* * *

A true representative of the Enlightenment in the diversity of his interests, Jean-Sylvain Bailly was one of only two men (Fontenelle was the other) to hold concurrent memberships in three of France's leading learned societies: admitted to the Académie des sciences in 1763, he was subsequently elected to the Académie française in 1783 and appointed by Louis XVI to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1785. Bailly held by inheritance a sinecure as guardian of the royal collection of paintings, was actively involved in efforts to establish a new model hospital to remedy the horrific conditions in which the sick were lodged in the Hotel-Dieu of Paris, and served alongside Benjamin Franklin on a special scientific commission created to evaluate the claims of Franz-Anton Mesmer regarding the healing powers of animal magnetism. He also dabbled in Freemasonry and Illuminism, joining the Loge des Neuf soeurs and befriending Antoine Court de Gebelin, whose researches into the “primitive world” may have contributed to Bailly's subsequent speculative prehistory. Bailly hereafter played a major role in the early stages of the Revolution and was elected mayor of Paris in 1789, but, as a product of the Old Regime culture of politeness and patronage, he quickly found himself out of his depth. His decision to send troops to quell an antiroyalist demonstration on the Champ de Mars on 17 July 1791 ended in bloodshed, an offense for which he died on the guillotine on 12 November 1793.Footnote ⁶

Trained as an astronomer and author of a scholarly paper on the moons of Jupiter, Bailly developed an interest in the history of astronomy in the ancient and modern worlds, and published a series of volumes on the subject. His search for the ancient origins of astronomy, however, drew him increasingly away from solid, well-documented scientific facts into the realm of prehistorical speculation. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, generations of scholars, scientists, and antiquarians had grappled with questions of historical chronology, seeking to reconcile the timelines of classical antiquity with the “sacred history” of the Bible. Anthony Grafton observes that, as humanist scholars rediscovered the ancient histories of Egypt, Phoenicia, and Mesopotamia via Greek sources, “The neatly defined, relatively short time line of the Bible began to fray,” as this evidence suggested “that the world was far older than the Biblical account stated.”Footnote ⁷ New revelations from Jesuit scholars at the court of Peking further compounded these concerns, as China's recorded history antedated the accepted date of the biblical Deluge.Footnote ⁸ Suzanne Marchand has written that “chronological battles were so very passionate and consequential because . . . it was assumed that ‘priority in time implied superiority in doctrine.’”Footnote ⁹ Similarly, Paolo Rossi has written that “the claim that there were histories older than sacred history could seem . . . an attack on the truth of Christianity and a sacrilegious statement.”Footnote ¹⁰ If this root civilization was not that of the biblical patriarchs, what was to become of sacred chronology and the story of human origins and the dispersion of peoples narrated in the book of Genesis?

To resolve such disputes, many scholars turned to the increasingly precise science of astronomy to provide empirical support or refutation for venerable but opaque sacred texts. As early as the fifteenth century, chronologists had drawn upon precisely datable astronomical phenomena (eclipses, conjunctions of planets, etc.) to corroborate the timeline of ancient history.Footnote ¹¹ Because celestial bodies shift position over the centuries, early modern scholars reasoned that the positions of the constellations in ancient astronomical charts could be used to calculate the precise dates in which those charts were composed. The eminent astronomer Isaac Newton used such methods to formulate a new chronological system, which was debated by classical scholars such as Nicolas Fréret, and, at the close of the eighteenth century, an “Egyptian zodiac” discovered in the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt caused great controversy, as its defenders claimed that it revealed the position of the stars around 13,000 BC—millennia before the accepted biblical date of Creation.Footnote ¹²

While Greek sources reported that the Egyptians and Chaldeans had been the first astronomers of the ancient world, Jesuit scholars on mission in Asia revealed that the Indians and Chinese had also charted the stars and recorded eclipses from a very early date, revelations that skeptics such as Voltaire trumpeted as proof of the unreliability of biblical chronology. While Bailly's history of astronomy included a discussion of Indian astronomical tables allegedly dating back to 3102 BC (a provocatively antediluvian date), he came to suspect that the true origins of science and civilization lay farther to the north. He stated this suspicion in his Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne (1775), arguing that accurate astronomical observations coincided with gross errors and superstitions in the annals of these ancient peoples, which suggested to him that they had merely copied the discoveries of a more advanced civilization that had since been forgotten. Bailly also reported that both Ptolemy and Zoroaster had written that the length of the day at the summer solstice was twice its length at the winter solstice, an observation which was incorrect for Greece and southern Asia, but correct at the forty-ninth parallel of latitude, where the length of the day varied from sixteen hours in June to only eight in December.Footnote ¹³ These intriguing theses called the attention of Voltaire, leading to an extended epistolary dialogue between the astronomer and the philosophe, then in the final years of his remarkably long and productive life.

Voltaire's interest in India grew over the final decades of his life, as it increasingly appeared to him as the most plausible candidate to displace the biblical Holy Land as the cradle of civilization. Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, first published in 1756 but written over the course of many years, presented India and China as the first advanced civilizations of the ancient world, while the Philosophie de l’histoire, written in 1765 as a preface to the former work, asserted that “the Indians around the Ganges River were possibly the earliest human beings forming a people.”Footnote ¹⁴ Voltaire's sources on ancient India included the Shastabad, a fragment included by J. Z. Holwell in his history of India, and the Ezour-vedam, an allegedly ancient text brought to him from India by an admirer, the chevalier de Maudave. Neither of these “sources” is today considered authentic: Holwell's fragment, supposedly reconstructed from memory from a copy lost in the upheavals of the Seven Years War, presents a rational “natural religion” of the sort favored by eighteenth-century deism, while the latter, a dialogue debating the merits of monotheism and polytheism, was, in the words of Friedrich Max Müller, the preeminent orientalist of the nineteenth century, a “crude forgery” composed by early modern Jesuits for the conversion of Hindus. Nevertheless, Voltaire would make extensive use of both texts in his campaign to undermine sacred chronology and to stress the greater antiquity of South and East Asia over the biblical lands.Footnote ¹⁵ Urs App has recently observed that “Voltaire created a narrative to serve a particular agenda” and “almost single-handedly transformed some missionary jottings from the South Indian boondocks into the ‘world's oldest text’. . . the Old Testament of his deism.”Footnote ¹⁶

