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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 VII.
THE STONE AGE IN ATLANTIS
THE most reliable method of comprehending early life in Atlantis can be gained by a consideration of those races of the Old Stone Age who made their way thence to Europe at different periods. In the last chapter we examined these in their European aspect, and we must now attempt some reconstruction of their conditions on Atlantis itself.
We find that the Aurignacians who "appeared suddenly out of the unknown," as Macalister says, and who entered France and Spain, possessed a relatively high stone culture and an advanced art. We must, therefore, regard this race as having dwelt on the Atlantean continent for many centuries. Quite probably it originated there, though on this question, as on many others connected with it, it is impossible to speak with certainty because of the impracticability of applying to the bed of the Atlantic those archaeological processes of examination possible elsewhere. Of the rise and development of the Aurignacian race we can posit nothing. We are forced to draw parallels between its conditions in Atlantis and in these regions to which it emigrated.
If we do so, we must think of Atlantis at the remote era of 26,000 years ago as an extensive insular region neither too thickly nor too sparsely populated. If it be granted that it was in area somewhat less than the size of Australia, or say 2,650,000 square miles in extent, we possess data to enable us to make a fair guess at its population. It has been proved that a population which depends upon the chase for its subsistence can support only one family to each forty square miles. The primitive family, for various reasons, can scarcely be estimated at more than six persons on an average, so that this would give us, roughly, a population of some 350,000 for Atlantis in Aurignacian times. But such an estimate fails to take into consideration the fact that the Aurignacians were essentially a people who had attained a fairly high condition of social life. Their art presupposes the association of the people not so much in small tribal groups of families subsisting on the chase, as in fairly large communities of village life. They had their cave-temples and their trades, their rulers and social grades.
Says Osborn: "There can be little doubt that such diversities of temperament, of talent, and of predisposition as obtain to-day also obtained then, and that they tended to differentiate society into chieftains, priests, and medicine-men, hunters of large game and fishermen, fashioners of flints and dressers of hides, makers of clothing and footwear, makers of ornaments, engravers, sculptors in wood, bone, ivory, and stone, and artists with colour and brush. In their artistic work at least these people were animated with a compelling sense of truth, and we cannot deny them a strong appreciation of beauty." Such a people could not have dwelt in small and negligible forest or mountain tribes, but must have grouped themselves into communities of considerable size. Life must have been of a settled character to have given free play to the love of artistic beauty which they so markedly evinced.
It is evident, too, that, as elsewhere, the nature of their religious beliefs assisted the associational character of the people. Spots especially sacred to them were the nuclei of social life. The cave-temple was, in fact, the centre of affairs. Dr. Heinrich Wenkel, speaking of the Aurignacian cave of Byciskala, in Moravia, described it as "the great cave where once the reindeer man lived whose antechamber was the scene of a cult of the dead, where at a chieftain's grave human sacrifices were offered. . . . It well expresses the feelings which these ancient caverns naturally excite, even in one who lives in the sceptical atmosphere of modern science." Later, Dr. Marett, in his essay on the cave of Niaux, does not hesitate to call it a "sanctuary," and to treat it as such. The existence of fine paintings at the farthest ends of these great and complicated caverns; the presence of the two splendid statuettes of bisons in the remotest recesses of Tuc d'Audoubert, are facts certainly suggestive of animal gods in their "chambers of imagery."
Of the dress and ornaments of these early Atlanteans we can speak with some certainty from the finds in the graves of their descendants in Europe. There are, of course, no remnants of the skins with which they were doubtless clothed. But as we know they bred the horse and cow, and hunted the reindeer, wolf and fox, there can be no doubt that they employed the pelts of those animals for coverings. Indeed microscopic examination of the surroundings of the dead has revealed traces of animal hairs, suggesting that they had been wrapped in hides. As regards their ornaments we are better informed. These consisted of cuirasses and aprons of small sea-shells (Nassa neritea) and fillets or head-bands of the same, necklaces of drilled deer's teeth, fish vertebrae, and ornaments of bone or reindeer horn, shaped like eggs. At Barma Grande was found the skeleton of a boy wearing an elaborate crown of fish vertebrae and a collar of Nassa-shells divided into groups by deer's teeth. These "cuirasses," crowns and collars have been found so frequently in Aurignacian graves that they may be regarded as typical of the ornaments worn by the race.
