CHAPTER X.

The Aryan colonies from Atlantis.

We come now to another question:  “Did the Aryan or Japhetic race come from Atlantis?”

If the Aryans are the Japhetic race, and if Japheth was one of the sons of the patriarch who escaped from the Deluge, then assuredly, if the tradition of Genesis be true, the Aryans came from the drowned land, to wit, Atlantis.  According to Genesis, the descendants of the Japheth who escaped out of the Flood with Noah are the Ionians, the inhabitants of the Morea, the dwellers on the Cilician coast of Asia Minor, the Cyprians, the Dodoneans of Macedonia, the Iberians, and the Thracians.  These are all now recognized as Aryans, except the Iberians.

“From non-Biblical sources,” says Winchell, “we obtain further information respecting the early dispersion of the Japhethites or Indo-Europeans—­called also Aryans.  All determinations confirm the Biblical account of their primitive residence in the same country with the Hamites and Semites.  Rawlinson informs us that even Aryan roots are mingled with Presemitic in some of the old inscriptions of Assyria.  The precise region where these three families dwelt in a common home has not been pointed out.” ("Preadamites,” p. 43.)

I have shown in the chapter in relation to Peru that all the languages of the Hamites, Semites, and Japhethites are varieties of one aboriginal speech.

The centre of the Aryan migrations (according to popular opinion) within the Historical Period was Armenia.  Here too is Mount Ararat, where it is said the ark rested—­another identification with the Flood regions, as it represents the usual transfer of the Atlantis legend by an Atlantean people to a high mountain in their new home.

Now turn to a map:  Suppose the ships of Atlantis to have reached the shores of Syria, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, where dwelt a people who, as we have seen, used the Central American Maya alphabet; the Atlantis ships are then but two hundred miles distant from Armenia.  But these ships need not stop at Syria, they can go by the Dardanelles and the Black Sea, by uninterrupted water communication, to the shores of Armenia itself.  If we admit, then, that it was from Armenia the Aryans stocked Europe and India, there is no reason why the original population of Armenia should not have been themselves colonists from Atlantis.

But we have seen that in the earliest ages, before the first Armenian migration of the historical Aryans, a people went from Iberian Spain and settled in Ireland, and the language of this people, it is now admitted, is Aryan.  And these Iberians were originally, according to tradition, from the West.