Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 07, May, 1858

The results of the past ten or fifteen years in historical investigation are exceedingly mortifying to any one who has been proud to call himself a student of History. We had thought, perhaps, that we knew something of the origin of human events and the gradual development from the past into the world of to-day. We had read Herodotus, and Gibbon, and Gillies, and done manful duty with Rollin. There were certain comfortable, definite facts in antiquity. Romulus and Remus were our friends; the transmission of the alphabet by the Phoenicians was a resting-spot; the destruction of Babylon and the date of the Flood were fixed stations in the wilderness. In more modern periods, we had a refuge in the date of the discovery of America; and if we were forced back into the wilds and uncertainties of American History, Mr. Prescott soon restored to us the buried empires, and led us easily back through a few plain centuries.

Beyond these dates, indeed, there was a shadowy land, through whose changing mists could be seen sometimes the grand outlines of abandoned cities, or the faint forms of temples, or the graceful column or massive tomb, which marked the distant path of the advancing race: but these were scarcely more than visions for a moment, before darkness again covered the view. Our mythology and philosophy of the past were almost equally misty and vague. History was to us a succession of facts; empire succeeding empire, and one form of civilization another, with scarcely more connection than in the scenes of a theatre;—the great isolated fact of all being the existence of the Jews. All cosmic myths and noble conceptions of Deity and pure religious beliefs were only offshoots of Hebrew tradition.

This, we are pained to say, is all changed now. Our beloved dates, our easy explanation, and popular narrative are half dissolved under the touch of modern investigation. Roman History abandons poor Romulus and Remus; the Flood sinks into a local inundation, and is pushed back nobody knows how many thousands of years; an Egyptian antiquity arises of which Herodotus never knew; and Josephus is proved ignorant of his own subject. Nothing is found separate from the current of the world's history,—neither Hebrew law and religion, nor Phoenician commerce, nor Hindoo mythology, nor Grecian art. On the shadowy Past, over the deserted battle-fields, the burial-mounds, the mausolea, the temples, the altars, and the habitations of perished nations, new rays of light are cast. Peoples not heard of before, empires forgotten, conquests not recorded, arts unknown in their place at this day, and civilizations of which all has perished but the language, appear again. The world wakes to find itself much older than it thought. History is hardly the same study that it once was. Even more than the investigations of hieroglyphs and bass-reliefs and sculptures, during the past few years, have the researches in one especial direction changed the face of the ancient world.

LANGUAGE is found to be itself the best record of a nation's origin, development, and relation to other races. Each vocabulary and grammar of a dead nation is a Nineveh, rich in pictures, inscriptions, and historical records, uncovering to the patient investigator not merely the external life and actions of the people, but their deepest internal life, and their connection with other peoples and times. The little defaced word, the cast-away root, the antique construction, picked up by the student among the vestiges of a language, may be a relic fresher from the past and older than a stone from the Pyramids, or the sculpture of the Assyrian temple.

In American history, this work of investigation till recently had not been thoroughly entered upon. Within the last quarter of a century, Kingsborough and Gallatin and Prescott and Davis and Squier and Schoolcraft and Müller have each thrown some light over the mysterious antiquity of our own continent. But of all, a French Abbé, an ethnologist and a careful investigator,—M. BRASSEUR DE BOURBOURG,—has, in a history recently published, done the best service to this cause. It is entitled "Histoire des Nations Civilisées du Mexique et de l'Amérique Centrale." (Paris, 1857.) M. de Bourbourg spent many years in Central America, studying the face of the country and the languages of the Indian tribes, and investigating the ancient picture-writing and the remains of the wonderful ruins of that region. Probably no stranger has ever enjoyed better opportunities of reading the ancient manuscripts and studying the dialects of the Central American races. With these helps he has prepared a groundwork for the history of the early civilized peoples of our American continent,—a history, it should be remembered, ending where Prescott's begins,—reaching back, possibly, as far as the earliest invasions of the Huns, and one of whose fixed dates is at the time of the Antonines. He has ventured to lift, at length, the veil from our mysterious and confused American antiquity. It is an especial merit of M. de Bourbourg, in this stage of the investigation, that he has attempted to do no more. He has collected and collated facts, but has sought to give us very few theories. The stable philosophical conclusions he leaves for later research, when time shall have been afforded for fuller comparison.

There is an incredible fascination to many minds in these investigations into the traditions and beliefs of antiquity. We feel in their presence that they are the oldest things; the most ancient books, or buildings, or sculptures are modern by their side. They represent the childish instincts of the human mind,—its gropings after Truth,—its dim ideals and shadowings forth of what it hopes will be. They are the earliest answers of man to the great questions, WHENCE and WHITHER?

The most ancient people of Central America, according to M. de Bourbourg,—a people referred to in all the oldest traditions, but of whom everything except the memory has passed away,—are the Quinames. Their rule extended over Mexico and Guatemala, and there is reason to suppose that they attained to a considerable height of civilization. The only accounts of their origin are the oral traditions repeated to the Spaniards by the Indians of Yucatan,—traditions relating that the fathers of this great nation came from the East, and that God had delivered them from the pursuit of their enemies and had opened to them a way over the sea. Other traditions reveal to us the Quinames as delivered up to the most unnatural vices of ancient society. Whether the Cyclopean ruins scattered over the continent,—vast masses of stone placed one upon another without cement, which existed before the splendid cities whose ruins are yet seen in Central America,—whether these are the work of this race, or of one still older, is entirely uncertain.

The most ancient language of Central America, the ground on which all the succeeding languages have been planted, is the Maya. Even the Indian languages of to-day are only combinations of their own idioms with this ancient tongue. Its daughter, the Tzendale, transmits many of the oldest and most interesting religious beliefs of the Indian tribes.

All the traditions, whether in the Quiche, the Mexican, or the Tzendale, unite in one somewhat remarkable belief,—in the reverent mention of an ancient Deliverer or Benefactor; a personage so enveloped in the halo of religious sentiment and the mist of remote antiquity, that it is difficult to distinguish his real form. With the Tzendale his name is Votan; 1 1 The resemblance of this name to the Teutonic Wuotan or Odin is certainly striking and will afford a new argument to the enthusiastic Rafn, and other advocates of a Scandinavian colonization of America.—Edd.