Though impressed with Bailly's history of astronomy, Voltaire was unconvinced by his claims of the northern origins of the science. Declaring, “I am convinced that everything comes to us from the banks of the Ganges,” Voltaire responded that the Brahmans, “dwelling in such a lovely climate and to whom nature bestowed all of its gifts, must, it seems to me, have had more leisure to contemplate the stars than the Tartars and the Uzbeks.”Footnote ¹⁷ By contrast, he argued that “Scythia has never produced anything but tigers, who have devoured our lambs,” and asked, “Is it believable that these tigers departed from their wilds with quadrants and astrolabes?”Footnote ¹⁸ Rolando Minuti has noted that such “zoomorphic metaphors” were central to Voltaire's representations of the “barbaric” peoples of Central Asia, and served within the philosopher's macronarrative of the rise of world civilization to juxtapose the destructive, animalistic nature of nomadic peoples with the cultivation of the arts and sciences by urban-based civilizations, depicting the former as “the historical antagonists of civilization.”Footnote ¹⁹ Consequently, although Voltaire praised as “ingenious and probable” Bailly's assertion that the difference in the length of the day between summer and winter would have inspired the first astronomical observations, he suggested that this contrast would have been sufficiently notable in the far north of India, at the thirty-sixth parallel. He noted that the Greeks credited India as a source of ancient wisdom, and asked, “Has anyone ever known a Greek philosopher to seek the sciences in the land of Gog and Magog?” Though he acknowledged that the Brahmans of contemporary India did not seem to live up to their ancient reputation, Voltaire continued, “Consider, I beg of you, that there is no longer a Plato in Athens or a Cicero in Rome.”Footnote ²⁰ Nevertheless, Voltaire was gracious and generous in his thanks to Bailly, calling his book “a masterpiece of science and genius.”Footnote ²¹

Unfortunately, the old philosophe's death in 1778 cut off any further debate over the origins of astronomy. Bailly nonetheless continued to expound his theories of prehistory in the form of a series of letters, twenty-four in all, addressed to Voltaire. Edwin Burrows Smith suggests that Bailly, recognizing “a first-class opportunity to acquire publicity,” concluded that “there was nothing to be lost and much to be gained by turning this private correspondence into a public debate.”Footnote ²² Bailly subsequently published this correspondence as Lettres sur l’origine des sciences et sur celle des peuples de l’Asie (1777) and Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon, et sur l’ancienne histoire de l’Asie (1779), which together presented a strikingly original interpretation of the origins and development of civilization.

Bailly's rejection of South and East Asia as the birthplace of civilization reflected prevailing Enlightenment assumptions regarding climate causality and the relationship between climate, forms of government, and the advance of the arts and sciences. In the Esprit des lois, Montesquieu argued that “the cowardice of the peoples of hot climates has almost always made them slaves and the courage of the peoples of cold climates has kept them free,” and popularized the theory, first articulated by the ancient Greeks, that extremes of both hot and cold stunted the physical and intellectual development of man, while the temperate zone allowed humanity to reach full fruition.Footnote ²³ These sentiments were echoed by the preeminent naturalist of the eighteenth century, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, whose Histoire naturelle stressed the superiority of the inhabitants of the temperate zone to the peoples of the poles and the tropics alike, declaring of the former, “It is in this climate that one should form an idea of the true natural color of man,” from which the other “varieties” of humanity had degenerated.Footnote ²⁴

At the same time that Montesquieu and Buffon stressed the superiority of the temperate environment, they and many of their contemporaries also began to reassess the relative merits of East and West. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Jesuit missionary–scholars, learned travelers, and Enlightenment philosophes, notably Voltaire himself, had celebrated the antiquity and wisdom of the Orient, reflecting the humanist admiration of the classical past and the authority of ancient tradition.Footnote ²⁵ As stadial theories of historical progress took root in the later Enlightenment, however, subsequent authors instead emphasized oriental “decadence” and contrasted the older, but seemingly stagnant, civilizations of the East with the younger, but more dynamic, civilization of Europe. Comparing the state of astronomy in both societies, the Histoire de l’Académie des sciences wrote in 1759 that “the genius of the Chinese, though very admirable, is greatly inferior to that of the Europeans.”Footnote ²⁶ The abbé Mably echoed this contrast between Western dynamism and oriental stagnation, writing, “two thousand years ago the Chinese had the same amount of knowledge that they have today.”Footnote ²⁷ Speaking of Asia more broadly, Montesquieu concurred, writing that the “laziness of the spirit” of oriental peoples ensured that “laws, mores and manners . . . remain in the East today as they were a thousand years ago.”Footnote ²⁸

Bailly drew upon such climate determinism to argue that the science of astronomy had emerged in the north and degenerated in the south, writing in his Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne,

In accordance with Enlightenment climate determinism, Bailly argued in the Lettres sur l’origine des sciences that the peoples of India and China lacked the “spirit of invention” and were “without energy or movement.”Footnote ³⁰ Citing the Jesuit scholar Parrenin on the conservatism of the Chinese court astronomers, who perceived any novelty as dangerous and threatening, Bailly remarked, “If we in Europe thought as they do, we would not have had Descartes, Galileo, Cassini, or Newton.”Footnote ³¹ Bailly concluded that the Chinese “have at no time had the true spirit of the sciences and, to put it bluntly, they have been lacking in genius.”Footnote ³² Similarly, he contrasted the alleged “decadence” of modern India with its glorious past, writing, “I see everywhere among them a degenerated philosophy, precepts whose meanings they have lost, physical truths covered with a figurative style that gives them the character of fable.”Footnote ³³

