two well-known German geologists, Penck and Bruckner, find evidence of a series of lesser variations of climate subsequent to the four main glaciations of the great Ice Age, leading gradually to modern conditions. These they call "stadia," and have named them the Buhl,Gsnitch and Dorn, according to the topographical conditions they appear to have created. The end of the Dorn stadium is roughly dated by Penck at about 7000 B.C., the Buhl, he would place about 20,000, and the Gsnitch between the two, or about 10,000 B.C. This latter is the accepted date for the arrival in Spain and Southern France of a race of men known as the Azilian-Tardenoisian. This people, the Abbe Breuil, the greatest living authority upon the pre-history of France and Spain, believes to have come from "circum-Mediterranean sources" about 10,000 years ago.
The Azilian race derives its name from a cave or tunnel, known as Le Mas d'Azil, in the Pyrenean department of Ariege, where its deposits were discovered by Edouard Piette. He found its remains deposited in nine strata on both banks of the river Arise, which flows through the Mas d'Azil tunnel, and its characteristics, as illustrated by the ddbris collected, are as follows: The people whose remains he discovered on this site must have been markedly vegetarian and fruitarian, for Piette discovered the stones or husks of oak-acorns, haws, sloes, hazel-nuts, chestnuts, cherries, prunes and walnuts. He also found a handful of barley-seeds, suggesting that they cultivated that cereal.
Harpoons were a feature of the Azilian culture, and this seems to indicate that their users were a people of maritime habits. These weapons were made of stag's horn, and were flat in shape. Over a thousand of these harpoons were found at Mas d'Azil. Along with them were found many necklaces of sea-shells, such as were then to be gathered on the French shores of the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and this would also seem to point to a maritime association in the case of this people.
But the most amazing detail which the Azilian art displayed was a large collection of pebbles having certain marks in red painted upon them with peroxide of iron, mingled with some resinous substance. These marks consist of vertical strokes, circles, crosses, zig-zags and ladder-like patterns. Several characters resembled the letter E, while others seemed to be composed of random lines.
The first assumption of their finder was that these characters were alphabetic, and the suggestion was made that they were the debris of a Palaeolithic school. Other authorities believed them to be pieces used in a game of skill. They seemed, too, to bear a close resemblance to the churingas of the Australian aborigines, magical or sacred slabs engraved with fetishtic or totemic symbols. But whereas the Australian churingas were invariably preserved in sacred caverns, the Azilian pebbles appear to have been objects of general use. The Abbe* Breuil and Sefior Obermeier, the well-known Spanish archaeologist, have, however, made it clear by a comparative study that the characters represented on the pebbles bear a close resemblance to those painted on the walls of certain caves in Spain. They are, indeed, human figures highly conventionalised, which, by long usage, have lost all likeness to human shape, just as the letters of our modern alphabet resemble not at all the early forms from which they have been developed. The likelihood is, according to Professor Macalister, that they are representations of the dead, or soul-houses, "abodes for the spirits of deceased members of the community, and were associated with the cult of the dead."
The Azilian culture has been discovered in Spain, especially in the north, at Castello and Valli, and in the Landes of France, the Haute Pyrenees and Ariege. The Text-book of European Archaeology, p. 531. race penetrated to Britain, and its remains have been found in Yorkshire and Durham, and in Scotland in the famous Oban cave, explored in 1894, when typical Azilian harpoons and other artifacts were found. In the island of Oronsay, too, flat Azilian harpoons were unearthed from a shell-mound, and that Azilian man in this region had some skill in navigation is shown by the presence in the mould of shells of deep-sea varieties of crabs.
