American antiquities, and discoveries in the West: being an exhibition of the evidence that an ancient population of partially civilized nations, differing entirely from those of the present Indians, peopled America, many centuries before its discovery by Columbus. And inquiries into their origin, with a copious description of many of their stupendous works, now in ruins. With conjectures concerning what may have become of them / Comp. from travels, authentic sources, and the researches of antiquarian societies. By Josiah Priest.

  • Priest, Josiah, 1788-1851.
Date:
1833
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: American antiquities, and discoveries in the West: being an exhibition of the evidence that an ancient population of partially civilized nations, differing entirely from those of the present Indians, peopled America, many centuries before its discovery by Columbus. And inquiries into their origin, with a copious description of many of their stupendous works, now in ruins. With conjectures concerning what may have become of them / Comp. from travels, authentic sources, and the researches of antiquarian societies. By Josiah Priest. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    first people, who practised raising tumuli around the urns which contained the ashes of their heroes,” And, as we know, tumuli are in abundance in the west, raised over the ashes, as we suppose, of their heroes; should we not in¬ fer that the practice was borrowed from that people ? This would prove some of them, at least, originally from about the Mediterra¬ nean. But notwithstanding our agreement with this writer that many nations, as the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Phoenicians, Carthagenians, Europeans, Romans, Asiatics, Scythians and Tar¬ tars, have, in different eras of time, contributed to the peopling of America; yet we believe, with the great and celebrated naturalist, Dr. Mitchell, that the ancestors of the people known by the appel¬ lation of the Malays, now peopling the islands of the Pacific, were nearly among the first who set foot on the coasts of America. And that the people who settled on the islands of the Atlantic, and es¬ pecially that of Atalantis, now no more, immediately after the dis¬ persion, were they who, first of all, and the Malay second, tilled all America with their descendants in the first ages. But in process of time, as the arts came on, navigation, with or without the compass, was practised, if not as systematically as at the present time, yet with nearly as wide a range ; and as convul¬ sions in the earth, such as divided one part of it from another, as in the days of Peleg, removing islands, changing the shape of conti¬ nents, and separating the inhabitants of distant places from each other, by destroying the land or islands between, so that when shipping, whether large or small, as in the time of the Phoenicians, Tyrians of King Solomon, the Greeks and Romans, came to navi¬ gate the seas, America was found, visited and colonized anew. In this way we account for the introduction of arts among the more ancient inhabitants whom they found there ; which arts are clearly spoken of in the traditions of the Mexicans, who tell us of white and bearded men, as related by Humboldt, who came from the sun, (as they supposed the Spaniards did,) changed or reduced the wandering millions of the woods to order and government, intro¬ duced among them the art of agriculture, a knowledge of metals, with that of architecture ; so that when Columbus discovered America, it was filled with cities, towns, cultivated fields and coun¬ tries ; palaces, aqueducts, and roads and highways of the nations 44