The Adamites

Abstract

PHILOLOGISTS will notice with regret a paper bearing the above title in the late number of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. The author appears to have taken up, without proper study, that difficult and dangerous line of argument, the comparison of historical names, and has naturally fallen into the network of delusive fancy which in past generations entangled Jacob Bryant and Godfrey Higgins. Modern philology has abundantly proved that slight, loose, and occasional correspondences in proper names are deceptive as evidence, even among languages of the same family, much more among languages of different families. It is a fair sample of the present paper, that it argues an affinity between the peoples of the Old and New Worlds on the basis of a connection between various names of the Deity, among which are the Russian Bog, the Mantchoo Ab-ka, and the Hottentot Teqoa. The special purpose is to prove that nations are shown by their names to trace descent from an ancestor called Ad—“Adam, or Father Ad.” Thus “the great Hamitic race of Akkad” is interpreted by the aid of Welsh ach—root, lineage,” so as to mean “sons or lineage of Ad;” and the name of Ta-ata, the Polynesian First Man, is “that of the mythical ancestor of the Adamites, reversed, however, and with the addition of ata (aka), spirit”! It is obvious, though unaccountably overlooked in the paper, that two of the clearest cases of the theory may be found near home. The descent of two nations from Father Ad is perfectly recorded by ourselves, when we call the representative of one a Paddy, clearly Ap-Ad (from Ap, “used in the sense of son”), while the other's Adamite ancestor is commemorated by calling his descendant a Ta-ffy.