Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers

by Carl Lehrburger

  It is estimated that about ten thousand natives died handless that way. Other events occurred during the second voyage that are also not well known in our schoolrooms. Columbus had named the small island of Saona to honor a childhood friend from Savona, Michele da Cuneo (who had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage and was also named governor of the island):

  [Cuneo] . . . reported in a letter that Columbus had provided one of the captured indigenous women to him. He wrote, “While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores.”30

  By the time of Columbus’s third voyage, a few of the islands had been heavily settled and more gold had been found and was being mined. However, Cuneo had advanced and had been replaced as governor, and Columbus was shipped back to Spain in chains because of charges made by the settlers. In a letter defending himself Columbus observed, “Now that so much gold is found, a dispute arises as to which brings more profit: whether to go about robbing or to go to the mines. A hundred castellanoes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.31

  However, the queen wrote Columbus that she did not want her (baptized) subjects sold as slaves. Columbus solved that problem by not baptizing them, for which more than a few churchmen criticized him. But he had witnessed the methods and the profits to be made off the slave trade when he sailed on Portuguese ships to Africa, so he apparently disobeyed the queen, and 560 Indians were shipped off to the welcoming slave markets of that country. But two hundred died, and half of those who remained were ill when they arrived. Of the ones who lived, some were allowed to return, and others were used as galley slaves. The experiment was not continued, and, in fact, soon enough there were almost no Indians to export or work in the mines and on the farms of the Spaniards. In addition, the islands simply did not have that much gold, while Indians who couldn’t deliver their gold quotas and tried to escape into the mountains were hunted down with dogs and killed. In fact, hunting Indians became a “sport,” and their babies were sometimes used to feed the dogs, there being no indigenous animals to supply them with food.

  Morgan comments on the observations of one traveler in the New World: “Peter Martyr could rejoice that ‘so many thousands of men are received to bee the sheepe of Christes flocke.’ But these were sheep prepared for slaughter . . . From a population of 100,000 at the lowest estimate in 1492, there remained in 1514 about 32,000 Arawaks in Española. By 1542, according to Las Casas, only 200 were left. In their place had appeared slaves imported from Africa [beginning in 1513]. The people of the golden age had been virtually exterminated.”32

  AFTERMATH

  As mentioned, historians have traditionally argued that Columbus remained convinced to the very end that his journeys had been along the east coast of Asia, but Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise, argues that a document in Columbus’s Book of Privileges indicates Columbus knew he had found a new continent. Furthermore, his journals from the third voyage call the “Land of Paria” a “hitherto unknown” possible continent because the volume of water of the Orinoco River could not have come from an island. Thus, it was in this area that he thought the Garden of Eden might be found—that the new continent of South America was the “Earthly Paradise” that was located “at the end of the Orient.” On the other hand, his other writings continued to claim that he had reached Asia, as in a 1502 letter to Pope Alexander VI, where he asserted that Cuba was the east coast of Asia.33

  To sum up his career as an explorer blessed by God to spread Christianity, Columbus began his Book of Prophecies (in Spanish, El libro de las profecías) on the third voyage. Writing between 1501 and 1505, he laid out the events that must occur before the end of the world and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ:

  Christianity must be spread throughout the world.

  The Garden of Eden must be found. (Columbus may have thought he found it in Venezuela in 1498, when he eyed the verdant crags of the tupuys of Venezuela.)

  The Christians must mount a Last Crusade to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims.

  A new world emperor must be chosen to lead the final crusade against the Muslims, for which Columbus thought the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella would be well suited.34

  These were not new ideas at the time, and apocalyptic medieval writers including Joachim Fiore greatly influenced Columbus. At the end of his life Columbus was infatuated with a vision that placed him at the center of the spread of Christianity and as a precursor to the Second Coming of Christ.

  Besides Book of Prophecies, Columbus wrote Book of Privileges, also begun on the third voyage, which outlined his rights, including 10 percent of the profits of the New World, that had been part of his contract with the king and queen, which had been taken from him after the troubles of his third voyage. Those two books survived in their entirety; however, it is strange that the logs of his voyages did not. These exist only in partial records as recorded by Spanish bishop and historian Bartolomé de Las Casas, who apparently had access to complete copies. Some have pointed to their destruction as being the work of extremists in the Catholic Church seeking to hide the true facts of what happened during the conquest. Las Casas was initially a settler, slave holder, and feudal land owner who received free labor and tribute from Natives in exchange for theoretically protecting them in a system known as la encomienda. However, he eventually was horrified at what was happening and became the Indians’ fierce defender and was responsible for major changes in the laws governing them. In other words, he would have included more about the enslavement of the Indians if more had existed in the logs (and as one can see from the quotations in this chapter, there is plenty there about this sad subject).35

