Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/227

Rh and carried the scalp at the pommel of their saddles; the Jews probably scalped their enemies:

"But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such a one as goeth on still in his trespasses." (Psa., lxviii., 21.)

The ancient Scandinavians practised scalping. When Harold Harefoot seized his rival, Alfred, with six hundred followers, he "had them maimed, blinded, hamstrung, scalped, or embowelled." (Taine's "Hist. Eng. Lit.," p. 35.)

Herodotus describes the Scythian mode of taking the scalp: "He makes a cut round the head near the ears, and shakes the skull out." This is precisely the Indian custom. "The more scalps a man has," says Herodotus, "the more highly he is esteemed among them."

The Indian scalp-lock is found on the Egyptian monuments as one of the characteristics of the Japhetic Libyans, who shaved all the head except one lock in the middle.

The Mantchoos of Tartary wear a scalp-lock, as do the modern Chinese.

Byron describes the heads of the dead Tartars under the walls of Corinth, devoured by the wild dogs:

These resemblances are so striking and so numerous that repeated attempts have been made to prove that the inhabitants of America are the descendants of the Jews; some have claimed that they represented "the lost tribes" of that people. But the Jews were never a maritime or emigrating people; they formed no colonies; and it is impossible to believe (as has been asserted) that they left their flocks and herds, marched across the whole face of Asia, took ships and sailed across the greatest of the oceans to a continent of the existence of which they had no knowledge.