The tools of the Aurignacians were distinct in shape and had different uses from those of the older European population they displaced, and we must think of these early Atlantean colonists as employing weapons and implements which were probably of their own invention in another sphere. Perhaps the most salient among these is a species of flint knife, of which one edge is trimmed away by chipping, the opposite edge being left untrimmed, to allow it to remain straight and sharp. A scraper for the purpose of preparing skins, and an engraver, with an edge at right angles to the plane of the blade, for working bone, horn and ivory into implements, and sometimes furnished with a beak or cutting-point at the end of the blade, must also have been the primitive chisel with which the Aurignacian sculptor put the finer touches to his images. It is a significant fact that while the races which preceded him used stone or wood, Aurignacian man used bone. He was, indeed, a worker in bone par excellence, and this prepares us for the belief that on Atlantis there probably existed large deposits of mammoth ivory. Ivory, says Plato, was one of the principal constituents of the great temple of Poseidon, and he also remarks that elephants abounded on the island-continent.
Smaller engravers or burins were also in use, some of these of the finest character imaginable, and for the first time in European archaeology we encounter bone needles with eyes. These were, of course, used to sew skins together. A race which employed the burin and the needle was tertainly on the road to civilisation.
The later Solutrean stage of culture, which supposes a second wave of immigrants from slowly disintegrating Atlantis, is somewhat different in its manifestations from Aurignacian proper, but that it emanated from the same region is certain. It appears in Spain and France about 16,000 years ago, and is of a distinctly higher standard than Aurignacian, so that we must suppose in the intervening thousand years a considerable cultural advance on Atlantis. Flints were now manufactured en masse, so that it would seem that the Atlanteans had arrived at the stage of mass production of artifacts, a condition which implies not only a great social advance, but shows that labour on Atlantis was in process of becoming departmentalized. The enormous strata of horse-bones found in some Solutrean deposits shows clearly that this people were eaters of horse-flesh, and as a race does not as a rule suddenly take to a diet to which it has primarily been unaccustomed, we may well believe that wild horses inhabited Atlantis in large numbers, galloping about its prairies or tundras in great herds.
We also encounter numerous hearth-burials in this stage, from which we are justified in assuming that the dead were interred in the huts they had occupied during life. This implies that the people had begun to live in small stone houses, and that the caves were now utilised chiefly for religious purposes, or as temples. But the most striking innovation is the appearance of a much higher type of flint tool than had before been in use. The implements of this period, indeed, display a beauty of line and flaking unsurpassed. They are commonly described as "willow-leaf" and "laurel-leaf" patterns, and consist of javelin or spear-heads, scrapers and borers. Thus a new art in stone had arisen in the course of centuries in Atlantis. Bone-working had to a great extent been abandoned. This may mean that the deposits of mammoth ivory had begun to give out, and that the race, forced back on the use of flint, had addressed itself to the perfection of a flint technique. We are compelled to some such conclusion, because in Europe there was no lack of bone, had the Solutrean workers cared to employ it.
"The Solutreans," says Macalister, who believes in an African origin for the Cro-Magnon race, "moved westward, and submerged the Aurignacians temporarily, driving them, perhaps, into Italy; where they were preserved, to reappear, after the Solutrean tyranny was overpast, as the Magdalenians . The Magdalenians seem essentially to have been similar in race to the Aurignacians, but to have lost the tall stature and the excessive cranial capacity perhaps as a result of the deterioration of climate, and it seems possible to affiliate the Magdalenian culture to the Aurignacian."
With the return of glacial conditions in the Magdalenian stage, we must suppose similar conditions in Atlantis. It is not necessary to assume with Macalister that the Magdalenians were Aurignacians who had long been segregated in Italy. Indeed he remarks elsewhere that no Magdalenian remains are to be encountered there, and it seems much more probable that they represent still another wave of Atlantean immigrants, whose customs had been changed by climatic conditions which were then growing more rigorous on the island-continent as in Europe. One of the outstanding weapons of this period is the harpoon, made from reindeer-horn or bone and used for spearing seals or fish. Another is the baton de commandement, a section of reindeer-horn pierced by a hole, or holes. These were certainly not sceptres, as their rashly assumed name might seem to imply, but have been likened to the rods used by Laplanders which they tie to the reins of the reindeer, to horse-bits, to shaft-straighteners, and to instruments of sorcery. They are frequently ornamented with engravings of animals. I believe them to have been magical implements resembling the "pointing-sticks" of Bornean and Australian savages, which they place in the direction of persons or animals on whom they wish to "put the hoodoo," in West Indian phrase, and the holes with which they are drilled mere conveniences to permit them to be attached to the wizard's belt.
