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

by Carl Lehrburger

  Fig. 15.12. Persian cartographer Hamad Allah Mustawfi’s world map of 1350 portrays Waq-Waq, which represents South America, as a ring of land around Africa and Eurasia (AO = Atlantic, WQ = Waq-Waq). (Gunnar Thompson, American Discovery, 292)

  Fig. 15.13. The Albertin de Virga map of 1414 is a pre-Columbian European map of the world. (Gunnar Thompson, The Friar’s Map of Ancient America—1360 A.D.)

  In addition to pre-Columbian maps, there is much more evidence of Arabic travels to the Americas. A road crew dug up a hoard of Arabian coins near Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1787. Arabian coins have been found in Venezuela, while carved tokens with inscriptions have been discovered in Tennessee, Indiana, and New York, along with items containing Kufic Muslim inscriptions in Nevada, California, and Tennessee.74

  As noted in chapter 14, McGlone and Leonard discovered what they considered to be “Arabian-like glyphs” in the southeastern corner of Colorado. They hypothesize that a form of Thamudic Arabian script made its way to Colorado. In 1987 the two researchers sent a detailed report of the glyphs to professional scholars. Nine of the ten semanticists who responded saw a close correspondence between the Colorado symbols and South Semitic letter-forms, using terms such as “remarkable resemblance” and “striking similarity.” However, while there definitely seemed to be similarities, they were not able to read the script, and Leonard continues to investigate the connections.75

  CONNECTIONS TO MESOPOTAMIA AND EGYPT

  Perhaps one of the earliest American artifacts from the Middle East is the well-documented ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet that Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph wore as a pendant. He gifted the one-inch square object to General Nelson Appleton Miles in 1877 upon his surrender to the U.S. calvary. The tablet was translated by a professor of Assyriology, Robert Biggs (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago) to be a sales receipt for a lamb dating back about 4,000 years. It is reported Chief Joseph said that long ago white men had visited his ancestors, teaching his people many things. Cuneiform was hardly known in the 1870s, especially in the American West, and it is unlikely the chief would have received it from a forger, missionary, or trader. The mysterious ancient object is housed in the museum at West Point, Virginia.

  As for Egypt, the evidence for a presence in the Americas includes inscriptions, artifacts, and even words found in some Native American languages. Compelling evidence of Egyptian contact with the Americas includes the discovery of nicotine and coca in Egyptian mummies. In 1992 German scientist Svetla Balabanova and her colleagues reported finding cocaine, hashish, and nicotine in Egyptian mummies.76 Despite initial criticisms the original findings have been supported by substantial evidence.77

  Some diffusionists look to ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut’s recorded expedition to the land of Punt in 1493 B.C. as being a trip to North America. A mural at her temple at Deir el Bahri shows an ear of maize and a pineapple, which are New World plants. Thompson has written that Punt was located on the American mainland.

  Also, Paul Gallez (1920–2007), an Argentinean cartographer and historian, has argued that Punt was the Puno region of Peru at Lake Titicaca. He noted that there are both old gold and antimony mines nearby, consistent with the Egyptian records, and that the reed boats used by Lake Titicaca’s natives are similar to those used in ancient Egypt.78 While scholars debate the exact location of the land of Punt and most believe it was on the shores of the Red Sea, others suggest it could be South Africa, India, or America.

  In southern Chile is a rock inscription discovered in 1885 that Fell interpreted to be a testimonial to a Libyan-Egyptian expedition. According to his translation, an Egyptian commander named Raga arrived in South America in 231 B.C., claiming the land for Egypt.

  Other possible Egyptian artifacts from the Americas include hieroglyphs from southern Chile, a stone carving of a griffin-sphinx near Cuzco, Peru, and in Central America, two statuettes were unearthed at an archaeological site in El Salvador in 1914.79 The discovery was reported in 1940 in Enrique Florescano’s book Historia de las historias de la nacion Mexicana. In another report, historian Mariano Cuevas describes the excavations of archaeologist and professor Miguel Angel Gonzalez in the Pacific port city of Acajutla.80 One of the objects was a miniature sarcophagus with an Egyptian cartouche. There have also been examples of Egyptian cartouches found in North America, including an alabaster egg found in Idaho in 190081 and an Egyptian scarab beetle with hieroglyphs found in southwestern Colorado (see figures 15.14 and 15.15).

