Relics of the American Mount-Builders

RELICS OF THE AMERICAN MOUNT-BUILDERS

CAMPBELL

1898

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SECTION II., 1898. [3] TRANS. R. S. C.

I.—Recently Discovered Relics of the American Mound-Builders.

By JOHN CAMPBELL, LL.D.,

Professor in the Presbyterian College, Montreal.

(Read 25th May, 1898.)

During the past winter there have been sent for my inspection, and if possible, for my decipherment, photographs of caskets, inscribed tablets, and other objects, that were found some six years ago in some mounds in Michigan. The first to send me these photographs was Mr. C. H. Roberts, of Paris, Ont., a gentleman until then entirely unknown to me, who was led to consult me by his study of my volumes on The Hittites. Mr. Roberts was under the impression that the objects were of great antiquity; that the characters of the inscriptions were cuneiform; and that one pictured tablet represented the Deluge. Any one who has seen the photographs will admit that, however improbable these conclusions may seem, there is much in the aspect of the articles portrayed to justify them. As a photograph, however well taken, is poor material for the epigrapher, I induced Mr. Roberts to furnish me with accurate drawings of such mound inscriptions as were in his possession, either as originals or as casts of the originals. He kindly provided me with four complete inscriptions and several fragments. Of the four inscriptions, two short ones belong to separate sides of a terra-cotta casket; the other two are on tablets, one of which contains the supposed Deluge scene.

On a careful examination of the workable material before me, I saw that I had to deal with something that was only new in the matter of grouping, in other words, with the old Turanian syllabary. This syllabary I was led into acquaintance with through Hittite studies, and, having mastered its various forms and their phonetic equivalents, I have published many decipherments of inscriptions made in its protean characters. Among these may be mentioned contributions to the Canadian Institute of Toronto on the Etruscan, Siberian, Lat Indian, American Mound-Builder, and Sinaitic inscriptions. The Celtic Society of Montreal published an article on the Turanian Inscriptions of the Isle of Man. For the Rev. Wentworth Webster, the author of Basque Legends, M. Henri O'Shea, author of La Maison Basque, La Tombe Basque, &c., and M. Victor Stempf, the Vasconist of Bordeaux, I have translated several so-called Celt-Iberian inscriptions found in various parts of Spain. During the past winter, I deciphered for Señor Don Juan Bethencourt Alfonso of Tenerife a number of similar inscriptions found in Hierro, one of the Canary Islands. And, at the meeting of the Australasian Association for

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4. ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA

the Advancement of Science, held last January in Sydney, N. S. W., Dr. John Fraser submitted my translation of a few characters inscribed upon a figure painted on the wall of a cave on the Glenelg river, which was the work of ancient ship-wrecked Japanese, as far back as the twelfth century A.D. The Association accepted my explanation, and Japanese and

[IMAGE: Plate I — A large inscribed tablet with arched top, containing multiple rows of symbols, characters, and pictographic elements including human figures, animals, geometric shapes, and various symbolic markings arranged in horizontal bands]

Basque scholars favour my translations, in the east of the Lat Indian and Siberian inscriptions, and in the west of the Etruscan, Celt-Iberian, and similar documents. Unfortunately, among philological ethnologists there are few Basque and Japanese scholars. I mention the above facts, not as a matter of ostentation, but as a justification, rendered necessary by much incredulity, of my ability to read the old Turanian character.

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5 [CAMPBELL] RELICS OF THE AMERICAN MOUND-BUILDERS

The oldest civilizations of the world were Turanian, that is, they were neither Semitic nor Aryan. Semitic writing is old, and Semitic speech was adopted by non-Semitic peoples, such as the Phoenicians. But the rulers of men were Turanians. Such were the primitive Egyptians whom we would now call Malays; and the Accadians of Chaldea, who might be termed Uralians. The latter, representing the Northern Turanians of postponing grammar, and vocabulary that mediates between the

[IMAGE: Plate II — An arched inscribed tablet containing multiple rows of complex symbols, characters, and hieroglyphic-style markings arranged in horizontal lines within the arch shape]

Basque and the Japanese, are popularly supposed to have had no other form of writing than the cuneiform of Babylonia, and the Hittite hieroglyphics. This is a radical misconception. They possessed a phonetic syllabary, not an alphabet, from before the time of the patriarch Abraham. Over 3,000 inscriptions in it are found from the Sinaitic Peninsula, and east of Jordan up into Syria. They have been called Sinaitic, Nabatean, and many other names, and, because men have failed to decipher them, they have been set aside as worthless. Most of the native syllabaries of Asia Minor, such as the Phrygian and Lydian, are of the same character.