If this theory suffices, we must thus assume the existence of an early form of magic on Atlantis. We also find that a javelin-propellor, the first actual machine invented by man, akin to that used by the ancient Mexicans, and the existing Australians and Eskimos, and the dagger or poignard were introduced.
But above and beyond all, we must regard Atlantis as the home of sculpture and painting. The art of Aurignacian man in Europe, suddenly appearing as if fullblown, leaves no doubt that it must have been perfected in another sphere and after centuries of effort. We must, indeed, assume the rise in Atlantis of a school of art immeasurably superior in its technique to that of Egypt, freer, if not nobler, more realistic, more inspired, more human in every way. There must have existed in the island-continent, we are forced to conclude, some great centre where an art so striking and admirable was developed. Twenty thousand or more years ago Atlantis must have been the scene of mighty artistic impulses of a kind equal to any which have been manifested in the history of mankind, and this presupposes the existence of a former great civilisation on the island, of which, perhaps, the art of the Aurignacians was merely the last degenerate phase.
That a race works in stone or bone, and is ignorant of metals, does not signify that it is destitute of civilisation. For centuries the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, and the Mexicans and Peruvians of America, possessed no metal tools, yet in the cities inhabited by them a very high standard of civilisation obtained, the equal in every respect of that of China some centuries ago, or of the culture of India, both metal-using countries. Let us suppose that Egyptians and Mexicans, because of some vast cataclysm of nature, had been compelled to abandon their original seats, and colonise Central Africa or South America. Would not their general circumstances of life have undergone a marked degeneration? As a matter of history they did throw out colonial branches into both of these areas, with degenerate results. What then is to hinder us in seeing in the Atlantean colonisation of Europe a similar degenerative process at work? For generations America and Australia, after their settlement by Europeans were, for the most part, bear-gardens, inhabited by a rude and almost barbarous people, who bore little resemblance to the cultured classes of the motherland. That Atlantean man succeeded at all in the transplantation of his art to European soil was probably the result of compelling agencies, which enforced the flight of the cultured along with the common people. But that the whole apparatus of Atlantean civilisation was bound to suffer degeneration by the mere circumstances which accompanied its partial removal to Europe, is plain. The civilisation of the "Aurignacians" perished at last, and was totally forgotten and buried in the soil for ten thousand years. Its rediscovery was merely a happy accident.
Such considerations reawaken the old controversy regarding the existence of a civilisation prior to those of Egypt and Babylonia, not a merely barbaric precursor of them, but an ancient culture of superior status, from which they derived. The elder world was full of myths and memories of such a civilisation. The tales of the Antediluvians, of Cyclopean builders, of giant forerunners, the thousand hints and intimations of an older race, embedded not only in Hebrew Biblical literature, but in the chronicles of practically all civilised peoples in Europe, Asia and America, universally point to a fixed belief in the prior existence of a culture of undoubted antiquity and excellence. The Scriptures regard it as historical, and take it for granted. The Babylonian poem of " Gilgamesh " not only refers to, but amplifies, the Biblical chronicles of the Flood. It is alluded to by Hellenic mythographers as the Golden Age. The sacred books of India reflect a whole world of information regarding a great prehistoric past. The Irish and Welsh poems and legends abound in references to it. The Popol Vuh, or legendary chronicles of the Quiches of Central America, contains in its first book numerous stories connected with the prehistoric Titans of Guatemala. Practically all the tribal chronicles of the American Indian "nations" refer to such a period . In the majority of instances this regime of the elder world was regarded as ending in ruin and cataclysm, induced by the wickedness of its rulers, and it is invariably spoken of as having existed at a period so remote that only the broad outlines of its history were, through tradition, available to the writer.
