Tag: South America

Did the Ancient Greeks Discover America?

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

In a word, no, but that doesn’t stop the Epoch Times for wasting electrons on a nutty theory … here are just enough exerpts to smack your gob:

The year 1492 is one of history’s most famous dates, when America was discovered by Europeans. However that “New World” may have been already known to the ancient Greeks, according to a book by Italian physicist and philologist Lucio Russo.

The translated title for Russo’s book would be “The Forgotten America: The Relationship Among Civilizations and an Error Made by Ptolemy.” But the author told the Epoch Times that the title for the English version, which isn’t ready yet, will probably be “When the World Shrunk.”
Some Clues

Among the many clues of contact between ancient Europeans and Native Americans are the few pre-Columbian texts to have survived the Spanish devastation.

In a book about the origins of the Maya-Quiché people there are many interesting points. The fathers of that civilization, according to the text, were “black people, white people, people of many faces, people of many languages,” and they came from the East. “And it isn’t clear how they crossed over the sea. They crossed over as if there were no sea,” says the text.

However, researchers later decided to translate the Mayan word usually meant for “sea” as “lake.”

There are also many Mayan depictions and texts about men with beards. But Native Americans do not grow beards.

Furthermore, some artworks of the ancient Romans show pineapples, a fruit that originated in South America.

Ways of Thought

Russo, who currently teaches probability at Tor Vergata University of Rome, says the main reason why researchers think America wasn’t known to ancient Greeks is not due to lack of proof, but to scientific dogma. […]

… now since they mentioned that old canard about pineapples in Roman art, we feel compelled to comment. We should make note of the photo that accompanies the original article:

Photo in the Epoch Times, apparently from Lucio Russo’s book

I won’t go too much into detail about the background on this claim (which ultimately goes back to Ivan Van Sertima … see Jason Colavito’s excellent post from a year or so ago: The “Pineapple” of Pompeii), but there clearly is something wrong with people if they look at those things and see pineapples. Begin with the mosaic and you’re looking at something that looks like it’s smaller than most of the fruit there. Then look at the fresco and see that the things are only slightly larger than the snake’s head. Then you can argue with yourself about the statue and decide whether it’s a child or an adult. If you’ve been around Classics for a while, however,  the thing is obviously a  pinecone, not a pineapple, which are similarly-depicted on plenty of pots relating to Dionysus/Bacchus and usually brandished by a Maenad, and often by Dionysus himself E.g.:

via Wikipedia

There are countless other examples, including architectural elements and the like. Once again we see the ‘danger’ of non-specialists building theories on rather common elements of ancient Greek and Roman life (more common than they want to believe) …

Odysseus in America Redux

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

We’ve had this nuttiness before and once again, it comes from the Greek Reporter:

Dr. Enrico Mattievich, a retired Professor of Physics from the UFRJ, Brazil, suggested in 2011 that Odysseus’s journey to the Underworld took actually place in South America. The river Acheron was the Amazon, after a long voyage upstream Odysseus met the spirits of the dead at the confluence of the Rio Santiago and Rio Marañon.

In his book, Journey to the Mythological Inferno, which is a historical non-Fiction winners’ book, Mattievich exposes his thesis on ancient contacts between the Old World and America, based on Greek and Roman classical texts, leading to new ideas about America that many historians and geographers have been reluctant to consider until now.

Some time ago, the writer and archaeologist Henriette Mertz suggested that the legendary voyage of Odysseus and his ship’s crew, after the Trojan War – narrated in Homer’s Odyssey – would be a trip across the Atlantic, from the Gibraltar Straits to North America. She also suggested that the Argonauts could have navigated down to the South Atlantic Ocean, passed the mouth of the Amazon River to Rio de la Plata, and, following it upstream, reached Bolivian Altiplano and Thiaguanaco. Dr. Christine Pellech also suggested that Odyssey’s voyage to the Kingdom of the Dead was a real trip to America.

The thesis presented in the Journey to the Mythological Inferno claims that Greek and Roman myths related to the Underworld, the House of Hades, the Kingdom of the Dead or the Inferno, originated in South America, specifically in the Andean region of Peru, where the ruins of the Palace of Hades and Persephone, mentioned in Hesiod’s Theogony – written around 700 B.C. – still stand, known as Chavín de Huántar. This theory took form after Mattievich’s first visit to the archaeological site of Chavín de Huántar, in 1981.

In his book, Mattievich presents classical literature texts, such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis, that relate to the knowledge of America. The Cadmus myth, written by Ovid, for example, is estimated to be a myth immortalizing the heroic feat of the discovery and conquest of the Amazon River by the Phoenicians. The prehistoric presence of Phoenician navigators along the coast and rivers of Brazil, could be confirmed by hundreds of engraved inscriptions on rocks– called itacoatiaras – by natives of Brazil, where it’s often possible to recognize archaic Semitic and proto-Greek characters. The same name Brazil, according to Professor Cyrus Gordon, comes from the vocable brzl, used by Canaanites to denote iron.

… back in November, they gave the same basic story: Odysseus in America? … it’s genuinely difficult to take this news source seriously at times. And once again I marvel how an outsider (retired physics guy) seems to be taken seriously in a matter clearly outside his purview. Maybe I should write how I proved string theory or something …