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

by Carl Lehrburger

  Another example of trans-Pacific diffusion is the Southeast Asian jungle chicken. Geographer George Carter identified Japan and India as the two most likely pathways to the Americas. In Japan these “chickens” are called totori birds, very similar to its name totoli used in Mexico. Bird bones from Pueblo archaeological sites in the American Southwest suggest that chickens arrived there before A.D. 900.14

  Furthermore, there is a close resemblance between the board game called pachisi in India and the pre-Colonial Aztec game patolli.15 Both games include moving counters along cross-shaped boards or mats, with the progress being determined by the throw of lots—six cowrie shells in the Hindu version and five black beans with white dots in Mexico. (See figure 15.4 below.)

  There are other notable Indus Valley connections to the New World, including symbols like the swastika and the eye-in-hand motifs found in Mayan and Native American art. Also, the lotus motif with seated human figures is common at Mayan sites such as Chichén Itzá, as well as the Amaravati Buddhist monastery in southern India (see figure 15.5 below). This suggests that the practices of yoga and meditation were taught in both places.

  Fig. 15.4. Similarities between the games of pachisi in India (left) and patolli in Mexico (right).

  (Drawing by Gunnar Thompson, American Discovery)

  Fig. 15.5. The lotus scepter motif from tenth-century Java (left) and from Palenque, Mexico.

  (Drawings by Gunnar Thompson, Nu Sun)

  CHINESE CONNECTIONS

  Thompson identified a shift in the symbols and artistic styles in Mesoamerica from about 500 B.C. to 100 B.C. that was parallel to a shift in Asian art at the time, and he has identified many dozens of Chinese and other Asian examples. These include the “endless knot,” flaming pearls, and the yin/yang symbol, along with the central importance of the serpent motif in both cultures. Not only do the symbols show noteworthy similarities, but their placements on monuments, buildings, and ceramic vases share commonalities as well.

  Also, there is an emphasis placed on the way jade was used for jewelry. According to Thompson, the similarities include the motifs themselves as well as the metal tools and lapidary techniques that he thinks arrived in the Americas from China.

  Fig. 15.6. Similarities between Chinese and Mesoamerican art. Chinese symbols found in the Americas include variations of the yin/yang symbol, the “endless knot,” serpents and turtles, and trumpet shells. (Gunnar Thompson, American Discovery)

  There have been a number of attempts to account for these evidences of interactions. Two interesting but unconvincing efforts both begin with the Chinese Shanhaijing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas), which describes medicines, animals, and geological features of “Mountains,” “Regions beyond Seas,” “Regions within Seas,” and “Wilderness.” First mentioned in the fourth century B.C., its authorship has traditionally been assigned to the mythological Yu the Great and/or his two traveling companions on his many journeys, Boyi and Yi. When Yu was historicized as the founder of the Xia dynasty (which may or may not have existed), he was given the dates 2145–2046 B.C. This has led several authors to claim that America had been visited and written about at that time, despite the fact that the book was originally about shamanism and not geography, something that can be traced back to beyond the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 B.C.). From that point in history, the basic story undoubtedly was adopted by many authors over the centuries, and apocryphal accretions formed around it.16

  Nevertheless, Henriette Mertz mapped out the voyages while describing the geography from the Shanhaijing. She proposed in her 1972 book Pale Ink that it all matched a description of an expedition to and from America.17

  A more recent proposal was made by Christian missionaries who worked in Asia, Hendon M. Harris and his daughter, Charlotte Harris Rees. They claim that 72 percent of the place names on a map he purchased from a Korean antique store are from the Shanhaijing and that the book describes a section of America that runs down the eastern side of the Rockies, including the Grand Canyon. The discovery of this map inspired Harris to collect twenty-two more documents that purportedly showed America across the sea from China, as he argues in a nearly eight-hundred-page book, The Asiatic Fathers of America: Chinese Discovery and Colonization of Ancient America.18 However, there are no dates on the maps, which Harris thought were copies of the ones that were used in the original Shanhaijing. Lost for some years among his papers, the maps were rediscovered by his daughter, who went on to write four books on the subject, pointing out that “blue spots” can appear on the lower backs of both Chinese and Native American babies and that there are five genetic markers that are similar.