The Jesuit missionary sources upon which both Voltaire and Bailly relied for information on ancient India further reinforced this narrative of past glory and present decadence. Dhruv Raina has observed that Jesuit treatises on India claimed that Hindu “idolatry” was a degenerate descendant of the original pure natural religion of mankind, which emerged following the dispersal of peoples after the destruction of the tower of Babel, an interpretation designed to support the dogmas of monogenesis and the universality of primordial monotheism. Similarly, Jesuit authors, such as père Coeurdoux, traced the migration of the first Brahmans to India from the north, implicitly linking them to a common biblical origin.Footnote ³⁴ Echoing such theologically inspired arguments in a secular register, Bailly argued that “the Indians are strangers to themselves,” which he explained by arguing “that the Brahmans are not Indians. They acknowledge this, and say that the Brahmans arrived from the north. This is the tradition and the proof of a migration.”Footnote ³⁵ He further wrote,

Bailly stated his hypothesis that “the sciences born at this northern latitude descended toward the equator to enlighten the Indians and the Chinese and that, against the prevailing opinion, the light of knowledge came from the north toward the south.”Footnote ³⁷ He recognized that his theory went against the established wisdom of his time, writing,

However, he argued that, on the contrary, it was more likely that men would have come in from the cold to settle under warm climates than the reverse, noting, “I would not dare propose to the people of Provence to go to take up residence in Petersburg.”Footnote ³⁸ In fact, as we shall see, Bailly would argue that gradual changes in global climate gave rise to the southward migration of this primordial people from its ancient northern home.

* * *

Bailly's first volume of letters posited the existence of a lost primordial civilization that had influenced all the others, but offered no specifics on the name, location, or fate of that civilization. His second volume, in contrast, offered a startling and original explanation, linking his theory of the primordial civilization to the story of the rise, expansion, and destruction of Atlantis as described in Plato's Timaeus and Critias. Bailly anticipated the objection that Atlantis was a didactic fable, “fruits of the brilliant and moral imagination of Plato,” but argued that “the majority of poems presented as historic, have subjects indeed drawn from history,” citing Virgil's Aeneid as an example. Consequently, he wrote of Plato's Atlantis, “It is evident that the morale here is but an accessory. He is a historian, who traces a great catastrophe and draws from it a great lesson.”Footnote ³⁹

The quest for Atlantis is one of the oldest themes in Western culture, which benefits from the prestige of Plato's authorship and offers obscure yet tantalizing promises of lost wisdom, wealth, and evidence regarding the remote prehistory of mankind. David King has written,

Pierre Vidal-Naquet has observed, however, that Plato's account of the rise and fall of Atlantis is best understood as a critique of Athenian maritime imperialism and commerce from the vantage point of austere republicanism that the author had already advocated in the Republic. Footnote ⁴¹ Lyon Sprague de Camp concurs, noting that Plato's contemporaries and immediate successors recognized the fictional and didactic nature of the story of Atlantis, and that it was the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, and the Renaissance scholars who rediscovered their works, who first interpreted Atlantis as a real place.Footnote ⁴²

Bailly's interpretation of the Atlantis story as historical fact reflected a strongly euhemerist approach toward classical mythology. Frank Manuel defines this approach (named for the late antique philosopher Euhemerus) as “the idea that in their origins the gods had their existence on earth, that they were ordinary human beings, and that the myths were commemorations of their acts in this world.”Footnote ⁴³ Anthony Grafton has observed that “the euhemerist interpretation of classical myths as reworkings of genuine events” served as “an interpretive Swiss Army Knife to legions of interpreters pagan and Christian,” and was widely used by classical authors themselves and by their humanist heirs in the Renaissance.Footnote ⁴⁴ Many early modern scholars, such as Joseph Scaliger, the sixteenth-century pioneer of comparative chronology, made use of classical mythology to reconstruct the earliest history of humanity, believing, as Grafton writes, “that the myths were not veiled accounts of philosophical doctrines but confused accounts of historical events.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Accordingly, while Nicolas Fréret, the most accomplished French classicist of the early eighteenth century, had concluded that Atlantis was a “philosophical fiction,”Footnote ⁴⁶ Bailly argued that the gods of the ancient Greeks, Phoenicians, and Egyptians were in fact the kings and heroes of Atlantis, and further noted that legends of the prehistoric reigns of giants, demigods, fairies, and genies represented a sort of ancestral memory of the grandeur of the Atlanteans. Bailly then turned to Diodorus Siculus, who presented Plato's Atlanteans as the first people, who were brought together and civilized by Uranus. Discussing the subsequent mythological history of the wars of succession between the gods and the titans, down to Jupiter's defeat of his father Saturn, Bailly speculated that this mythological narrative was rooted in the real dynastic history of the first civilization of man.Footnote ⁴⁷ Suggesting that, with the passage of time and the loss of direct contact with the Atlanteans, the legends of their great deeds became increasingly mythologized, Bailly suggested a hypothetical modern parallel:

Drawing upon the assumption that Atlantis was a real, if now vanished, place, Bailly then began to assemble the clues left by Plato and other ancient authors as to its location, arguing that previous scholars had erred in looking to the west, rather than to the north.Footnote ⁴⁹ He compared the Greek myth of Prometheus, who was bound to the Caucasus Mountains for the crime of giving fire to mankind, to the Zoroastrian cult of sacred fire, and argued that the two stories reflected a common origin in the frozen north, where the maintenance of an eternal flame was essential to the preservation of life. He wrote that “as the climate masters us, men demonstrate by their customs the lands in which they were born,” and argued that the veneration of fire could not be native to the hot lands of the south.Footnote ⁵⁰ Bailly declared that the sun, which “reigned as a despot” under the tropics, could only be an object of veneration to the peoples of the north, where its disappearance threatened the destruction of life and its return marked the renewal of hope, and cited the Hyperborean Apollo as “a god of these cold lands, a foreign god, later adopted by the Greeks.”Footnote ⁵¹

