Phoenicians in the New World

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Phoenicians in the New World

Postby peterfc » Mon 12 Feb 2018 2:49 pm

An SIS, In The News item on the 6th of February headed “Greeks in Canada” says that a Plutarch text suggests that he had knowledge of a continent across the Atlantic, but concludes with the words “there is no reason why the Greeks, or the Phoenicians come to that, may have stumbled on the Americas.” However, there is, I believe, clear evidence that someone did, because Plato in his book, Timaeus, says that the Egyptians had told Solon that travellers beyond the Pillars of Hercules could visit islands from which they could reach “the opposite continent that surrounds what can truly be called the ocean”. Plutarch would, of course, have read Plato and this could well be the origin of his story, in his text about the Man in the Moon, of a sailor's visit to a trans-Atlantic continent.

Pre-Columbus knowledge about the Americas from a source other than the Vikings is confirmed by a long inscription on the Piri Re’is map (see Hapgood’s Voyages of the Ancient Sea Kings) that says that Columbus had “a book that states that the Western Sea had an end, that on the side the Sun sets there are coasts and islands and many different kinds of mines”. Furthermore, Hapgood on page 33 of my copy of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings says “we see evidence that the people that originated the maps possessed a more advanced science than that of the Greeks” and, on page 49, referring to the location of Atlantic islands says that “we seem forced to ascribe the origins of this part of the map to a pre-Hellenic people.”

This pre-Hellenic people were, I believe, the Phoenicians who certainly knew that the world was a globe, knew how to measure latitude and understood trigonometry. If they knew the location of Atlantic islands they must have visited them. However, the Piri Re’is map shows the islands of the Azores as both larger and more numerous than now, which suggests to me that when discovered by the Phoenicians the Azores were quite a bit closer to the North Pole than they are now; sea levels near the equator are raised by the equatorial bulge. If the pole was as much closer as this suggests the relatively short passage from Africa to Brazil could have been made in both favourable trade winds and favourable ocean currents. Intrepid seamen could, after making this relatively easy trans-Atlantic passage, have explored the east coast of North America and returned to Europe with favourable winds and current via the Azores. Furthermore, if they had also explored the American coast to the south they could have found an ice free Antarctic Peninsular which could explain this otherwise unexplained ancient geographical knowledge. It would also explain the finding of cocaine and nicotine in some Egyptian mummies.

As I showed in my SIS 2007 conference presentation, see SIS Review 2008, and explained in my recent SIS Review 2017:3 paper, An Inverted Earth, a Warlow style "tilt" driven by electromagnetic forces generated between planets can change the location of the Poles and the Equator.
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Re: Phoenicians in the New World

Postby peterfc » Thu 15 Feb 2018 9:57 am

Philip Coppens at www.philipcoppens.com/copper.html says “archaeologists have accepted that much more copper was used than what they have been able to attribute to European mines. So where did an extremely large part of the copper come from? The answer, as bizarre as it may sound, could be America. It is known that during the European Bronze Age, large quantities of copper were mined in North America. However, no-one is able to answer as to what became of the copper that was mined there.”

Coppens says that “more than 500,000 tons of copper was mined in the so-called Upper Peninsula, in the American state of Michigan. The largest mine was on Isle Royale, an island in Lake Superior, near the Canadian border. Here, there are thousands of prehistoric copper pits, dug thousands of years ago by ancient peoples unknown”. According to Coppens not even 1% of this copper has been recovered in North America.

Apparently the Menomonie Indians of north Wisconsin possess a legend that speaks about the ancient mines. They described the mines as being worked by “light skinned men”, who were able to identify the mines by throwing magical stones on the ground, which made the ores that contained copper ring like a bell. Coppens says that this practice closely resembled that used in Europe during the Bronze Age and it would seem that the tools and mining methods were similar to those used in the Great Orm copper mines in North Wales.