  Gunnar Thompson also published Nu Sun: Asian-American Voyages, 500 B.C. in 1989, in which he suggested that Asian merchants stimulated the formulation of Mayan religion, astronomy, metal casting, architecture, writing, and commerce.19While some of the dates he presented in Nu Sun are problematic, a compelling artifact supporting his theory is a statuette found in Mexico by archaeologists that is covered with symbols reminiscent of the Chinese Zhou dynasty. This Tuxla statuette has been dated between 200 B.C. and A.D. 300.

  Fig. 15.7. This Jade Tuxla statuette found by Mexican archaeologists has many symbols similar to those of China’s Zhou dynasty. (Drawing by Gunnar Thompson)

  Also, as previously reported in chapter 5, Thompson presents compelling evidence of diffusion from China in his survey of artistic motifs between 1500 B.C. and 500 B.C. At first he found little similarity between East Asia and Mexico. However, around 500–200 B.C. the situation changed dramatically, and preponderance of similarities and, in some cases, identical symbols appeared in both China and Mesoamerica. Two of these motifs are the scroll and double scroll symbols attached to flying serpents and other characters, as used in Mexican scrolls after 500 B.C. Thompson believes that after A.D. 200, Mesoamericans also absorbed influences from other transoceanic cultures, including Hebrews and Egyptians. These more divergent styles and religious iconographies were the result of foreign merchants visiting the Maya at various locations, including Izapa in southern Mexico.20

  Another modern author who speculated about a Chinese-American connection is Gavin Menzies, who, in 2002, published the bestseller 1421: The Year China Discovered America.21 He wrote that the largest fleet the world had then ever seen consisted of three hundred massive four-hundred-foot-long junks under the command of Admiral Zheng He. With these, Menzies claims that the Chinese sailed around Africa, up the Cape of Good Hope, across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, landed in America seventy years before Columbus, and settled Australia and New Zealand three hundred years before Captain Cook, all while mapping the entire globe long before the historic European voyages of discovery. However, he suggests that records, documents, and maps of the voyages of 1421–1423 were deliberately hidden or expunged by officials of the Chinese court during an abrupt change in foreign policy. Thus, after the passing in 1424 of the Yongle Emperor Zhudi (who had sponsored the voyages), China began a long, self-imposed period of isolation from the world. Menzies writes that the great ships “rotted at their moorings” and that the records of their journeys were destroyed.

  There are problems with Menzies’s arguments that undermine the credibility of the premise that Zheng made it to the Americas. Critics believe that the Zheng voyages between 1405 and 1433 only surveyed portions of the Indian Ocean, and as one critic wrote, “The evidence Menzies presented has been contested by experts in cartography and naval architecture.” The behemoth junks are considered a technical absurdity, the story relies on ocean currents that don’t exist, and Menzies’s most important map is considered a twenty-firstcentury forgery.22

  However, one famous Chinese explorer who might have made it to America is Hsu Fu, or Xufu. Born in 255 B.C., he was ordered by Emperor Qinshihuang (259–210 B.C.) to sail east in search of an elixir of life and to locate the mysterious Isle of Immortals. His second journey in 219 B.C. departed with three thousand men and women, but they never returned. Howeve
r, it was written in the first-century-B.C. book Shiji that “Hsu Fu found some calm and fertile plain with a broad forest and rich marshes where he made himself a king.”23

  Perhaps the most reliable Chinese records documenting a journey to America are the official court records of A.D. 499 that describe the voyages of Huishen, or Hwei Shan (not to be confused with Hsu Fu), one of five Buddhist monks who, in A.D 458, sailed from southern China to “Fusang,” a Chinese name for a legendary land across the Eastern Sea. After forty years, he returned with a detailed tale of a six-thousand-mile odyssey to a land across the sea, which was described a hundred years later in The Book of Liang by Yao Silian. Surprisingly, the distance and directions given by him indicate a coastal island-hopping route across the North Pacific, past the Aleutian Islands to Alaska, and then down the entire west coast of America to at least as far as Mexico.

