With
such proofs of international communication, and more than proved
relations between the Indian Aryans and the Phoenicians, Egyptians and
other literate people, it is rather startling to be told that our
forefathers of the Brahmanic period knew nothing of writing.
Admitting, for the argument only, that the Phoenician were the sole
custodians of the glorious art of writing, and that as merchants they
traded with India, what commodity, I ask, could they have offered to a
people led by the Brahmans so precious and marketable as this art of
arts, by whose help the priceless lore of the Rishis might be preserved
against the accidents of imperfect oral transmission? And even if the
Aryans learned from Phoenicians how to write--to every educated Hindu an
absurdity--they must have possessed the art 2,000 or at least 1,000
years earlier than the period supposed by Western critics. Negative
proof, perhaps? Granted: yet no more so than their own, and most
suggestive.
And now we may turn to the Pelasgians. Notwithstanding the rebuke of
Niebuhr, who, speaking of the historian in general, shows him as hating
"the spurious philology, out of which the pretences to knowledge on the
subject of such extinct people arise," the origin of the Pelasgians is
conjectured to have been from--(a) swarthy Asiatics (Pellasici) or from
some (b) mariners--from the Greek Pelagos, the sea; or again to be
sought for in the (c) Biblical Peleg! The only divinity of their
Pantheon well known to Western history is Orpheus, also the "swarthy,"
the "dark-skinned;" represented for the Pelasgians by Xoanon, their
"Divine Image.
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