Owl-Headed Vases, Troy and Peru
The illustrations on page 397 strikingly confirm Mr. Ferguson’s views.
“The sloping jambs, the window cornice, the polygonal masonry, and other forms so closely resemble what is found in the old Pelasgic cities of Greece and Italy, that it is difficult to resist the conclusion that there may be some relation between them.”
Even the mode of decorating their palaces and temples finds a parallel in the Old World. A recent writer says:
“We may end by observing, what seems to have escaped Señor Lopez, that the interior of an Inca palace, with its walls covered with gold, as described by Spaniards, with its artificial golden flowers and golden beasts, must have been exactly like the interior of the house of Alkinous or Menelaus—
“‘The doors were framed of gold,
Where underneath the brazen floor doth glass
Silver pilasters, which with grace uphold
Lintel of silver framed; the ring was burnished gold,
And dogs on each side of the door there stand,
Silver and golden.’”
“I can personally testify” (says Winchell, “Preadamites,” p. 387) “that a study of ancient Peruvian pottery has constantly reminded me of forms with which we are familiar in Egyptian archæology.”
Dr. Schliemann, in his excavations of the ruins of Troy, found a number of what he calls “owl-headed idols” and vases. I give specimens on page 398 and page 400.
In Peru we find vases with very much the same style of face.
I might pursue those parallels much farther; but it seems to me that these extraordinary coincidences must have arisen either from identity of origin or long-continued ancient intercourse. There can be little doubt that a fair-skinned, light-haired, bearded race, holding the religion which Plato says prevailed in Atlantis, carried an Atlantean civilization at an early day up the valley of the Amazon to the heights of Bolivia and Peru, precisely as a similar emigration of Aryans went westward to the shores of the Mediterranean and Caspian, and it is very likely that these diverse migrations habitually spoke the same language.
Señor Vincente Lopez, a Spanish gentleman of Montevideo, in 1872 published a work entitled “Les Races Aryennes in Pérou,” in which he attempts to prove that the great Quichua language, which the Incas imposed on their subjects over a vast extent of territory, and which is still a living tongue in Peru and Bolivia, is really a branch of the great Aryan or Indo-European speech. I quote Andrew Lang’s summary of the proofs on this point: