Post by blackcrowheart on Mar 20, 2006 16:42:03 GMT -5
Ancients in America Long before Columbus sailed to North America,
this hemisphere may have been visited by other Europeans, ancient
Romans, Chinese and Japanese - even the ancient Egyptians!
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue...
Many of us learned that rhyme, part of a longer history poem, when being
taught in school that Christopher Columbus discovered America. Although
nothing can be taken away from Columbus' daring voyage, he certainly was
not the first to arrive on the shores of the Americas. For one thing,
there were already people here - many Native American nations inhabited
what later became North and South America and even the Caribbean islands
where Columbus landed. Columbus probably wasn't even the first "white
man" to make it here. It's fairly well documented that Icelander Leif
Ericsson successfully sailed to North America in the year 1000 - almost
500 years prior to Columbus's voyage.
In fact, there's a growing amount of proof suggesting that a lot of the
familiar history of human exploration and "discovery" by our ancestors
as we were taught it may be quite wrong. There is hard evidence of
ancient civilizations making their mark in places where, according to
traditionally accepted history, they just shouldn't be. Here's an
overview of some of the most remarkable and fascinating cases.
Greeks and Romans in the New World
* Coins:
* Roman coins have been found in Venezuela and Maine. * Roman
coins were found in Texas at the bottom of an Indian mound at Round
Rock. The mound is dated at approximately 800 AD. * In 1957 by a
small boy found a coin in a field near Phenix City, Alabama, from
Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, and dating from 490 B.C. * In
the town of Heavener, Oklahoma, another out-of-place coin was found in
1976. Experts identified it as a bronze tetradrachm originally struck in
Antioch, Syria in 63 A.D. and bearing the profile of the emperor Nero.
* In 1882, a farmer in Cass County, Illinois picked up bronze coin later
identified as a coin of Antiochus IV, one of the kings of Syria who
reigned from 175 B.C. to 164 B.C., and who is mentioned in the Bible.
* Pottery: Roman pottery was unearthed in Mexico that, according to
its style, has been dated to the second century A.D. * Inscriptions:
* In 1966, a man named Manfred Metcalf stumbled upon a stone in the
state of Georgia that bears an inscription that is very similar to
ancient writing from the island of Crete called "Cretan Linear A and B
writing." * In the early 1900s, Bernardo da Silva Ramos, a Brazilian
rubber-tapper working in the Amazon jungle, found many large rocks on
which was inscribed more than 2,000 ancient scripts about the "Old
World." * Near Rio de Janeiro, high on a vertical wall of rock -
3,000 feet up - is an inscription that reads: 'Tyre, Phoenicia, Badezir,
Firstborn of Jethbaal..." and dated to the middle of the ninth century
B.C. * Near Parahyba, Brazil, an inscription on Phoenician has been
translated, in part, as: "We are sons of Canaan from Sidon, the city of
the king. Commerce has cast us on this distant shore, a land of
mountains. We set [sacrificed] a youth for the exalted gods and
goddesses in the nineteenth year of Hiram, our mighty king. We embarked
from Ezion-Geber into the Red Sea and voyaged with ten ships. We were at
sea together for two years around the land belonging to Ham [Africa] but
were separated by a storm [lit. 'from the hand of Baal'], and we were no
longer with our companions. So we have come here, twelve men and three
women, on a... shore which I, the Admiral, control. But auspiciously may
the gods and goddesses favor us!" * The Kensington Stone
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.fate\
mag.com/2006%5F01art1.html> , discovered in Kensington, Minnesota in
1898 contains an inscription describing an expedition of Norsemen into
the interior of what is now North America. It's estimated that this
expedition took place in the 1300s. * In 1980, P.M. Leonard and J.L.
Glenn, from the Hogle Zoological Gardens, Salt Lake City, visited a rock
outcropping in Colorado that was reputed to be inscribed with "peculiar
markings." Leonard and Glenn believe they are excellent examples of
Consainne Ogam writing - a type ascribed to ancient Celts. One of the
many inscriptions was translated as: "Route Guide: To the west is the
frontier town with standing stones as boundary markers." * A
fist-sized, round stone was found during the early 1890s in an cemetery
near Nashville, Tennessee. Its front was inscribed with symbols thought
to be Libyan, pre-100 A.D. style. It translates as: "The colonists
pledge to redeem."
