Transcriber’s Note
A number of typographical errors have been maintained in this version ofthis book. They are marked and the corrected text is shown in the popup.A description of the errors is found in the list at the end of the text.Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been maintained. A listof inconsistently spelled and hyphenated words is found at the end ofthe text.
Prehistoric Structures
——OF——
CENTRAL AMERICA.
WHO ERECTED THEM?
A LECTURE,
BY
MARTIN INGHAM TOWNSEND,
OF TROY, NEW YORK.
TROY, N. Y.:
T. J. HURLEY, PRINTER, HARMONY HALL BUILDING.
1895.
INTRODUCTION.
It was not a long period after 1492, when the great Italian navigatorwith his Spanish crew made their first discoveries upon the centralportion of America, that the Europeans, who had followed the footstepsof Christopher Columbus, began to fall in with structures of greatmagnitude and architectural beauty scattered widely throughout Mexico,Guatemala and Yucatan, &c.; and when the conquest of Peru was achieved,artificial highways and water courses were found there, such as couldhave owed their existence to no people but one with advanced knowledgeof science as well as of the arts of civilized life. No people existedthen upon this continent capable of doing the work which so astonishedthe world.
Thinking men and dreaming men have, from the earliest of thesediscoveries, been busying themselves to find out when, and by whatpeople, these early monuments to human efforts were constructed.
Norwegian discoverers and Welsh emigrants have been pressed into theservice. Our own Donnelly has changed the place where God and historyhad located the origin of the human race in the valley of the Tigris andEuphrates, to a suppositious island in the Atlantic Ocean, and led outthe nations of the earth from there to Asia, Africa and western Europe,until he had no further need of the island and then sunk it in “the[2]bottom of the sea.”
A whole people have been pressed into the service of explaining thismystery. The convenient “Lost ten tribes of the House of Israel” havebeen set to do this work, as their fathers were compelled to “make brickwithout straw” in the Land of Egypt, and then suffered to escape to someland where search for them would be in vain.
The following treatise is written for the purpose of showing—
First.—That the lands where these structures exist were known tocommercial people and to many of the scholars of the countries about theMediterranean Sea for at least a thousand years before the ChristianEra.
Second.—That these discoveries were made by the people of Phœnecia,originally located on the eastern border of the Mediterranean Sea, andby their colonies settled about Carthage in Africa, and throughout Spainand Portugal up to the Ebro; and who traversed every ocean almost asthoroughly as have their Anglo Saxon successors for the past fourhundred years.
Third.—That the origin of the people who made t