An Academic Journey to a New World, Part II

Part I Part III Part IV Part V

Phoenicians In The New World

The first Old World "discovery" of the Americas has always been in dispute. Traditional history gave the honor to Christopher Columbus, the Genovese sailor in the service of Spain who found the New World in 1492. While that discovery and interaction was the first in modern times, "fringe scholarship" has held that different Old World peoples knew about America and sometimes even colonized it. Suggestions have included the Vikings, the Celts, the Chinese, but mainly the Phoenicians. All these theories were laughed off until a Viking settlement was discovered in L'Anse Aux Meadows in Newfoundland dating to the 10th century. Now scholarship is just beginning the process of looking into these other claims, and entrenched theories are falling into doubt.

Some of the claims are harder to prove than others, but certainly the strongest claimant to the discovery of the Old World would be the Phoenicians and their descendant civilization the Carthaginians. They knew about the Americas for the longest period of time and conducted the widest operations in the New World of any pre-Columbian Old World power, and they left the most records of their presence.

Indeed, the theory of pre-Columbian Phoenician contact with the New World was rather prevalent until about 1940 or so, with many scholarly magazines from that time period running articles in support of the theory. It fell into disrepute about that time because of stronger evidence supporting the settlement of America via the Bering Strait. Politics also entered into the equation-most anti-Phoenician contact scholars considered the notion of the Native Americans deriving their culture and accomplishments from a Phoenician model as tantamount to racism. However, the Viking discovery in the 60's reopened the issue for debate, and slowly the evidence has been accumulating.

With the facts and the evidence at hand, a rough chronology of events can be constructed. The Bible mentions the details of construction of the First Temple under King Solomon, around 900 BC. Solomon contracted with King Hiram of Tyre to supply him with a fleet of ships to purchase gold, silver, ivory, and other valuables for the Temple from foreign lands. Hiram's fleet went out to the land of Ophir in vessels from Tarshish (1) and brought back the necessary materials. Tarshish has been identified as the leading city in Spain at the time, but Ophir has yet to be found. Theories have been offered that it may have been a city in India, as the fleet was constructed at the Israelite port of Elath. However, the fleet returned every three years (1), much too long for a simple trade mission to India but perfectly timed for a trading mission to South America. (2) (3) Also, Israel had trade links already with India at this point, they could have traded there themselves. The only logical reason for bringing Tyrian sailors into the venture would be to reach a land that the Israelite sailors could not.

The monopoly that Ophir apparently held on the trade of almug wood (4) also suggests an extra reason to consider Ophir's location in South America. Many plants and trees are unique to South America, especially in the Amazon. If Ophir had been located in India, land-based caravans would still have imported the wood, and the same goes for Africa. The possible explanation of an embargo on the wood by a state-run monopoly also falls flat-neither India nor central Africa were at the time unified to the degree necessary to prevent the exportation of almug wood, were it to exist in their territory. Furthermore, they would have had no reason to do so-exports of almug wood would have added to tax revenue.

It seems that the height of Israel's trade with Ophir was during the reign of King Solomon (5), but knowledge of and interaction with Ophir continued in Israel until at least the time of the prophet Isaiah circa 450 BC. (6)

The Tyrians did not merely conduct trade between Israel and the Americas, however. A study done at the Munich Museum in the early 1990s discovered that several ancient Egyptian mummies had traces of nicotine and cocaine in their hair and bones. In fact, mummies have been excavated with coca leaves in their mouths and bags of coca leaves in their hands. In these mummies, levels of cocaine were on par with Peruvian mummies. (7) High levels of nicotine were also found in several of the Egyptian mummies, but evidence wasn't as conclusive that they had ingested nicotine. (8) The significance of these findings is, of course, that neither tobacco nor cocaine was grown anywhere in the Old World at this time, giving weight to the possibility of trade between the Old and New Worlds at this time.

The strongest argument used by establishment Egyptology against the mummies' use of nicotine and cocaine is the lack of a record of tobacco or cocaine use in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Egyptians left significant records of their use of wine, beer, and even opium-if tobacco or cocaine were used, surely there would have been records left. (9) However, there are obvious explanations against this suggestion. First, the evidence of tobacco levels suggests that the plant was not ingested by the ancient Egyptians; at least not in large quantities. Tobacco also acts as a preservative, and may have been used in the embalming process, in which case levels would generally be higher in bones than hair. (10) Indeed, a native Egyptian plant with trace levels of nicotine, compositae, was used in the mummification of Ramses II for precisely that reason. (11)

Also, only a third of mummies have tested positive for nicotine on levels high enough to suggest tobacco was the source of nicotine, suggesting that its use as a preservative (which would have required generous use of the leaves) would have been limited to the richest of the rich. Even though mummification was in theory available to rich and poor alike, (12) most mummies known today were rich. (13) Also, tobacco may have been used as a medicine, in which case nothing would have been inscribed about it in a tomb, where scenes of the afterlife were present. In the Egyptian afterlife, bodies were perfect and immune to disease, rendering medicine unnecessary. (14)

As for cocaine, it was quite obviously used as a recreational drug, so the medicinal reasoning for tobacco falls short. There is the unlikely possibility that the lotus motif common in Egyptian architecture was a reference to the coca leaf, however a comparison of the two items will make this comparison a stretch. More likely is the possibility that only the rich could afford it, and therefore cocaine never entered the popular drug culture of Egypt. Since coca leaves had to be imported by comparatively slow-moving ships with a small cargo hold, the cost of importation would have been prohibitively high for the lower strata of Egyptian society, and therefore its use would not have been well-documented.

Continue on to Part III