Dan In America - Part
2 Chapter 1
By Walter Baucum
DAN IN AMERICA
"Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp
beside the golden door." When Emma Lazarus penned these famous lines in
1903, she might have been reflecting an ongoing situation through much of
recorded history. This is that America, for well over 2,000 years, has served
as a place of refuge for Old World peoples driven from their homes by conquest
or persecution. 1
Evidence abounds that many of these visitors to America were
Israelites, Dan being just one tribe among them. A clay tablet found in a rock
crevice near Big Bend, Texas, tells of Zoroastrians (followers of Mithraic sun
worship) who came once to America, probably from Iberia. Dr. Henriette Mertz,
Professors Cyrus Gordon and Cyclone Covey, and Dr. Robert Stieglitz discovered
an immigration to Tennessee and Kentucky of homeless Jews after the many
pogroms of Antiochus in Syria and Nero and Hadrian in Rome. Some were here
already when, in 69, during the First Revolt of Jerusalem against the Romans,
others came over. Flavius Josephus, who himself took part in this revolt,
mentions that through the year 69 a great comet hung like a flaming sword over
Jerusalem. Some Zealots took it to be the sign of the coming of the promised
Messiah and rebelled. Today we know that it was Halley's Comet, making one of
its many returns. A stone excavated from a burial mound at Bat Creek in
Tennessee tells us that Jews in Tennessee recognized the sign and inscribed the
stone "The Comet for the Jews." This strongly suggests that Tennessee
and Kentucky became havens of refuge for these persecuted Hebrews. A
later influx of Jews came to the same place after the next, and last, revolt
against Rome over a hundred years later. Hebrew shekels dating from the Second
Revolt in 132 occur in many parts of Kentucky and a nearby district of
Arkansas. Dr. Joseph Mahan is presently researching these matters in the
language and traditions of the southeastern tribes. He also is investigating
Hebrew religious ceremonies found among the Yuchi Indians there. 2
At Los
Lunas, near Albuquerque, is a version of the Ten Commandments engraved on rock
and another similar inscription has been found on a stone tablet found in a burial
mound at Newark, Ohio. These are ancient inscriptions using a north Canaanite
script and old Hebrew language. 3
These
petroglyphs date to 800-900 B.C.E. and are in the Old Hebrew language and using
a Phoenician alphabet.
4
Note the date. This
was in the times of King Solomon and the Phoenician King Hiram. The authors
believe this region in New Mexico to have been the destination of the
"Ships of Tarshish" in 1 Kings 10:22. The Old Hebrew language was not
used by the Jews after the Babylonian exile. Aramaic replaced it. The old
script was replaced in the last century B.C.E. by the quadratic script, which
is still in use today. Rabbis, though, still understand the Old Hebrew, in
which the first five books of Moses are written.
The Phoenician
language and script had spread through the Mediterranean area by the turn of
the first millennium B.C.E., was the basis of the Hebrew, Greek, and other
alphabets, had been supplanted in the old Phoenician territory around Tyre and
Sidon by the time of Alexander, but had remained dominant in Carthage (called
Punic language) until the city's destruction by Rome in 146 B.C.E. In other
North African and American colonies of the Phoenician-Danites, the language
remained in use until the 4th century C.E. Then it, along with Cuneiform
writings and Egyptian hieroglyphs, vanished into oblivion. About 200 years ago
the Phoenician script was deciphered.
The
above authors wondered if the inscriptions were made by Jews
(Israelites--probably Dan), who, together with Phoenicians, made long voyages
for King Solomon. After an absence of three years, they delivered 420 talents
of gold (1 Kings 9:28 and 10:22). The 420 talents would be about 11,000 kg.
today with a value of about 100 million dollars. Nowhere in the Bible is there
a clue to where "Ophir" is. The Phoenicians, we have learned, kept
their trade routes a strict secret. 5
The authors decided
to investigate further, specifically to check out the assertions by skeptics
that they were a Mormon fake. At the Mormon Pioneer Museum in Salt Lake City,
they found no evidence of Mormons having been in the Los Lunas area, except for
one instance. The "Mormon Battalion," which was part of the U.S. Army
during the Mexican War, marched from Santa Fe down the Rio Grande Valley. They
read diaries of the soldiers, reading that the officers commanding the
battalion maintained strict discipline, allowing none of their soldiers to
leave the column. Also, a Professor Charles S. Peterson, Mormon history
specialist, told them that in the 19th century, no Mormon would have been able
to write such an inscription. Joseph Smith had studied Hebrew, but had been
murdered before the Mormons' trek to the West.