  Moreover, Las Casas would not have known about the influence of the Arabic maps. After 1492 and the expulsion of the Jews, the Inquisition (established in 1481 by Ferdinand and Isabella) took care to eliminate any remaining Moorish influence in Spain. A linguistic imperialism also contributed to this endeavor after Columbus returned from the New World. The bishop of Avila, Antonio de Nebrija, was inspired to present the royal couple with the first Spanish grammar book and advised them, “After Your Highness takes under her yoke many barbarian towns and nations with strange tongues, and with the conquering of them, they will need to receive the laws that the conqueror puts on the conquered and with those, our language.”36

  Looking forward to our time, it does seem that modern America has become that Christian nation that was envisioned by Columbus. Since winning in World War II, the United States has been in a perpetual war, while producing and selling more weapons and devoting resources to war and destruction by a factor many times greater than any other nation. The foreign policy of the country remains focused on domination and economic control. Conquest continues to be the guiding force in the exploitation of resources and the perpetration of a policy of unlimited growth characterized by excessive consumption and waste—the precedent and tradition established by Columbus and his church.

  However, Morgan epitomizes this modern view by rationalizing the conquest of Columbus as a forward march of civilization when he writes, “That the Indians were destroyed by Spanish greed is true. But greed is simply one of the uglier names we give to the driving force of modern civilization.”37

  But there is another tradition and another story of the Americas. There is evidence that the Celts
, Romans, Chinese, Egyptians, Africans, Hebrews, Arabs, and many other races and cultures seem to have come here. But where and when? And why is the evidence of their journeys to the Americas not common knowledge today? As I came to learn, their stories are carved on rocks, lead crosses, coins, and many other artifacts, surely demonstrating that many travelers arrived in the Americas long before Columbus.

  2

  American History ABC

  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

  MARCEL PROUST

  BARRY FELL’S AMERICA B.C.

  It was more out of curiosity than anything else that I read America B.C. by Barry Fell in 1986, eleven years after it had been published. I thought to myself after reading it, “The telling of the New History of America begins with Barry Fell,” because his underlying conclusions were paradigm shifters in light of what I had been taught. Unfortunately, Fell, the most controversial and prolific diffusionist historian in my lifetime, died in 1994.

  Although Fell was a professor at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, his first book, America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World, described a history where Columbus was one of the last and not the first explorers to arrive in the Americas. This book was followed by his other books, Saga America: A Startling New Theory on the Old World Settlement of America before Columbus in 1980 and Bronze Age America in 1982.

  What became clear after poring over Fell’s information-packed pages, maps, drawings, and photos was that Old World peoples (Europeans, Indo-Europeans, Chinese, Africans, and others) traveled to the New World for centuries and millennia before the arrival of the Spanish in 1492. He used epigraphy to provide evidence of earlier peoples in the Americas, epigraphy being the study of ancient writing, including inscriptions engraved in stone or other material. Thus, he made translations of Old World inscriptions found in the Americas that included Ogham (or Ogam), Phoenician, and Egyptian hieroglyphs among others.

  Fig. 2.1. Barry Fell’s concepts of diffusionism. A composite drawing by the author of concepts presented in Fell’s books America B.C. and Saga America, illustrating his ideas about early transoceanic contacts in the Americas.

  I began to investigate some of Fell’s claims and read other books cited by the Harvard professor. One fascinating artifact he addressed was the Bat Creek Stone, which was discovered in 1889 in an undisturbed mound in Tennessee along the Little Tennessee River. Carved letters on the stone were misidentified by the Smithsonian as Indian markings because, after the discovery was published, it was discovered by Joseph Corey Ayoob and Henriette Mertz that the inscription was published upside down.*3 1 Later, in 1971, Semitic scholar Cyrus H. Gordon, Ph.D., identified this inscription as being written in Canaanite, and he translated a clear sequence of five letters as meaning “for Judiah.”2 Yet it is considered a fake by the archaeological community. (This subject will be returned to in chapter 14.)

  Fig. 2.2. Map of Atlantic currents. (Map by U.S. Army, Wikimedia Commons)

  Fig. 2.3. The Bat Creek Stone, found in Tennessee in 1889 (see also color insert). The words “for Judiah” are written in Canaanite, according to Semitic scholar Cyrus H. Gordon. (Photo by Scott Wolter)

  Fell’s thesis and the evidence he put forward astounded me at the time. Since he was able to integrate multiple areas of expertise, including maritime travel and European and Indo-European history as well as languages and epigraphy, he opened the eyes of thousands of enthusiasts like me, providing a key to rethink much of what we had been taught.

  THE PHOENICIANS IN AMERICA

  In America B.C., Fell suggested that the greatest of the ancient mariners who crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus were the Phoenicians. They were of Semitic origin and spoke a language that was of the Canaanite subgroup, which used alphabetic letters similar to ancient Hebrew.