Is it possible that this great mass of traditional material, appearing in the sacred and profane writings of the oldest nations, has behind it nothing of reality? The law, now well recognised, that all tradition of this description rests upon a substratum of fact, is in itself sufficient to dispel such a supposition. The " Diffusionist " School would probably recognise in such a widespread belief merely the passage from tribe to tribe and country to country of a myth originating in some specific nucleus, say in Babylonia, for in Egypt, the favourite centre of the Diffusionists, the tradition, so far as I am aware, is not to be encountered, unless we take it that Solon's priest was correct in saying that records of it existed there. But let us remember that whereas the Greeks regarded the gods and Titans as having originated in the West, the American races spoke of them as coming to their shores from the East.
To some extent archaeology corroborates these venerable traditions. It proves the existence of a highly developed art, almost in its decadence indeed, in the Upper Palaeolithic levels of France and Spain, and having there neither its roots nor any evolutionary links. The earliest sites of the race which produced that art are almost exclusively situated on or near the Western coasts of the Franco -Spanish peninsula. The art itself has been alluded to as " a technical invasion of Europe." It is obvious that it had its roots elsewhere, and there is not the slightest sign that it came from Asia. Linking the results of archaeology with the traditions which speak of a venerable civilisation cut off in its prime, and of those which insist upon a western milieu for this civilisation, it certainly seems as if the Aurignacian remains were the transplanted relics of an ancient culture which had arrived at fruition in a Western oceanic locality, and which, before its removal to Europe, had manifested an even higher ideal than in its new and colonial condition.
The whole of archaeology is, indeed, unconsciously straining towards some such explanation of the Aurignacian question. The Aurignacian race, it admits, was physiologically far superior to any human type presently existing. That alone calls for explanation, as does the fact of the very exalted position occupied by Aurignacian art.
But, the entire human and cultural conditions of Atlantis must have undergone enormous changes after the emigration of Aurignacian man to Europe. It seems probable that the bulk of its inhabitants deserted it, and this seems to be borne out by the character of the race it once more cast up on European soil as a fresh human wave in Azilian times, for the Azilian civilisation shows in some ways a marked inferiority to the Aurignacian. Its art-forms are distinctly cruder, and its cultural remains of a more primitive kind generally.
It would seem, indeed, from the human relics of the Azilian period, as if Atlantis must, in the interval between the Aurignacian and Azilian immigrations, have been invaded or colonised itself, and the general osteological character of Azilian remains leads to the surmise that this, race may have had an African origin. It might be thought easier to grant a direct migration of the Azilians from Africa to Spain and France, but there seems to be no close connection between the Azilian stages in Africa and Spain and any older form. The relationship between the African and Iberian Azilians is evidently linked up by the Capsian, an African civilisation, which seems to have inherited or absorbed Azilian traits, and there is, indeed, no pure Azilian culture of that period visible in Africa. But that it had a much more remote African origin seems probable, and that it penetrated to Atlantis over the land-bridge which once connected the African "shelf" with the island-continent appears likely.
In any case, North African features obtrude themselves into Azilian osteology and art. This people, the ancestors of the Iberian race, were stamped with the seal of North Africa, and although little or no trace of them is to be found there, for they are by no means the same as the Capsians, that does not militate against their one-time occupancy of the country. We must then imagine Atlantis at some period between 16,000 and 11,000 years ago as having been invaded by a race bearing a strong general resemblance to the Berbers of North Africa, that is, not Negroid or "Arab," but Iberian, a tall, slender high-featured people, dark or brown-haired, grey or blue-eyed, using the bow and arrow, and strongly resembling the Guanches of the Canary Islands, who, were indeed, in part their descendants. These, compelled for some reason to cross the land-bridge connecting Atlantis with the African Continent, must have fallen upon the diminishing island in hordes, have vanquished its Aurignacian inhabitants, and have remained there through the centuries until such time as the last cataclysm forced them to return to Europe and to that African soil from which they originally hailed, and where, we will remember, Diodorus expressly states, they had extensive settlements.
