Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  If you read a “fact” in an alternative history book, you can be fairly certain of one thing: It won’t be true. In They Came before Columbus (1976) the Afrocentrist writer Ivan Van Sertima, for whom evidence exists solely as grist for polemic, claimed that the ancient Mexican and Egyptian calendars were substantively similar because a scholar, the Abbé Hervas, had written that

  The Mexican year began upon the 26th of February, a day celebrated in the era of Nabonassar, which was fixed by the Egyptians 747 years before the Christian era; for the beginning of their month Toth, corresponded with the meridian of the same day. If those priests fixed also upon this day as an epoch, because it was celebrated in Egypt, we have there the Mexican Calendar agreeing with the Egyptian. But independent of this, it is certain, that the Mexican Calendar conformed greatly with the Egyptian.[291]

  Van Sertima declines to note that the Abbé Hervas lived in the eighteenth century, and his discussion was a private letter sent to the cleric Francesco Saverio Clavigero (also known as Francisco Javier Clavijero Echegaray) and published in 1780 in The History of Mexico.[292] He acknowledges this obliquely in the end notes (citing the 1804 edition), but does not mention the fact in the body text.[293] Van Sertima then manages to misunderstand Hervas despite having two hundred years of advances to draw upon. He seems to think that the Egyptian calendar “began” on February 26, 747 BCE but does not seem to understand what is meant by this. Van Sertima seems to think that time began anew on that date for the Egyptians (though he acknowledges that their calendar is older than this), but this is not true. Hervas recognized that “Nabonassar” (i.e. Nabu-nasir), a king of Babylon, had reformed the Babylonian calendar, creating intercalary months to marry lunar and solar calendars and establishing an eighteen year cycle.

  However, Hervas takes the Hellenistic astronomer Ptolemy at his word in the Almagest that this established a universal Anno Nabonassari,[294] but in fact the only reason Nabu-nasir’s name is remembered is because Ptolemy and other Hellenistic astronomers used his calendar to calculate the motion of the stars. This, in turn, occurred because it is only with the ascension of Nabu-nasir that complete and careful astronomical and calendar records began to be kept at Babylon, which Ptolemy drew upon. There is no evidence of an Anno Nabonassari until Ptolemy introduced it.

  Nor was this the only “era” used by Ptolemy; he also said that the calendar began anew with Philippus Aridaeus, Caesar Augustus, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius. He did not mean that the calendar literally started to mark time for each of these men; rather, this was how Ptolemy was referencing dates to try to reduce confusion created by the traditional (eastern) practice of counting years by the name of the monarch—i.e., “the third year of Cleopatra VII,” etc.—by grouping years together in larger eras. Nabu-nasir came first because he had the oldest usable records. Besides, it would have been strange for Egypt to have used a Babylonian king to define their calendar for all time.[295] (In 747 BCE, Egypt was in the Third Intermediate Period, with control divided among native rules and the Nubians, from the south.) Such facts are beyond Ivan Van Sertima, who cares nothing for what Ptolemy actually said so long as someone, somewhere said something he could use for Afrocentric polemic.

  Since the Mayan calendar, which marks time from August 11, 3114 BCE, was not deciphered and correlated to the Gregorian calendar until the twentieth century, Hervas must have been talking about the Aztec calendar, which was already understood in the eighteenth century. This calendar, though, was nothing like the Egyptian. The Egyptian calendar had twelve months of thirty days plus five intercalary days. The Aztec calendar had eighteen months of twenty days plus five intercalary days. The coincidence of five intercalary days—something Hervas emphasizes and Van Sertima quotes gleefully[296]—stems entirely from the impossibility of dividing the 365 days of the solar year into even units, not from any magical ancestral calendar. It is simple math, derived from the coincidental remainder when dividing 365 evenly by either eighteen months (as in Mexico) or twelve months (as in Egypt). In both cases, five days are left over.

  Nor is the beginning of the calendar cycle well-fixed. The earliest recorders differed in their descriptions. Diego Durán, a Dominican friar, held that the new year began on March 1, while Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan priest, held that the new year began on February 2. At any rate, the celebration of the New Year, even if it were February 26, is hardly the same thing as Ptolemy suggesting that a new era began on one specific February 26 in 747 BCE. The Egyptian New Year began on August 29, at least in the late period. Because they had no concept of the leap day, the calendar gradually shifted across the seasons.