Bailly's shifting of Atlantis from the west and south of Europe toward its north and east, and his attribution of a central role for the Caucasus in the remote prehistory of mankind, were not the isolated musings of a solitary thinker, but reflected the prevailing historical, aesthetic, and geographical assumptions of his time. The invention of “Caucasian” as a category to describe the fair-skinned peoples of Europe and western Asia drew upon Enlightenment theories of human diversity, as well as on neoclassical aesthetic values common to the eighteenth-century European elite. Bruce Baum has noted that “the ancient Greeks . . . saw the Caucasian range as the site of the suffering of Prometheus” and as the “land of Colchis,” to which Jason and the Argonauts sailed to seek the Golden Fleece. Baum further observes that “in Christian Europe, the most important source for beliefs about humanity's origins in the Caucasus was the then-prevailing account of where Noah's ark landed after the flood.”Footnote ⁵² Baum notes that the first author to use “Caucasian” as a racial category was the German Christoph Meiners in 1785, and that the term entered the mainstream of scientific discourse in the third edition of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's thesis On the Natural Variety of Mankind, published in 1795. Blumenbach explained his choice of the term by declaring that the Caucasus “produces the most beautiful race of men . . . and because . . . in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind.”Footnote ⁵³ Given the aesthetic, religious, historical, and political factors at play, the designation of the Caucasus as the birthplace of mankind was perhaps overdetermined. Unlike his German contemporaries Meiners and Blumenbach, it should be noted, Bailly never used “Caucasian” as a racial descriptor, and in his account the Caucasus was not the original home of the Atlanteans, but the location from which they spread civilization to the ancient Greeks. Such subtle distinctions, however, were easily glossed over as the notion of a “Caucasian race” gradually took root in the European imagination.

As fantastic as his theories now appear, Bailly was not the first European writer to suggest that the Atlantis of the ancients lay in the far north. A century earlier, Olaus Rudbeck, a professor of medicine at the University of Uppsala, had become obsessed with the theory that Atlantis was in fact Sweden, and that Greek legends of the Hyperboreans similarly referred to his native country. During the final years of his life, Rudbeck devoted himself to advancing this theory in a multivolume work in Latin and Swedish, Atlantica (1679), which Gunnar Eriksson has described as “a historical work of extreme patriotism,” made up of “classical mythology, Edda poetry, and endless breakneck etymologies.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Perhaps oversensitive to the views of scholars from Latin Europe who considered Scandinavia a land of barbarism, only recently Christianized and civilized, Rudbeck sought to prove that Sweden was, on the contrary, the original spring of Western culture, from which the arts and sciences later flowed southward to the Greeks, Phoenicians, and other ancient peoples. Even though, as David King notes, “by the early eighteenth century Atlantica had fallen into the realm of parody (and) Rudbeck's name was becoming synonymous . . . with wild theorizing,”Footnote ⁵⁵ the notion of a northern Atlantis had been advanced into European historical discourse, and was available to Bailly in his efforts to prove that the arts and sciences had first been developed near the Arctic Circle.

Bailly's theory of a northern Atlantis, however, raised more difficulties than it resolved. Reflecting Aristotelian assumptions of a golden mean, Enlightenment climate theory, as developed by Montesquieu and Buffon, presented both polar and equatorial climates as barriers to human development.Footnote ⁵⁶ In his reply to Bailly, Voltaire expressed doubts that astronomy could have been invented in “a climate covered with snow and horrid frosts,” concluding that “the land of lovely nights is the only one where astronomy could have been born.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The harsh climate of northern Asia posed a barrier to Bailly's theories that would need to be explained away.

In order to address these objections and to explain the southward migration of the ancient Atlanteans, Bailly adopted a model of global cooling first proposed by Buffon, who sought to explain the presence of elephant (actually mammoth) remains in northern Europe, arguing that the earth had once been much hotter than it was at present, and that zones now frigid were once temperate and pleasant to inhabit. “Is it not singular,” he remarked,

Explaining that the “central fire” at the core of the Earth preserved sufficient warmth on the planet to make it habitable even in winter, Bailly cited Buffon's hypothesis that the Earth had begun as a globe “heated to incandescence, which then cooled slowly as a result of its great mass,” over the course of many centuries, “to descend from the state of incandescence to a habitable temperature, and thence to evolve, from this temperature which we enjoy today, to the cessation of heat, to the state of ice and death, which must be the end of all things.”Footnote ⁵⁹

It is surely significant that while Bailly's first mention of a lost primordial people, in a chapter entitled “De l’astronomie antediluvienne” in the Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne (1775), invoked the biblical Deluge as the caesura between prehistorical and historical time, in the Lettres sur l’Atlantide, written just four years later, Bailly replaced sacred history with a purely secular explanation derived from contemporary natural science. Observing that “there is therefore a constant cause, which over the long term produced these changes,” Bailly suggested that the original home of mankind lay far to the north, inside the Arctic Circle, which, as the Earth gradually cooled, was the first region of the world to become habitable, but which man later had to flee as this cradle of humanity was covered by a wall of ice. Like the biblical paradise, this Arctic Eden was no longer accessible: “Nature has closed it off. The sea is as solid as our rivers in a rigorous winter, a belt of ice envelops the pole, and this ancient world is dead from the cold.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Buffon's model of global climate change offered Bailly a plausible macrohistorical explanation for the rise and subsequent disappearance of a primordial civilization in the far north. Calling Tartary “the cradle of all peoples, the stage where great and ancient scenes were enacted,” Bailly declared,

He concluded with an appeal to Voltaire, “I dare to beseech you, Monsieur, to believe in the cooling of the earth, as you believed in the attraction of Newton. You are in France an apostle of this great truth; I offer another to you that merits the same homage.”Footnote ⁶²