This theory not only accounts for the marked change in the character of the immigrants from Atlantis in Azilian times, but suggests an almost radical racial reconstruction in Atlantis itself. We recall that Plato alludes to the admixture of the divine Atlantean race, the original lineage of the gods, with the sons of earth, with ordinary mortals. Who were those " mortals," who impoverished the divine strain? They can only have been the Azilians, whose remnants mingled with those of the Aurignacian or "godlike" stock, and who are still to be found in the Canary Isles, the last vestiges of Atlantis. Many writers speak of the Berber or Iberian relationship of the indigenous population of the Canaries. Of this theory Sergi is, indeed, the chief exponent. He calls the Iberians the "Mediterranean Race," and states that not only did they overflow the Mediterranean area, but penetrated to Britain and Ireland, France and elsewhere.
The Azilian or pro to Iberian age on Atlantis must then have been one and the same with that stage of moral and cultural degeneration which Plato speaks of, and his Atlantean invaders identical with the Azilians or proto-Iberians. These people, like the Aurignacians, were cave-dwellers, or, more properly speaking, employed deep and secluded caverns of great size as temples, and this would seem to show that the Azilian invaders of Atlantis had been converted to the ancient religion of the country. Indeed, so far as it is possible to judge of the religious usages of peoples so remote, there seems to have been little or no difference between the religious ideas of the Aurignacians and the Azilians, save that a grosser species of faith, suggesting magic, was practised by the latter. The worship of the bull was, however, maintained, and the ritual was probably similar to that described by Plato.
We must, then, think of later Atlantis, the Atlantis of the final catastrophe, as having been somewhat degenerate in thought, if not in culture. We say "the final catastrophe," but we have absolutely no evidence to permit us to state with any exactitude precisely when Atlantis was finally submerged. Indeed she was never totally submerged, for the Canary Islands and the Azores, her highest peaks, still remain above water as witnesses of her former existence. We know that it is only about three thousand years since the land connection between Great Britain and the Continent of Europe was finally destroyed, and that the English Channel sweeps over the site of forests so recently plunged into ocean's bed. Is there any good reason then, to deny to Atlantis an even longer existence than Plato assumes? With that question we shall concern ourselves later. But at this stage it may be said that such a theory would render Plato's account of Atlantis as a great and flourishing civilised community much more ready of acceptance. If we are to judge her condition from the races she sent to Europe as immigrants, we must in the event assess her culture either as the broken-down remains of a much higher human condition (Aurignacian) or from what we know of the Azilian, as a typical Palaeolithic or Upper O14 Stone Age culture.
It is impossible for me to believe and from this belief I am not to be moved by the conclusions of archaeologists who are not also students of tradition that the manifestations of Aurignacian art did not have behind them many centuries of cultural ancestry. To regard these as the spontaneous outcome of savage mentality is, to my way of thinking, an absurdity unsurpassable. No savages to-day practise an art so finished in its technique, indeed recent developments in modern European art appear as greatly more akin to the barbaric than the delicate productions of Aurignacian and Magdalenian man. What truly artistic mind cannot applaud the horse's head from Les Espftungues, the clay bisons on the nightbound walls of the Tuc d'Audoubert, or the charging bull from Altamira? Compare these for action, motion, with the wooden immobility of ancient Egyptian painting or the crudity of the early Italian Old Masters, and you behold an art brimming with life and obviously proceeding from minds attuned to a veritable realism which at the same time is conscious of the value of inspiration, which has seized upon and pictured-up the real in the spirit of the ideal. Savages! Let us beware how we describe these ancient sculptors and limners, lest posterity, with a more just sense of aesthetic values, accords to them an eminence which it may not accede to ourselves!
And if this ancient art ranks so highly as all enlightened students of aesthetics admit, can we deny to that Atlantis from which it emanated much of the wondrous culture which Plato, obviously the mouthpiece of a much more venerable tradition, claimed for it? What, after all, do we know of the ancient world so far, to permit us to adopt an attitude of negation to the deep-rooted traditional statement so oft-repeated in the most venerable chronicles that at a period almost transcending the imagination a civilisation of a high order, from which all the cultures of this planet proceeded, shone, flickered, and, like a shattered sun, cast its broken lights upon the dark places of our star ? If we can discover no material proof of that civilisation, is it not because its remains sleep beneath the Atlantic? But we can surely infer with confidence from its last fragments in Europe, Africa and America, appearing suddenly and having no roots therein, as well as from its well-authenticated tradition, that it assuredly existed.