  Van Sertima, ignoring all of this, then completely misunderstands Hervas, writing that “Egyptian influence may be traced to…the time Mexicans began to count the years….”[297] Hervas never says that the Mexican calendar began for all time on February 26, and in fact stated that the new year began that day.[298] Van Sertima confuses the New Year’s date with the foundation date of the calendar.

  Read Hervas’s subsequent sentence carefully: “If those [i.e. Aztec] priests fixed also upon this day as an epoch, because it was celebrated in Egypt, we have there the Mexican Calendar agreeing with the Egyptian.”[299] The “if” clause is important. It is telling us that Hervas is asking us to assume that if the Mexicans adopted the Egyptian calendar’s “epoch,” then the Mexican calendar is also the Egyptian calendar. This is circular reasoning made possible because Hervas adopted the widespread (and fictive) belief that “the Mexicans [i.e. Aztec] had their Calendar from the Toltecas (originating from Asia)….”[300] Hervas believed the Toltecs were originally from Asia and had contact with the Egyptians, and that contact occurred at a relatively early date, c. 800 BCE. (Later research would prove that the Toltec actually flourished much later—from 800 to 1000 CE—and were indigenous Americans whose last Asian ancestors were at least ten thousand years in the past.)

  This fictive history of the Toltec, in turn, was made possible by the religious belief that the first Americans were descendants of one of Noah’s sons, probably Shem, a people who migrated to the Americas sometime after 2356 BCE, the calculated year of the Flood based on creation in 4004 BCE. According to theories popular in the eighteenth century, these people were probably some of the Lost Tribes of Israel, who therefore did not reach the Americas until after the Assyrian conquest of Israel in 720 BCE, when they disappear from the Biblical record. This is the deep background for why Hervas felt that the Toltec must have brought the post-747 BCE Nabonassar calendar with them, since it would have been in universal use, or so he thought, in the Near East of the age.

  But Van Sertima cares nothing for this, or for the longstanding controversy about the peopling of the Americas that it forms a small sidelight upon. Hervas was a man of his time, but that time had long passed by 1976, and Ivan Van Sertima—a graduate student at Rutgers that year—should have known that centuries-old sources cannot be used uncritically, and that hoary old claims do not automatically pass a “rigorous test” in his words simply by being old.[301] Hervas’s claims do not match modern discoveries, and Van Sertima displayed his monumental hubris in pretending that two centuries of subsequent research and findings could be ignored because a letter in an appendix to an old book could help him make a case for Afrocentrism when the facts, as known to science, could not.

  36. Egyptian Dog Chariots in Mexico?

  I don’t think that Ivan Van Sertima actually knew how to read. At least that’s the impression I get every time I try to trace back one of his Afrocentrist claims from They Came before Columbus (1976) back to its source. Van Sertima wrote his book when he was a graduate student at Rutgers, and it says little for that institution’s educative training that one of their bestselling graduates simply could not understand what he read in articles and books.

  In discussing the alleged “connections” between the Nubian people of the Sudan and the Olmecs of Mexico, Van Sertima makes a rather bizarre argument that, frankly, is difficul
t to follow. The background is that the Nubians (more properly the Kushites of the Kingdom of Kush of 800 BCE to 350 CE—“Nubians” being the people who replaced them) adopted and modified Egyptian culture, building their own pyramids and making statues of the Egyptian gods.

  With that established, we can now look at Van Sertima’s tortured argument. He first identifies that importance of dogs in ancient Egypt, claiming they were mummified by the pharaohs. (This is true, but dogs were not universally part of the pharaoh’s funerary package; dogs were more likely to be buried in mass animal tombs, excepting perhaps beloved pets.) He then pivots and says that the “Nubians,” whom he confuses with Kushites, “were fascinated by horses”[302] and buried horses in Kushite royal tombs along with full chariots:

  Yet in spite of this departure from the Egyptian type of burial, the coexistence of the two cultures was preserved by a symbolic Nubian homage to the dog. The Egyptian dog-headed god, Anubis, graces the Nubian funerary offering tables.[303]

  Anubis had the head of a jackal, not a domestic dog.

