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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2014
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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18 Letter of Voltaire to Bailly, 19 Jan. 1776, reproduced in Bailly, Origine des sciences, 6.
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21 Letter of Voltaire to Bailly, 9 Feb. 1776, reproduced in Bailly, Origine des sciences, 12–14.
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33 Ibid., 56.
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57 Letter of Voltaire to Bailly, 9 Feb. 1776, reproduced in Bailly, Origine des sciences, 12–14.
58 Bailly, Origine des sciences, 266.
59 Ibid., 270, 308.
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61 Ibid., 273.
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85 Royou, review of Bailly, Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon (cont'd), in Année littéraire, 2 (1779), 39–72, 55–6, 59.
86 Cited in Smith, “Jean-Sylvain Bailly,” 477.
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88 On the dispute between Bailly and Royou and its resolution, see Smith, “Jean-Sylvain Bailly,” 477–8.
89 Delisle de Sales, “Vie littéraire et politique de Bailly,” 24.
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99 Trautmann, Aryans and British India, 42. Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races, also notes that many British anthropologists remained wedded to the “Mosaic ethnology” well into the nineteenth century.
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115 Said, Orientalism.
