Transatlantic Parallels in Antiquity

[uniface]

Mentioning Ignatius Donnelly's name triggers the Defenders of Settled Science Orthodoxy and elicits a flood of invictive -- the substance of which boils down to "He's a stinky old poopy head." Never, ever, do the Brain Police recommend reading what he wrote to get a true appreciation of how "crazy" his writings are.

Let's have some fun :

The mounds of Europe and Asia were made in the same way and for the same purposes as those of America.

Herodotus describes the burial of a Scythian king; he says, “After this they set to work to raise a vast mound above the grave, all of them vying with each other, and seeking to make it as tall as possible.”


“It must be confessed,” says Foster (“Prehistoric Races,” p. 193), “that these Scythic burial rites have a strong resemblance to those of the Mound Builders.”


The pyramids of Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia had their duplicates in Mexico and Central America. The grave-cists made of stone of the American mounds are exactly like the stone chests, or kistvaen for the dead, found in the British mounds. (Foster’s ” Prehistoric Races,” p. 109.)


Tumuli have been found in Yorkshire enclosing wooden coffins, precisely as in the mounds of the Mississippi Valley. (Ibid., p. 185.) . . .

https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2016/02/25/ignatius-donnelly-trans-atlantic-architecture/

Even more fun :

https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/ignatius-donnelly-trans-atlantic-languages/

 

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[unclemac]

i always liked thee from Tiwanaku in Bolivia

 

[joshuaream]

Ignatius Donnelly has been dead for 200+ years and a lot of the theories of his day are now viewed as almost comical. But he very much represented the edge of common thought back in the Victorian era, and was a product of his time. I think it was really interesting how he was able to piece together a lot of theories and descriptions based on really imperfect access to information, and combine into an almost unified string theory of ancient culture. It was captivating to a lot of people.

My general thought is that he proposed some strange ideas, but the underlying thought that prehistoric groups could and did move across huge distances has been proven to be more right than wrong.

A classic Scythian relic because pictures are cool.

 

[Charl]

I’ve always looked at Ignatius Donnelly as one of the progenitors of the model of cultural diffusionism(vs independent invention) as an explanation for similarities among widely disparate cultures. In Donnelly’s version of diffusionism, later human cultures could be traced back to the survivors of a catastrophe that destroyed the island of Atlantis:

https://www.duhovnirazvoj.com/ElektronskaBiblioteka/The Antideluvian world-Atlantis.pdf

This book is an attempt to demonstrate several distinct and novel propositions. These are:
1. That there once existed in the Atlantic Ocean, opposite the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, a large island, which was the remnant of an Atlantic continent, and known to the ancient world as Atlantis.

2. That the description of this island given by Plato is not, as has been long supposed, fable, but veritable history.

3. That Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization.

4. That it became, in the course of ages, a populous and mighty nation, from whose overflowings the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were populated by civilized nations.

5. That it was the true Antediluvian world; the Garden of Eden; the Gardens of the Hesperides; the Elysian Fields; the Gardens of Alcinous; the Mesomphalos; the Olympos; the Asgard of the traditions of the ancient nations; representing a universal memory of a great land, where early mankind dwelt for ages in peace and happiness.

6. That the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Hindoos, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis; and the acts attributed to them in mythology are a confused recollection of real historical events.

7. That the mythology of Egypt and Peru represented the original religion of Atlantis, which was sun−worship.

8. That the oldest colony formed by the Atlanteans was probably in Egypt, whose civilization was a reproduction of that of the Atlantic island.

9. That the implements of the "Bronze Age" of Europe were derived from Atlantis. The Atlanteans were also the first manufacturers of iron.

10. That the Phoenician alphabet, parent of all the European alphabets, was derived from au Atlantis alphabet, which was also conveyed from Atlantis to the Mayas of Central America.


11. That Atlantis was the original seat of the Aryan or Indo−European family of nations, as well as of the Semitic peoples, and possibly also of the Turanian races.


12. That Atlantis perished in a terrible convulsion of nature, in which the whole island sunk into the ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants.


13. That a few persons escaped in ships and on rafts, and, carried to the nations east and west the tidings of the appalling catastrophe, which has survived to our own time in the Flood and Deluge legends of the different nations of the old and new worlds.


If these propositions can be proved, they will solve many problems which now perplex mankind; they will confirm in many respects the statements in the opening chapters of Genesis; they will widen the area of human history; they will explain the remarkable resemblances which exist between the ancient civilizations found upon the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean, in the old and new worlds; and they will aid us to rehabilitate the fathers of our civilization, our blood, and our fundamental ideas−−the men who lived, loved, and labored ages before the Aryans descended upon India, or the Phoenician had settled in Syria, or the Goth had reached the shores of the Baltic.