I believe that the Phoenicians operated these North American mines for around 150 years and shipped the copper output across the Atlantic via the Azores to fuel the demands of the Late Bronze Age, which in my Venus cycle derived chronology was ended by an inversion catastrophe in 674 BC; see my papers, The Venus Cycle, in SIS Review 2016:1 and, An Inverted Earth, in SIS Review 2017:3. This would mean that the generally accepted dating for the mines is quite a bit too early, but if my Venus cycle theory is correct virtually everything from before the last inversion at Halloween 627 BC, with the exception of things reported in the Bible, are dated too early.

Gavin Menzies in his book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis (Swordfish 2011), suggests that it was the Minoans that found and exploited the North American mines, but they like the Phoenicians were a late Bronze Age culture that flourished in the first half of the 1st millennium BC. I am confident that the Phoenicians were the more experienced and more adventurist deep sea sailors; we know that they were major buyers of Cornish tin and consequently seasoned Atlantic sailors. Of course, for some decades before the catastrophe that I date to 674 BC, the Phoenicians were ruled by Assyria, but their Atlantic trade at this time was run from Carthage.

I think that the later exploiters of the North American mines that Coppens mentions and the “light skinned men” remembered by the Menomonie Indians of north Wisconsin were probably Vikings.
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Re: Phoenicians in the New World

Postby peterfc » Wed 07 Mar 2018 4:13 pm

Charles Hapgood thought that a pre-Hellenic people, who had a more advanced science than the Greeks, must have been the source of much of data he and his student assistants had found in ancient maps. He thought that the use of trigonometric projections in the Peri Re'is map and the accuracy of the longitudes in this and other ancient maps implied that ancient mapmakers had more sophisticated mathematical knowledge than he thought was possessed by the Greeks.

Hapgood claimed, in his book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, that the main part of the Piri Re'is map appeared to have been drawn from a spherical projection source map centred in Egypt. At first he thought that the source mapmaker must have used Alexandria as the centre of his grid, but could not reconcile the data using Alexandria as the centre. However, by selecting a site in the south of Egypt near the Tropic of Cancer for the centre of the grid and adjusting the radius for Eratosthenes’ over-estimate of the circumference of the Earth in the 3rd century BC, Hapgood and his assistants found the longitudes shown on the Piri Re'is Map to be remarkably accurate. Longitudes recorded on various other ancient maps of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, were also unbelievably accurate; prior to the development of marine chronometers in the second half of the 18th century it was thought that such accuracy was not possible.

Hapgood considered the possibility that the Earth's poles had changed position in the past and that quite a lot of the data used by the Piri Re’is prime source mapmaker was from a time when the Earth's axis was different. However, he did not go one step further and realise that the source mapmaker could have made his map at a time when the Earth was actually rotating on a different axis although he did note that on some of the maps he and his assistants examined, sea levels appeared to differ from the present.

Although my copy of Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings was published in 1996, the book was first published in 1966, long before J. M. Dent published Peter Warlow’s book, The Reversing Earth, in which he explained how, if subjected to a strong externally driven torque force, the Earth could experience “tilts” and even full “inversions” if the force persisted for long enough. Warlow maintained that the historical record and geological evidence suggested that “tilts” and “inversions” were experienced within the lifetime of mankind.

If the Piri Re’is prime source mapmaker had lived at a time when a Warlow style “tilt” had changed the location of the poles and the equator it would explain the compass rose positions of the Piri Re’is map, the orientation of the grids of the map and the longitude accuracy of the map. The original mapmaker could have known exactly how much the Earth’s axis had tilted; that is the difference between the position of the Polar Star before and after the “tilt”. Assuming that he also had a record of the latitudes of the lands of the western ocean from both before and after the “tilt”, he could, using trigonometry, have accurately established the longitude of each observation point. Of course the same exercise with sites of known latitude would give accurate longitudes throughout the Mediterranean.

The Phoenicians certainly knew that the world was a globe, knew how to measure latitude and understood trigonometry. Their mapmakers would have had access to latitude data for all lands their seamen had visited and if they had experienced an axis “tilt” between visits they had the data needed to draw up the accurate ancient maps analysed by Hapgood.
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