Owl-Headed Vase, Troy

“Señor Lopez’s view, that the Peruvians were Aryans who left the parent stock long before the Teutonic or Hellenic races entered Europe, is supported by arguments drawn from language, from the traces of institutions, from religious beliefs, from legendary records, and artistic remains. The evidence from language is treated scientifically, and not as a kind of ingenious guessing. Señor Lopez first combats the idea that the living dialect of Peru is barbarous and fluctuating. It is not one of the casual and shifting forms of speech produced by nomad races. To which of the stages of language does this belong—the agglutinative, in which one root is fastened on to another, and a word is formed in which the constitutive elements are obviously distinct, or the inflexional, where the auxiliary roots get worn down and are only distinguishable by the philologist? As all known Aryan tongues are inflexional, Señor Lopez may appear to contradict himself when he says that Quichua is an agglutinative Aryan language. But he quotes Mr. Max Müller’s opinion that there must have been a time when the germs of Aryan tongues had not yet reached the inflexional stage, and shows that while the form of Quichua is agglutinative, as in Turanian, the roots of words are Aryan. If this be so, Quichua may be a linguistic missing link.

“When we first look at Quichua, with its multitude of words, beginning with hu, and its great preponderance of q’s, it seems almost as odd as Mexican. But many of these forms are due to a scanty alphabet, and really express familiar sounds; and many, again, result from the casual spelling of the Spaniards. We must now examine some of the forms which Aryan roots are supposed to take in Quichua. In the first place, Quichua abhors the shock of two consonants. Thus, a word like ple’w in Greek would be unpleasant to the Peruvian’s ear, and he says pillui, ‘I sail.’ The plu, again, in pluma, a feather, is said to be found in pillu, ‘to fly.’ Quichua has no v, any more than Greek has, and just as the Greeks had to spell Roman words beginning with V with Ou, like Valerius—Ou?ale’rios—so, where Sanscrit has v, Quichua has sometimes hu. Here is a list of words in hu:

“There is a Sanscrit root, kr, to act, to do: this root is found in more than three hundred names of peoples and places in Southern America. Thus there are the Caribs, whose name may have the same origin as that of our old friends the Carians, and mean the Braves, and their land the home of the Braves, like Kaleva-la, in Finnish. The same root gives kara, the hand, the Greek xei’r, and kkalli, brave, which a person of fancy may connect with kalo’s. Again, Quichua has an ‘alpha privative’—thus A-stani means ‘I change a thing’s place;’ for ni or mi is the first person singular, and, added to the root of a verb, is the sign of the first person of the present indicative. For instance, can means being, and Can-mi, or Cani, is ‘I am.’ In the same way Munanmi, or Munani, is ‘I love,’ and Apanmi, or Apani, ‘I carry.’ So Lord Strangford was wrong when he supposed that the last verb in mi lived with the last patriot in Lithuania. Peru has stores of a grammatical form which has happily perished in Europe. It is impossible to do more than refer to the supposed Aryan roots contained in the glossary, but it may be noticed that the future of the Quichuan verb is formed in s—I love, Munani; I shall love, Munasa—and that the affixes denoting cases in the noun are curiously like the Greek prepositions.”

The resemblance between the Quichua and Mandan words for I or me—mi—will here be observed.

Very recently Dr. Rudolf Falb has announced (Neue Freie Presse, of Vienna) that he has discovered that the relation of the Quichua and Aimara languages to the Aryan and Semitic tongues is very close; that, in fact, they “exhibit the most astounding affinities with the Semitic tongue, and particularly the Arabic,” in which tongue Dr. Falb has been skilled from his boyhood. Following up the lines of this discovery, Dr. Falb has found (1) a connecting link with the Aryan roots, and (2) has ultimately arrived face to face with the surprising revelation that “the Semitic roots are universally Aryan.” The common stems of all the variants are found in their purest condition in Quichua and Aimara, from which fact Dr. Falb derives the conclusion that the high plains of Peru and Bolivia must be regarded as the point of exit of the present human race.

[Since the above was written I have received a letter from Dr. Falb, dated Leipsic, April 5th, 1881. Scholars will be glad to learn that Dr. Falb’s great work on the relationship of the Aryan and Semitic languages to the Quichua and Aimara tongues will be published in a year or two; the manuscript contains over two thousand pages, and Dr. Falb has devoted to it ten years of study. A work from such a source, upon so curious and important a subject, will be looked for with great interest.]

But it is impossible that the Quichuas and Aimaras could have passed across the wide Atlantic to Europe if there had been no stepping-stone in the shape of Atlantis with its bridge-like ridges connecting the two continents.

It is, however, more reasonable to suppose that the Quichuas and Aimaras were a race of emigrants from Plato’s island than to think that Atlantis was populated from South America. The very traditions to which we have referred as existing among the Peruvians, that the civilized race were white and bearded, and that they entered or invaded the country, would show that civilization did not originate in Peru, but was a transplantation from abroad, and only in the direction of Atlantis can we look for a white and bearded race.

In fact, kindred races, with the same arts, and speaking the same tongue in an early age of the world, separated in Atlantis and went east and west—the one to repeat the civilization of the mother-country along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, which, like a great river, may be said to flow out from the Black Sea, with the Nile as one of its tributaries, and along the shores of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf; while the other emigration advanced up the Amazon, and created mighty nations upon its head-waters in the valleys of the Andes and on the shores of the Pacific.

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