Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/133

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trait, though vestiges of it, probably carried thence by trade, are to be found in Tahiti and China of the third millenium B.C. The center of the culture trait of quippu-reckoning is apparently South America.

''Recently, the quippus recording populations and tribute of the Incan Empire have been found. From them we have learned that the Incan Empire at the time of the conquest ruled about three hundred million souls, or three times the population of the present United States. Today, Peru has a population of five million.''

$2$See Articles on Empire of The Moon and The Spider Totem.

$3$''The Nazca culture is of Mexican affinities according to Kroeber. According to him, not only the truncated pyramids, but also the three-legged vessels of the Nazcas suggest a Mexican source. Other authorities have noted a similarity in design between this locality and Oaxaca, while the similarity of Viracocha and Wixicocha as names for The Great Reformer is also significant.''

$4$''Tello is a full-blooded Quichua Indian, who absorbed the legends of his people during his Indian childhood. He says that his earliest memory is the tiny Indian village with its curious half-pagan festivals, and the ancient songs which his mother sang as she sat weaving lama wool into blankets whose patterns reached into the depths of the past. Today he is the world's greatest authority upon his people and their early neighbors, the author of many books and the head of the Lima Museum.''

$5$''According to the Popul Vuh, the first rulers who were burned in the Sacred Fire of Xibalba were the aggressors in that war. Their posthumous and orphaned twin sons by a Xibalban princess then returned to their grandmother where they were raised but were ill-treated by their elder half-brothers of the monkey-totem. They then spent most of their youth in the northern woodland shooting birds with their blow-pipe (Algonkins?) and returning to their home defeated the elder brothers and took over their music and culture before setting out to revenge the death of their father and overthrow their mother's people.''

By THE EDITORS OF AMAZING STORIES

VER since Amazing Stories first published Mr. Richard S. Shaver's "mysterious" alphabet which he claimed to have received from the "caves" and which was claimed by him to be the "key" to all languages, we have received repeated requests for reprinting of the alphabet itself, and for more information about it. This article is an attempt to comply with these requests, and to present more completely and more accurately the principles involved.

Originally we published only the alphabet, with the meanings attributed to each letter. We did not go into "shades" of meaning, but gave the bare framework—which was sufficient to arouse a storm of interest, and sufficient to prove to the veriest tyro that the alphabet is important. We did not go into the "ancient language," the "mother" tongue of all languages, at all. We did not because many basics were not fully understood (nor are they now). However, due to the work that has been done by Mr. Shaver, by your editors, by many readers, we are able to give a more complete picture—and we are able to present an hypotheses which will certainly prove startling to the experts, and will even more certainly arouse a storm of disagreement and criticism. (See Mr. Shaver's article called "Proof" in this issue.)

Many of our readers will have read Lancelot Hogben's "The Loom of Language," which is perhaps the most authoritative book in print today on the languages of the world and their relationship to one another, and their relationship to the dead languages of the past. He has traced modern languages back and ancient languages forward. He has given the step-by-step evolution of words up to the present day. It is well accepted today that English (especially as spoken in America) is a composite of many languages. There is German, French, Italian, Latin, Old English, Spanish, etc., etc., in it. It is a "potboiler" language. All this has been done by "comparison," both along grammatical and historical paths. It has been done by piecing together the bits of a "jigsaw puzzle." Historically there is a record of progressive continuity which afford some clues that are the basis of many other clever deductions.

The sum total of all this work has been to arrive at modern English as the resultant.

No one has stopped to consider that all of the work done on languages would apply equally well if we "turned about" and looked the other way, and considered modern English as causative. In other words, if there is any similarity in basics in Sanskrit and in English, might it not be because English is the common denominator, rather than the reverse, which even Lawrence Hogben admits is not true.

Shaver, along with his other "unproved" statements, has maintained steadfastly that the mother tongue of all mankind (including those super races