* Pictures: An experienced botanist has identified plants in an
ancient fresco painting as a pineapple and a specific species of squash
- both native to the Americas. Yet the fresco is in the Roman city of
Pompeii. * Statues: In 1933, in a burial at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico,
archaeologist José García Payón discovered a small carved head
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.econ\
.ohio%2Dstate.edu/jhm/arch/calix.htm> with "foreign" features in an
undisturbed burial site. It was later identified by anthropologist
Robert Heine-Geldern as "unquestionably" from the Hellenistic-Roman
school of art and suggested a date of "around AD 200." * Structures:
Many stone chambers
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.scie\
nce%2Dfrontiers.com/sf103/sf103a02.htm> dot the New England countryside
and most archaeologists insist they are all potato cellars built long
ago by farmers. Others argue that they are too sophisticated for such a
mundane application. One, is built into a hillside at Upton,
Massachusetts, has sophisticated corbelling that follows they style of
Irish and Iberic chambers. It's theorized that it was really built by
Europeans around 700 AD - long before the Leif Eiriksson. * Ships:
In 1886, the remains of a shipwreck was found in Galveston Bay, Texas.
Its construction is typically Roman. * Toys: A doll made of wood and
wax was found deep in a "Well of Sacrifice" at Chichén Itzá,
Mexico, on which is written Roman script. * Tombs: In the Mayan
ruins of Palenque, a stone sarcophagus was found that is very much in
the style of the ancient Phoenicians.
The Far-Traveling Egyptians
* Statues: In 1914, archaeologist M.A. Gonzales was excavating some
Mayan ruins in the city of Acajutla, Mexico when he was surprised by the
discovery of two statuettes
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.scie\
nce%2Dfrontiers.com/sf098/sf098a01.htm> that were clearly Egyptian. One
male and one female, the carvings bore ancient Egyptian dress and
cartouches. They are thought to depict Osiis and Isis. *
Inscriptions: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.crys\
talinks.com/egyptaustralia.html> have been found in New South Wales,
Australia. Located on a rock cliff in the National Park forest of the
Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, the enigmatic carvings have been known
since the early 1900s. There are more than 250 carvings of familiar
Egyptian gods and symbols, including a life-sized engraving of the god
Anubis. The hieroglyphs tell the story of explorers who were shipwrecked
in a strange and hostile land, and the untimely death of their royal
leader, "Lord Djes-eb." From this information, scholars have been able
to date the voyage to somewhere between 1779 and 2748 BC. * Fossils:
In 1982, archaeologists digging at Fayum, near the Siwa Oasis in Egypt
uncovered fossils of kangaroos and other Australian marsupials. *
Language: There are striking similarities between the languages of
ancient Egypt and those of the Native Americans that inhabited the areas
around Louisiana about the time of Christ. B. Fell, of the Epigraphic
Society, has stated that the language of the Atakapas, and to a lesser
extent those of the Tunica and Chitimacha tribes, have affinities with
Nile Valley languages involving just those words one would associate
with Egyptian trading communities of 2,000 years ago. * Artifacts:
Near the Neapean River outside Penrith, New South Wales, a scarab
beetle - a familair Egyptian symbol - carved from onyx was unearthed.
Another was found in Queensland, Australia. * Tombs: The April 5,
1909 edition of The Phoenix Gazette carried a front-page article about
the discovery and excavation of an Egyptian tomb in the Grand Canyon
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.geoc\
ities.com/TheTropics/Lagoon/1345/Canyon.html> by none other that the
Smithsonian. The Smithsonian has since denied knowledge of any such
discovery.
The Scattered Tribes of Israel
* Inscriptions:
* In 1889, the Smithsonian's Mound Survey project discovered a stone
in a burial mound in eastern Tennessee on which is inscribed ancient
Hebrew lettering. Known as The Bat Creek Stone
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.econ\
.ohio%2Dstate.edu/jhm/arch/batcrk.html> , experts have identified its
letters as being Paleo-Hebrew dating from the first or second century
A.D. Some of the letters spell out: "for Judea." * An abridged
version of the Ten Commandments was found carved into the flat face of a
large boulder resting on the side of Hidden Mountain near Los Lunas, New
Mexico. Known as The Los Lunas Inscription
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.econ\
.ohio%2Dstate.edu/jhm/arch/loslunas.html> , its language is Hebrew, and
the script is the Old Hebrew alphabet with a few Greek letters mixed in.