Another feature of the Azilian culture are the objects usually described as pygmy or "Tardenoisian" flints, which take their name from Fere-en-Tardenois in the department of the Aisne, in France. These are small splinters of flint, usually less than an inch in length, resembling arrowheads. Most of these have been found in the neighbourhood of the sea, and were probably intended to serve as fish-hooks. These are not necessarily Azilian, though very frequently found associated with that culture, and the name "Tardenoisan" is thus usually applied separately to them. They appear, indeed, to be more specially related to what in now known as the "Capsian" culture (usually attributed to North Africa, and so called from Capsa or Gapsa in Tunis) which flourished in that region long prior to the appearance of the Azilians in Europe, and which itself had invaded the Spanish peninsula. "With the Capsian culture," remarks Macalister, "must undoubtedly be associated the Spanish wall-paintings at Alfera, Cogul and elsewhere. ... It follows that these are two strong links uniting the Capsian with the Azilian culture. The Capsian Art is the parent from which the painted pebbles of Le Mas d'Azil have been derived, and the Capsian flint industry is the origin of the Azilian-Tardenoisian." The bow, he thinks, was also introduced into Europe by the Capsian people.
Whence came the Azilians and their predecessors the Capsians? "The Azilian bone-harpoon industry," says Professor Osborn, "like the Tardenoisan microlithic flint industry, was largely pursued by fisher-folk." Breuil believes the Azilians to be of Mediterranean origin, and sees the gradual introduction of Azilian culture in that area slowly mingling with older forms. The Azilian culture in its earliest phase is to be found in North Africa and South-Western Europe.
The question for us here is: did it develop in these regions, or was it introduced? The Azilian people were undoubtedly the forerunners of the Neolithic race, the people of the New Stone Age, and brought with them to Europe an entirely new mode of living, a new art, new religious beliefs. They invaded Europe at a period which, broadly speaking, can be successfully collated with the date given by Plato. They must have poured into Europe in their thousands, dispossessing the older Aurignacian or Cro-Magnon inhabitants and destroying their relatively high culture.
And who were those "earlier inhabitants?" Were they of a character so civilised, did they possess such an art as would in any way identify them with the "Athenians " of Plato's Egyptian priest? They did. "These people," says Professor Osborn, referring to the Aurignacians, "were the Palaeolithic Greeks; artistic observation and representation and a true sense of proportion and of beauty were instinctive with them from the beginning. Their stone and bone industry may show vicissitudes and the influence of invasion and of trade and the bringing in of new inventions, but their art shows a continuous evolution and development from the first, animated by a single motive, namely, the appreciation of the beauty of form and the realistic representation of it." Elsewhere he says: "Decorative art has now become a passion (with the Aurignacians), and graving-tools of great variety and shape, curved, straight, convex or concave diversified both in size and in style of technique are very numerous. We may imagine that the long periods of cold and inclement weather were employed in these occupations. . . . Strong and very sharp graving-tools were also needed for the sculpture out of ivory and soap-stone of such human figures and figurines as the statuettes found in the Grottes de Grimaldi, and at Willendorf, and still more powerful tools for such work as the large stone bas-reliefs at Laussel. ... As this industrial evolution widens, it is apparent that we witness not the local evolution of a single people, but rather the influence and collaboration of numerous colonies reacting more or less one upon the other and spreading their inventions and discoveries."
This gifted race, the Cro-Magnon, whose art is usually styled "Aurignacian," from the finds of it discovered in the grotto of Aurignac in France, was originally traced by M. E. Lartet near the small village of Cro-Magnon hard by Les Eyzies on the Vezere.
The discovery of the remains of this race, the forerunners of the Azilians, at once aroused profound interest in the scientific world, for the height and brain-capacity remarked in the skeletal specimens recovered was so extraordinary as to force anthropologists to the conclusion that at one time a much higher type of man must have dwelt in Europe. The average height of Cro-Magnon man was 6 feet 11 inches, he had relatively short arms, a sign of high racial development, the brain-case being extraordinarily large in capacity. This race arrived in Europe at the close of the Ice Age, or roughly about 25,000 years ago, and seems to have practically wiped out the low and undeveloped human type, known as the Neanderthal, which it found in sparse possession.
