Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/158

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ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD.

Chaldeans vases were constructed around the bones, the neck of the vase being too small to permit the extraction of the skull. (Foster's "Prehistoric Races," p. 200.)

The use of cement was known alike to the European and American nations.

The use of the arch was known on both sides of the Atlantic.

The manufacture of bricks was known in both the Old and New Worlds.

The style of ornamentation in architecture was much the same on both hemispheres, as shown in the preceding designs, pages 137, 139.

Metallurgy.—The Atlanteans mined ores, and worked in metals; they used copper, tin, bronze, gold, and silver, and probably iron.

The American nations possessed all these metals. The age of bronze, or of copper combined with tin, was preceded in America, and nowhere else, by a simpler age of copper; and, therefore, the working of metals probably originated in America, or in some region to which it was tributary. The Mexicans manufactured bronze, and the Incas mined iron near Lake Titicaca; and the civilization of this latter region, as we will show, probably dated back to Atlantean times. The Peruvians called gold the tears of the sun: it was sacred to the sun, as silver was to the moon.

Sculpture.—The Atlanteans possessed this art; so did the American and Mediterranean nations.

Dr. Arthur Schott ("Smith. Rep.," 1869, p. 391), in describing the "Cara Gigantesca," or gigantic face, a monument of Yzamal, in Yucatan, says, "Behind and on both sides, from under the mitre, a short veil falls upon the shoulders, so as to protect the back of the head and the neck. This particular appendage vividly calls to mind the same feature in the symbolic adornments of Egyptian and Hindoo priests, and even those of the Hebrew hierarchy." Dr. Schott sees in the orbicular wheel-like plates of this statue the wheel symbol of Kronos