= 
> . . > 
7 
1898-99.] THE OLDEST WRITTEN RECORDS OF THE LEAGUE OF THE IROQUOIS. 245 
THE OLDEST WRITTEN RECORDS OF THE LEAGUE 
OF THE IROQUOIS. 
By REV, JOHN CAMPBELL, LL.D. 
(Read Fanuary 22nd, 1898.) 
The late Horatio Hale, a lamented member of the Institute, in his 
Iroquois Book of Rites, follows Lewis H. Morgan in placing the forma- 
tion of the Great League in the middle of the fifteenth century. David 
Cusick, who wrote the History of the Six Nations, takes it back a thou- 
sand years before Columbus. That the confederacy was revived at the 
time suggested by Morgan, Hale, and others, in view of Algonquin 
pressure,-is most reasonable to suppose. That any such confederation 
took place on American soil in the end of the fifth century, as Cusick 
states, is more than improbable, since there is no evidence that even the 
Mound -Builders, who later formed the most ancient population of 
Mexico proper, entered the continent before the eighth century. Some 
rocks and stones engraved with inscriptions in the Mound-Builder char- 
acters, commemorate Iroquois and Huron chiefs, but make no mention 
of a League. Neither is there any mention of such in the inscriptions of 
Siberia and Buddhist India, which were erected by the ancestors of the 
Iroquois and cognate tribes. But writing of essentially the same char- 
acter, and yielding a still more archaic but decidedly genuine Japanese 
form of speech, is found throughout the Sinaitic Peninsula, and the 
country east of the river Jordan, up to the Hauran and beyond it. 
These venerable inscriptions mention repeatedly the kum no to, or Band 
of the League, and one of them names as contemporaries Odatshehte 
and Dekanawidah, two of the League’s founders. Many inscriptions 
also refer to another League founder, the terrible Atotarho of the 
Onondagas, who was the original Ben-Hadad, or in Hittite speech, 
Hadad-ezer, of the race of Hamath, or the mountain door. These men 
flourished before Israel went out of Canaan into Egypt. 
The only attempt at deciphering the Sinaitic inscriptions known 
to me is that of the Rev. Charles Forster in his Sinai Photographed. 
The reverend author, regarding them as Hebrew records corresponding 
