The Lost Colonies of Ancient America: A Comprehensive Guide to the Pre-Columbian Visitors Who Really Discovered America
320
The Lost Colonies of Ancient America: A Comprehensive Guide to the Pre-Columbian Visitors Who Really Discovered America
320Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
If so, how are we to account for an Egyptian temple accidentally unearthed by Tennessee Valley Authority workers in 1935? What is a beautifully crafted metal plate with the image of a Phoenician woman doing in the Utah desert? And who can explain the discovery of Viking houses and wharves excavated outside of Boston?
These enigmas are but a tiny fraction of the abundant physical proof for Old World visitors to our continent hundreds and thousands of years ago. In addition, Sumerians, Minoans, Romans, Celts, ancient Hebrews, Indonesians, Africans, Chinese, Japanese, Welsh, Irish, and the Knights Templar all made their indelible, if neglected, mark on our land.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781601632784 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2013 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 1,050,082 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Sumerians
They created the first human society known to have met all the fundamental requirements for civilization. They built the earliest city-states overseen by ruling dynasties; carved out empires and engaged in foreign relations; instituted a legal code and administrative systems, complete with courts, jails, and government records; instituted military science with divisions of infantry, transport (carts drawn by pairs of desert onagers, Asiatic wild asses), and spear-throwers; invented systems of weights and measures; created accounting and record-keeping, and published histories in an original written language; organized agriculture and irrigation; warehoused produce for general distribution; engaged in long-distance commerce; ran a merchant fleet; established an economy based on the various trades of its subjects; employed skilled artisans for public works projects; organized large-scale labor and hierarchical management for the construction of monumental temples and palaces, some with arches, domes, and buttresses, thousands of years before these architectural components were re-discovered by Roman building engineers; provided welfare for the underprivileged; protected women under the law and allowed them to achieve much higher status than in other, contemporaneous societies; taught navigation, mathematics, geometry, algebra, surveying, and astronomy with abacus and slide rule; specialized in decorative arts; and codified religion.
Who were these inventive people? And how did they come to take the first step from pre-civilized to civilized humankind?
The Sumerians called themselves the Ug sag gíg-ga, or "black-headed people," though surviving examples of their painted statuary depict them with blue eyes, and poems celebrated their "fair-headed lads and maidens." Nor did they ever refer to the territories they occupied in what is today modern Iraq as "Sumer." The name is Semitic, after the later Akkadian Šumeru, itself derived from the earlier Hittite Šanhar and Egyptian Sngr. To these "Sumerians," their domain was originally known as Ki-en-gir, or "land of the civilized kings," a name reflecting their self-conscious identity as culture-creators.
They were a non-Semitic folk from Samarra, in northern Mesopotamia, their lineage going back to a Sanskrit-speaking, Aryan homeland in the Southern Urals Steppe region. These roots in south-central Russia account for the ubiquitous appearance of the swastika, that emblematic symbol of all Indo-European tribes, among the inhabitants of Samarra. Paleolinguists Hyatt and Ruth Verrill have demonstrated the relationship "between Sumerian and Sanskrit."
The proto-Sumerians of Samarra flourished as able farmers, weavers, leatherworkers, masons, and potters. Such skills led to increasing population pressures that forced some, after 4500 BC, to leave Samarra for less crowded conditions at the southern end of the Fertile Crescent. There, the immigrants drained the marshes, established their culturally superior industries, and traded with their neighbors — indigenous peasants in mud-brick huts, together with nomadic Semites, pastoralists living in black tents and following herds of sheep and goats. The newcomers' innovative management of storable food fostered a demographic expansion constrained within settled areas, with consequent development of extensive labor forces required to serve the diversifying needs of burgeoning community life. Rising levels of material success had gradually matured into prosperous urban centers sprouting along the Persian Gulf. Here history merged with myth to explain the birth of civilization on the Euphrates-Tigris alluvial plain, south of Baghdad.
