Note 22 — STEPPES AND DESERTS.

p. 11.—“The western part of the Atlas.”

The question respecting the position of the ancient Atlas has been much discussed in modern times, but the oldest Phœnician legends have been confounded in this discussion with the later fables of the Greeks and the Romans. A man who combined deep philological with thorough mathematical and astronomical knowledge, Professor Ideler, (the father,) was the first person who explained and dispelled the confusion of ideas which had previously existed on this subject. I permit myself to introduce here the remarks that clear-sighted and highly-informed writer has communicated to me on this important subject.

“At a very early period of the world the Phœnicians ventured beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. They built Gades and Tartessus on the Spanish, and Lixus and several other towns on the Mauritanian coasts of the Atlantic. They sailed along those coasts northwards to the Cassiterides where they obtained tin, and to the Prussian coast from whence they brought amber; and southwards, past Madeira, to the Cape de Verde Islands. They visited, among other places, the Canaries, and were struck by the appearance of the lofty Peak of Teneriffe, enhanced by its rising immediately from the sea. Through the colonies which they sent to Greece, and especially through that which came under Cadmus to Bœotia, the notice of this mountain rising high above the region of clouds, and of the “Fortunate Islands,” adorned with fruits of every kind, and especially with the golden orange, spread into Greece. Here the tradition was propagated by the songs of the bards, and thus reached Homer. He speaks in the Odyssey (i. 52) of an “Atlas who knows all the depths of the sea, and who supports the great pillars which divide heaven and earth from each other.” He speaks, too, in the Iliad, of the Elysian fields, which he describes as a lovely land in the west. (Il. iv. 561.) Hesiod expresses himself in a similar manner respecting Atlas, who he makes a neighbour of the nymphs the daughters of Hesperus. (Theog. V. 517.) He calls the Elysian fields, which he places at the western limit of the earth, the islands of the Blest. (Op. et dies, v. 167.) Later poets have added further embellishments to these myths of Atlas, of the Hesperides, their golden apples, and the Islands of the Blest, assigned as the dwelling-place of the virtuous after death; and have combined with them the expeditions of the Tyrian god of trade, Melicertes (the Grecian Hercules).

“The Greeks only began at a very late date to rival the Phœnicians and Carthaginians in navigation. They visited the coasts of the Atlantic it is true, but never appear to have penetrated far into the ocean. I doubt whether they ever saw the Canaries and the Peak of Teneriffe. They believed that Atlas, which their poets and legends described as a very high mountain placed at the western limit of the earth, must be sought on the west coast of Africa. It was placed there also by their later geographers, Strabo, Ptolemy, and others. As there is not any single mountain distinguished by its elevation in north-western Africa, the true situation of Mount Atlas has been a subject of perplexity; and it has been sought, sometimes on the coast, sometimes in the interior, sometimes near the Mediterranean, and sometimes further towards the south. It became the custom (in the first century of our era, when the Roman arms penetrated into the interior of Mauritania and Numidia,) to give the name of Atlas to the African chain of mountains which runs from west to east almost parallel with the coast of the Mediterranean. Pliny and Solinus were, however, very sensible that the descriptions of Mount Atlas given by the Greek and Roman poets were not applicable to this long mountain chain; and they therefore thought it necessary to transfer the Atlas, of which they gave a picturesque description in accordance with the poetic legends, to the terra incognita of Central Africa. According to what has been said, the Atlas of Homer and Hesiod can only be the Peak of Teneriffe; and the Atlas of the Greek and Roman geographers must be in Northern Africa.”

I will only add the following remarks to this instructive discussion by Professor Ideler. According to Pliny and Solinus, Atlas rises from a sandy plain (e medio arenarum); and elephants (which certainly were never known in Teneriffe) feed on its declivity. What we now term Atlas is a long ridge. How came the Romans to recognise in this long ridge the isolated conical mountain of Herodotus? May not the reason be found in the optical delusion by which every mountain chain seen in profile, in the prolongation of its direction, has the appearance of a narrow cone? I have often seen in this manner, from the sea, the ends of long chains or ridges, which might be taken for isolated mountains. According to Höst the Atlas is covered near Morocco with perpetual snow, which implies an elevation of above 1800 toises, or 11510 English feet. It is also remarkable that, according to Pliny, the “Barbarians,” i. e. the ancient Mauritanians, called the Atlas “Dyris.” The chain of the Atlas is still called by the Arabs Daran, a word which has almost the same consonants as Dyris. Hornius, on the other hand (de Originibus Americanorum, p. 195), thinks that he recognises the word Dyris in the Guanche name of the Peak of Teneriffe, Aya-Dyrma. On the connection between purely mythical ideas and geographical traditions, and on the way in which the Titan Atlas gave occasion to the image of a mountain supporting the heavens, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, see Letronne’s “Essai sur les Idées cosmographiques qui se rattachent au nom d’Atlas,” in Férussac’s Bulletin universel des Sciences, Mars 1831, p. 10.

Considering that our present (it is true, very limited) geological knowledge of the mountainous parts of North Africa does not make us acquainted with any trace of volcanic eruptions within historic times, it is very remarkable to find among the ancients so many indications of a belief in the existence of this class of phenomena, in the Western Atlas, and in the neighbouring west coast of the continent. The streams of fire, so often mentioned in Hanno’s ship-journal, may indeed have only been strips of burning grass, or signal fires kindled by the wild inhabitants of the coasts to give to each other notice of the danger threatened by the appearance of the hostile vessels. The lofty flame-enlightened summit of the “chariot of the gods” (θεῶν ὅχημα), may recall obscurely the Peak of Teneriffe; but farther on Hanno describes a singular conformation of ground. He finds in the Gulf near the Western Horn, a large island, and in it a salt lake which again contains a smaller island. South of the bay of the Gorilla Apes, the same conformation is repeated. Is this a description of coral productions, of “lagoon islands, (Atolls)” or volcanic “crater lakes” in the middle of which a cone has been upheaved? The Triton lake was not in the neighbourhood of the lesser Syrtis, but near the Atlantic coast. (Asie Cent. T. i. p. 179.) The lake disappeared in consequence of earthquakes which were accompanied by great outbursts of fire. Diodorus (Lib. iii. 53, 55) says expressly, πυρὸς ἐκφυσήματα μεγάλα. But the most wonderful conformation is ascribed to the “hollow Atlas” in a passage hitherto little noticed, occurring in one of the philosophic Dialexes of Maximus Tyrius. This Platonic philosopher lived in Rome, under Commodus. The situation of his Atlas is “on the continent, where the Western Lybians inhabit a projecting peninsula. The mountain has in it towards the sea a semicircular deep abyss.” The precipices are so steep that they cannot be descended; the abyss below is filled with trees, and “one looks down upon their summits, and on the fruits which they bear, as if one was looking into a well.” (Maximus Tyrius, viii., 7, ed. Markland.) The description is so graphic and so individually marked, that it doubtless conveys the recollections impressed by a real prospect.