ROME
There is no actual physical evidence of Roman occupation of or habitation in America, but there are shipwrecks. Lying at the bottom of Guanabara Bay off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, the wreckage of at least three vessels believed to be Roman were found in 1982, which immediately set alarm bells ringing over by the Iberian Peninsula, as Spain and Portugal both began to see a growing threat to their claims that their boy was the one to have discovered America. They even warned the Brazilian government that they, the Spanish and Portuguese, would be obliged to extend immediate Brazilian citizenship to all Italians in that country, just as they did to all Portuguese immigrants. Um, what? How is that a threat? Are they saying that they would make the Romans - all those long-dead sailors Brazilians? How would that help?
In the apparent interest of deterring plunderers, the Brazilians caved and had the entire area covered over with muck and silt, preventing any possible embarrassing discovery that might, sorry, rock the boat. This wasn’t the first time the might of Spain and Portugal had combined to ensure the lie about Columbus was maintained. In 1972 permission was refused by the Honduran government for divers to access a shipwreck which might have turned out to have predated the
Santa Maria. Let the gravy train roll on boys, let the gravy train roll on. Or in this case I guess, gravy boat.
Here comes Professor Barry Fell again.
Nothing could be done to prevent ancient Roman coins being dug up in a field in Massachusetts, except to mutter that they must have been - say it with me - lost by a careless collector. But our man Barry ain’t having that. The fact that there are the images of four consecutive emperors on these coins and that they were all found in the same spot make that theory bollocks, to quote Professor Fell. All right, I’m not quoting him, but I’m sure that’s what he’d like to say if he didn’t have to observe the professional niceties. Our Barry reckons they came from a Roman merchant ship which would have arrived in America around 375, still a thousand years ahead of Senor Colon. Again though, the evidence keeps piling up and again the skeptics, or those with something to lose, keep denying it.
In Mexico, the terracotta head of a Roman figurine, dated to the third century, was unearthed from a grave in 1933, in Alabama in 1942 it was an oil lamp from Pompeii, first century AD, and again in Virginia four years later, this time a goblet again from the worst possible place to have gone for a holiday in ancient times. Unless your ideal holiday, of course, entailed being covered over with mountains of volcanic ash, in which case, you were sorted. A grave containing the skeletons of what turned out to be nine Jews was discovered in 1889 in Tennessee (though originally dismissed as nothing since the inscription was read upside-down). Yeah. Again let me hand you over to Patrick Huyghe: he explains it so much better than I could.
In 1889, a stone measuring about five inches long and two inches wide and inscribed with eight Hebrew characters was excavated by John Emmert, a field assistant then employed by the Smithsonian Institution. He found the stone along with two brass bracelets and what appeared to be polished wooden earspools under the skull of one of nine skeletons that had been carefully laid out at the bottom of an unrifled burial mound measuring twenty-eight feet in diameter and five feet high. The curator of ethnology at the Smithsonian, in a report on the excavations published five years later, expressed the opinion that the mound was made in historic times by the Indians and that the inscription was in Cherokee syllabic script. Therefore, he concluded, it could not be older than the early nineteenth century. But the curator never realized that he had read the script upside down.
More than a half century later, when scholars turned the inscription right side up, they found the letters “LYHWD” in Hebrew. In 1972, Cyrus Gordon, a Hebrew scholar at Brandéis University, recognized that the letters belonged to the Hebrew style of the Roman period. He noted in particular that the shape of the Hebrew “W” occurred on coins of the Bar Kokhba revolt. The embellishment of letters with a little drilled hole, as atop the L and Y, was typical of Hebrew coins of the Roman period. This enabled Gordon to translate the text as “A comet for the Jews,” a standard phrase dating from the revolt of a.d. 125 when Bar Kokhba was associated with prophecy regarding a comet.
Gordon assigned a date of about a.d. 135 to the migration of Jewish refugees to America, partially on the basis of the coin finds in neighboring Kentucky. A recent investigation shows that Gordon’s estimate was in the right ballpark. In 1988, a Swiss laboratory, with the cooperation of the Smithsonian, was able to determine the age of a piece of wood from one of the earspools found with the skeletons and the Bat Creek stone. By the use of accelerator mass spectrometry, the date obtained shows the Bat Creek burial to have taken place about 1,605 years ago, give or take 170 years. If this time period is correct, the brass bracelets found with the skeletons could only have come from the Old World.
So there you have it. Proof positive. Well no, not really. Prominent archaeologists dismiss it because, well, it just really doesn’t fit in with their theories, and they decided to accuse the guy who excavated the grave as having forged the text. Sure why not? Ohio State University did not agree, and published an article backing up the veracity of the tomb, but of course nobody can prove it for certain and it’s all a case of could have been, may have been, is possible that and so on. Other finds were unearthed in Newark and Ohio, but again their authenticity has been disputed. South of the border though, down Mexico way, is a site that nobody disputes.
Comalcalco, a Mayan site in the southeastern corner of Mexico, is a site of almost four hundred structures, including a pyramid, made out of bricks whose source is definitely not local, as the site lies about sixty miles from any usable building stone at all. Our man Barry checked out the bricks - or some of them; I guess he was hardly likely to examine tens or hundreds of thousands of the things! - and noted they seem to have a Roman stonemason’s mark on them, a sort of CE symbol I guess, Guaranteed Roman, Best in the Empire, sort of thing.