Cro-Magnon graves present a new aspect in Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age archaeology. They are amply furnished with flints, pebbles, perforated shells, teeth, and other amulets and charms. Large mantles or gorgets of shells seem to have covered the whole or part of the body, and every sign is present that the race devoutly believed in a future state, and buried his possessions with the individual for use therein. Moreover, some of the burial usages of the Cro-Magnons certainly display the first rude tendencies towards that system of preserving the bodies of the dead which later developed into mummification. The flesh was removed from the bones of Cro-Magnon skeletons and these were painted red, the colour of life. "The dead man was to live again in his own body, of which the bones were the framework," says Macalister. "To paint it with the colour of life was the nearest thing to mummification that the Palaeolithic people knew; it was an attempt to make the body again serviceable for its owner's use."
The art and industries of this remarkable people, whose chief seats were on the Biscay Coast and in the Pyrenean region and Dordogne, were greatly more advanced than those of any other Palaeolithic civilization, and are still to be observed in the caves which they formerly inhabited in the localities mentioned. Their artistic output is chiefly composed of wonderful drawings, paintings and sculptures of animals, horses, deer, bears, bisons and mammoths, and occasional statuettes of the human figure, which were probably idols or gods. This Aurignacian art flourished over a period of 15,000 years, or during the phase between 25,000 and 10,000 years ago, when the Capsian and the Azilian broke in upon and displaced it. Its greatest period was known as the Magdalenian. A glance at any book which deals with Aurignacian art, say Macalister's Text-book of European Archaeology, or Osborn 's Men of the Old Stone Age, will at once convince the reader of its great superiority and "modern" character, and assure him that the race which produced it cannot be classed as merely savage. In fluency and originality, at least, Aurignacian art is, indeed, greatly superior to that either of Egypt or Babylonia, and to achieve a standard of such surpassing excellence it must have persisted elsewhere than in the area where it arrived at fruition for many thousands of years. But where? This highly-developed race of painters and sculptors who designed and carried out works so striking and of such surpassing genius, who possessed a taste so cultivated and a touch so sure, must have had a long history in some other region.
No living archaeologist, perhaps, is enabled to pronounce with such authority upon the problem of the Upper Palaeolithic world as the Abbe Breuil. In his opinion successive invasions of culture occurred either from the Mediterranean region, or from that part of the Biscay coast of France and Spain, which he calls the "Atlantic." "The archaeologic testimony," says Osborn, "strongly supports this culture-invasion hypothesis, and it appears to be strengthened in a measure by the study of the human types." "We can hardly contemplate an origin from the east," says Breuil, "because these earlier phases of the Aurignacian industry have not as yet been met with in Central or Eastern Europe." "A southerly origin," says Osborn, "seems more probable, because the Aurignacian colonies appear to surround the entire periphery of the Mediterranean, being found in Northern Africa, Sicily, and the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, from which they extended over the larger part of southern France. In Tunis we find a very primitive Aurignacian, like that of the Abri Audit of Dordogne, with implements undoubtedly similar to those of Chantelperron in France. Even far to the east, in the cave of Antelias, in Syria, as well as in certain stations of Phoenicia, culture-deposits are found which are characteristically Aurignacian "; but "the pure early Aurignacian industry is seen in the regions of the Dordogne and the Pyrenees."
"The Cro-Magnon people," says Macalister, "wherever and however they may have originated, developed and fixed their special characteristics in some extra-European centre, before they invaded our Continent."
We see then that Cro-Magnon man arrived in south-western Europe at a period when great subsidences were taking place both in Europe and the Atlantic area. It is, indeed, significant that these Aurignacian sites which have been discovered in Spain and France are, without exception, situated in the Biscay region, and not on the southern coasts of the peninsula. It is also noteworthy, as I have shown elsewhere, that the culture of the Guanche people of the Canary Islands was undoubtedly Aurignacian. This relationship is upheld by Osborn, Rene Verneau, and the late Lord Abercromby, and proves that the Cro-Magnon race was indigenous to the Canary Islands, the remnants of Atlantis, and did not drift there from Europe. Like many of the animals and plants of these vestigial islands, Cro-Magnon man was cut off and marooned on them by some great natural cataclysm. At the period in which he lived marine navigation had not even been thought of. He must have invaded Europe at the end of the Ice Age, or about 25,000 years ago, by means of a still existing land-bridge. That he did not proceed from Europe to the Canaries is obvious, as it is as an invader of Europe, a newcomer there, that he is first discovered.