Bailly's eclectic methodology not only drew on mythology, geology, and climate theory, but also made use of philology. This is not at all surprising, as etymology was central to early modern “sacred geography,” which sought to derive the origins of contemporary peoples from biblical progenitors, while, in the nineteenth century, a much more rigorous science of philology would become central to the reconstruction of the genealogical trees of world civilizations.Footnote ⁶³ Bailly himself was no linguist (in fact, his limited mastery of classical languages was cited by those who opposed his entry into the Académie des inscriptions et belles lettresFootnote ⁶⁴), but in one of his early works, an “Eloge de Leibnitz,” composed a decade earlier for Frederick the Great's Berlin Academy, Bailly had praised the German philosopher for recognizing the importance of the comparative study of language in reconstructing the lost prehistory of peoples, noting that he proposed “to excavate from the very languages of peoples the much-sought knowledge of their origins and kinship.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Bailly returned to this theme in his correspondence with Voltaire, writing, “The structure of language reflects the accent of climate . . . Languages, well understood, well studied, may therefore reveal the origin of peoples, their kinship, the lands they once inhabited, the point of knowledge they have achieved and the degree of maturity of their spirit.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In response to Voltaire's objection that no solid historical evidence proved the existence of the primordial northern civilization, Bailly insisted,

He compared the conservation of Sanskrit among the Brahman elite with the continued use of Latin among French érudits, and suggested that, just as the French had originally been civilized by the Romans, this linguistic evidence demonstrated that the Indians had once been civilized by a foreign, Sanskrit-speaking people.Footnote ⁶⁸

Although Bailly could not read Sanskrit, or any other ancient or modern Asian language, he anticipated the role that philology would play in the reconstruction of migration routes and the construction of the Aryan myth in the following decades. He then discussed the efforts at historical linguistics of Leibniz, de Brosses, and Court de Gebelin, noting with approval Leibniz's classification of the languages of the north as “Japhetic” (after Noah's son, whose descendants were believed to have colonized Europe), and those of the south as “Aramean,” a divide which Bailly associated with the two sides of the Caucasus.Footnote ⁶⁹ As we shall see, subsequent philologists and philosophers would ground a new science of man upon this linguistic distinction, describing the former group as Indo-German, Indo-European, or Aryan, and the latter as Semitic.Footnote ⁷⁰

* * *

Bailly's work was applauded by some of his contemporaries. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder spoke approvingly of the “daring hypotheses of Bailly,” and expressed the hope that such researches would offer new insights into the remote prehistory of humanity.Footnote ⁷¹ The Correspondance littéraire offered a noncommittal, but generally favorable, assessment of Bailly's volumes, and concluded,

Friedrich-Melchior Grimm, who oversaw the Correspondance littéraire, also sent a copy of Bailly's Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne to Catherine the Great, who was sufficiently pleased by the astronomer's suggestion that the arts and sciences might have been born in Siberia that she sent him a jeweled box as a gift.Footnote ⁷³ While the empress of Russia was flattered at the notion that world civilization might have emerged from within her domains, some of Bailly's compatriots were offended that his account failed to recognize the contributions of their own ancestors. The abbé Nicolas Baudeau argued in a Mémoire à consulter pour les anciens Gaulois that it was the ancient Gauls, the ancestors of the French, who had pioneered astronomy, citing Bailly's claim that the science was developed around the forty-ninth parallel of latitude. Bailly dismissed Baudeau's patriotic exaltations, though he acknowledged that “our good Gauls are descended from the common homeland like other peoples.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Bailly's hypothesis found a few stalwart defenders in France, particularly among the esoteric and Illuminist circles in which he dabbled. A minor philosophe, Jean-Baptiste Delisle de Sales, echoed many of Bailly's theories on the origins of civilization in his multivolume Histoire philosophique du monde primitif, which argued that the root civilization of mankind had been located in the Caucasus, but was subsequently displaced by barbarian invasions and its traces effaced by the cooling of the Earth. Another shadowy figure, the mystic Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, later developed the same theme in his similarly named Histoire philosophique du genre humain. Fabre d’Olivet borrowed from Baudeau as well as from Bailly, for while he began his history of the world with the Aryan conquest of India, he identified his protagonist, Rama, as a Celtic Druid expelled from his ancestral home for rejecting human sacrifice. Fabre d’Olivet also racialized prehistory into a struggle for global dominance between different races of mankind, each associated with a different continent and having separate origins, in which the (white) Aryan conquest of (black-ruled) India was the first turning point in the history of humanity.Footnote ⁷⁵

Bailly's fellow scientists, admirers of his more empirically based work on the history of astronomy, were divided with regard to his bolder speculations on prehistory. One of the most favorable was Buffon, his colleague in the Académie des sciences, who cited Bailly's early work on astronomy and the history of science in his 1778 Des époques de la nature. In this work, Buffon concurred with Bailly that the “root civilization” of mankind must have existed high in the mountains and plateaus of Central Asia, writing, “it is thus in the northern regions of Asia that the stem of human knowledge arose; it is on this trunk of the tree of science that the throne of its power was raised.” Knowledge of the sciences could only emerge, Buffon continued, among “active men in a happy climate, under a clear sky to observe and on fertile ground to cultivate.” He argued that, as the Earth cooled and the flood waters receded, these conditions emerged first “in the middle of Asia, from the fortieth degree of latitude to the fifty-fifth . . . this land more elevated, more solid than the others . . . over five hundred leagues from the oceans.” This region, he concluded, saw the emergence of “the first people worthy of the name . . . creator of the arts, sciences, and of all useful knowledge.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Buffon did not, however, endorse all of Bailly's claims, for he claimed that the Atlantis of the ancients was a lost continent in the Atlantic which once united Europe and America, making possible the migration of both animals and men from the former to the latter.Footnote ⁷⁷

Nevertheless, Buffon praised Bailly's Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne as displaying “shrewdness of insight and depth of erudition,” and repeatedly sponsored the astronomer as a candidate for admission to the Académie française. This nomination was vetoed by d’Alembert, who wrote to Voltaire that “Bailly's dream about the ancient people, which has taught us everything except their name and existence, seems to me one of the most hollow that man has ever dreamed.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Bailly was finally admitted to the Académie française in 1783, a year after d’Alembert's death. In his address on the occasion of Bailly's admission to the Académie, the marquis de Condorcet damned the astronomer's speculative prehistory with faint praise, likening Bailly's elegant style to “novels and theatre pieces,” and telling him,

Condorcet thus dismissed the Lettres sur l’Atlantide, as even Bailly himself occasionally described it, as a roman philosophique.