* Artifacts:
* In June, 1860, David Wyrick found an artifact on the general shape
of a keystone near Newark, Ohio that is covered in four ancient Hebrew
inscriptions translated as: "Holy of Holies," "King of the Earth," "The
Law of God" and "The Word of God." * In November of that same year,
Wyrick found an inscribed stone
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.econ\
.ohio%2Dstate.edu/jhm/arch/decalog.html> in a burial mound about 10
miles south of of Newark, Ohio. The stone is inscribed on all sides with
a condensed version of the Ten Commandments or Decalogue, in a peculiar
form of post-Exilic square Hebrew letters. A robed and bearded figure on
the front is identified as Moses in letters fanning over his head.
Asians on the West Coast
* Stories:
* Indian traditions tell of many "houses" seen on Pacific waters.
Could they have been ships from Asia? * Chinese history tells a
charming account of voyages to the land of "Fusang." * Old Spanish
documents describe oriental ships off the Mexican coast in 1576.
* Coins: In the summer of 1882, a miner in British Columbia found 30
Chinese coins 25 feet below the surface. The examined coins of this
style were invented by the Emperor Huungt around 2637 B.C. *
Artifacts:
* Japanese explorers and traders left steel blades in Alaska and
their distinctive pottery in Ecuador. * Underwater explorations off
the California coast have yielded stone artifacts that seem to be
anchors and line weights. The style and type of stone point to Chinese
origins.
* Structures: California's East Bay Walls, ancient low rock walls
east of San Francisco Bay, have long been a mystery. No one knows who
built them or why. In 1904, Dr. John Fryer, professor of Oriental
languages at U.C. Berkeley, declared: "This is undoubtedly the work of
Mongolians... the Chinese would naturally wall themselves in, as they do
in all of their towns in China."
this hemisphere may have been visited by other Europeans, ancient
Romans, Chinese and Japanese - even the ancient Egyptians!
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue...
Many of us learned that rhyme, part of a longer history poem, when being
taught in school that Christopher Columbus discovered America. Although
nothing can be taken away from Columbus' daring voyage, he certainly was
not the first to arrive on the shores of the Americas. For one thing,
there were already people here - many Native American nations inhabited
what later became North and South America and even the Caribbean islands
where Columbus landed. Columbus probably wasn't even the first "white
man" to make it here. It's fairly well documented that Icelander Leif
Ericsson successfully sailed to North America in the year 1000 - almost
500 years prior to Columbus's voyage.
In fact, there's a growing amount of proof suggesting that a lot of the
familiar history of human exploration and "discovery" by our ancestors
as we were taught it may be quite wrong. There is hard evidence of
ancient civilizations making their mark in places where, according to
traditionally accepted history, they just shouldn't be. Here's an
overview of some of the most remarkable and fascinating cases.
Greeks and Romans in the New World
* Coins:
* Roman coins have been found in Venezuela and Maine. * Roman
coins were found in Texas at the bottom of an Indian mound at Round
Rock. The mound is dated at approximately 800 AD. * In 1957 by a
small boy found a coin in a field near Phenix City, Alabama, from
Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, and dating from 490 B.C. * In
the town of Heavener, Oklahoma, another out-of-place coin was found in
1976. Experts identified it as a bronze tetradrachm originally struck in
Antioch, Syria in 63 A.D. and bearing the profile of the emperor Nero.
* In 1882, a farmer in Cass County, Illinois picked up bronze coin later
identified as a coin of Antiochus IV, one of the kings of Syria who
reigned from 175 B.C. to 164 B.C., and who is mentioned in the Bible.
* Pottery: Roman pottery was unearthed in Mexico that, according to
its style, has been dated to the second century A.D. * Inscriptions:
* In 1966, a man named Manfred Metcalf stumbled upon a stone in the
state of Georgia that bears an inscription that is very similar to
ancient writing from the island of Crete called "Cretan Linear A and B
writing." * In the early 1900s, Bernardo da Silva Ramos, a Brazilian
rubber-tapper working in the Amazon jungle, found many large rocks on
which was inscribed more than 2,000 ancient scripts about the "Old
World." * Near Rio de Janeiro, high on a vertical wall of rock -
3,000 feet up - is an inscription that reads: 'Tyre, Phoenicia, Badezir,
Firstborn of Jethbaal..." and dated to the middle of the ninth century
B.C. * Near Parahyba, Brazil, an inscription on Phoenician has been
translated, in part, as: "We are sons of Canaan from Sidon, the city of
the king. Commerce has cast us on this distant shore, a land of
mountains. We set [sacrificed] a youth for the exalted gods and
goddesses in the nineteenth year of Hiram, our mighty king. We embarked
from Ezion-Geber into the Red Sea and voyaged with ten ships. We were at
sea together for two years around the land belonging to Ham [Africa] but
were separated by a storm [lit. 'from the hand of Baal'], and we were no
longer with our companions. So we have come here, twelve men and three
women, on a... shore which I, the Admiral, control. But auspiciously may
the gods and goddesses favor us!" * The Kensington Stone
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.fate\
mag.com/2006%5F01art1.html> , discovered in Kensington, Minnesota in
1898 contains an inscription describing an expedition of Norsemen into
the interior of what is now North America. It's estimated that this
expedition took place in the 1300s. * In 1980, P.M. Leonard and J.L.
Glenn, from the Hogle Zoological Gardens, Salt Lake City, visited a rock
outcropping in Colorado that was reputed to be inscribed with "peculiar
markings." Leonard and Glenn believe they are excellent examples of
Consainne Ogam writing - a type ascribed to ancient Celts. One of the
many inscriptions was translated as: "Route Guide: To the west is the
frontier town with standing stones as boundary markers." * A
fist-sized, round stone was found during the early 1890s in an cemetery
near Nashville, Tennessee. Its front was inscribed with symbols thought
to be Libyan, pre-100 A.D. style. It translates as: "The colonists
pledge to redeem."
* Pictures: An experienced botanist has identified plants in an
ancient fresco painting as a pineapple and a specific species of squash
- both native to the Americas. Yet the fresco is in the Roman city of
Pompeii. * Statues: In 1933, in a burial at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico,
archaeologist José García Payón discovered a small carved head
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.econ\
.ohio%2Dstate.edu/jhm/arch/calix.htm> with "foreign" features in an
undisturbed burial site. It was later identified by anthropologist
Robert Heine-Geldern as "unquestionably" from the Hellenistic-Roman
school of art and suggested a date of "around AD 200." * Structures:
Many stone chambers
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.scie\
nce%2Dfrontiers.com/sf103/sf103a02.htm> dot the New England countryside
and most archaeologists insist they are all potato cellars built long
ago by farmers. Others argue that they are too sophisticated for such a
mundane application. One, is built into a hillside at Upton,
Massachusetts, has sophisticated corbelling that follows they style of
Irish and Iberic chambers. It's theorized that it was really built by
Europeans around 700 AD - long before the Leif Eiriksson. * Ships:
In 1886, the remains of a shipwreck was found in Galveston Bay, Texas.
Its construction is typically Roman. * Toys: A doll made of wood and
wax was found deep in a "Well of Sacrifice" at Chichén Itzá,
Mexico, on which is written Roman script. * Tombs: In the Mayan
ruins of Palenque, a stone sarcophagus was found that is very much in
the style of the ancient Phoenicians.