SCANDINAVIA
While they would probably prefer to stick to the myth of Columbus having been the first to discover America, those with a fixation that only a white man could have been there before anyone else will at least be slightly cheered by the evidence that they may be right. Just, you know, not in the way they think. Evidence shows clearly the presence of a Norwegian known as Woden-lithi, a trader who sailed from Ringerike in Norway about 3,600 years ago to do business in Canada. He was however not an explorer, had no interest in discovering a new land (and anyway for him it would not have been so, as there were people there already and he was going there to trade with them) and once he had sorted his business he fu
cked off back to Norway and is lost to history, just another businessman taking a trip south to conduct some business. Technically speaking also, I guess you might say even if he had been credited with the discovery, it would not have been of America, as he only went as far as Canada, around the Toronto area.
Petroglyphs, which I assume from my limited (i.e., almost non-existent) knowledge of Latin, are rock carvings, graffiti on stone, show pictures of boats and sea vessels which are not believed to have existed in the American continent at that time. The Native Americans certainly did not have them, the best they could muster being dugout canoes, while these petroglyphs clearly depicted long ships with carved animal figureheads and masts, and graffiti later translated by an expert on Norse languages seems to speak of the visit of a Scandinavian king, so we know that Woden-lithi was no simple tradesman, though he did come to Canada to buy copper for use in bronze manufacture.
Red, White and Green: Erik the Red and the Flotation of Greenland
Life could be tough for Vikings around the tenth century. Known as vicious marauders who would quite literally kill you as soon as look at you, they worshipped the fierce Norse gods Odin (or Woden), Thor and Loki, and believed the only way to die with honour was in battle yadda yadda but eventually all of this killing, pillaging, plundering and stomping about became tiring, and Vikings began to consider a change of god, the Christian one looking a decent substitute. Which is to say, by the tenth century most Norse had converted to Christianity, given up the plundering, pillaging and fighting (perhaps indulging in the odd rape, but sure you can’t expect a man to change overnight can you now?) and settled down to be farmers and traders.
That’s all very well and good. As most warrior civilisations have found out down through history, that sort of full-on-us-against-the-world attitude can’t last, and as you get older as a people you need to have the odd breather, these becoming longer and more frequent till eventually you say “Ah fu
ck it! I’m not going plundering today. There’s
Goldfinger on the telly!” or words to that effect, Basically, all warrior peoples go one of two ways: they settle down and ditch the warrior ways or they warrior themselves right out of existence. So the Norse chose the first option, and life became a lot easier and quite possibly better.
Except for poor Erik the Red, that is.
Erik was born in Norway but his father was exiled to Iceland for manslaughter. Now, in the good old days of the “real” Vikings, this would have engendered likely nothing more than a few grins down the local and a round of beers, clapped shoulders all round and maybe one or two guys might fight it out to the death, just for the hell of it, as Vikings did. In fact, it’s not widely known (since I made it up but it could have been true) that a Viking heading down to the Axe and Sword for a quiet twenty pints or so with the lads might growl to his wife “I’ll be back at sunrise, unless I get killed, in which case make sure my sons have a father. Cheers love!” A night on the razz in downtown Oslo or Bergen could be a dangerous affair.
But after the Christian God was adopted the kind of harmless fun Vikings had been known to indulge in became illegal, murder even, and thus Thorvald, Erik’s dad, was kicked out of Norway for explaining the finer points of his argument with, well, the finer points of a battleaxe maybe. Not wishing to be outdone, Erik too got himself exiled. See, neither Erik nor his old man had accepted Jesus into their lives. In fact, they told the shocked priests just exactly where Jesus could stick his eternal salvation and brotherhood to all men, and further, went on to say that if he and Erik could find their way into the Kingdom of Heaven, they would be sure to ransack it and carry off as many angels as one man could manage.
In other words, Thorvald remained a staunch supporter of Odin, and when Erik followed in his dad’s footsteps his wife, a true Christian now, told him she’d be damned (literally) if she would lie with a pagan, and that if he wanted some he had better make with the holy water and that sign of the cross that was becoming so popular, adding that she was sure Mrs. Sharpaxe at number seven didn’t have this trouble with her husband, who converted dutifully when told to, nor even Mrs. Wolfclaw, who she had never liked but at least knew how to keep her man in line. How, she may have wailed, could Erik embarrass and scandalise her so? Clinging to outmoded beliefs, talking about Valhalla as if it existed, when everyone knew that the only real place you went when you died was Heaven? Did he realise that everyone was laughing at him?
Erik may have realised, but did not care, and so when - possibly due to having been forced into celibacy - he took exception to his neighbour killing all his slaves, and addressed his concerns by killing said neighbour, the council of elders shook their heads and said come on now, this isn’t the seventh century you know Erik. Perhaps a spell in that undiscovered land to the southwest is just what you need, yeah the one with no name. Off you go, and don’t come back for, oh, let’s say three years.
And off he went. The land he was exiled to turned out to be pretty much the same as Iceland, but in a move worthy of the greatest spindoctors and
PR executives today, and completely ignoring the fact that it was a total lie, Erik named the new land Greenland, and began trying to attract settlers. Many of them, perhaps fed up with the Christian god and his incessant bans on just about everything that was enjoyable, to say nothing of that fu
cking Latin they had to listen to, joined him. It’s not recorded what the first would-be settlers to arrive there had to say on seeing what they had invested in, but it’s a fair bet that it would have gone along the basic lines of “Fu
ck me! Where’s all this green then? Don’t see much of that. White we got, grey too. No green though. You sure you named this place properly, Erik me old son? Did you maybe mean Greyland?”
As an aside, you have to laugh at the names these guys either gave themselves or were given. Erik’s neighbour, to whom he was most un-neighbourly, was known as Eyjolf the Foul, and one of the men who rose against Erik later in the ensuing dispute went by Thorad the Yeller (I’m going to assume that meant he shouted loudly, not that he was a coward). But what did Erik the Red have to do with the exploration of America? Well, nothing actually, but his son sure did.