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The inscription of Lemnos belongs to their category, with the Etruscan and other non-Pelasgic documents of Italy; and to these must be added the Celt-Iberian of Spain and the Canary Islands. When the Turanian was driven into the north, as the Esthonian, the Finn, the Lapp, and the Pict, he carried his runes with him, even as far as Greenland in the west. The Teutonic and perhaps the Celtic peoples seem to have borrowed these from him, changing the phonetic staff, and turning the syllabic into the alphabetic to suit themselves; but most of the runic inscriptions are not Norse, Gothic, and Anglo-Saxon, as their translators who make them yield unhistorical rubbish falsely imagine. Their authors and their languages were and are Turanian, and the best key to them is the Basque.

Besides this westerly movement of Turanian peoples and letters, there was a more extensive eastern one. When it first began we are not yet in a position to tell, but we know that it received a great impetus towards the end of the eighth century B.C., when Sargon of Assyria broke up the Hittite empire in Syria, Mesopotamia and the adjoining countries. The Turanians held their own in Parthia, and exercised sovereignty there from 255 B.C. till 226 A.D., when Persian rule was restored. They filled the rest of the Persian empire, in which scattered remains of their script may be found; but it was in northern India that their empire, arts, civilization and letters revived under the religious forms of Buddhism. There were no royal Aryans then in India; they were simply for a time Brahman priests and councillors of Kshattriya or Turanian kings. When Buddhism was revived by the Sakya prince who was called Gotama, the occupation of the Brahman was gone, and he became a merchant, a seaman and an agitator. The name of Prince Sidhartta has nothing to do with the keeping of cows, as the Sanscritists translate Gautama; it is pure Japanese, Go-tama, the excellent master. The Buddhist inscriptions of India are in a form of the old Turanian character; they are the work of royalty, not of mendicant monks, as Prinsep, Cunningham and others have made them out to be; and their language, as I have shown, is pure Japanese. It is not in vain that Japanese historians derive their race from India. An interesting fact for us in Canada is that, in the Andhra dynasty of Magadha, there reigned four Satakarnis and two Skandaswatis, names we are familiar with as those of two founders of the league of the Iroquois, Shadekaronyes and Skandaswati.

From before the Christian era on to the fifth century A.D., the Brahmans worked to overthrow Turanian and Buddhist rule; not driving all the Turanians out, but subordinating them as the three inferior castes, and imposing on all a modified Brahmanism that contained many elements of Turanian heathenism. As late as the seventh century, Brahman kings were few and weak in authority. But, as early as the fifth century, the literary Turanian betook himself from northern India to Siberia, carrying his Buddhism and his Buddhist scribes with him.

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[CAMPBELL] RELICS OF THE AMERICAN MOUND-BUILDERS 7

About the head waters of the Yenisei, and west and east of them, he built his wooden cities, heaped his mounds, and engaged in the chase and in war. Still his inscriptions are in the same character, if a little ruder in form, and their Japanese is less archaic than that of India. The chief monarchs who reigned in Siberia appear in the Japanese annals, which do not tell, as do the rocks of the Yenisei, that they ruled over the Raba and the Yoba Kita. It is hard to decide, from the diverse data furnished by the Corean, Japanese and Chinese historians, when the Turanians of Siberia descended upon Corea and northern China, over which they ruled for about two centuries. The rule of the Khitan in China is said to have ended in 1123, and is supposed to have begun before the middle of the tenth century; but they were in Corea before the end of the seventh. The Corean alphabet is a much modified form of the Lat Indian and Siberian syllabary, and, with the Cypriote syllabary and the Aztec hieroglyphic system, constituted my material for fixing the phonetic values of the Hittite characters.

The Turanian writers must have been in Japan long before their brethren conquered China, probably as early as the sixth century. This we know, not from the Japanese annals, full of Siberian, Indian and still more western and ancient monarchs, going back to 660 B.C., but from the mound-builder inscriptions of America, and from the history of Mexico. The most ancient date of Mexican history is 717 A.D., and the oldest monuments on American soil which are dated are the two stones from Davenport, Iowa, engraved in 793 and 795. Their dates are Buddhist, reckoning from the death of the sage in 477 B.C. Copies of inscriptions in the Turanian character from Japan have been sent to me, but they were too much weathered to yield any satisfactory result. The Japanese are said to have replaced their ancient form of writing by modifications of the Chinese in 285 A.D., under the advice of the wise Wonin. This is quite fabulous, as the Japanese were at that time in India. But it is probable that the change of script took place during the period of Khitan rule in the celestial empire, which lies somewhere between the sixth and the twelfth century. The mound-builder inscriptions of America are all in the old character, although their dates extend from 793 to 1261, and I am not aware of the existence of any American inscription in the Japanese modifications of the Chinese form of writing. Ban Nobutomo's work on old Japanese alphabets shows that the Japanese are now ignorant of their ancient form of written speech; yet I have a shrewd suspicion that it may be preserved among the arcana of Buddhist priests in the land of the chrysanthemum. At any rate, it is perfectly evident that there is not knowledge enough of this old Turanian writing in the world to enable any one to forge it, as it has been charged over and again to have been done by American antiquarians, who have thus sought to shield their own ignorance.

