Atlantis, the Antediluvian World

IT may seem like a flight of the imagination to suppose that the mariner's compass was known to the inhabitants of Atlantis. And yet, if my readers are satisfied that the Atlantean, were a highly civilized maritime people, carrying on commerce with regions as far apart as Peru and Syria, we must conclude that they possessed some means of tracing their course in the great seas they traversed; and accordingly, when we proceed to investigate this subject, we find that as far back as we may go in the study of the ancient races of the world, we find them possessed of a knowledge of the virtues of the magnetic stone, and in the habit of utilizing it. The people of Europe, rising a few centuries since out of a state of semi-barbarism, have been in the habit of claiming the invention of many things which they simply borrowed from the older nations. This was the case with the mariner's compass. It was believed for many years that it was first invented by an Italian named Amalfi, A.D. 1302. In that interesting work, Goodrich's "Life of Columbus," we find a curious history of the magnetic compass prior to that time, from which we collate the following points:

"In A.D. 868 it was employed by the Northmen." (The Landnamabok, vol. i., chap. 2) An Italian poem Of A.D. 1190 refers to it as in use among the Italian sailors at that date. In the ancient language of the Hindus, the Sanskrit -- which has been a dead language for twenty-two hundred years -- the magnet was called "the precious stone beloved of Iron." The Talmud speaks of it as "the stone of attraction;" and it is alluded to in the early Hebrew prayers as Kalamitah, the same name given it by the Greeks, from the reed upon which the compass floated. The Phœnicians were familiar with the use of the magnet. At the prow of their vessels stood the figure of a woman (Astarte) holding a cross in one hand and pointing the way with the other; the cross represented the compass, which was a magnetized needle, floating in water crosswise upon a piece of reed or wood. The cross became the coat of arms of the Phœnicians -- not only, possibly, as we have shown, as a recollection of the four rivers of Atlantis, but because it represented the secret of their great sea-voyages, to which they owed their national greatness. The hyperborean magician, Abaras, carried "a guiding arrow," which Pythagoras gave him, "in order that it may be useful to him in all difficulties in his long journey." (Herodotus, vol. iv., p. 36)

The magnet was called the "Stone of Hercules." Hercules was the patron divinity of the Phœnicians. He was, as we have shown elsewhere, one of the gods of Atlantis -- probably one of its great kings and navigators. The Atlanteans were, as Plato tells us, a maritime, commercial people, trading up the Mediterranean as far as Egypt and Syria, and across the Atlantic to "the whole opposite continent that surrounds the sea;" the Phœnicians, as their successors and descendants, and colonized on the shores of the Mediterranean, inherited their civilization and their maritime habits, and with these that invention without which their great voyages were impossible. From them the magnet passed to the Hindus, and from them to the Chinese, who certainly possessed it at an early date. In the year 2700 B.C. the Emperor Wang-ti placed a magnetic figure with an extended arm, like the Astarte of the Phœnicians, on the front of carriages, the arm always turning and pointing to the south, which the Chinese regarded as the principal pole. (See Goodrich's Columbus, p. 31, etc.) This illustration represents one of these chariots: