Did the Pharaohs, the Babylonians, and the Indians Borrow Their Civilization from Mexico?

In the last issue of "The Woman's Voice" appeared a study by the man of letters Mr. Mohammad Jamil Beyhum on the points of resemblance between Mexico and Egypt in dress, food, and customs, past and present. This resemblance stirred in him the desire to go back to history, hoping to find there a light that would lead to the sources and causes of this resemblance. In this, his second article, he attempts to define the tie that has bound, and still binds, the two countries.

— 2 —

It is commonly held that Christopher Columbus discovered America at the end of the fifteenth century, and on the strength of this illusion people gave this continent the name of the New World. In fact America is an old world, enjoying numerous lofty civilizations and cultures; and perhaps in distant centuries it stood in firm contact with our world, just as it now stands in close contact with it.

Whoever reads the book The Elephant and the Anthropologists by the learned Elliot Smith is seized by wonder, like the author himself, and asks how it came about that the Americans, a thousand years ago or thereabouts, carved statues of the elephant, though this animal does not live in their country; and he asks too, with the author, whether Indian culture passed from India to the American continent, carrying with it the image of the elephant!

And whoever turns the pages of the 1947 datebook which the United States Information Office in Beirut presented at the time to its friends finds his eye arrested by the picture of a village resembling the villages of Egypt, and asks why this picture, so foreign to America, should have been published, when the datebook confined itself to views of American scenes alone. Then he reads, on the page facing the picture, the following:

"This is a view of a village built by the Red Indians about a thousand years ago in the state of New Mexico. The houses were built of a kind of clay which they call 'adobe' — a word taken from the Coptic word for brick — and the Red Indians inhabit these houses to this day."

The many accounts of the antiquity of Mexico's civilization, and the carrying back of that civilization to a very remote age, make us pause a moment and ask whether it was not Egypt and India that borrowed civilization from Mexico — contrary to what is commonly said, that Mexico took it from them. What moves us to this question is what certain historians have related: that the pyramid of Shishiklu, standing in a suburb of Mexico City, the capital, is between four and ten thousand years old. If it is true that this pyramid was built several thousand years ago, then Mexico preceded Egypt in raising pyramids. If not, then the pyramid of Shishiklu was perhaps contemporary with the first pyramid built by the First Dynasty of the Pharaohs, or was built, at the very least, within the ages in which the three pyramids of Giza were raised, under the Fourth Pharaonic Dynasty.

Yet these estimates of mine did not remove every difficulty. Another suspicion presented itself to me from the moment I cast my eye upon the pyramids standing in Mexico: they are built in the form of stepped terraces, and I was told that they chose this form of building according to astronomical principles, by which they reckoned the daily and monthly seasons from the movements of the sun and the moon. The proof of this is that the largest of these pyramids are two, one of which bore the name of the Sun and the other the name of the Moon. Moreover, my eye was caught by statues and raised carvings on these pyramids that are most like the carvings and figures of India, and not far from the carvings of the Babylonians and the Chaldeans. And since the three pyramids of Giza are smooth, with neither terraces nor ornament, I had to ask myself again and again whether Mexico had taken, in ancient times, the idea of the pyramid — and the religious purposes it enfolds — from some source other than Egypt; especially since there has been found among the ruins of Babylon evidence that the ancient Babylonians built their lofty towers in the form of a pyramid stepped in terraces, each terrace smaller in area than the one beneath it, after the manner of the pyramids of Mexico.

And if we grant this view, what then shall we say of the statue crouching before the entrance of the Temple of the Warriors in the ruins of Chichen Itza, in the region of Yucatan? If the idea of the pyramids was not carried over from the Pharaohs, but was taken from others, shall we say that this great statue, which represents a woman's head upon the body of an animal, is likewise not borrowed from the Sphinx couched at Giza?

Then what shall we say of those inscriptions found in Mexico upon the tombs of certain great chieftains and elsewhere, which resemble the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing carved upon stone and papyrus?

Such knowledge remains a secret among secrets, for the excavation of antiquities in Mexico goes back only to the opening of this century. Perhaps time will unveil these riddles for us.