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I must not be unjust in this matter, nor leave it to be understood that America alone produces sceptics. Mr. Roberts sent his photographs and some memoranda with which I had furnished him to the head of one of the departments of the British Museum, who returned for answer this remarkable piece of dogmatism: "In my opinion, the objects shown in the photographs have not the least scientific interest or importance, and nothing founded on them can be of the slightest value." The same gentleman favoured me with a note, cautioning me against the discovered objects. Mr. Roberts's reception by the authorities of the Smithsonian Institution was equally chilling. At the same time, so convinced is he of the genuineness and unique character of the remains, taken from the mounds, that he wished to keep the secret of their discovery, and gave me nothing more than the general statement that they came from a part of Michigan which had not been explored by Professor Cyrus Thomas and mound-visiting coadjutors of Washington. With this meagre information I should have been compelled to rest content, had not a second set of photographs arrived about the middle of March, this time not from Paris, but from Leamington, Ont. They were sent by a respected minister of that town, who was formerly one of my best students. It will hardly be violating the confidence of private correspondence to transcribe that part of his letter which relates to the photographs. In regard to these the writer says:

"The story of them is briefly this. A young man visiting in this section recently brought these pictures to me, thinking that possibly I might be able to decipher them. Of course I was unable to do so, and expressed the desire that he would leave them with me, and I would get your opinion about them. As far as I could learn from him, they were found, about six years ago, at a place called Wyman, near Mount Pleasant, Michigan. The circumstances connected with the discovery were as follows: A man was digging holes in the ground for the purpose of erecting a fence, and about three feet below the surface his spade struck a stone, which appeared to give forth a hollow sound. He dug around it, and unearthed a casket, which when opened he found to contain some tablets, with curious inscriptions engraved on them. The tablets when taken out of the ground were soft like clay, but when exposed to the sun became quite hard. Of course, when this discovery was made, the whole community was aroused, and they began to dig in several other places, and on one spot, which was mound-shaped, they found the largest casket, containing other tablets. This one was very much below the surface of a mound on which there grew a pine tree over four hundred years old. The tablets were preserved, and a photographer from Mount Pleasant took views of them, copies of which I am sending you. This, in brief, is about all the information I could get about them. He—that is, the man who brought them to me—said the people living

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[CAMPBELL] RELICS OF THE AMERICAN MOUND-BUILDERS 9

around there believed they were placed there by the Chaldeans, but I told them that in all probability they were similar to the tablets found in Mexico and Peru."

From the two sets of photographs, which are not identical, showing that the collection taken must have been larger than that in the possession of either of my correspondents, and from Mr. Roberts's communications, I gather that the terra-cotta caskets, surmounted by sphinx-like and couchant winged animal figures, were at least five in number; that either in or near them were found complete specimens of pottery, stone dies for stamping the figures on the clay, pieces of copper larger than a cent, having the appearance of coin, and some tablets, of which one is an effigy thoroughly mound builder in character. As I have already stated, I have made no attempt to decipher any of the tablets but the two of which Mr. Roberts sent me faithful copies, nor of the legends of the caskets beyond two which he also sketched for my benefit. In the uninitiated they are calculated to inspire incredulity. Sphinxes and cuneiform characters, together with a deluge scene, seem out of place in Michigan. Yet, sphinxes with men's faces such as these belong to the art remains of Buddhist India, and doubtless are known in Japan. The supposed cuneiform characters are not really such, those that have a wedge appearance being few, and scattered among the ordinary types of the Turanian syllabary. There are also some hieroglyphic or ideographic symbols with which I am not familiar. The deluge scene is misnamed, as investigators might have learned had they only taken the trouble to look at the object near the human figure on the top of the left side of the tablet. It is the stump of a tree, and indicates that the three lower compartments are stages in the Buddhist underworld.

The chief peculiarity in the writing on tablets and caskets, which, in the syllabary throughout the world, I have met but rarely, is the grouping of characters, either by simple superposition or by adherence to a staff representing an open vowel or an aspirate syllable, such as o, ha, ye. As the documents are ecclesiastical rather than historical, consisting of what might almost be called charms, this mode of writing may have been an invention of the monks to add mystery to the formulas of their creed. A few ideographs occur in the tablets under consideration, such as the figure of a man, hito, and that of a deer, skika. These are simple enough