Classicists and clerical commentators were still more negative in their assessments of Bailly's speculative prehistory. Such opposition is hardly surprising, for as Pierre Vidal-Naquet observes, Bailly's Atlantis “plays a double role: it is both a substitute for Judea and a real counterpart of the Biblical Eden.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Similarly, Chantal Grell writes that in Bailly's “deist” system, “the Atlanteans come to occupy the place previously reserved for the Jewish people” as “the sole actor of primitive history.”Footnote ⁸¹ One Catholic reviewer complained that in Bailly's work, “the Hebrew people is totally denied the prerogative of having enlightened the nations, as almost all respectable scholars have hitherto believed.”Footnote ⁸² An anonymous reviewer of the Lettres sur l’Atlantide in the Journal des sçavans highlighted the many discrepancies between Bailly's representations of Atlantis and that presented in Plato's Timaeus and Critias, drew attention to the former's dependence on Rudbeck's much-mocked Atlantica, and suggested that classical mythology was better understood allegorically, rather than as a distorted representation of real prehistoric events. The reviewer concluded that Bailly “would better occupy his time with the progress of astronomy . . . rather than in laborious researches into its obscure origins.”Footnote ⁸³

An extensive and scathing review of the Lettres sur l’Atlantide appeared in the Année littéraire in 1779, written by the abbé Thomas-Marie Royou, the brother-in-law of Voltaire's longtime nemesis Élie Fréron and the latter's successor as the journal's editor. Criticizing Bailly for adopting “the spirit of system” and “transforming history into a novel,” Royou declared that in Bailly's work, “the chimera succeeded reality, and paradox rises over the debris of truth.” The reviewer lamented that Bailly,

The result of his efforts, Royou wrote, was “an immense but fragile edifice, a work of pure imagination, which the lightest breath of criticism could destroy from top to bottom.” Even though “until now all scholars have agreed in considering the inhabitants of the southern countries as inventors of the arts and sciences,” Bailly “suspected the existence of an ancient people, who long before the Deluge, cultivated and advanced the science of astronomy,” even though “he did not yet know the name of this famous people, nor the places it inhabited, nor the era which saw its birth.” Royou then faulted Bailly for “transporting to the Spitzberg the cradle of the world, of the sciences and arts,” even though “all historians, all ancient and modern geographers placed the island of Atlantis in the ocean of that name, opposite the columns of Hercules, which are nothing other than (the mountains flanking) the strait of Gibraltar.”Footnote ⁸⁴ He faulted Bailly for errors of both classical erudition and scientific logic, noting that the ancients claimed that the Atlanteans did not worship the sun, but rather shunned and hated it, as they lived under a hot and burning climate, while the same authors reported that the home of the Scythians was nearly deserted because of the extreme cold of its climate. The abbé further observed that Bailly's account exploded sacred chronology by inventing a people that existed long before the Indians and Chinese, and criticized Bailly for replacing the Bible with “Oriental traditions . . . the most absurd collection of fables, except for his own, that the imagination of man has ever created.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Royou's denunciation of Bailly's Atlantean hypothesis gave rise to a scandal that ultimately drew in the censors of the Old Regime and the archbishop of Paris. Louis Petit de Bachaumont observed at the time that “the astronomer claimed to be quite religious; he appealed to M. le Garde des Sceaux against such a serious charge.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Bailly's protestations of religious orthodoxy are unconvincing, as George Armstrong Kelly describes him as “a deist without personal religion,” while a contemporary admirer, Delisle de Sales, observed that Bailly “wished to be a philosophe in his opinions, but not to bear the stamp.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Similarly, Edwin Burrows Smith notes that Bailly was a cautious man who wished to avoid the controversies that some of his more daring contemporaries seemed to relish. Bailly's protestations of good faith did, however, satisfy the censors, who not only did not ban the Lettres sur l’Atlantide but even forced Royou to issue a half-hearted apology to the astronomer.Footnote ⁸⁸

Ironically, it was Bailly's endorsement of a theory of global climate change (one of the only solid planks in the house of cards he constructed) that proved the sticking point with his contemporaries. Delisle de Sales reported that Bailly's theory generated “ephemeral enthusiasm,” but was soon forgotten, as “the voyage of the new Montesquieu to the Spitzberg Atlantis had no more authority than the voyage to the moon of Cyrano de Bergerac.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The orientalist scholar Joseph de Guignes criticized Bailly for situating his root civilization “in Siberia near Selinginskoi and Lake Baikal, a region where nature seems dumb and where the inhabitants were anciently plunged into the greatest barbarity.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The British orientalist William Jones, whose researches into Sanskrit would shape the subsequent development of the Aryan myth, also criticized Bailly for situating the cradle of humanity

As a result of such criticism, Bailly would back down from his most adventurous claims in his subsequent writings. In his Traité de l’astronomie indienne et orientale (1787), Bailly continued to insist that the Brahmans who compiled India's ancient astronomical tables were newcomers who migrated to India from a homeland farther to the north (which he now situated in the vicinity of Tibet), but quietly dropped all explicit references to Atlantis.Footnote ⁹²

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As we have seen, both Bailly and Voltaire had based their arguments regarding ancient India on indirect information from unreliable sources. Dorothy Figueira has observed that the first articulation of the Aryan myth antedated the linguistic evidence later mobilized to support it, writing, “The Veda's ‘discovery,’ ‘scientific’ analysis, and presence in the West as a text would not significantly alter the nonspecialist portrait of the Aryan. In fact, Orientalist scholarship is seen to have provided the documentation necessary to support the Enlightenment conceptual apparatus.”Footnote ⁹³ Figueira further writes that “Enlightenment thinkers idealized the Vedic past in an attempt to find a utopia outside Europe and as an alternative to the biblical tradition,” creating a “new mythology of the past.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Bailly's dialogue with Voltaire was instrumental in this effort to frame a new macronarrative of prehistory.

