2020, twenty-four hours to go: I've got another bookshelf entry for you!

Happy New Year's Eve everyone, I hope you get the appropriate level of drunk to celebrate the end of this year from hell. I've got a couple rum and Cokes lined up to ring in the New Year right proper, before we all wake up and realize that 2020 won.

I'm not sorry for those puns, and I'd make them again. But to make up for them, I can announce a new bookshelf entry I just finished marking up. It's titled An Academic Journey to a New World, and it's one of two papers I discovered on my laptop from my undergrad days. In what's starting to look like a pattern, I once again dabble on the fringes of known history, weighing evidence for Phoenician and Carthaginian travel to the Americas. I was solidly in favor of this idea as an undergrad, then I swung against it as a graduate student, and now I'm not sure. All I can do is point you towards the evidence, be honest about where that evidence has been debunked in the intervening years, and offer my best guess.

If someone held a gun to my head and told me to guess, I'd say that this particular pre-Columbian contact probably happened. The Phoenicians were no less able seafarers than the Polynesians, who I briefly mention in the introduction almost certainly did make it to the Americas and back. The evidence is scattershot and circumstantial, but not without merit. Some peculiarities about the trade with the city of Ophir mentioned in the first book of Kings in the Bible weighs in its favor, as does some narcotics found in Egyptian mummies, and some shipwrecks off the Eastern seaboard. To learn more, you'll just have to check it out.