  This is where things get weird:

  In this very period the Olmecs began to sculpt little clay dogs attached to wheels or to tiny chariots with wheels. In this peculiar blend of dog and chariot lies virtually their only use of the wheel. […] How they struck upon this ritual association (dog/wheeled chariot) is an intriguing question.[304]

  It would be, especially since Van Sertima just told us that the “Nubians” (Kushites) buried horses and not dogs. Van Sertima intends us to believe that the Olmec were visited by the Kushites during the high point of their culture, 800 BCE to 350 CE, bringing with them the post-747 BCE calendar discussed in our previous chapter. This is just chronologically possible since the Olmec flourished between 2500 BCE and 400 BCE. But does Van Sertima’s source support his claim?

  Van Sertima relies entirely upon one academic journal article for this claim: Gordon F. Ekholm’s 1946 American Antiquity article “Wheeled Toys in Mexico.”[305] It does not say what Van Sertima says it says.

  In his article, Ekholm describes a series of toys found in Mexico, dating from primarily from the last few centuries before the Spanish conquest, which he called “period V,” dating to around 1200 CE. He does not provide dates for all the pieces, but those he does date are not Olmec. Ekholm describes these toys as “wheeled vehicles,” by which he meant that they could be pulled on a string, like children’s toys today. Van Sertima mistakes this phrase for confirmation that the toys were intended as a “peculiar blend of dog and chariot.” This is not what was meant by “vehicle.” Instead, Ekholm describes a particular animal toy with wheels that had been found in 1880 and labeled by its discoverer, the French archaeologist Claude-Joseph-Désiré Charnay, as a “chariot.” Well, that’s how Ekholm summarized it. In the original, Charnay calls it a “cart” and discusses how the word “chariot” was used differently in post-Conquest Mexico. But Charnay was describing the resemblance of the low-slung, flat animal with wheels to a cart with an animal face. Charnay thought it might represent an Aztec wagon or cart.[306] Examining the illustration Charnay provided of the cart in his volume makes plain that this is an animal with wheels, not as Van Sertima mistakenly believes from Charnay’s wording as conveyed by Ekholm a “little clay dogs attached … to tiny chariots with wheels.” Nor is it of Olmec extraction; it was found near Mexico City and dates from either late Toltec or early Aztec times (around 1200 CE), as Ekholm clearly explained.[307]

  The final piece, the only one that Van Sertima could reasonably have associated with the Olmec, was described as coming from Oaxaca, near the Olmec heartland. However, Ekholm explains in no uncertain terms that he believed the toy “must have been made in Spanish times” since it depicted a horse with a saddle, something unknown in pre-Columbian Mexico.[308] Saddles were only invented anywhere on earth around 700 BCE and were not in widespread use in the Old World until the Olmec had vanished. He also said it was of the Zapotec (Monte Alban) style, not Olmec.[309]

  The earliest example identified Ekholm placed in the Teotihuacan Period (100 BCE-700 CE), again not Olmec. He did write that such toys might be “the result of contact with or influence from some Old World culture,” which Van Sertima gleefully seized upon, ignoring the subsequent statement that such a possibility was “quite unlikely.”[310]

  Ekholm does not identify the wheeled animals as dogs. He cites others as identifying some as peccaries and armadillos, and suggesting the above-mentioned animal was a horse. Charnay’s illustration perhaps resembles a dog, but there is no way to be sure. The figures are stylized. Some, especially those found after he wrote, undoubtedly were dogs,[311] but Ekholm doesn’t say so and Van Sertima never went in search of those sources.

  In sum, Ivan Van Sertima either purposely misrepresented Ekholm’s article for profit, or he was simply incapable of understanding the material that he read. Given the polemical nature of Van Sertima’s book, the former would seem the more prudent conclusion, but given his admitted ignorance of the Olmec in later years, I suspect the latter.

  Van Sertima’s They Came before Columbus was not given a full academic review until the twenty-first century, and so far as I know, its claims have never been systematically evaluated. It’s painful to see that entire careers can be built on misunderstandings, fabrications, and lies just because no one ever bothered to check the sources.