In the final quarter of the eighteenth century, British scholars in colonial Bengal began the scholarly reconstruction of ancient Indian civilization that Raymond Schwab has labeled the “Oriental Renaissance.” The most famous and talented of these early orientalists, William Jones, would unwittingly give new life to Bailly's theories of primordial peoples and prehistoric migrations. A far better linguist than Bailly and an employee of the East India Company with direct access to Sanskrit texts and Hindu pandits, Jones made the linguistic discoveries that would transform the European understanding of prehistory in the following century. Jones unveiled this discovery in his 1786 essay “On the Hindus,” writing that

B. B. Lal has noted that, while Jones's observations were initially confined to the domain of linguistics, they inspired

Jim Schaffer and Diane Lichtenstein observe that “perhaps no other scholarly hypothesis of the eighteenth century . . . has continued to so influence such diverse disciplines as linguistics, history, biology, ethnology, and political science,” and observe that “the legacy of post-Enlightenment western scholarship concerning South Asian prehistory and history has been for the arguments to be repeated so often as to become dogma.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Ironically, Jones, whose work was to give apparent scientific backing to Bailly's speculative prehistory, was himself quite skeptical of Bailly's bold assertions. Though he praised Bailly as a “wonderful ingenious man and a very lively writer,” Jones was far from convinced of the existence of a lost civilization in the far north, or of the transmission of civilization from north to south. Even if one were to discount the question of climate, and agree with Bailly on the gradual cooling of the Earth, Jones argued, the barbarity of the Central Asian Tartars made the former's theory of a north-to-south transmission of culture untenable. Jones wrote that Bailly's hypothesis ignored the fact of “an immemorial and total difference between the savages of the mountains, as the old Chinese justly called the Tartars, and the studious, placid, contemplative inhabitants of these Indian plains.” Jones also rejected Bailly's argument that Sanskrit, “of which he gives a most erroneous account,” was proof of the existence of a lost ancient civilization with its origins in the far north.Footnote ⁹⁸

Thomas Trautmann has observed that Jones approached the study of ancient India from very different epistemological assumptions than did the French philosophes Voltaire and Bailly. While Voltaire was drawn to India by its potential to refute the Genesis account of human origins, and Bailly framed his northern Atlantis as an alternative to the biblical Eden, Jones, like most of his countrymen until the mid-nineteenth century, continued to operate within what Trautmann calls the “Mosaic ethnology,” which sought to reconcile the nascent discipline of orientalism with Holy Scripture by tracing the descent of all the peoples of the ancient world from the three sons of Noah. Trautmann argues that the predominant interpretation of Jones as the pioneer of comparative linguistics and of the “Aryan myth” obscures the antiquarian's own project of “forming a rational defense of the Bible out of the materials collected by Orientalist scholarship.”Footnote ⁹⁹ For this reason, Jones could not accept Bailly's extended timeline for human civilization, nor his rejection of Eden in favor of Atlantis.

The legend of a prehistoric, Sanskrit-speaking root civilization of mankind, suggested by the works of Bailly and Jones, was popularized in the early years of the nineteenth century by the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel, who studied Sanskrit in Paris with the British orientalist Alexander Hamilton in 1803–4, compared the discovery of ancient Indian Vedic texts with the revival of classical learning in fifteenth-century Italy, arguing that this “Oriental Renaissance” would “have no less influence on the sphere of European intelligence.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Schlegel claimed that Sanskrit was not only related to Greek and Latin, as Jones had argued, but was “of higher antiquity” than either, and compared the diffusion of Sanskrit-derived languages throughout Europe and Asia to that of the Romance languages from the ancient Mediterranean to the contemporary New World.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Perhaps most importantly, it was Schlegel who popularized the term “Aryan” to refer to this root civilization, linking it etymologically to the modern German word Ehre, or honor.Footnote ¹⁰²

From this linkage of Aryans and Ehre (which is linguistically correct if historically misleading), it was but a small step to imagine a wandering, conquering Herrenvolk before the dawn of time, whose unique genius gave rise to all of the advanced civilizations of antiquity. Suzanne Marchand has observed that Friedrich Schlegel's celebration of the ancient “Aryans” laid “the foundations for a sort of exclusionary philology in which the speakers of Sanskrit and its Indo-European spin-off languages are credited with all humankind's great achievements.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Nevertheless, the emergence of the “Aryan myth” was a gradual process, and Marchand argues that “while language groups were coalescing and hierarchies and lineages were being formed using fragments of linguistic and ethnic data, we do not yet see, by the 1850s, fully racialized human histories.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Schlegel's essay, in fact, concluded that the linguistic connection between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin proved that “the Europeans and Asiatics form only one great family,” and the philosopher expressed his hopes that, in the light of this discovery, “all prejudiced and narrow ideas will thus unconsciously disappear.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Marchand argues, however, that by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, “lines drawn by philologists were . . . hardening into rigid cultural stereotypes with something like the force of biological boundaries,” and that “from the romantic era forward, the study of Sanskrit and its related cultures and languages was constantly, if not primarily, linked to Germanic ancestry in a way that was easily racialized.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The most distinguished orientalist of the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Max Müller, cautioned against such analytical slippage, writing that “there are Aryan and Semitic languages, but it goes against all rules of logic to speak . . . of an Aryan race, of Aryan blood, or Aryan skulls.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Far too often, however, this prescient warning was ignored by scholars and polemicists seeking “scientific” proof of European superiority.

