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THE LOST CAUCASIAN CIVILIZATION: JEAN-SYLVAIN BAILLY AND THE ROOTS OF THE ARYAN MYTH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2014

DAVID ALLEN HARVEY
DAVID ALLEN HARVEY*
Affiliation:
Division of Social Sciences, New College of Florida E-mail: dharvey@ncf.edu
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Abstract

Jean-Sylvain Bailly, an eighteenth-century French astronomer and polymath, elaborated an original interpretation of the prehistoric origins of civilization which anticipated many of the details of the “Aryan myth.” Bailly argued that Atlantis was the root civilization of mankind, which had invented the arts and sciences and civilized the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians. He situated this primordial people in the far north of Eurasia, and argued that as the cooling of the Earth buried their ancestral home beneath sheets of ice, the Atlanteans were lost to history. Bailly drew eclectically upon science, classical mythology, linguistics, and orientalism to substantiate his case, and argued that the Brahmans who shaped Indian civilization were Sanskrit-speaking Atlanteans. His theories reflected many of the prevailing ideas of the age, such as the climate determinism of Montesquieu and Buffon and the superiority of the dynamic West over the decadent Orient. Though Bailly did not racialize the Atlanteans, his works laid the foundations for the subsequent emergence of the Aryan myth.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , August 2014 , pp. 279 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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