B: Bacab to Byamspa 67
inhabitants in the Canary Islands; and, most surprisingly, Nahuatl, the language of
the Aztecs, in ancient Mexico. Each one of these disparate peoples played impor-
tant roles in the story of Atlantis.
A revealing cognate is “Atalya,” the name of a prehistoric ceremonial mound
in Biarritz, in Basque country. “Atalaia” is also a site in southern Portugal featur-
ing Bronze Age tumuli, or domed tombs, dating to the high imperial phase of
Atlantis, in the 13th century B.C. Another “Atalya” is a Guanche region high in
the central mountains of Gran Canaria that could pass for a scene taken directly
from Plato’s account of Atlantis. “Atalya” is the name of a holy mountain in the
Valley of Mexico, venerated by the Aztecs at the time of their discovery by the
Spaniards in the 16th century.
Clearly, “Atalya” carries the same meaning in Euskara, Iberian, Guanche,
and Nahuatl, the Aztec language; namely, the description of a sacred mountain,
mound, or mound-like structure, and apparently derivative of “Atlas,” the holy
peak at the center of the island of Atlantis. The “Atalya” of the Basque, Iberians,
Guanches, and Aztecs were probably meant to commemorate, in both word and
configuration, that original Mount Atlas, from which their ancestors fled the
destruction. Indeed, they all preserved stories of a great flood that preceded the
establishment of their own civilizations.
Parallels between Euskara and pre-Columbian speech are underscored by a
traditional ball game known alike to Europe’s Euskotarak and the ancient Maya
of Middle America. Rules of the Basque Pelota are identical in numerous details
to the otherwise unique Maya version. “These similarities,” observed the noted
German Atlantologist, Otto Muck, “form a bond between peoples on two sides of
the Atlantic, pointing to a common cause, a common center: Atlantis, heartland
of this long-vanished maritime power.”
There is an additional link between the Basques and the ancient Canary
Islanders: the Guanches practiced a singular goat cult with rituals likewise observed
in traditional Basque witchcraft. Basque folktales still recount the Aintzine-koak,
their seafaring forefathers who arrived in the Bay of Biscay after “the Green Isle,”
Atlaintika, went under the waves. Atlantidais a national Basque poem describing
their ancient greatness in Atlaintika, its fiery collapse into the sea with most of its
inhabitants, and the voyage of survivors to southwestern Europe. Although com-
posed in the 19th century, “like many other epics committed to paper long after
their first telling,” according to a Reader’s Digest investigation, “it is based on age-
old folk belief and oral tradition.”
In 1930, the famous German writer Ernst von Salomon reported a claim made
by a native of the Pyrenees: “The Basque are the last of a more beautiful, freer,
prouder world, long ago sunk beneath the sea.”
Historian Robert Gallop writes, “These fireside tales of the Basques are a
strange hotch-potch of legends which must have reached them from east and south
and north, and—who knows?—perhaps even from the west, if there is anything to
the Atlantis theory!” (165).
Racially, the Basque have been associated by some anthropologists with the
pre-Indo-European people who occupied the western Mediterranean until the