As the Aryan myth gained currency in nineteenth-century linguistic, historical, and philosophical theories, the noble Aryans were juxtaposed against a variety of less exalted Others. Linguists and Orientalist scholars in colonial India pitted the northern Aryans against the “Dravidians,” speakers of unrelated languages in the southern part of the subcontinent. The Aryan/Dravidian divide was naturalized into Indian discourse during the colonial era, with the Hindu traditionalist Bal Tilak citing Europe's Aryan myth, including Bailly's theory of Siberian origins, in The Arctic Home of the Vedas, while critics of Brahman authority, such as the Dalit spokesman Ambedkar, rejected both the myth and the caste society which it was cited to support.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Müller contrasted the Aryans, whom he envisioned as a civilized, agricultural society, with the nomadic “Turanians” of the Central Asian steppes. However, from the early nineteenth century, once again through the mediation of linguistics, Aryans were most often compared to the speakers of “Semitic” languages, a term popularized by August Ludwig von Schlözer and later by Ernest Renan. The specific usage of the term “Aryan” to mean “non-Jewish” in anti-Semitic discourse appears to have surfaced first in fin de siècle Vienna, which numerous historians have identified as the birthplace of a “sharper key” of radicalized anti-Semitism and pan-Germanic nationalism, the tragic consequences of which are too well-known to require further elaboration here.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

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What, then, was Bailly's contribution to the subsequent emergence of the Aryan myth? One of the few contemporary historians to have analyzed Bailly's speculative prehistory, Dan Edelstein, has argued that Bailly's theory of the climate-driven migration of the Atlanteans “mobilized the myth” of Atlantis, making it a “‘floating signifier,’ an indicator of cultural superiority and originality that could be affixed to any place and people with whom the migrant Atlanteans might have come into contact.” Consequently, Edelstein concludes, “rather than Orientalize Atlantis, [Bailly] Atlanticized the Orient, making a snow-white, northern European people, the Hyperboreans, responsible for the cultural achievements and splendors of the East.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ While Edelstein is correct, in my view, in sketching a genealogy linking Bailly to the later racial-historical speculations of Madame Blavatsky and of the racial ideologues of National Socialism, I believe that this genealogy leads him to read into Bailly's text a biological racial determinism that was absent from the astronomer's work. Nowhere in his Lettres sur l’Atlantide does Bailly identify the Atlanteans as a white race; in fact, nowhere in his works does he discuss skin color at all, nor divide humanity into distinct races with fixed biological characteristics.

Rather than the rigid racial hierarchies of the nineteenth century, Bailly's work instead strongly echoes the climate determinism of Montesquieu and Buffon. Although scientific racism was to some degree enabled by the secularization of European thought in the eighteenth century, it was but one of the many intellectual progeny of the age, and would only come to fruition much later, and under a quite different set of assumptions and values. Marvin Harris has noted that climate determinism remained the dominant paradigm in Enlightenment theories of human difference, arguing that “scientific racism remained a minority point of view until after the French Revolution.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Therefore Bailly's account of the ancient Atlanteans, in contrast to the subsequent elaboration of the “Aryan myth,” does not racialize the different prehistoric peoples whose speculative history he discusses, but rather attributes their character to what Montesquieu called “the empire of climate.”

Nevertheless, Edelstein is correct to observe that Bailly's project effectively appropriates the cultural achievements of ancient Asia by attributing them to a still-older primordial civilization, which is linked by language, scientific outlook, and dynamism to contemporary Europe. Dhruv Raina concurs with this assessment, writing that Bailly's “antediluvian hypothesis may retrospectively be seen as an attempt to divest non-European peoples of the invention of science.”Footnote ¹¹² Bailly's theory of a northern Atlantis, after all, emerged out of his broader project on the origins and early history of astronomy. In his Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne, Bailly first hypothesized the existence of an enlightened antediluvian people, “the teacher of all the peoples of the Orient, peoples who were but the depositaries, until the genius of Europe came to take up the thread of astronomical ideas.”Footnote ¹¹³ Bailly's macrohistorical works exemplify what Karen O’Brien has called “enlightened narratives,” secular accounts trumpeting the advance of science and progress over superstition and barbarism.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Arctic Atlantis displaces the biblical Eden as the cradle of humanity, and the systematic study of nature, rather than divine revelation, becomes the source of all wisdom.

Bailly's enlightened narrative, however, was founded on a deeply problematic distinction between active and passive peoples, although Bailly himself attributed this dichotomy to climate causality rather than to intrinsic “racial” characteristics. Nevertheless, as this essay has demonstrated, Bailly denied the ancient civilizations of Asia the honor of being the first instructors of mankind, and bestowed that title on a lost people that existed far to the north, and which entered into history by way of the Caucasus, a place which many of his contemporaries and immediate successors celebrated as the cradle of the race of white Europeans. Bailly further contrasted a free, vigorous Europe to an indolent, despotic Asia, a binary opposition by which, Edward Said has argued, modern Europeans came to define themselves in relation to a stereotyped “Orient.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ On the eve of the expansion of European colonialism throughout South Asia, Bailly's work underscored the alleged incapacity of decadent orientals to invent the science of astronomy on their own. His theories of prehistory were thus ripe for appropriation and transformation by successors with different epistemological assumptions and far more explosive and dangerous views of the causes and significance of human difference. Bailly did not create the “Aryan myth” and would surely have repudiated its ultimate conclusions, but he did furnish some of the key materials out of which it was later to be constructed.