Another
possibility might have been when the Romans destroyed Carthage. Punic sailors
and other Israelites living there might have fled across the ocean to avoid the
burning of their ships, which has been reported by Livius in his History of
the Punic Wars.
6
In
1558, a French churchman, the Abbe Amiot, became the literary sensation of
Europe, having just discovered ancient Greek manuscripts by a historian named
Plutarch in monastery libraries in Italy. In one segment of Plutarch, he
discusses an ancient Carthaginian manuscript he says he found in the ruins of
that city, one dealing with voyages across the Atlantic. The islands he
mentioned perfectly fit the Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes, and Iceland (Ogygia).
Then, he says, if you sail along this coast in a southward direction, you will
pass a frozen sea and come to a land where Greeks have settled and intermarried
with the native barbarians. 7 In analyses of Norse sailing routes, George
Lechler pointed out that the southern part of Davis Strait, between Labrador
and Greenland, becomes an impassable mass of floating ice during the summer
season, when northern navigations could be performed. The land where the Greeks
had settled and intermarried with the native barbarians, Nova Scotia and New
England, lies in the position Plutarch gave, for he said they lay in the same
latitudes as the Caspian Sea.
I won't go into the
prevalence of Greek roots of the Micmac language, but will remind the
reader that many of the Greeks were Danite Israelites. Briefly, though, Barry
Fell says the Greek of Micmac is more appropriately called Ptolemaic Greek, and
it came to Nova Scotia and Maine from North Africa, where many Greek-speaking
communities existed in Classical times.
In
"Barry Fell and His Accomplishments," we find that the ancient San
Telmo Stone of Portugal, believed to have the oldest form of Basque writing on
it, was unreadable until Fell deciphered it, using the Cree Indian alphabet
of North America.
8
Plutarch records
that the northern outward route followed by Carthaginian ships to America went
by way of Iceland (Ogygia?), and the return route followed the anti-trade winds
around latitude 40 degrees N. back to Spain and Carthage. Likely, many ships
followed the outward route used later by Columbus, in tropical latitudes,
thereby gaining the benefit of the westward-blowing trade winds. Diodorus of
Sicily implies that this route was followed when he speaks of an island
resembling Cuba that the Carthaginians discovered.
Barry Fell and
others have found multiple evidence of Phoenicians in America. He and his
colleagues visited the ancient sites of Carthaginian settlements in North
Africa and Spain and the ruined cities of peoples who were allies of them, or
whose mariners sailed on Carthaginian ships. They visited archaeologists and
historians who work on Old World sites and discussed their American finds with
them. Many of these came over to America to study the finds for themselves and
to lend their skills.
Carthaginian coins
have been found in the Azores and all over America. All have one characteristic
in common. All belong to the earliest issues of Carthage, those of the fourth
and early third centuries B.C.E. All are the work of highly skilled Greek
artists.
According to
legend, a horse's head in the ground was the Oracle's prediction of how the
founders of Carthage would recognize the site destined for the city. It was
used, with a palm tree, as the coat of arms of Carthage. Carved horse heads
have been found in North Africa and America. A white limestone horse's head was
discovered in North Salem, New York, near stone chambers, both being quite
ancient.
Symbols of the
goddess Tanith (spouse of Baal) and related signs have been found on
Carthaginian tombstones in North Africa and in Colorado, almost identical and
being another symbol of Carthage.
We have
shown earlier how the Tribe of Esau became the Phoenicians and how Dan was
intermingled with them; how their most famous ancient cities were Sidon and
Tyre; how around 800 B.C.E. they established strong trading posts on the North
African coast, west of Egypt and as far afield as Morocco and southern Spain;
how one of their posts grew into the powerful Kharkhedona (called by the Greeks
and Romans "Carthage") located in a bay at the northern tip of
Tunisia; how they traded in purple dye and cloth and were called
"Phoinikoi," (The Purple People) by the Greeks (and from which word
we get our name, Phoenician) and Punici by the Romans, which means the same. We
usually restrict the use of the word "Punic" to serve as a synonym
for Carthaginian and speak of them as using the "Punic" language. 9 They were
famed mariners and established a complete monopoly on the tin trade, getting it
from England and areas near the British Isles. They jealously protected their
monopoly on it by blockading the Straits of Gibraltar so that no foreign vessel
could leave or enter the Atlantic without their knowledge and permission.