 

[Charl]

In his second book, a companion to his book Atlantis, “Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel“, he became one of the fathers of modern day catastrophism in geology. Catastrophism vs. Uniformitarianism, that change was not slow and incremental, but that history was punctuated by catastrophic events, such as comet impacts. Now we know, or believe we know, as one example, that the dinosaurs and other life suffered a world wide extinction event, caused by a comet/asteroidal impact some 65 million years ago.

He applied the idea of punctuated catastrophes to human history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnarok:_The_Age_of_Fire_and_Gravel

”In Ragnarok, Donnelly argues that an enormous comet hit the earth 12,000 years ago, resulting in widespread fires, floods, poisonous gases, and unusually vicious and prolonged winters. The catastrophe destroyed a more advanced civilization, forcing its terrified population to seek shelter in caves. As cave-dwellers, they lost all knowledge of art, literature, music, philosophy, and engineering (see Ragnarök).”

 

[unclemac]

you guys are a little too Euro-centric in your thinking...you need to move east to fill out the story....religion in India in particular is fascinating. gets me thinking..."so this is what modern day poly-theism would look like"....if Middle East, Euro, Meso-American and African religious traditions had continued to develop.

 

[uniface]

On a roll here.

Not the joke you might assume it must be :

https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2016/11/28/myths-of-the-cherokee-the-lost-tribes-of-israel/

 

[uniface]

Probably the last posting on this topic for a while (no arrowheads = no interest). But this page of articles alone contains more information on actual trans-polar migrations than I could digest in hours. The "settled science" fairy tale is utterly bankrupt. Enjoy. https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2017/01/

 

[uniface]

I was wrong on that being the last one.

It turns out that the Mayans used cylinder seals and stamp seals, the same way the Mesopotamians did.

https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/harold-sterling-gladwin-mayan-hieroglyphs/

 

[Fred250]

I hope it’s not the last. I think there is interest just most of us lack the knowledge to really contribute much to the discussion.

 

[Red-Coat]

Donnelly was indeed ahead of his time in his thinking... despite being completely wrong in most of his theories. We tend to forget how recently it was recognised that what we now know to be lithic artefacts were the product of ancient people. To feed @uniface's "no arrowheads = no interest" mantra:

In Europe, until the 18th Century, prehistoric flint and other stone arrowheads, spearheads, and even axes were popularly believed to be natural objects rather than having been made by ancient people. They were closely associated with folklore and believed by most to have formed in storm clouds and fallen to the ground where lightning had struck. They were known as “ceraunia” (from the Latin for “thunderbolt”) or “thunderstones” (“donnersteins” in German, or “pierres de foudre” in French).

Even scholars did not begin to recognise the possibility that such items were man-made until the 16th Century. The change in thinking was a pivotal event in the history of prehistoric archaeology. The first rumblings to challenge the origin of cenauria came from European explorers – particularly in the New World. It was previously widely held that the weapons of ancient people would have been made from iron, but those early explorers observed native people using stone. Jean de Léry wrote in 1578 that the natives of Brazil used “sharpstones as knives.” In the 17th Century René Goulaine de Laudonnière wrote that the Indians of Florida used arrows pointed with the teeth of fish or finely worked stones; John Smith noted that the Sasquesahanock of Virginia used bows and arrows in their hunting and warfare, and that their arrows were made from sprigs of wood or reeds headed with “splinters of a white cristall-like stone, in forme of a heart, an inch broad, and an inch and a halfe or more long” and “in the place of metal swords they used the horn of a deer inserted into a piece of wood like a pickaxe and they made hatchets by forcing a long stone sharpened at both ends through a wooden handle”; Roger Williams noted that the Indians of New England used “a variety of stone implements in the place of metal knives, awls, hatchets, or hoes.”

The credit for the change in thinking in Europe should probably go to the 16th Century Italian Michele Mercati. He was superintendent of the Vatican Botanical Garden and had access to the Vatican’s huge covert collection of natural history and geology, within which there were many ceraunia specimens. Unfortunately, his massive geological treatise “Metallotheca” which was completed in 1593 didn’t get published until long after his death in 1717, but it contains a lengthy and highly original discussion of ceraunia. In particular, he says: “Many people believe they are thrown to the ground by lightning, but those who know history think that in early times before iron was used to make weapons people made blades and arrowheads of hard flint.”

 

[uniface]

Attempted linking to illustrations @ MB don't work. If genetic linkage of Native Americans to Europeans (curiously ignored by "settled science") is of interest, scroll down to the Hg "R" & Hg "X" distribution map @

https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2016/11/04/the-arabian-horizon-the-cherokee-compass/