  A controversial and mostly dismissed find from the early twentieth century is a ritual grave object found in a burial mound in Libertyville, Illinois, similar in appearance to statues from the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty in Egypt, which began around 685 B.C.82

  Images with distinctly Egyptian characteristics are also found in North American rock art. The image of Anubis (the Egyptian jackal god) in Oklahoma’s Anubis Caves plays a significant role in the equinox Silent Opera animation described in chapter 8. The distinctive canine figure has a flail on its back, as do Egyptian representations, and it is estimated to be about two thousand years old. Other Egyptian symbols found in rock art in North America include the ankh “life force” symbol.

  Fig. 15.14. Egyptian scarab beetle stone engraving found about thirty miles from Durango, Colorado. (Courtesy of Terry Carter, American Historical Research Foundation)

  Fig. 15.15. Obverse of Egyptian scarab beetle stone from Colorado.

  Perhaps the most famous report of Egyptian artifacts, thus far not proven, is a newspaper story from 1909 of a cave uncovered in the Grand Canyon. The front-page story from the April 5, 1909, Arizona Gazette recounted the discovery by Smithsonian-funded archaeologists of a series of caves and many artifacts in the Grand Canyon’s Marble Canyon area. The Smithsonian denies that any artifacts or caves were found. The area has been secured since then, preventing any investigations of the reported finds.

  VIKING CONNECTIONS

  There is no disputing that Eric the Red, father of Leif Ericson, founded a short-lived Norse colony at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, in A.D. 987, but there is also evidence of other Norse excursions in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Maine, and New England. Examples include large stones with runic inscriptions similar to more than a thousand found in Scandinavia with dates as early as A.D. 300–400 and continuing into the twelfth century. Most memorialized a death or an event, and many include images of Christian crosses or Thor’s hammer.

  One such stone is the controversial 202-pound Kensington Runestone, which was discovered in 1898 in Minnesota by a Swedish immigrant farmer (see figure 15.16 below). As usual, the skeptical archaeopriests ridiculed its authenticity because they were perhaps too quick to ignore epigraphic evidence that might establish its legitimacy. For example, forensic scientist and geologist Scott Wolter has authored several papers and books on the Minnesota artifact, including his 2009 book The Hooked X: Key to the Secret History of North America, which he says offers concrete validation of its authenticity.83 By using forensic geology and epigraphy, Wolter concluded that the inscription was Norse and was consistent with the date cited on the stone: A.D. 1362. He translated it as follows:

  Eight Götalanders and 22 Northmen on (this?) acquisition journey from Vinland far to the west. We had a camp by two (shelters?) one day’s journey north from this stone. We were fishing one day. After we came home, found 10 men red from blood and death. Ave Maria save from evil. There are 10 men by the inland sea to look after our ships fourteen days journey from this peninsula (or island). Year 1362.84

  Fig. 15.16. The Kensington Runestone. Discovered in 1898 in Minnesota, the rune inscription includes the date of A.D. 1362.

  Fig. 15.17. The Kensington Runestone, hooked X detail. Scott Wolter identified the X with a hook, which was not known to scholars until 1935. (Drawing based on Scott Wolter, hooked X book cover)

  In addition to the hooked X character, Wolter discovered a so-called dotted R glyph on the Kensington Runestone. This was a glyph that was
not known to exist by the scientific community until 1935, thirty-seven years after the rune stone’s discovery.

  Wolter’s personal quest for a New History of America has included production of the 2012 History Channel series America Unearthed, which featured his work, many other mysteries, and Old World connections to the Americas. However, there has been a general rejection of much of his work, which was the same fate as for Thor Heyerdahl’s efforts to establish evidence of a greater Norse presence in North America than the brief colonization of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.

  A NORWEGIAN VILLAGE IN AMERICA AND THE SUPPRESSION OF THOR HEYERDAHL

  No other diffusionist has matched the popular status of Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, who died in 2002. He is best known for his 1947 expedition from Peru to Polynesia, a five-thousand-mile journey on his self-built raft, the Kon-Tiki, to prove that ancient South American Indians could have colonized the Pacific. Later he sailed from Morocco to Barbados in a boat made of reeds to demonstrate that ancient mariners from the Mediterranean would have been able to reach Central America easily.

  While Heyerdahl received great popular acclaim for his expeditions, his diffusionist views have been widely discounted by the archaeopriests as pseudohistory and lacking credibility. These included the theories he presented in his book Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island, in which he postulated that the founders of Easter Island were “white-skinned” people who came sailing “from a mountainous land in the east that was scorched by the sun.”85 This book was published in English but Ingen grenser, his most controversial book, was never translated, and its contents are almost unknown outside of Scandinavia. In this 1999 book, the title of which translates into English as No Border, Heyerdahl and Swedish map expert Per Lilliestrom claimed that Norse colonists fished, cut timber, and raised animals as far south as today’s New York City as early as A.D. 1000. 86

  This would have been the great land of Vinland that was so vividly discussed in the Viking Sagas and that was thoroughly examined in Frederick N. Brown’s 2009 book, Rediscovering Vinland: Evidence of Ancient Viking Presence in America.87 However, while the archaeopriests begrudgingly accepted Eric the Red’s brief presence, Heyerdahl challenged their “failed colonization” theory and proposed a greater Vinland, as he described in a New York Times article: “I would draw the boundaries of Vinland to include the area from Hudson Strait in the north down through the Gulf of St. Lawrence and all the way down to Long Island. Why would they stop?”88

  Heyerdahl and Lilliestrom reviewed medieval documents from the Vatican Library to document the extent of westward expansion into the Americas. There, they discovered the earliest references to Vinland, a land beyond Greenland, in Adam of Bremen’s History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, published in A.D. 1075. Referring to his conversation with King Svend Estridsen of Denmark, Adam of Bremen wrote, “He also spoke of another island, which many have found in this great ocean, and which is named Vinland because grapes grow wild there, and yield the best wine. There is also an abundance of self-sown grain, as we know not from hearsay only, but from the sure report of the Danes.”89

  Heyerdahl suggested that the Vinlanders migrated into the Great Lakes and New England regions to escape tax collectors and the tithe-demanding church, and that the pope assigned sixteen bishops to oversee Greenland and associated lands from A.D. 1112 to about A.D. 1500, when the Greenland colony ceased to exist. Heyerdahl also noted that the Norwegian-Swedish king Magnus Eriksson sent out an expedition to inspect the Norse colonies that were founded in 1355, and it returned home in 1364.

  Moreover, in 2012, signs of Norse outposts in Nanook at Tanfield Valley on Baffin Island, as well as Nunguvik on Willows Island and in the Avayalik Islands were identified by Canadian researchers.90 There are also artifacts that include an eleventh-century silver coin from Norway that was discovered in Maine91 and many rune stones with inscriptions, including two found in Spirit Pond, Maine (A.D. 1400, 1401), and the Kensington Runestone (1362) that was detailed above. Still, these items may not seem like much to have been left by established colonists from Norway. However, it is consistent with the scenario outlined by Heyerdahl that the visiting Vikings lived more like early Native Americans than Europeans, intermarrying with Indian women and leaving little evidence of their European origins, not unlike the situation with French trappers centuries later.

