Pacific Archaeology

And Its Meaning

By Arthur J. Vogan, Pros

r pHE origin of the peoples of the Pacific has been intriguing the

minds of scientists and laymen for

the past century. Whatever the arguments concerning this, it is quite certain that we shall never know the real truth. The author of this article, who has done much research in the Pacific, believes that the Polynesians and Fijians have affinities in ancient Africa, the Middle East and in India. He tells you here why he believes this.

EVERY one of the thousands of weird ; wild, or exquisitely beautiful islands of the North-Western Pacific— mostly the summits of long-submerged mountain ranges of a buried land con nection with Australia —bears upon it, fascinating evidence of a past history of Asiatic peoples, who, flying from vic torious foes, or seeking that change of fortune that has peopled Australia, have left carvings, inscriptions, cave temples, and earth-works that surely deserve the attention of our thinking, and cultivated minority.

In allowing these scientifically invalu able records of the past to pass away un heeded, we are rendering ourselves liable to the coming censure of a more en lightened public.

Wave after wave of advancing semi civilisations have flamed across the earth, including our corner of the Pacific —and then retired again. Between Australasia and Asia are thousands of evidences of this.

In the Yasawa Islands in Fiji, I dis covered most interesting examples of a former people, after Mrs. Routledge, the authority upon the Easter Island giant statues, wrote me. about 1913, advising me to search the Fiji group, as it had “not been done.”

Here I found cave temples, carvings, and inscriptions; and at the extreme northern point, a great figure group, 40 feet high, of a man in a sitting posi tion, with a child upon hi& knee.

The man wears the snow boots, and the child the pointed straw cap of ancient Persian art; and the group seems to syn chronise, in motive, with a famous bas relief in Egypt, andT with ancient carv ings in Yucatan—which seems to show that religious and art ideas had a com mon source. .

Even the name of these islands, in the Fiji group, is of value to the enthusiastic linguist, for Yasawa means “Eight Islands” in the ancient Japanese tongue. rE Yasawa Islands have other attrac tive features about them besides purely archaeological ones.

For the Fijians tell me that they came from Africa—their ancestors belonging to Lake Tanganyika (as their language cor roborates) who were sailor slaves to the Arabs, who had ships, in those far off days, capable of carrying 500 persons, and were trading and mining through the Indian Ocean and our Pacific Islands.

Wreckage upon the prpverbially dan gerous reefs easily explains their pres ence in Vanua Levu, their Fijian home- D. Daunt and other leading authori ties show us that ancient Babylon was not situated in the Euphrates Valley, but in India whence the earliest naviga tion of the Pacific Ocean evidently occurred. So we need not be surprised to find that splendid figure group at the northern point of Yasawa referred to was, judging by the fact that

the man wears the well-known snow boots and the child the pointed straw cap of ancient Iranian art, apparently done by Persian artists.

In the Trobriand group, south of Rabaul, in 1931, I found beautifully made and designed earthen burial jars which seem to connect with that mysterious old civilisa- Lion of the Indus mouth, where the ancient sites of Harappa and Mohenjodaro (modern names) have produced similar ones to searchers; and where stone rings, used in the Carolines as money, also occur. The inhabitants of these old cities believed that the Pipal tree was inhabited by a god, because of its everquivering leaves—an idea that still obtains in many parts of India.

The Polynesians came from Northern India; and probably began, as humans, in what are now the arid wastes of the Pamir plateau and Gobi desert. The name of the New Zealand branch—whom we have the temerity to call “Mowry,” when the correct pronounciation is Ma-ori, derived from “Mauru” the Sun-god that gave the Romans the name of their wargod, Mars. Their empire was the first

that obtained in India, Major Burton, the famous Asiatic authority, showed me that the Maori tongue is closely allied with the Persian; and that during the Indian Mutiny, when an English officer, on one occasion, dis tinguished himself by an act of heroism, his attendant, a Sepoy, exclaimed; “Ake!

Ake! Kia kaha!”, which is an ancient war-cry that one hears to-day on New Zealand football fields. The well known Maori word “Kaianga” (literally “place of eating”) or home, according to the great Indian authority, H. D. Daunt, was the alternative name for the King dom of Sumer; and many Egyptian words show an Indian origin, and are closely akin to Maori ones.

ANY may ask what is the use of this ill peculiar kind of knowledge? Just as biology is generally acknow ledged to be the science of living, and teaches us how to live healthily, so archaeology is the equally valuable science that tells us of past attempts at civilisation. Why they failed, and why, in places, they succeeded for a time.