Although archaeologists and paleo-anthropologists are unable to definitively trace the Sumerians' ethnic or linguistic roots, the "black-headed people" themselves told how their first city was built in the south, from whence spread high culture northward throughout the Fertile Crescent. Their claim was borne out by field investigators, who identified Eridu as the oldest city not only in Mesopotamia, but in the world. It was established around 5400 BC, near the mouth of the Euphrates River and the seacoast, but lies now some distance from the Persian Gulf, due to the accumulation of silt at the shoreline over the last 74 centuries. Eridu, according to the Sumerians, was founded by Adapa, a representative from the far-off land of Dilmun, revered as the seat of Creation.
It was from this "place where the Sun rises" that "the first man" landed with the seeds of a technological society that soon after blossomed between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Although scholars have not yet determined the location of Dilmun, its culture-bearers appear to have indeed gained a foothold in coastal Iraq nearly one thousand years before immigrants from Samarra arrived at Eridu, where a synthesis of Adapa's sea-faring people from Dilmun with the Ug sag gíg-ga of Samarra resulted in Sumerian civilization. This conclusion is underscored by the excavation at Eridu of abundant fish middens containing the mid-sixth-millennium BC skeletal remains of deep-water ocean catch made by a sailing folk fitting Adad's characterization and believed to have been ancestors of the Sumerians.
Two thousand years later, Ki-en-gir was divided into about a dozen independent city-states ruled over by either an ensi, a kind of priestly governor, or a monarch, known as the lugal. These were transitional to their First Dynasty, circa 2900 BC, and Sumer flourished for more than 400 years, until violence began to wash over the "land of the civilized kings" with the onset of the 26th Century BC. Cities grew suddenly overpopulated and threw up formidable defensive walls, while undefended villages disappeared. An aggressive Semitic kingdom, Akkad, was making its bid for supreme power.
Around 2500 BC, Eannatum of Lagash endeavored to unify all of Sumer against this dire threat by taking most of his fellow city-states by force. His dynamic action saved Ki-en-gir for the next 230 years. But with the appearance of Sargon the Great, the ancient "land of the civilized kings" was completely overpowered in 2270 BC. The Akkadians themselves went into precipitous decline just 52 years later, only to be replaced by the non-Semitic Gutians. Successful revolts against this barbarous tribal people were led by the lugals, Ur-Nammu and Shulgi, who expelled the barbarous occupiers around 2047 BC. Their triumph unleashed a national revival of civilization that flourished for more than 100 years.
But renewed, mid-20th-century-BC bickering between quarrelsome city-states doomed this "Sumerian Renaissance." In 1940 BC, another Semitic people, the Amorites, overwhelmed Ki-en-gir, which would never rise again, although the elegance of its speech would linger on in revered use for centuries to come among the Babylonians, much as Latin is still the language of the arts and sciences in our modern world. Thus vanished a formerly great people, who lost their birthright for all time, because they preferred relatively petty disputes among themselves to unity in the face a growing menace threatening their common existence. The heritage of their forefathers and posterity of their children the Sumerians squandered on behalf of issues less important than their own survival.
The Sumerians left their foremost surviving memorial to themselves in a place known 4,000 years ago as Urim. Today shortened by archaeologists to "Ur," it was originally a very populous and prosperous coastal urban center on the Persian Gulf, until millennia of silting stranded it far inland, 10 miles from the Iraq city of Nasiriyah, south of the right bank on the Euphrates River. It was here that labor teams and building engineers constructed E-temen-niguru, the "House Whose Foundation Creates Awe," more familiar now as the "Great Ziggurat of Ur." The term is Akkadian, from the verb zaqaru, "to build on a raised area," and describes a step-pyramid of large, layered platforms ascending in successively receding stories or levels.