Other evidence is forthcoming that Cro-Magnon man was of extra-European origin. In his Races of Europe, Dr. Ripley advances the theory that the Basques of Northern Spain and Southern France speak a language inherited from the Cro-Magnons. "This hypothesis is well worth considering," says Osborn, "for it is not inconceivable that the ancestors of the Basques conquered the Cro-Magnons and subsequently acquired their language." The lack of affinity between the Basque language and other European tongues is well known, but it has strong resemblances to some American forms of speech. "The fact is indisputable," says Dr. Farrer, in his Families of Speech (p. 132), "and is eminently noteworthy, that while the affinities of the Basque roots have never been conclusively elucidated, there has never been any doubt that this isolated language, preserving its identity in a western corner of Europe between two mighty kingdoms, resembles in its grammatical structure the aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent and those alone." Says Professor J. L. Myres, in the Cambridge Ancient History (p. 48): "The similarity between Aurignacian skulls in Europe and the prehistoric skulls in Lagoa Santa in Brazil and other remote localities round the margins of South America suggests that this type had once almost as wide a distribution as that of the older types of ements." The Basque language may thus be the sole remaining remnant of the tongue of Atlantis.
The Cro-Magnons were a race of fishermen, and like the Atlanteans, had a special reverence for the bull, which they frequently depicted on the walls of their caverns.
Now whence came these races of prehistoric antiquity, the Cro-Magnon, the Capsian and the Azilian? If we examine an archaeological map, we see that the greater number of Cro-Magnon stations, as is the case with the Azilian, are situated in the Biscay region and in the Dordogne. Here we have an art fully developed and obviously having behind it many centuries of evolution, suddenly appearing in a locality in which there are no signs of its earlier phases. The best and most trustworthy authorities call it "Atlantic" or "cir cum-Mediterranean," and it certainly does not appear to have come from the East. Nor am I at all satisfied that, as Macalister thinks, it originated in Central Africa. No signs of it have been discovered there, and that is sufficient to put the whole hypothesis (it is really only a tentative hypothesis on Professor Macalister's part, as he admits) out of court.
I believe that Cro-Magnon man was the first of those immigrant waves which surged over Europe at a period when the continent of Atlantis was experiencing cataclysm after cataclysm, partial disruption, or violent volcanic upheaval. Successive outbreaks and the impossibility of remaining in his early habitat forced him across the land-bridge which then existed between Atlantis and Europe into France, Spain and North Africa. The same phenomena occurred in the case of Azilian man. "It seems," says Osborn, speaking of the Aurignacian culture, "like a technical invasion in the history of Western Europe, and not an inherent part of the main line of cultural development." Breuil observes that "it appears as if the fundamental elements of the superior Aurignacian culture had been contributed by some unknown route to constitute the kernel of civilisation." "The only possible explanation," says Macalister, "is that the upper Palaeolithic civilisation was introduced into Europe by a new population which entered the continent from without."
The later Azilians appear in precisely the same European region. They probably came by sea, and not by the land-bridge, which, at the period of their coming, had in all likelihood disappeared. We have seen that they were deep-sea fishers, as the finds in the Oban cave demonstrated. Osborn says that their stations are usually to be found on ocean inlets or river-courses, and calls them "a population of fishermen." They must then have possessed sea-going craft of a fairly reliable character. But a closely-knit insular chain between slowly foundering Atlantis and Europe may have assisted their passage.
As a more extended proof of the Atlantean origin of these races has already been given in my book The Problem of Atlantis, it is unnecessary to stress it in these pages, and in my Atlantis in America I have endeavoured to prove that the Cro-Magnon race also overflowed into America. In the succeeding chapter I shall attempt to give a picture of these races as they appeared in the original Atlantean homeland.