  The place was rich in copper and traces of gold and silver but no iron. The native tribes in Fusang were civilized, living in well-organized communities. They produced paper from the bark of the Fusang plants for writing and produced cloth from the fibers of the bark, which they used for robes or wadding. Their houses or cabins were constructed with red mulberry wood. The fruits and young shoots of the plants were one of their food sources. They raised deer for meat and milk, just as the Chinese raised cattle at home, and produced cheese with deer milk. They traveled on horseback and transported their goods with carts or sledges pulled by horses, buffalo, or deer.24

  There are inconsistencies and perhaps some problems with Huishen’s accounts. One is that horses did not exist then on the American continent, nor did the habit of taming and milking deer, although South American llamas and alpacas do fit this description. However, noted Hispanic scholar Charles E. Chapman (1880–1941) wrote of the many relevant aspects of Huishen’s account, pointing out that the descriptions of the people and places the man visited resemble places in America.25 For example, his description of people living in the “Land of Marked Bodies” matches that of villagers observed at Point Barrow, Alaska, in the nineteenth century, who had tattoos and face paintings. Also Huishen’s detailed description of “Fusang trees” as a source of food and fiber for making clothing exactly matches that of the maguey, or century plant, of Mexico, which is often called a tree because it can reach a height of thirty feet.

  Huishen also said the inhabitants of Fusang did not wage war. They had no military weapons or soldiers and no fortresses or walled cities, unlike the other great civilizations of antiquity. (This was before the warlike Nahua tribes such as the Aztecs arrived in central Mexico in the thirteenth century.) His reports of the use of copper but not iron and the minor value of gold and silver were also consistent with Mexico. Chapman also pointed out that the likenesses of early Buddhism to early Mexican religion are striking; for example, corpses were cremated among the Aztecs, and there are many shared elements between the priesthoods. After ten highly detailed pages about the subject, including descriptions of Chinese artifacts and coins found particularly around Puget Sound in Washington state, Chapman concludes, “Either Huishen was in America, presumably in Mexico, or else the story was a lie. The evidence that it was true is almost overwhelming.”26

  JAPANESE CONNECTIONS

  Cyrus H. Gordon proposed in his book Before Columbus that Japanese sailors reached South American shores five thousand years ago. Gordon believed that transoceanic mariners came to the Americas from China, Southeast Asia, and India via the Pacific over many periods.27

  Other researchers have also come to the same conclusions; for instance, there is archaeological evidence from Valdivia in Ecuador that includes pottery with unique, highly decorated rim designs. These are rare outside of Japan, where the Jomon culture has decorated their pots in this way for at least ten thousand years. Moreover, carbon-14 dating analysis of the charcoal found at the same excavation level gives a date of circa 3600 B.C.28

  In 1828 in Veracruz, Mexico, workers uncovered several marble vases, each having three legs and a bulging base, similar to Japanese vases. These vases were later identified by archaeologists as originating from Japan around the first millennium A.D.29 There have also been a few other Japanese artifacts reported in the Americas, and many Asian tools have been found along the Pacific Coast, including mortars, pestles, jade knives, and axes that are indicative of the spread of Asian cultures to the Americas.

  However, perhaps some of the best examples of evidence for Japanese migrations to the Americas are the many similarities between the cultures of Japan and the Zuni tribe of New Mexico and Arizona. In her book Zuni Enigma, anthropologist Nancy Yaw Davis makes the case that the Zuni are a mixture of Japanese immigrants and Native Americans. She suggested that a group of Japanese Buddhists arrived on the southern coast of California after a major earthquake around A.D. 1350 and eventually migrated to what is now Zuni territory.30 She supports her thesis by using forensic evidence, including analyses of DNA, dental morphology, and skeletal remains. She also points to the Zunis’ exceptionally high incidence of a specific kidney disease called mesangiopathic glomerulonephritis, which is also unusually common in Japan, and the two peoples’ similar frequency of type-B blood, which is nearly absent in other Native Americans.31

  Davis also notes similarities between the Zuni and Japanese languages, along with the Zuni “sacred rosette” that often adorns pottery and clothing, which resembles the Japanese Buddhist chrysanthemum symbol (which is also Japan’s imperial crest).32

