IN THE KHITAN LANGUAGES. 295 
unless we are disposed to admit the prior claims of the Circassian 
sheelday or the Georgian kalaki. 
Nothing can prove more convincingly the wonderful vitality of 
words even among peoples devoid of literature than the comparison 
just instituted between the Basque and the Iroquois. If it be 
allowed that the separation of the two stocks only took place at the 
time when the Hittite empire was overthrown by the Assyrian 
Sargon, for certainly it can be placed at no later period, then it fol- 
lows that 2,600 years have passed since the ancestors of the Vascones 
and those of our Hurons and Iroquois mingled their voices on the 
banks of the Euphrates. But if, as is far more probable, the Basques 
reached their Spanish home by way of Northern Africa, this journey 
must have been undertaken long centuries before, when that Shepherd 
tide of conquest, in which the Kheti formed a mighty wave, was 
driven back upon the desert sands and the Mediterranean shore by 
the great Egyptian Pharaohs of the 18th dynasty. When Moses 
was still a child, and the ancient Hebrew language had not yet 
assuméd a literary form, the Khitan wanderers carried their imperish- 
able speecl. across the Libyan sands to plant it at last in the remotest 
bound of the European continent. 
Even now we hear much of the Atlantis theory, of the population 
of America from Western Europe and Africa by means of a sub- 
merged continent, or by such brave sea daring as brought Columbus 
to the New World, and the very connection of the Basque and 
Iroquois Janguages tempts the question: May there not be truth in 
such a theory? But language, which has established the relationship 
of the peoples, refutes the theory. Our Huron-lroquois came not 
to the east first but to the west, not to the south but to the north. 
Their features, their religion, their character and customs are dis- 
tinctively Koriak, and their appearance upon the stage of American 
history began at a time when, had Biscay or Morocco been their 
starting point, they must have brought with them some traces at 
least of medizval culture. Euskara and Basque, names of a people 
only in Spain, are to the Iroquois Tawiscara and Jouskeha, gods or 
divine ancestors of the race, whose memory has vanished long years 
ago from Guipuzcoa and Navarre. The Basque is a seaman, but 
some other race than his own, that of his mother, it may be, who 
gave the European tint to his dusky complexion, must have taught 
him to hold the sail and brave the dangers of the ocean, for the 
