A Blast from the Past: "America Before" vs. "Atlantis: The Antediluvian World"

​As I work my way through Graham Hancock’s America Before this week, I can’t help but share with you some thoughts I had in reading a long chapter comparing Native American spiritual beliefs to those of ancient Egypt. The Old Kingdom of Egyptian history flourished around 2500 BCE, while the Native American practices Hancock cites range from archaeological evidence dating back thousands of years BCE all the way down to nineteenth century oral accounts recorded by ethnologists. The similarities are, to my mind, unconvincing: bird iconography, an interest in the belt stars of Orion, monuments in geometric shapes, a concept of life after death, and fashion trends for astronomers involving clothes marked with stars. Hancock concedes that Native Americans and Egyptians were never in direct contact with one another, but this gives him the license to suggest that a lost civilization like Atlantis gave this spiritual knowledge to both.

​The claim immediately reminded me of very similar arguments made by Ignatius Donnelly in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882).

Plato says that in Atlantis there was "a great and wonderful empire," which "aggressed wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia," thus testifying to the extent of its dominion. It not only subjugated Africa as far as Egypt, and Europe as far as Italy, but it ruled "as well over parts of the continent," to wit, "the opposite continent" of America, "which surrounded the true ocean." Those parts of America over which it ruled were, as we will show hereafter, Central America, Peru, and the Valley of the Mississippi, occupied by the "Mound Builders."

​It is astonishing that the above paragraph could equally have come from Donnelly’s Atlantis or Hancock’s America Before. The only real way to tell the difference is that Donnelly, being a Victorian, imagined Atlantis engaging in direct colonial rule. Hancock, in a postcolonial world, sees a more diffuse cultural imperialism, something like the impact of Hollywood movies on the Third World.
 
But Donnelly provides the template in more ways than this. Let’s try to identify which passages belong to Donnelly and which to Hancock in the list below:

1. The grave-cists made of stone of the American mounds are exactly like the stone chests, or kistvaen for the dead, found in the British mounds. Tumuli have been found in Yorkshire enclosing wooden coffins, precisely as in the mounds of the Mississippi Valley. The articles associated with the dead are the same in both continents: arms, trinkets, food, clothes, and funeral urns.
 
2. That epoch, moreover, around 2500 BC, coincides and overlaps with the megalithic epoch in Europe, so another curiosity is the way the circular geoglyphs of Amazonia resemble “henges”—the circular embankments with deep internal ditches that surround the great stone circles of the British Isles. The scale is very similar and the resemblance is so obvious that even the most sober archaeologists, usually wary of cross-cultural comparisons, are willing to remark upon it.
 
3. In both America and Egypt the pyramids were used as places of sepulture; and it is a remarkable fact that the system of earthworks and mounds, kindred to the pyramids, is found even in England. Silsbury Hill, at Avebury, is an artificial mound one hundred and seventy feet high. It is connected with ramparts, avenues (fourteen hundred and eighty yards long), circular ditches, and stone circles, almost identical with those found in the valley of the Mississippi.
 
4. Though different in degree in terms of the engineering required, there is no difference in kind between the hole in the Ojibwe tent and the star-shaft in the Great Pyramid—which likewise appears intended to facilitate soul-travel to the sky across the barrier to the spirit realm.
 
5. There is evidence which goes to prove that the Mound Builders had relations with the people of a semi-tropical region in the direction of Atlantis. Among their sculptures, in Ohio, we find accurate representations of the lamantine, manatee, or sea-cow--found to-day on the shores of Florida, Brazil, and Central America--and of the toucan, a tropical and almost exclusively South American bird. Sea-shells from the Gulf, pearls from the Atlantic, and obsidian from Mexico, have also been found side by side in their mounds.
 
6. What, then, are we to make of the fact that stunningly similar earthworks repeating stunningly similar geometric themes on a stunningly similar scale to those of the Amazon River basin are also found in the Mississippi River basin?

​The odd-numbered passages belong to Donnelly and the even-numbered ones to Hancock. Except for some quaint turns of phrase and some outdated terminology, Donnelly’s passages could slide into America Before unnoticed. I was struck by the “stunningly similar” arguments and evidence, even at more than 135 years’ remove.