  In addition to Heyerdahl, Eben Norton Horsford wrote The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega, which was published in 1890. It was about a legendary New England Viking city from the eleventh century.92 Horsford identified the Norumbega town site as being where Bangor, Maine, is located now on the Penobscot River and claimed it was specifically sought after by explorer Samuel de Champlain when he explored the area in 1605. In the preface to the book Judge Dale, the president of the Council of the American Geographical Society, wrote that Horsford confirmed “what is now generally admitted—that America was discovered by the Northmen five centuries before the arrival of Columbus, and that for a considerable period thereafter they maintained a settlement upon our northeastern coast, and kept up during that time an intercourse with the mother country.”93

  Perhaps with even newer findings of the Norse presence, Heyerdahl’s book No Borders will see the light of day in English and other languages, hopefully along with many other neglected chapters from the New History of America.

  THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR CONNECTION

  There is some evidence that members of the Knights Templar landed in America after their order was destroyed in 1307. The background to this incredible piece of history is shrouded in secrets, codes, and lost documents, which began to come to light with the publication of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 1982 by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The three authors pieced together a secret history revolving around the origins of the Templars as a Christian order of warrior knights and their rise to become the wealthiest and most powerful organization in Europe. However, Baigent and Leigh later lost a fortune suing Dan Brown for plagiarizing them and their original research in his mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code.94

  The Templar order was formed in 1119, but the knights had already spent a decade excavating Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, which is where they got their name. It is believed they were exposed to ancient knowledge and wealth that had been lost during the Dark Ages of Europe. Granted status as a protected order in 1139 by Pope Innocent II, they provided the most efficient military arm for Christian campaigns in the Holy Land. Soon their wealth rivaled that of the church itself, with merchant fleets, ports, and a bank that charged interest for loans.

  However, they posed a threat to the monarchies and wealthy elites because of their wealth and power. Collaboration between the French monarchy and the church destroyed the Templars, beginning in 1307, just as it had a century earlier destroyed the Cathars of southern France. Catharism, a “heretical” form of Christianity, emphasized the importance of gnosis (direct knowledge of spiritual truth) instead of following a canonized gospel. The Cathars, like the Templars, also challenged the church’s teaching regarding Mary Magdalene and instead emphasized her importance as a companion wife of Jesus.95 The growing Cathar influence even challenged the church’s power to tax. As a result, the church organized prosecutions and established the Inquisition in 1234 to control the heretics. Some years later a war was launched against the Cathars that, in the end, resulted in their extermination by the early fourteenth century.

  As for the Templars, their end came when Philip IV of France, who owed them vast sums for his war against the British, connived with Pope Clement to suddenly arrest them and begin confiscating their property. This occurred on Friday, October 13, 1307. Tortured into confessing that they held heretical thoughts and performed vile actions, the Templars were condemned and burned to death while their properties were confiscated.

  It is thought by Steven Sora, as presented in The Lost Colony of the Templars, that some surviving Templars, whose origin
s could be traced back to the Norwegian Vikings, aligned themselves four decades later with Henry I Sinclair (ca. 1345–ca. 1400). He was a Scottish-Norwegian nobleman who, in 1398, aided or led them on a mission to start Arcadia, a colony that would serve as a refuge from the corrupt church.96

  Sora suggests that one of their stops was Oak Island on the southern shore of Nova Scotia, where an extensive complex of tunnels, drains, and booby traps that was discovered in 1795 became the basis of the Templar treasure stories. In 1992, also in Nova Scotia, a rectangular stone structure was discovered in Waverley by researcher and treasure hunter Jack McNab that Sora said could be linked back to the Templars.97

  Also according to Sora, Sinclair and his band made their way down the coast to what is now Newport Harbor in Rhode Island. On the west side of Newport Harbor, there is a stone structure that was built before the arrival of Giovanni da Verrazano in 1524, with the exact measurements of a Templar baptistery. It was obviously not built by Native Americans, since on eight rough stone columns that are separated by arched entrances there sits a round tower about twenty-five feet in diameter and about twenty-five feet high. There is no other similar structure in America, although round and octagonal buildings like it are found throughout Europe and may be based on the design of the Chapel of the Holy Sepulcher, a domed circular rotunda that was built over the tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem.