Read Ebook: Prehistoric Structures of Central America: Who Erected Them? by Townsend Martin I Martin Ingham

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The prehistoric structures found in those regions and in neighboring regions are all built on plans and patterns borrowed from lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea, although the structures seem to have followed verbal descriptions rather than exact mechanical patterns.

All of these structures north of Panama seem to have been erected for public purposes, and probably in connection with the offices of some form of religion; and every structure of them, of which any appreciable portion is standing, is built upon or in connection with pyramids as perfectly pyramidal and regularly constructed as were the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Most of these pyramids, however, are mere earth mounds, instead of being constructed of brick or stone as were those upon the banks of the Nile. Let us refer to a few of the localities where these pyramidal structures are most conspicuous.

At Copan, situate at the western border of Honduras, and by the side of the river Copan, is a large enclosure, some two miles in extent, bounded upon the one side by the Copan river, on the bank of which are walls of beautiful cut and fitted stone rising to the height of fifty to one hundred feet, designed to keep the earth upon that side of the river from being carried away by floods. This river at this place constitutes one side of a tract of land laid out nearly in a square, along the outer sides of which, at regular intervals, are constructed, and still remaining, a very large number of pyramids made of hewn stone evidently designed to outline this extended sacred field.

This field within, is ornamented with a wealth of statuary, monuments and figures of idols, practically inconceivable in amount; but we count this statuary of no importance now, as we are confining our attention to the tendency of this prehistoric people to erect pyramids. For a fuller account of this locality we refer to Stephens' Travels in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, Vol. 1, Chap. 8.

At Santa Cruz Del Quiche, within the State of Chiapas, Mexico, there exists a pyramid erected for defensive purposes, constructed of earth and terraced as it rises, of enormous proportions; upon its top is a regular fortification upon the top of which rises a pyramidal temple above the fortification. This structure is particularly described by Stephens in the work above quoted, in his second volume, chapter 10, page 161, &c.

At Occasingo in Chiapas, there is a conspicuous pyramid constructed of earth, of somewhat exalted proportions, upon the top of which is a small pyramidal temple having over its porch the ornamentation which is so common upon the temples of ancient Egypt, and occasionally seen in the land of Phoenicia, to wit: a winged globe wrought in stone. The globe itself has become loosened, and has dropped from its place upon the front of the temple but still rests upon the ground before it, while the wing to which it was attached remains in place upon the temple as perfect as when it was first wrought. For a description of these works at Occasingo, see Stephens' second volume, chapter 15, page 258, &c.

The same sort of pyramidal structures remain in admirable preservation conspicuous at Palenque, in Chiapas, where an immense pyramid still exists standing in great perfection with an elegant temple upon its top. Pyramidal structures and shapings are found everywhere at Palenque. See Stephens' Work, above quoted, vol. 2, chap. 20, page 337, &c.

At Uxmal, also in Chiapas, we have another exhibition of pyramidal structures with temples upon their tops. We refer again to the same work of Stephens, vol. 2, chap. 25, page 420, &c.

These remains, to which we have referred, have far greater importance in our investigation than can be attached to the mere building of pyramidal structures. The wealth of sculpture found at the places referred to is immensely great and deserves the attention of scholars and thinking men to an extent greater than we can now devote to them.

In our view, the people who erected those structures possessed a knowledge and civilization far in advance of the population that surrounded them, and that the surrounding populations to a great degree imitated their examples and adopted their religion.

That, as we believe, led to the construction at Cholula, a little town now of ten thousand inhabitants, fifteen miles from Puebla, on the road leading from Vera Cruz to Mexico, on the plains of Anahuac, at the height of 6912 feet above the sea, of that immense pyramid of earth still standing, 177 feet in height, measuring 1445 feet on either side, and ascended by 120 steps.

There are two other pyramids at Otumba, seven leagues north-east of the City of Mexico, and in the language of the aboriginal inhabitants, called, one "The House of the Sun," and the other, "The House of the Moon." The House of the Sun is 680 feet square at the base, and 221 feet high.

On the top of this there was originally erected a great statue of the sun. The other pyramid is much smaller but rises to the height of 144 feet, and on its top was a statue of the moon. Upon the plain about these structures are a number of smaller pyramids not necessary to be described.--The sides of all the pyramids here constructed correspond with the cardinal points of the compas. The pyramids that we have referred to are all patterned after those constructed upon the banks of the Nile, and are all found about the west border of Yucatan, about the north border of Guatamala and south of the centre of the great Republic of Mexico.

It will be well to remember that the mountains and plains of North America cover millions of square miles north and east of the country where these pyramids have been constructed, and that those mountains and plains are covered in many places with earth mounds of an almost inconceivable variety of forms, and yet the form of the pyramid seems to be utterly unknown on the Western Continent, except in the narrow region that we have delineated. We might, perhaps, be justified in asking: From what people on earth could this building of pyramids be copied except from those dwelling upon the banks of the Nile?

THE RELIGIOUS BELIEF OF THE PEOPLES WHO CONSTRUCTED THE WONDERFUL PREHISTORIC TOWERS AND TEMPLES UPON THE CONTINENT OF AMERICA.

They were the worshipers of Baal, the god worshiped by the Phoenicians, and paid their devotions to him with the same rites that they practiced wherever their influence was effective.

It will be remembered that Baal was supposed to exist and was worshiped as a being of biform existence. In his beneficent qualities, as the sun, he was supposed to be the author and sustainer of all life and the fountain of all pleasures. In his sterner character wherein he was known as Moloch or Molech, by the children of Israel, he was the most cruel, stern, relentless monster that the imagination of man ever depicted, and his votaries everywhere sought to conciliate him by presenting him with the most horrid scenes of human agony. Attempts were everywhere made to conciliate him by laying human captives upon his altar, and for want of captives taken in war, such peaceful citizens as the priests saw fit to select.

Human victims were constantly dying upon a thousand altars not only in Phoenicia, but in all western and north-western Europe.

It was firmly believed by the votaries of Moloch that he could be most readily conciliated by the offering of children upon the altars, that he most especially delighted in the sacrifice of the first born of every family. Men thus offering "the fruit of their bodies for the sin of their souls." Early in the history of this worship it was deemed sufficient if children passed through the fires without the destruction of their lives, but down the ages it came to be believed, that if a family would secure the favor of this deity, the oldest child of each union must be actually roasted to conciliate favor. Even good old Abraham who had been called from upper Chaldea to receive all the land of Israel for him and his seed forever, conceived the idea that God required the roasting of the son of Sarah upon the hill of Zion, and never relented until a ray of common sense enlightened his intellectual vision, after he had actually bound Isaac to the altar.

We have referred to the beautiful monuments that still exist at Uxmal, Palenque, Occasingo, Queche and Otumba, and to the temples and monuments still standing there. Upon all these beautiful structures are engraved in the living stone, or wrought in stucco, most striking representations of the sun with a huge priest on either side, standing with arms outstretched each holding in his hands a naked child offering it to the relentless deity. The practice of burning human beings as offerings to the sun existed very extensively down to the date of the Spanish conquest. Showing that the same so-called religion which prevailed in western Europe before the Roman conquest, was still paramount and terribly enforced among these settlers in America, though so far removed from the parent stock. We have spoken thus far of American remains which are found north of the Isthmus of Panama, but there are still existing, in the old land of Peru, structures which for thousands of years have been telling the story of their origin.

There are all over this land of Peru remains not of palaces and temples, but of roads and water-courses showing a mechanical skill such as perhaps cannot be found in any part of the earth elsewhere as existing as early as these must have been constructed.

The people who did this work are absolutely extinct. Many have supposed that in the population of Central America there is still a remainder of the blood of the people who once dwelt there, thus rendering the local inhabitants in some degree superior to the aboriginal Indians of that country. Not so in Peru. It is only from the structures which we find and the conditions which attend them that, any evidence is found that there ever was in Peru, any people superior to the dull Indians of the mountains.

The traditions of the country speak of one Manco Capac appearing in the country at some indefinite period, and that he and his family descendants were rulers for a long course of time, ruling and controling the business and social life of the population of Peru. That blood had been long extinct before the Spanish conquest.

Let us see for a moment whether anything remains to show what were the religious ideas of Manco Capac, and those coming with and descended from him. We find abundant remains of structures and carved columns in the almost desert regions of Atacama, in the high lands of what is now Bolivia, between Peru and Chili, between twelve and thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. These structures and carved monuments are largely gathered about the lake of Titicaca. At Sillustani on a promontory extending into that lake, is constructed a stone circle as an outdoor temple, standing more perfect to-day than Stonehenge or Stennes, or the structures at Carnac in Bretagne. It is undoubtedly an outdoor temple for the worship of the sun. See Squires' Travels in the Lands of Incas, page 384, &c.

This, taken by itself, might not prove to a certainty that this outdoor temple was for the worship of the sun, but at Tiahuanuco, in the same work, at page 288 to 292 inclusive, we have the whole story told as plainly as it could be in a thousand printed volumes. Over the entrance to a cemetery is a carved monolith, or single stone, on which is the following described carving: Centrally over the gateway upon this monolith is a well carved figure of the sun, and upon the right hand and the left hand and below, are sculptured some fifty figures of beings with human bodies, and the wings of angels as imagined and represented in western Asia and in Europe. Half of the angels have human bodies, angel wings and the heads of hawks. The Romans and the Greeks held Mercury to be the god of eloquence and of wisdom.

Instead of furnishing him with the wings of the Asiatic angel, they clothed his head in a cap close to the ears with wings extended from the ears, and with other wings extended from his ankles.

It will be remembered that when Paul and Barnabas were upon their great mission through Asia Minor, preaching the gospel, the people became very much excited at Paul's preaching at Lystra and Derbe, and believing that the gods themselves had come to them, they called Barnabas, Jupiter, and the orator Paul, Mercurius. See acts of the Apostles, Chap. 14, 12th verse.

In the Egyptian economy, Thoth was worshiped as the god of wisdom and eloquence, and represented as possessing a human body with a hawk's head. Both regions representing the hawk as the embodiment of wisdom among the feathered creation. Here, at Tiahuanuco, we have the Greek and Egyptian god of wisdom, furnished with the wings of the Asiatic angel, and standing in eternal attendance upon the Phoenician sun god. All these figures are perfect, as showing the ideas and intentions which led to their construction, yet indicating in the roughness of the work that they had been constructed by one who was without exact measurements, probably without patterns, and without the means of obtaining either measurements or patterns. In this cemetery at Tiahuanuco, one will find a hundred structures so like the round towers upon the south coast of Ireland as strongly to awaken one's attention. So that, Manco Capac and his descendants were not only sun worshipers but very strongly imbued with the ideas which originated in the eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean sea.

Thus we have seen that the prehistoric people who built the structures in Central America and Mexico, which have in these later days filled the civilized world with wonder and admiration, were constructed by a people whose knowledge of science and the arts had reached the same point of advancement as had been reached upon the banks of the Nile, and in the cities of Phoenicia, for at least a thousand years before the Christian era. That in the erection of these structures they had implicitely followed the patterns, even to their ornamentation, of structures and ornaments then known and adopted in ancient Egypt. That their religious beliefs were identical with those which prevailed among the Phoenician people upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean sea, upon the coast of north-western Africa and throughout the entire west and north-western portions of Europe. They were sun worshipers, offering infants and full grown human victims to appease the wrath and conciliate the favor of their god. And we have farther seen that that strange people called the Incas, built outdoor temples of standing stones, and upon the entrance to their cemeteries engraved the effigies of the same god worshiped in Central America, and in so large a portion of the eastern world.

So we think we may say, with entire confidence, that it was known to many learned men in ancient times that there were settlements upon the continent of America, and that the dreams of the Western Islands of the Blest, and of the gardens of the Hesperides, rested upon most substantial facts. Modern scholars, looking at the matter casually, have allowed themselves to conclude that, because these discoveries were made at a very early period in the history of the world, by a people who were unable to build their ships according to the rules of modern science, and were compeled to navigate stormy oceans without the aid of steam, and probably without the aid of the mariner's compass, could never have navigated wide seas and stormy oceans.

But how baseless this idea is found to be, when we come to see how easily and successfully the Phoenician people traversed northern, western and eastern oceans, and brought home the products of the whole world to enrich themselves and the peoples among whom Providence had fixed their destinies! And how strangely such a suggestion sounds when addressed to the understanding of peoples who have seen again and again the boisterous Atlantic traversed from continent to continent by three men, two men, and even a single man, in an open boat! So that the origin of this people, who were so conspicuous at one time in Central America, is certainly found to have been of the Phoenicians from Tyre, Sidon or Aridas or from Tharshish or Carthage or the settlements towards the west. The settlement of these countries must have been very early, and their location must have been guarded by all the pains and penalties so graphically described in the ancient authors which we have quoted. Intercourse with Central America from the east must have ceased before the discovery of letters, for nowhere that we have discovered throughout the extent of the American settlements has a letter been found of any form whether Cuniform, Greek, Roman, Hebrew or Phoenician. These western settlers must have been entirely ignorant of Egyptian hieroglyphics, for the figures upon their walls show the invention of a system of hieroglyphics more complicated than anywhere else discovered, and which no Champollion has yet been able to translate. The human mind was not dormant here but its discoveries are utterly lost to mankind. It will be asked what has become of this Central American population who wrought the works in question? This can only be answered from conjecture. The number of actual settlers from the east were doubtless few. In erecting the structures which have been so much admired and wondered at, they doubtless used the labors of untold thousands of the aboriginal inhabitants, appealing perhaps to their fears and desires to conciliate the favor of that God, whose terrors made the Phoenecian priests such an irresistable power over the nations in the west and north of Europe.

But if for a moment superstition lost its terrors, this little flock of more intelligent incomers were powerless to resist the avenging hands of the million aboriginal barbarians. But we are not engaged in discussing the mode in which this people became extinct, but choose to confine ourselves to the questions, who were they, and where did they come from? We say without hesitation, that when Columbus parted from Palos in Spain, he sailed from a Phoenician city, in Phoenician vessels, manned by Phoenician crews to rediscover worlds that the Phoenician ancestors of these men had known and settled not less than three thousand years before. We believe that traditions had always existed in Spain, whose blood up to the Ebro is almost purely Phoenician, of these western worlds discovered by their fathers. No nation north of Spain could be induced to give any considerable attention to the arguments and solicitations of Columbus. True, Ferdinand and Isabella were of northern blood, red haired Goths, but their northern blood had been nourished for a thousand years upon the hillsides of Northern Spain, and they had become Spaniards in fact, with all Spanish beliefs and tendencies. Beyond all question Columbus took into account the Norwegian and Icelandic voyages and the voyage of Madoc with his Welsh brethren. But Columbus knew that those voyages only claimed to relate to lands lying west and north-west of the Straits of Gibraltar. But when Columbus unfurled his sails outside these Straits, in latitude thirty-five, he made no effort to find the lands claimed to have been discovered by the Icelanders, Norwegians or Welsh, but directed his course to a point from fifteen to twenty degrees farther south, and thus reopened to the knowledge of the world what should have been the happy islands of the west and the storied gardens of the Hesperides. We make no doubt that the Incas of Peru were brought to that country by the ships of the same Phoenician people. But the Incas were very few in number, and came to Peru with mechanical knowledge and the knowledge of pottery far in advance of that possessed by the settlers in Central America, and their works initiated for the purpose of improving water courses and constructing roads were far more beneficial to mankind than the temples erected to Baal in Central America, although the Incas, though more intelligent than the settlers in Central America, were not yet emancipated from belief in that heathen god. Manco Capac, the first Inca, may have been left, for aught we know, by Solomon's fleets from Eziongeber, when in search of rosewood, mahogany, and gold, and may have been one of those skilled mechanics that built Solomon's Temple, and constructed the basins for it, and thus have become enlightened in religious matters, although he had not yet advanced so far as to entirely abandon the worship of Baal.

We are not unaware that Peruvian tradition introduces Capac into Peru at a much later period, but no confidence can be placed in dates suggested by a people utterly unacquainted with letters or figures, and we make no suggestion as to the exact time when the first Inca showed himself in Peru. It may be asked what we are to say in regard to the storied Atlantis, and especially, what shall we say to the fancies of Ignatius Donnelly, who has written such a beautiful romance in regard to that island supposed by him to have existed, and have been the actual birthplace of man. Our reply is that Central America was the only true Atlantis; and that Atlantis sunk in the ocean only when its discoverers became weakened in the face of the barbarous people who surrounded them and lost their supremacy in the commercial world among the nations. Beyond what was true of Central America, Atlantis was a dream of fancy at an age of the world when fancy supplied the place of facts to an uninstructed people.

NOTE.

I am under strong obligations to MR. GEORGE R. HOWELL, Archivist of the New York State Library, for the aid he has given me in selecting from ancient Greek and Roman authors their substantial statements in regard to what they considerered in their day to have been discoveries in the western world.

Transcriber's Note

The following misspellings and typographical errors were maintained.

Page Error TN-1 5 real sea. should read real sea." TN-2 13 against Ai should read against Ai. TN-3 13 pealed should read peeled TN-4 20 compas should read compass TN-5 20 Guatamala should read Guatemala TN-6 24 controling should read controlling TN-7 26 implicitely should read implicitly TN-8 27 compeled should read compelled TN-9 29 irresistable should read irresistible TN-10 31 considerered should read considered

The following words were inconsistently hyphenated.

north-west / northwest Sea / sea

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