Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix. (191 5), No. 10. 119 



depend upon the evidence of one set of practices, how- 

 ever complex, bizarre and distinctive they may be. 



The positive demonstration that I have endeavoured 

 to build up in this communication depends upon the fact 

 that the whole of the complex structure of the "heliolithic" 

 culture, which was slowly built up in Egypt during the 

 course of the thirty centuries before 900 B.C., spread 

 to the east, acquiring on its way accretions from the 

 civilizations of the Mediterranean, Western Asia, Eastern 

 Africa, India, Eastern Asia and Indonesia and Oceania, 

 until it reached America. Like a potent ferment it 

 gradually began to leaven the vast and widespread 

 aboriginal culture of the Americas. 



The rude megalithic architecture of America bears 

 obvious evidences of the same inspiration which prompted 

 that of the Old World ; and so far as the more sumptuous 

 edifices are concerned the primary stimulus of Egyptian 

 ideas, profoundly modified by Babylonian, and to a less 

 extent Indian and Eastern Asiatic, influences is indubi- 

 table. Comparison of the truncated pyramids of America, 

 of the Pacific, Eastern Asia and Indonesia with those of 

 ancient Chaldea, affords quite definite corroboration of 

 these views. It would be idle to pretend that so complex 

 a design and so strange a symbolism as the combination 

 of the sun's disc with the serpent and the greatly expanded 

 wings of a hawk, carved upon the lintel of the door of a 

 temple of the sun, could possibly have developed inde- 

 pendently in Ancient Egypt and in Mexico (see especially 

 Bancroft, 3, Vol. IV, p. 351). 



But it is not merely the designs of the buildings and 

 their association with the practice of mummification (and 

 later, in Mexico, with cremation;, but the nature of the 

 cult of the temples and all the traditions associated with 

 them that add further corroboration. Thus, for example, 



