Hello Everyone,
Phoenician voyages into the South Pacific.
Mount Moehau, on New Zealand?s Coromandel Peninsula, plunges steeply into the sea. Draped in subtropical rain forest, downcut by waterfalls and precipitous gorges, the region oozes mystery and enchantment.
Here, says Maori legend, the Turehu people, light-skinned, with reddish hair, made their last stand.
The Maoris say they found them in parts of New Zealand. As the Maori encroached, the Turehu retreated further into the hills, particularly of the Coromandel Peninsula. Here the mountains of Moehau, steep and remote, became their final refuge. Since they sought concealment near the misty summit of Moehau, the Turehu were sometimes spoken of as the "Mist People". Their voices and the ghostly piping of their flutes could often be heard in the dense forest. Huge gourds they grew. They built forts from interlaced supplejack, a long thick woody vine that trailed across the tall forest trees.
According to other Pacific islanders, people answering the same physical description had come from the east ? from the direction of South America ? long, long ago.
And would you believe, in South America I ran into similar traditions of a light-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed race. According to legends, these people had settled and built cyclopean stone cities (whose ruins survive), but following a war had fled westward across the Pacific.
Was there some link, here? Could they have been the same people?
And pushing the question a little further, could these people of historical tradition have been the descendants of some ancient traders whose story we shall now relate?
Around the fifteenth century BC, two powers were taking possession of the land on the eastern Mediterranean coast. About the same time as the Hebrew (Israelite) nation was coming into Palestine, another power was being established on the sea coast adjacent to the north, a people whose career was definitely marked out for them.
It was the destiny of Phoenicia that she should become to the ancient world in material things, what the Hebrew had become in spiritual things.
Phoenicia was the great manufacturing nation of the ancient world. Her dyed textiles, glass technology, superb stonework, ceramics and gem engraving were unsurpassed.
Indeed, L.A. Waddell (citing Sir Flinders Petrie) asserts that the Phoenicians "had a civilization equal or superior to that of Egypt, in taste and skill.., luxury far beyond that of the Egyptians, and technical work which could teach them rather than be taught. The city of Tyre was the London of antiquity, the center of a vast global trading network.
Phoenicia, mistress of the seas, sent ships to all ports and traversed all oceans. From the thirteenth century BC she was the dominant naval and commercial power. Her mercantile operations were enormous. This great naval power had the trade of the planet in her hands. She was a great distributing nation; her people were the carriers of the world.
The famous Indian epic, the Mahabharata, states that:
The able Panch (Phoenicians) setting out to invade the Earth, brought the whole world under their sway. They were termed "leaders of the Earth".
And Phoenicia was, in the tenth to eleventh centuries BC as great as Babylon or Egypt. The coasts and islands of the Mediterranean were rapidly covered with colonies. Today?s "Venice" preserves the ethnic title of "Phoenicia".
The Straits of Gibraltar were passed and cities built on the shores of the Atlantic. They founded Gades (Cadiz) on Spain?s west coast, 2,500 miles from Tyre, as the starting point for the Atlantic trade.
In the expanding range of their voyages, Phoenician ships out of Spain were battling the wild Atlantic en route to the tin of Cornwall and even to Norway (2,000 miles beyond Gades). Eastward, there is evidence that Phoenicia built factories on the Persian Gulf and traded as far as Ceylon.
It has been adduced from substantial evidence that some 89 years after the fall of Troy (a Phoenician colony), Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan royalty, sailed up the River Thames in Britain and founded Tri-Novantum ("New Troy"). This ultimately became London.
Thus, contrary to popular misconception, there existed a highly civilized dynasty, which survived in Britain even until the Roman invasion. It left behind gold coins, at least one surviving stone inscription and a detailed chronology. Indeed, Julius Caesar and other contemporaries testified to its cultured, well-dressed city-dwelling subjects, though untamed tribes did flank the western and northern borders.
Researcher L.A. Waddell gives an authenticated unbroken chronology of highly civilized independent British kings reigning in London from Brutus (c. 1103 BC) to the Roman conquerors. There is evidence that a large proportion of the people of Britain are descendants of the sea-going Phoenicians.
Phoenician ships probed ever further. Navigation across open ocean was no problem to these explorers. Due to the insufficient attention paid to this aspect of the subject, we have tended to belittle the size and sophistication of Phoenician shipping.
If we conceive of it as represented by types of marine craft as outlined on Phoenician coins and tombs, we shall not be able to suppose that the nation was ever employed on such voyages as those that shall shortly engage our attention.
There is evidence that they had the benefit of sophisticated instruments and large, fast, modern vessels carrying over 500 people.
The type of vessel built especially for ocean travel was designated "ship of Tarshish" to distinguish it from the smaller craft which merely plied the eastern Mediterranean. The name of the original Tarshish (in Spain) became displaced as the horizon of the Phoenician navigators moved westward.
Herodotus records a Phoenician clockwise circumnavigation of Africa about 600 BC, on behalf of Pharaoh Necho ? a distance of 13,000 miles. Herodotus sniffed at their report that the sun was on their right, that is, to their north.
This establishes the fact that Phoenician nautical prowess and daring was at a level not to be seen in modern times until the century of Columbus.
It is only due to the proud announcement of the Pharaoh who sponsored the trip that we know of this voyage. The Phoenicians were not publicists.
So what other trips were being made ? from perhaps as early as 1200 BC?
At La Venta, Mexico, was found a sculpture with distinctly Phoenician characteristics: bearded faces, upturned shoes, twisted rope borders and other details. It has been dated to around 850 BC. From Nicaragua to Mexico, on jade figurines, the backs of slate mirrors, funeral urns and other objects, appear bearded men who bear little resemblance to American Indians.
A well-known colony of Phoenicia was Carthage. An ancient historical work records the voyage of a convoy of as many as 60 ships, each carrying 550 people. This was around 500 BC. Strabo writes that Phoenician colonies (300 colonies, he estimates) were planted prolifically well down the Atlantic coast of Africa.
From West Africa, it would be a simple matter to follow the trade winds to - you guessed it - South America.
To some, the idea that ancient mariners would have known the Americas may appear too ridiculous to consider, and it will be cast aside. But before such actions are taken, surely the evidence for this position should be carefully considered.
As Michael G. Bradley aptly put it, "The truth is just now being glimpsed by a handful of specialists - it is still almost completely unsuspected by the average civilized citizen." Voyages to the New World at around the time of King Solomon of Israel now seem more likely than not.Some twelve years? research finally convinced me that these colonists of a forgotten age were indeed part of a great network of ancient civilizations that once maintained a flourishing trade between Europe, Asia, and the Americas, some 3,000 years ago.
I should not have been surprised to discover that Harvard professor Dr. Barry Fell, from his own research, had reached the same conclusion. He considered the ancient visitors to North America were probably not explorers, but rather merchants, trading with well-established fur trappers and very likely also mining precious metals on those sites where ancient workings have been discovered.
Because of the depth of ignorance into which Europe fell during the Dark Ages, at times we are apt to forget how advanced were the ideas of the ancients, and how much they knew about the earth and about astronomy and navigation. Fell is also convinced that "America shares a history with the Old World, and ancient Americans must have been well acquainted with much of that history as it took place." Dr. Fell is now recognised as one of the world?s foremost epigraphers.
to be continued.....
Linkback: You are not allowed to view links.
Please Register or Login
http://www.thunting.com/smf/index.php/topic,15926.msg102253.html#msg102253
|
|
Logged
|
|