Tin, remember, is
used with copper to make bronze, which was in high demand by most of the
Mediterranean world of that day. Tin was mined and smelted continuously in
Cornwall from Bronze Age times onward, right through the Roman occupation and
on through the Dark Ages and medieval times until the modern era. Because of
the mixture of Danites with Phoenicians, wherever Phoenicians went, Dan went
also.
Besides searching
for tin and copper, other Old World peoples came for different reasons.
Religious motives caused Egyptian equipped expeditions to be sent far and wide.
Pharaoh Ramesses III, in his quest for immortality, sent out ships to find the
celestial paradise, the Mountain of Manu, which supposedly lay in the far West.
There is evidence to show that the ships reached Mexico during the 12th century
B.C.E. and established the Olmec civilization, which in turn became the mother
civilization of other American civilizations that followed.
Thor
Heyerdahl, in the now-famous Ra-Expeditions, reported that the Palenque Pyramid
in Mexico and the Egyptian pyramids are extraordinarily alike. In addition, he
says, there was a priest king laid out in the coffin. "Its lid, and the
walls of the tomb, were decorated with reliefs of human figures, some wearing
false beards as a badge of rank, a custom duplicating an ancient Egyptian
habit. Inside and outside, the sun king of Palenque had followed the ancient
Egyptian formula for pyramid burial." 10
Concerning
the density of foreign traffic along the navigable coastal and riverine
waterways of North America, a map shows that the main arteries into the
interior were the St. Lawrence downward and into the Great Lakes, the
Mississippi River upward and eastward and westward, and the Snake-Columbia
outward. Petroglyphs depicting ancient coins extend the range to the ancient
equivalent of the Oregon Trail, extending across the prairies to Moneta in
Wyoming (center of the fur-trading center in ancient America during Roman
times, believed by Fell and others). Moneta lies near the North Pass in the
Great Divide, making it as convenient in those days as the nineteenth-century
Wyoming markets were for trappers and buyers of the Astor Fur Trading Company.
This route also gave access to Nevada and Californian silver and, in the north,
the Michigan copper mines linked both the upper Mississippi traders and the
ships on the Great Lakes. 11
Fell opines that
many furs were taken across to the Snake River near Rexburg, Idaho, then on
downriver to the Columbia and to its mouth in the Pacific. There, Arab traders
in their ocean-going dhows picked them up and sold them to Asian and European
markets, especially to the Romans. Tons of evidence seems to support this
theory, but time and space will not permit it here. The fact is that over 22,000
deep-earth copper mines, found in Michigan alone, also tend to support Fell's
and others' theories that the Phoenicians exploited America for centuries
during its monopoly on the tin and copper trade. Amerindians did not dig deep
mines to gather copper.
Everywhere they
went along these river arteries, they left messages in the rocks for others
coming after them. Having personally visited Wees Bar on a main trade artery,
the Snake River, 25 miles below Boise, I have observed the highest
concentration of petroglyphs in the state of Idaho. On one rock alone are
engraved three different ancient languages: Arabic, Viking (runic), and
Egyptian.
These written
messages, with their proven alphabets, are called Great Basin Curvilinear by
the ostrich archaeologists, many still believing them to be graffiti markings
on rocks put there by bored Indians. Eventually, though, the inter-oceanic
trade ceased.
"The
conquest of Egypt by Darius I in 525 B.C.E. and the successive rise of the
Greek and Roman empires effectively closed the eastern Mediterranean to
Carthaginian shipping. Carthage retaliated by closing the Straits of Gibraltar
to all European mariners. Under the guise of supposed Spanish and North African
trade, Carthaginian merchants exploited the North Atlantic resources, bringing
to Cadiz the copper of the Celtiberian settlements of North America, and the
tin of Cornwall, to provide the raw materials of a bronze industry, whose
products were re-exported to Britain, Gaul, North America, and West Africa.
The Celts of New England obtained a share of the American imports by supplying
furs and hides, both of which the Carthaginians re-exported to the eastern
Mediterranean as supposed products of Gaul, the furs even reaching India. By
the time the Romans conquered Spain and Carthage, they had adequate alternate
sources of these materials, and they took no interest in overseas shipping,
having no merchant navy. The North American trade dwindled, the last phases
presumably being operated by the maritime Celts of Brittany until their
conquest by Caesar in 55 B.C.E. For 400 years after the Battle of Actium in 31
B.C.E., the Romans had no navy, since they had no rivals, and the memory of
America apparently was lost. By C.E. 200, geographers believed that a voyage
westward from Spain would lead to India and China, and this was the inheritance
of Columbus."
