Atlantis : the antediluvian world eBook

Ignatius Donnelly
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 497 pages of information about Atlantis .

Atlantis : the antediluvian world eBook

Ignatius Donnelly
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 497 pages of information about Atlantis .

And we have also a new and singular form of the legend in the following.  Lenormant says: 

“Among the Iranians, in the sacred books containing the fundamental Zoroastrian doctrines, and dating very far back, we meet with a tradition which must assuredly be looked upon as a variety of that of the Deluge, though possessing a special character, and diverging in some essential particulars from those we have been examining.  It relates how Yima, who, in the original and primitive conception, was the father of the human race, was warned by Ahuramazda, the good deity, of the earth being about to be devastated by a flood.  The god ordered Yima to construct a refuge, a square garden, vara, protected by an enclosure, and to cause the germs of men, beasts, and plants to enter it, in order to escape annihilation.  Accordingly, when the inundation occurred, the garden of Yima, with all that it contained, was alone spared, and the message of safety was brought thither by the bird Karshipta, the envoy of Ahuramazda.” ("Vendudid,” vol. ii., p. 46.)

This clearly signifies that, prior to the destruction of Atlantis, a colony had been sent out to some neighboring country.  These emigrants built a walled town, and brought to it the grains and domestic animals of the mother country; and when the island of Atlantis sunk in the ocean, a messenger brought the terrible tidings to them in a ship.

“The Greeks had two principal legends as to the cataclysm by which primitive humanity was destroyed.  The first was connected with the name of Ogyges, the most ancient of the kings of Boeotia or Attica—­a quite mythical personage, lost in the night of ages, his very name seemingly derived from one signifying deluge in Aryan idioms, in Sanscrit Angha.  It is said that in his time the whole land was covered by a flood, whose waters reached the sky, and from which he, together with some companions, escaped in a vessel.

“The second tradition is the Thessalian legend of Deucalion.  Zeus having worked to destroy the men of the age of bronze, with whose crimes he was wroth, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus, his father, constructed a coffer, in which he took refuge with his wife, Pyrrha.  The Deluge came; the chest, or coffer, floated at the mercy of the waves for nine days and nine nights, and was finally stranded on Mount Parnassus.  Deucalion and Pyrrha leave it, offer sacrifice, and, according to the command of Zeus, repeople the world by throwing behind them ’the bones of the earth’—­namely, stones, which change into men.  This Deluge of Deucalion is, in Grecian tradition, what most resembles a universal deluge.  Many authors affirm that it extended to the whole earth, and that the whole human race perished.  At Athens, in memory of the event, and to appease the manes of its victims, a ceremony called Hydrophoria was observed, having so close a resemblance to that in use at Hierapolis, in Syria, that we can hardly fail to look upon it as a Syro-Phoenician importation,

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Atlantis : the antediluvian world from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.