The mounds of Europe and Asia were made in the same way and for the same purposes as those of America.  Herodotus describes the burial of a Scythian king; he says, “After this they set to work to raise a vast mound above the grave, all of them vying with each other, and seeking to make it as tall as possible.”  “It must be confessed,” says Foster ("Prehistoric Races,” p. 193), “that these Scythic burial rites have a strong resemblance to those of the Mound Builders.”  Homer describes the erection of a great symmetrical mound over Achilles, also one over Hector.  Alexander the Great raised a great mound over his friend Hephaestion, at a cost of more than a million dollars; and Semiramis raised a similar mound over her husband.  The pyramids of Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia had their duplicates in Mexico and Central America.

Carving on the Buddhist tower, SARNATH, India

The grave-cists made of stone of the American mounds are exactly like the stone chests, or kistvaen for the dead, found in the British mounds.  (Fosters “Prehistoric Races,” p. 109.) Tumuli have been found in Yorkshire enclosing wooden coffins, precisely as in the mounds of the Mississippi Valley. (Ibid., p. 185.) The articles associated with the dead are the same in both continents:  arms, trinkets, food, clothes, and funeral urns.  In both the Mississippi Valley and among the Chaldeans vases were constructed around the bones, the neck of the vase being too small to permit the extraction of the skull. (Foster’s “Prehistoric Races,” p. 200.)

The use of cement was known alike to the European and American nations.

The use of the arch was known on both sides of the Atlantic.

The manufacture of bricks was known in both the Old and New Worlds.

The style of ornamentation in architecture was much the same on both hemispheres, as shown in the preceding designs, pages 137, 139.

Metallurgy.—­The Atlanteans mined ores, and worked in metals; they used copper, tin, bronze, gold, and silver, and probably iron.

The American nations possessed all these metals.  The age of bronze, or of copper combined with tin, was preceded in America, and nowhere else, by a simpler age of copper; and, therefore, the working of metals probably originated in America, or in some region to which it was tributary.  The Mexicans manufactured bronze, and the Incas mined iron near Lake Titicaca; and the civilization of this latter region, as we will show, probably dated back to Atlantean times.  The Peruvians called gold the tears of the sun:  it was sacred to, the sun, as silver was to the moon.

Sculpture.—­The Atlanteans possessed this art; so did the American and Mediterranean nations.