The Far-Traveling Egyptians
* Statues: In 1914, archaeologist M.A. Gonzales was excavating some
Mayan ruins in the city of Acajutla, Mexico when he was surprised by the
discovery of two statuettes
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.scie\
nce%2Dfrontiers.com/sf098/sf098a01.htm> that were clearly Egyptian. One
male and one female, the carvings bore ancient Egyptian dress and
cartouches. They are thought to depict Osiis and Isis. *
Inscriptions: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.crys\
talinks.com/egyptaustralia.html> have been found in New South Wales,
Australia. Located on a rock cliff in the National Park forest of the
Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, the enigmatic carvings have been known
since the early 1900s. There are more than 250 carvings of familiar
Egyptian gods and symbols, including a life-sized engraving of the god
Anubis. The hieroglyphs tell the story of explorers who were shipwrecked
in a strange and hostile land, and the untimely death of their royal
leader, "Lord Djes-eb." From this information, scholars have been able
to date the voyage to somewhere between 1779 and 2748 BC. * Fossils:
In 1982, archaeologists digging at Fayum, near the Siwa Oasis in Egypt
uncovered fossils of kangaroos and other Australian marsupials. *
Language: There are striking similarities between the languages of
ancient Egypt and those of the Native Americans that inhabited the areas
around Louisiana about the time of Christ. B. Fell, of the Epigraphic
Society, has stated that the language of the Atakapas, and to a lesser
extent those of the Tunica and Chitimacha tribes, have affinities with
Nile Valley languages involving just those words one would associate
with Egyptian trading communities of 2,000 years ago. * Artifacts:
Near the Neapean River outside Penrith, New South Wales, a scarab
beetle - a familair Egyptian symbol - carved from onyx was unearthed.
Another was found in Queensland, Australia. * Tombs: The April 5,
1909 edition of The Phoenix Gazette carried a front-page article about
the discovery and excavation of an Egyptian tomb in the Grand Canyon
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.geoc\
ities.com/TheTropics/Lagoon/1345/Canyon.html> by none other that the
Smithsonian. The Smithsonian has since denied knowledge of any such
discovery.
The Scattered Tribes of Israel
* Inscriptions:
* In 1889, the Smithsonian's Mound Survey project discovered a stone
in a burial mound in eastern Tennessee on which is inscribed ancient
Hebrew lettering. Known as The Bat Creek Stone
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.econ\
.ohio%2Dstate.edu/jhm/arch/batcrk.html> , experts have identified its
letters as being Paleo-Hebrew dating from the first or second century
A.D. Some of the letters spell out: "for Judea." * An abridged
version of the Ten Commandments was found carved into the flat face of a
large boulder resting on the side of Hidden Mountain near Los Lunas, New
Mexico. Known as The Los Lunas Inscription
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.econ\
.ohio%2Dstate.edu/jhm/arch/loslunas.html> , its language is Hebrew, and
the script is the Old Hebrew alphabet with a few Greek letters mixed in.
* Artifacts:
* In June, 1860, David Wyrick found an artifact on the general shape
of a keystone near Newark, Ohio that is covered in four ancient Hebrew
inscriptions translated as: "Holy of Holies," "King of the Earth," "The
Law of God" and "The Word of God." * In November of that same year,
Wyrick found an inscribed stone
<http://paranormal.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.econ\
.ohio%2Dstate.edu/jhm/arch/decalog.html> in a burial mound about 10
miles south of of Newark, Ohio. The stone is inscribed on all sides with
a condensed version of the Ten Commandments or Decalogue, in a peculiar
form of post-Exilic square Hebrew letters. A robed and bearded figure on
the front is identified as Moses in letters fanning over his head.
Asians on the West Coast
* Stories:
* Indian traditions tell of many "houses" seen on Pacific waters.
Could they have been ships from Asia? * Chinese history tells a
charming account of voyages to the land of "Fusang." * Old Spanish
documents describe oriental ships off the Mexican coast in 1576.
* Coins: In the summer of 1882, a miner in British Columbia found 30
Chinese coins 25 feet below the surface. The examined coins of this
style were invented by the Emperor Huungt around 2637 B.C. *
Artifacts:
* Japanese explorers and traders left steel blades in Alaska and
their distinctive pottery in Ecuador. * Underwater explorations off
the California coast have yielded stone artifacts that seem to be
anchors and line weights. The style and type of stone point to Chinese
origins.
* Structures: California's East Bay Walls, ancient low rock walls
east of San Francisco Bay, have long been a mystery. No one knows who
built them or why. In 1904, Dr. John Fryer, professor of Oriental
languages at U.C. Berkeley, declared: "This is undoubtedly the work of
Mongolians... the Chinese would naturally wall themselves in, as they do
in all of their towns in China."