Built mostly of mud bricks set in bitumen (mortar manufactured from a naturally occurring tar), the 210-foot-long structure stood more than 100 feet high in three terraces. Each of its baked bricks measured 11.5 by 11.5 by 2.75 inches and weighed about 33 pounds. Approximately three million six hundred thousand of them were carried by an estimated 10,000 workers — not slaves — laboring year-round to complete their monument in a single generation. Unguessed thousands of cut stones additionally went into its construction. As a Khan Academy writer observes, "The resources needed to build the Ziggurat at Ur are staggering."
Across the front of its 150-foot expanse angled a series of ramps priests and privileged worshippers — though not the general public — used to climb from its base to the first tier, from which they continued their ascent via grand stairways, eventually reaching a shrine for the moon god, Nanna, at the flat summit. Thirty-two ancient ziggurats have been identified, but in only one other place outside Iraq and Iran: South America.
The pre-Inca peoples of coastal Peru built stone and mudbrick step pyramids of similar design and proportions. Like their Middle Eastern counterparts, the Andean versions were part of temple complexes surrounded by other buildings to serve as city administrative centers. These included courtyards, storage rooms, bathrooms, and living quarters, likewise among Sumerians and Peruvians, even to the shared use of massive ramps. Writes Jim R. Bailey in his acclaimed Sailing to Paradise:
But it is not only the general form of these pyramids that is common to the Middle East and to America. In both regions there was a temple on top for the benefit of the god that — again in both regions — was also used by the priests for astronomy. In both regions the sides of the temples were often accurately aligned with the four points of the compass. In both regions a broad flight of steps, a Jacob's ladder, led from the ground to the temple at the summit.
The most cogent such comparison is found in the Supe Valley, Barranca province, about 130 miles north of Lima, some 13 miles from the Pacific coast. Although discovered during 1948, the ruins at Caral — part of a high culture referred to by U.S. archaeologists as "Norte Chico" — were not truly appreciated for their high significance until the early 21st Century, when Ruth Shady Solís, director of Peru's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the National University of San Marcos, re-examined their plazas, mud-brick buildings, and stone monuments.
Towering above them all is the 59-foot-tall Pirámide Mayor, 490 feet long and 520 feet wide, covering nearly four football fields (more than four acres), and made of quarried stone and river cobbles. As described by Archaeology magazine's Roger Atwood, "Armies of workers would gather a long, durable grass known as shicra in the highlands above the city, tie the grass strands into loosely meshed bags, fill the bags with boulders, and then pack the trenches behind each successive retaining wall of the step pyramids with the stone-filled bags."
The discovery of these sacks in situ at the site accurately disclosed the structure's age, because they were woven of reeds, readily carbon-datable material that allows for a high degree of accuracy. Their repeated C-14 testing consistently revealed that the Pirámide Mayor was built in 2627 BC. This year is remarkable not only for identifying Caral as the oldest urban center in the Americas, but because it perfectly coincides with crucial changes brought about with Mesopotamia's transition to the Dynastic IIIa period. At that time, its city-states were beginning to engage in warfare among themselves, spoiling the previous two centuries of relative harmony and cooperation typified by Early Dynastic II. To escape these worsening conditions, it would appear some Sumerians emigrated from "the land of the civilized kings," even as far as the other side of the world. That they possessed the means whereby to carry themselves anywhere they chose is beyond question. "Cuneiform inscriptions tell of vessels large enough to carry twenty-eight tons of cargo," writes Dr. Gunnar Thompson in American Discovery.
Archaeologists know that these self-described "black-headed people" were highly skilled mariners, operating four different classes of vessels. These included eminently seaworthy boats constructed from animal skins; virtually identical craft were used many centuries later by Christian missionaries for regular crossings of the treacherous Irish Sea, 150 miles of open water, often in the company of cows or horses. The Sumerians also built deep-keel (for ocean-going), wooden-oared warships and freighters capacious enough for carrying fully armed troops or livestock.
