Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/100

82 vessel.—He took my hand and made me rise.—He made my wife rise, and made her place herself at my side.—He turned around us and stopped short; he approached our group.—"Until now Khasisatra has made part of perishable humanity;— but lo, now Khasisatra and his wife are going to be carried away to live like the gods,—and Khasisatra will reside afar at the mouth of the rivers."—They carried me away, and established me in a remote place at the mouth of the streams.' "

"This narrative," says Lenormant, "follows with great exactness the same course as that, or, rather, as those of Genesis; and the analogies are, on both sides, striking."

When we consider these two forms of the same legend, we see many points wherein the story points directly to Atlantis.

1. In the first place, Berosus tells us that the god who gave warning of the coming of the Deluge was Chronos. Chronos, it is well known, was the same as Saturn. Saturn was an ancient king of Italy, who, far anterior to the founding of Rome, introduced civilization from some other country to the Italians. He established industry and social order, filled the land with plenty, and created the golden age of Italy. He was suddenly removed to the abodes of the gods. His name is connected, in the mythological legends, with "a great Saturnian continent" in the Atlantic Ocean, and a great kingdom which, in the remote ages, embraced Northern Africa and the European coast of the Mediterranean as far as the peninsula of Italy, and "certain islands in the sea;" agreeing, in this respect, with the story of Plato as to the dominions of Atlantis. The Romans called the Atlantic Ocean "Chronium Mare," the Sea of Chronos, thus identifying Chronos with that ocean. The pillars of Hercules were also called by the ancients "the pillars of Chronos."

Here, then, we have convincing testimony that the country referred to in the Chaldean legends was the land of Chronos, or Saturn—the ocean world, the dominion of Atlantis.

2. Hea or Ea, the god of the Nineveh tablets, was a fish-god;