  Fig. 15.8. Zuni sacred rosette (left) and Japan’s national chrysanthemum symbol (right). (Image based on graphic from Science Frontiers Online)

  I had an occasion to relate Davis’s thesis to a Zuni on a visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, not so many years ago. I was walking near the central square and approached a Native American man who was magnificently dressed as a dancer in traditional clothing. About thirty years old, he wore an abundance of feathers and a decorative headband, and the rest of his traditional clothing was beaded and bell adorned. He seemed quite receptive to a conversation, so after introductions I queried him about Davis’ Zuni Enigma. To say the least, he became quite enraged and agitated as he lambasted her breach of trust and “untrue and white” conclusions about the origins of the Zuni people.

  It is understandable why some Native Americans feel that Davis, Matlock, and other diffusionists are “whitewashing” their traditions and history by suggesting a transoceanic origin of some native peoples. However, some of the origin myths of specific tribes inform that their ancestors came from the “underworld.” And as noted in chapter 12, a Hopi elder told Carl Bjork, “We came from another land to the coast of California and made it to the mesas in which we live today.”

  MINOAN, PHOENICIAN, AND GREEK CONNECTIONS

  According to Thompson, there is evidence of Minoan contact with the Americas between 3400 B.C. and 1400 B.C. that is based on inscriptions found along the Amazon River in Brazil.33 Also, the maze-like symbol used by the Pima Indians of Arizona is identical to the “Minoan maze” symbol from the Cretan story of the minotaur and the maze.34

  After cataclysmic tidal waves and volcanic ash destroyed Crete and Minoan society around 1400 B.C., the Phoenicians came to power in what is now Lebanon. As documented in chapter 2, the Phoenicians were the greatest sailors and merchants of the ancient world. By 1000 B.C. their reach expanded to North Africa, into what is now Tunisia and Libya, and by the eighth century B.C. they had established settlements in what is now Spain on the Iberian Peninsula. Driven by the lucrative trade in copper, Phoenician traders formed sailing alliances with Hebrews, Egyptians, and people from other Mediterranean cultures. It appears they came to Lake Superior’s Isle Royal and Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula to mine and transport copper to Europe and the Mediterranean. Other evidence they might have left behind would include the Bourne Stone in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the contents of the Crespi Collection in Ecuador (chapter 2).

  In addition to the Bourne Stone, another engraved stone mentioned in
chapter 13 is the Grave Creek stone. It was excavated from a mound in Moundsville, West Virginia, in 1838. In America B.C., Fell wrote that the language of the Grave Creek artifact is Phoenician Punic and proposed a translation, which he revised in a later and more detailed analysis to read, “Tumulus in honor of Tadach. This engraved tile [his] queen caused to be inscribed.” The controversial stone is near universally considered a hoax by the archaeopriest community. However, McGlone and Leonard consider it one of the better “epigraphic indications of Old World contact, because it seems impossible that it could have been faked in a script that was unreadable at the time, and because two similar ‘body tabs’ [tablets] have been found in West Virginia,” meaning the Braxton (or Wilson) Tablet found in 1931 in a streambed and the Ohio County Tablet found in 1956. The original Grave Creek Stone has been lost, and only the plaster cast and wax impressions remain.35

  Fig. 15.9. The Grave Creek Stone. The small sandstone disk found in 1838 was inscribed with twenty-five characters that were interpreted by Fell to be Phoenician Punic. (Smithsonian Institution photo of a plaster cast from www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/grvcrk.html; accessed July 8, 2014).

  As for the Greeks, around 150 B.C., the scholar and geographer Crates of Mallos created the earliest known globe to explain the journeys of Ulysses in Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. It was lost to history, but Roman geographer Strabo (ca. 64/63 B.C.–A.D. 24) re-created it, meaning it was well known during the Roman era.

  Crates credited Homer with discovering the spherical shape of the world because his Ulysses made it to Peroikoi, which Homer called “the land of those who live on the opposite side on the same meridian.” If this was North America, it meant that South America was the lands at the bottom of Crates’s map that were called Antipodea (the “Opposite Foot”). The term was used by Aristotle, Strabo, Plutarch, and Diogenes Laertius and was adopted into Latin as the antipodes.