When in 1824 a neighbor of McCormick began to dig the foundation for a new house, he came across an ancient burial. The grave, judging by the amulets on the deceased, belonged to a priest. The body tissues had decayed long ago, but something like a plaster mask remained on the face, which, unfortunately, crumbled into dust when it was touched. But McCormick remembered well and immediately drew an extremely strange face of a man, his nose began not between the eyes, but from the middle of the forehead, forming a characteristic bony ridge on the skull. McCormick donated his drawing of the preserved skull and objects found in the burial to the local archaeological museum
In 1912, sensational reports appeared in many newspapers referring to the grandson of the famous archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann - Paul. His grandfather, as you know, unearthed Troy, while his grandson “unearthed” the will of his grandfather, in which he said that he allegedly attacked the traces of Atlantis.
According to the grandson, during the excavation of Troy, the grandfather found a bronze vessel with an inscription in Phoenician language "From the king of Atlantis Chronos", and during excavations in Egypt - some papyri with information about Atlantis. Among other Egyptian finds of his grandfather, there was also an "Atlantean mask" made from carefully selected pieces of amber.
Instead of a mask, Paul Schliemann showed reporters a black-and-white photograph of her, hinting at a mysterious safe where grandfather's findings were hidden.
But the First World War broke out, and the sensation did not take place, and Paul Schliemann disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
Archaeologists have unanimously expressed an amber mask - an obvious fake, since amber is found only on the Baltic coast and in much smaller quantities in Alaska, but not in Egypt. However, soon amber jewelry was also found in the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs of the fifth dynasty, and in 1954, the Mexican archaeologist Alberte Luillier found amber in the grave of a noble Mayan priest. A mask was made on the face of the deceased from many pieces of amber. At the same time, a photograph of the mask presented by Paul Schliemann was extracted from the archives. Along the way, they remembered the humble Irish teacher McCormick.
His drawing and Schliemann's mask belonged to the same unknown human race, whose nose began in the middle of the forehead.
From McCormick's drawing and Schliemann's photograph, it followed that people of this race had a European type of face, characteristic of the Spaniards or the French, differing only in the shape of the nose. The size of the found skeleton of the "priest" determined the
height of its owner, which significantly exceeded the height of the average Irishman.
After World War II, archaeological excavations continued in Central and South America. The Mayan cities of Tikal and Copan Palenque were excavated there. And again traces of the “long-nosed ones” were found, in Palenque they dug up the famous jade mask and figurines of warriors and priests with the same characteristic noses. And curiously, the masks and images of the “long-nosed ones” belonged mainly to persons of high position - leaders and priests. The same characteristic noses were found in the deities of the Sun God and the God of corn, most revered by the Maya people.
The skull, found by McCormick, and the burial at Palenque are more than two millennia apart. According to archaeologists, the skull is at least three millennia old, and the time of the Palenque culture corresponds to 111-8 centuries AD e. However, the Maya and other Indian tribes kept legends about tall blue-eyed and fair-haired people who sailed to them on ships from the country of Tollan or Aztlan.
And now let's get a grasp of the text of Heinrich Schliemann's "will" to which his grandson refers. “In St. Petersburg, in a museum, I found an old scroll of papyrus from the time of the reign of Pharaoh Saint from the second dynasty from 4571 BC. This papyrus contains a description of the pharaoh's expedition to the west in search of traces of the country of Atlantis, from where the ancestors of the Egyptians arrived 3,350 years ago. The expedition returned six years later without finding traces of the legendary country. In another papyrus from the same museum, owned by an Egyptian historian
Manetho, it is specified that the history of Egypt began 16,000 years ago. The inscription I found on the Lion's Gate in Mycenae says that Misor, from whom the Egyptians descended, was the son of the Egyptian god Thoth, the son of a priest from Atlantis. ' Falling in love with the daughter of the king Chronos, he fled from Atlantis and after long wanderings arrived in Egypt. It was Thoth who built the first temple in Sais and passed on to people the knowledge gained in his native country."
Interested in this message, the Polish atlantologist Ludwik Seidler turned in the early 60s with a corresponding request to the Hermitage, which houses the largest collection of Egyptian papyri in our country, but received a discouraging response. There are no papyri, which Heinrich Schliemann refers to, in the Hermitage and never have been. Then Seidler wrote to his colleague, the Soviet atlantologist NF Zhirov, the author of the only serious monograph on Atlantis in the USSR. Zhirov, responding to the request of his Polish colleague, made a request to the well-known Egyptologist, a member of the Hermitage, Professor I. M. Lurie. The answer was the same - the Hermitage never had these papyri. Moreover, the Pharaoh Saint from the second dynasty is not known to historians, just as the ancient Egyptian historian Manetho is unknown to scientists.
However, in the world famous book by K Keram "Gods, Tombs, Scientists" there is a list of Egyptian rulers, in which a pharaoh named Sandi or Setenes is mentioned among the rulers of the second dynasty. As you can see, the difference is only in writing, and numerous foreign atlantologists and Egyptologists refer to the works of Manetho.
One can, of course, declare Heinrich Schliemann's letter of will, written by his playful grandson, whom many consider a fraud, to be falsified. Soviet writer Gleb Golubev in his book "Unsolved Mysteries" even claimed that Heinrich Schliemann did not have any grandson and that some American journalist was engaged in these hoaxes from his name (in fact Paul Schliemann is a very real person and he is really the grandson of Heinrich Schliemann).
It is interesting that other foreign atlantologists, in particular, the American Ignatius Donnelly, who published the classic monograph on Atlantis in 1882, also refer to the “Petersburg papyri” containing information about Atlantis. There is also domestic evidence, for example, of the famous poet and writer Valery Bryusov, who during the revolutionary years was very interested in the secrets of Atlantis and his brother, the famous Soviet archaeologist, Doctor of Historical Sciences. Alexander Yakovlevich Bryusov, who acquainted Valery Bryusov with the translations of the Egyptian papyri of the Hermitage containing information about the legendary continent. That is, before the revolution, the mysterious papyri were there, and then disappeared.
But at the beginning of 1917, after the February Revolution, as you know, the Provisional Government settled in the Hermitage, which greatly displaced the exhibits. The next revolution, the October Revolution, inflicted even greater damage on them. As the father of the current director of the Hermitage, Academician BB Piotrovsky, bitterly joked at one time, “two revolutions are equivalent to one fire”. And there was also the Great Patriotic War, when the treasures of the Hermitage were urgently packed and exported. It is possible that it was after these shocks that the mentioned papyri disappeared. True, another version is put forward when domestic and foreign atlantologists became interested in them, the authorities ordered to remove the "seditious" documents out of sight so that they would not violate the newly built history of mankind.
But let's not throw another stone into our historical treasury. Before the revolution, there were also private collections of papyri in St. Petersburg, in particular, Golenishchev, Likhachev, Turaev, Tsereteli, with which Schliemann and other atlantologists could get acquainted. Hopefully, these important historical documents are not completely lost.
Samoilova, historian