Some Sumerian hulls were clinker-built, stitched together with onager hair and waterproofed with bitumen. Also known as lapstrake, clinker building fixes wooden planks one to another, enabling them to overlap along their edges. The entire length of one such composite plank is called a strake. This technique was invented for navigating transoceanic swells and high waves, as dramatically demonstrated by the Viking long-ships. In fact, clinker-built vessels were formerly associated with Norse seafaring to such an extent that they were believed to have originated in Northern Europe sometime during the early second century AD, as suggested by Denmark's Nydam Bog find, until their discovery in ancient Mesopotamia.
The Sumerians also successfully operated large reed boats, as recreated by Dr. Thor Heyerdahl for his "Tigris Expedition." In 1978, his 55-foot-long re-creation cruised down Shatt-el-Arab from Iraq into the Persian Gulf, continuing on to Pakistan's Indus Valley, before sailing back over the Indian Ocean to Africa. Heyerdahl covered 4,225 miles in five months, demonstrating his reed vessel's capabilities by successfully voyaging to pre-planned harbors, regardless of contrary winds and ocean currents. The same could have been identically achieved in the Atlantic Ocean.
According to Dr. Thompson, "Sumerian tablets of the 3rd Millennium B.C. tell of voyages 'beyond the western sea,'" an apparent reference to the Mediterranean. In fact, the discovery of resin from Mozambique in the tomb of Puabi, an eresh (queen) at Ur, showed that her people were capable of navigating equivalent distances as far east as the South China Sea or as far west as the Canary Islands. Bailey compares 22 Sumerian gold weights with their virtually exact counterparts among the Ashanti, a strong indication that merchants from Ur not only visited Ghana, but made a lasting impression there. As long ago as 1935, Willibald Wanger's Comparative Lexical Study of Sumerian and Ntu documented the relationship "between Sumerian and black African Bantu languages...."
Hugh Fox, PhD, a professor at Michigan State University and the author of six published anthropology books, wrote of the Sumerians' "connection to West Africa, then the leap across the Atlantic (carried by friendly currents) to the New World." Writing in The Western World Review, Robert Sagehorn cited Hugh Fox as "... one of the foremost authorities (perhaps the foremost authority) on pre-Columbian American cultures." During his extensive research into parallels between the ancient Middle East and pre-Columbian South America, Fox made an important, relative find in Dr. Thor Heyerdahl's Early Man and the Ocean: "Con-Ticci-Viracocha is a composite of three names for the same white and bearded deity. In pre-Inca times, he was known on the coast of Peru as Con and in the highlands as Tici or Ticci, but when Inca rule and language (Quechua) spread to encompass the entire territory, the Incas recognized that the names Con and Ticci referred to the same deity as the one they themselves called Viracocha. They therefore grouped the three names together, to the satisfaction of all the people of their empire."
The original Con and the later, amalgamated Con-Ticci-Viracocha was revered as the founding father of Andean society — described in native traditions as a tall, red-bearded, fair-skinned culture-bearer, who bequeathed to their ancestors all the benefits of civilization, which had been developed in his overseas' kingdom. This was important news to Fox, who read in L.A. Waddell's The Makers of Civilization in Race and History that "the second pre-dynastic Sumerian king is known as Kon."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Lost Colonies of Ancient America"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Frank Joseph.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Recovering From Cultural Amnesia 13
Chapter 1 Sumerians 17
Chapter 2 Egyptians 39
Chapter 3 Minoans 65
Chapter 4 Phoenicians 77
Chapter 5 Romans 103
Chapter 6 Kelts 121
Chapter 7 Hebrews 135
Chapter 8 Africans 149
Chapter 9 Japanese 165
Chapter 10 Chinese 177
Chapter 11 South East Asians 197
Chapter 12 Norse 217
Chapter 13 Knights Templar 243
Chapter 14 Christians 261
Notes 289
References 309
Index 313
About the Author 319