  37. The Pineapple of Pompeii

  While I’m on the subject of alleged Old World incursions in to the ancient New World, let’s pause to consider the an alleged case of the reverse. The Afrocentrist scholar Ivan Van Sertima discussed in his They Came before Columbus (1976) his belief that Native American travelers reached Roman-era Europe in 62 BCE, based on a text by Pliny discussing “Indians” from India, not America[312] (see Chapter 47), and in so doing, he adds a weird little detail that he believed Native Americans brought pineapples with them while traveling from North America to Germany:

  These Americans came to early to have been the carriers of the maize grain to the Old World, but they might have brought the pineapple. Their visit occurred in 62 B.C. About a hundred years later (79 A.D.) a catastrophe struck the Roman city of Pompeii. Excavating under the volcanic dust archaeologists turned up a mural that depicted this plant, completely unknown in the Old World.[313]

  Imagine that: A few Native Americans in a bark canoe following the Gulf Stream somehow brought a pineapple from lower South America all the way up to the North American coast and then across the Atlantic—keeping it fresh, no less—before turning it over to the Romans, who dispatched it not to the capital but to a resort town where its image was faithfully preserved, though only in an obscure corner of a single mural, for 140 years. It makes perfect sense.

  Van Sertima then claims that Domenico Casella, a botanist whom he identifies as a scholar of Pompeii, recognized the mural as a pineapple, as did plant taxonomist E. D. Merrill. Casella, in turn, proposed in a 1950 study published in Pompeiana that images on the murals of Pompeii depict three tropical fruits: the pineapple, the mango, and the custard-apple.[314] The latter two are images of highly stylized fruits that no other scholar has been able to identify—as tropical or anything else. They are too doubtful to assign a meaning, let alone to propose absent any supporting proof that they represent a fruit unseen anywhere else in ancient Europe.[315] The “pineapple” is a more interesting case. The image, found at the “House of the Ephebe,” depicts what nearly most scholars are sure is the cone of the umbrella pine.

  Those who disagreed early on that the image was that of a pine cone were usually scholars who were not native to Italy and therefore based their opinions solely on Casella’s text rather than knowledge of Italian botany. One of these was anthropologist George Carter, who accepted Casella’s argument without question, and to it attached a number of other diffusionist claims about American products in the Old World.[316] Carter was well-known as a diffusionist and proponent of the theory that humans had lived in America for more than 100,000 years
—nearly 10 times the scholarly consensus. His work has not stood up to skeptical inquiry. E. D. Merrill, a botanist, certainly was qualified to speak about plants, though he was not an expert in Roman art or Old World archaeology. His judgment was based entirely on the degree to which he felt the image depicted on the mural resembled the pineapple.[317]

  Despite these supporters, archaeologists and art historians immediately criticized Casella’s claims, and in the 1950s a lively exchange played out across the academic journals. Ivan Van Sertima either knew nothing of this or cared nothing about it, or the emerging scholarly consensus that the Roman image depicts an umbrella pine cone. Instead, he draws on the tradition represented by coverage of the pineapple claim in The Inter-american (1967) and The New Diffusionist (1973) of simply repeating controversial academic papers without a fair presentation of the broader intellectual argument surrounding them. We should credit him, however, for resisting the temptation to pluralize the pineapple, as is done by less cautious alternative authors like Gunnar Thompson who frequently write of the many “pineapples” depicted in Pompeian murals, thus transforming Casella’s tentative identification of a single image into a wide-ranging crop of pineapples.

  The similarity of pineapple and pine cone has a linguistic echo. The very word “pineapple” was coined in early modern England to describe the cones of pine trees, the “apple” (or fruit) of the “pine.” It was only when European explorers found the American pineapple (native to South America) and saw the visual similarity that they applied the name to the American fruit, causing the new meaning to supersede the old. The older meaning, however, clung on in places, which is why Marc Monnier’s 1886 book on the Wonders of Pompeii could describe an image at Herculaneum as depicting a serpent “eating a pineapple,”[318] a description drawn from a half a century of earlier descriptions all referencing the “pine-apple” or “pineapple” on the sign, meaning a pinecone. Similarly, Asclepius (the god of healing) was said in pre-1900 manuals of mythology to be associated with “the pineapple,” which later writers were forced to clarify meant a “pinecone” due to confusion caused by the American fruit and their similar appearance.