Читать книгу The City of the Sacred Well онлайн

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Landa says in his book that some old men of Yucatan related to him the story, handed down for many generations, that the first settlers had come from the east by water. These voyagers were ones “whom God had freed, opening for them twelve roads to the sea.” If there is any truth in this tradition, these progenitors may have been one of the lost tribes of Israel. An interesting side light on this hypothesis is the distinctly Semitic cast of countenance of some of the ancient sculptures and murals found at Chi-chen Itza and in other old Maya cities. The dignity of face and serene poise of these carved or painted likenesses is strikingly Hebraic.[2]

While we are in the field of conjecture, we may as well consider the old Greek myth of the lost continent of Atlantis. From the geological point of view, it is not impossible. The whole of Yucatan is low and was once the bottom of the sea, as is indicated by its surface rock and sand. Furthermore, the stretching out of the Antilles as though to form a bridge with the Azores, and the shallowness of the intervening Atlantic Ocean, lends plausibility to the idea that there may have been a cataclysmic upheaval of the ocean-bed during some past era, and not long ago, geologically speaking—an upheaval which created the land of Yucatan and caused what was land to the eastward to sink beneath the level of the Atlantic. What is more natural to suppose than that in some prehistoric period the lost continent of Atlantis did exist and proved an easy means of passage between Europe and America?