  There are different theories regarding the earliest Phoenicians. The most predominant is that they emerged from a wider group known as Canaanites who had previously populated the land called Canaan, which stretched from modern-day Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories to the western part of Jordan and southwestern Syria. In the West, this group was called Carthaginians, and the city of Carthage got its name from them when they settled there in 814 B.C. in what is now the northern tip of Tunisia. At the same time, they also established trading posts along the North African coast as far west as Morocco and into southern Spain. The Romans referred to them as the Punis, but this refers only to the Carthaginians in North Africa, who used the Punic dialect and alphabet. The North African center of the western or Carthaginian ethnic stock of the Phoenicians was Carthage.3

  Regarding the Phoenicians, Fell wrote in America B.C.:

  Fig. 2.4. The alphabet family tree. The Phoenician alphabet is the root of the modern Western alphabets. (Adapted from S. Khalaf, phoenicia.org.)

  In the wake of the Celtic pioneers came the Phoenician traders of Spain, men from Cadix who spoke the Punic tongue, but wrote it in the peculiar style of lettering known as Iberian script. Although some of these traders seem to have settled only on the coast, and then only temporarily, leaving a few engraved stones to mark their visits or record their claims of territorial annexation, other Phoenicians remained here and together with Egyptian miners, became part of the Wabanaki tribe of New England. . . . Descendants of these visitors are also to be found apparently among the Amerindian tribes, several of which employ dialects derived in part from the ancient tongues of Phoenicia and North Africa.4

  THE PHOENICIAN NEWTON STONE IN SCOTLAND

  The Newton Stone in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, demonstrates a Phoenician influence in northern Europe and can be compared with similar artifacts in North America. On one side of the pillar are faded, bilingual ancient writings in Phoenician and a Celtic script called Ogham, the vowelless writing system that was principally used long ago in the British Isles. On the other side is a design of a snake along with a variant of the barbell-shaped glyph often associated with astronomical phenomena.

  While the translation of the bilingual monument is not conclusively accepted, Lawrence Austine Waddell’s study of the Newton Stone from the 1920s is perhaps the most reliable. He used previous, unsuccessful efforts to help him identify the Phoenician script as Aryan Phoenician, one of the many different forms of the language. Once he began translating, he was able to find strings of personal, ethnic, and place names. His interpretation reads, “This Sun-Cross (Swastika) was raised to Bil (or Bel, the God of Sun-Fire) by the Kassi (or Cassi-bel[-an]) of Kast of the Siluyr (sub-clan) of the “Khilani” (or Hittite-palace-dwellers), the Phoenician (named) Ikar of Cilicia, the Prwt (or Prat, that is “Barat” or “Brihat” or “Brit-on”).”5

  Fig. 2.5. The Scottish stone pillar with inscription inserted found in Newton. (© Golux, from Megalithic Portal site, www.megalithic.co.uk.)

  I was to discover several dozen good examples of Ogham inscriptions in my journeys throughout the United States, although most were etched horizontally, unlike the Newton Stone.

  THE BOURNE STONE

  More epigraphic evidence of Phoenicians in America was offered by Fell. He identified an Ogham inscription on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine to read, “Ships from Phoenicia, Cargo Platform.” According to Fell this was a posted inscription informing Phoenician captains where to load and unload trading vessels. Another artifact that Fell says was likely left in North America by Phoenician sailors is the Bourne Stone from Bourne, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. It was found in the foundation of a Wampanoag house around 1800 and was later used as the doorstep for a meetinghouse. It is currently on display at the museum of the Bourne Historical Society. Fell interpreted it to read, “A proclamation. Of annexation. Do not deface. By this Hanno takes possession.”6

  Fig. 2.6. Inscription on the Bourne Stone of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The stone weighs three hundred pounds and is 4 by 1.5 feet.

  The earliest authenticated Phoenician inscription in the Americas is a tablet in Ib
erian script discovered in 1838 in a burial chamber at the base of Mammoth Mound, in Moundsville, West Virginia.7 Fell also notes other examples of scripts found in Massachusetts and Oklahoma that were likely employed by Phoenician (Punic) colonists who came from their ancient homelands throughout the Mediterranean.

  A comparison of Phoenician writing circa 800–600 B.C. from what is now Lebanon with the styles of Punic writing from Spain and the Massachusetts Bourne Stone demonstrates the similarities, as can be seen by comparing the letters representing the sounds b, g, and d (figure 2.7).

  Fig. 2.7. Examples of Punic letters from Phoenicia, Spain, and Massachusetts circa 800–600 B.C. with two tables showing the fifteen-character alphabet described in Fell’s America B.C., 161.

  An April 2013 news article from a local Cape Cod newspaper had the headline “Bourne Stone Continues to Baffle the Experts.” The article cited Judy McAlister, director of the Jonathan Bourne Historical Center, who explained that Fell’s translation and the proposed connection with Phoenicia, along with several other theories regarding interpretations of the inscription, are still in vogue. These included the use of Native American and Chinese languages and the runes of the Vikings. For the latter, she noted author Frederick Pohl’s Atlantic Crossings before Columbus, where a Norse language expert from a century ago claims the inscription was related to “Jesus in Heaven.”