12
There
are definite indications of North African influences on the Algonkin
"Indians" of North America. Fell notes that the Kyrie eleison (Lord
have mercy) on a Kikapoo prayer stick preserved in the Smithsonian Institution
appears three times written in Carthaginian (Semitic) letters and language. The
omission of "Christ have mercy" suggested to Fell that this might be
a pre-Christian formulation.
George Carter discusses cowry shells from the
Mediterranean among the Objibwa. "What is indicated is some important
contact with the Mediterranean, and more specifically with North Africa....
"...Jackson reporting that the same shell is used in the same
way in West African society. "...when it is found that Cyprea
moneta was found in an Adena mound." 13
The
Adena were builders of great mounds that were earlier and different from the
so-called temple mounds of the Southeastern United States. Alphabetic
inscriptions, i.e., the Grave Creek Mound inscription of probable Libyan
(Northwest African) origin, as well as other traits, suggest Old World
connections for this Adena culture.
Linguists
had classified the speech of the Atakapa, Tunica, and Chitimacha tribes of
Southern Louisiana, Southern and Delta Mississippi, and Southeast Texas as
unique, having no known relationship with any known language. Fell researched
this thoroughly. "But my examination of the vocabulary, particularly that
of the Atakapa, since it is better known than the other two, disclosed an all
embracing affinity with the known languages of ancient Egypt and the peoples of
the adjacent sections of the Nile Valley."
Continuing,
Fell says that whenever an Egyptian expedition to foreign lands was imminent,
the Pharoah would initiate a massive slave raid on the black tribes of the
Upper Nile to provide laborers and mariners. The speech of these tribes would
indicate just such a scenario if Egypt had established a trading outpost in the
Lower Mississippi in ancient times, and if the members had either been
abandoned or had of their own volition remained behind. He believes such a
small colony could have survived only by merging with local Indians to produce
a mestizo population, speaking a tongue derived from the several different
contributory dialects.
Their vocabulary is seen to span elements of
virtually every aspect of life in a society such as an Egyptian-led trading
community in the New World 2,000 years ago. The language includes elements of
Memphitic (lower Nile), Thebaic, Nubian (Blue Nile), Nuer (White Nile), and
Luganda and Nandi (area around Lake Victoria). 14
The
Danite/Phoenician Transoceanic Trade
In a
chapter entitled, "America and the Punic Wars," Barry Fell makes a
good case of America's involvement in the three Punic wars Phoenicia fought
with Rome. The dates of the Carthaginian coinage being found all over America
match the sudden influx of gold in Carthage. While the initial issues of this
coinage was silver, the nature of the coinage underwent a sudden and dramatic change
around 300 B.C.E., when very large quantities of gold coins began to be minted.
It actually was mostly gold, mixed with small amounts of silver, and which
coins were called "electrum" by the ancients. Phoenician-made (or
they had them made--many being traced to the workshops of Cyprus as the
most-likely origins of many of these) art objects were undoubtedly held in high
esteem by Amerindians, for many have been found in North and Central America.
Fell further suggests that these art artifacts were offered for barter at
landing points in Panama or the Caribbean coast of Colombia or Venezuela and
were traded for gold. Gold was not highly regarded over here, save as a metal
easy to work into complicated jewelry or cast or hammered into figurines. Nevertheless,
the dates of Carthaginian contact with North America, yielded by the coinage
now being recovered so massively, match the sudden influx of gold in Carthage. 15
So
Fell proposes that an American source for the Carthaginian gold coinage should
seriously be considered, and that the gold was bartered for the bronze art
manufactures of the Cypriot Phoenicians. He further proposes the source of the
pine lumber which built the great fleets of Carthage, and whose supply suddenly
dried up at the end of the First Punic War in 241 B.C.E. Along with the bronze
art replica-gold trade going on, the Phoenician ships also picked up shipments
of large pine logs from the Algonquian tribes of Northeastern North America, to
whom they traded adequate stocks of iron cutting-tools, axes, and other
desirable items. This included occasional bronze art replicas, since so many
have been found in New York and other places, low-value Carthaginian coins of
attractive appearance, glass beads, and so on. Such trade, profitable alike to
the Amerindian and the Carthaginian, would result in a steady input of gold and
lumber on the home markets in Carthage, would yield the timbers needed to build
ships, and would provide them with straight masts and oars, plus the gold
ingots required to produce the coinage that financed the military and naval
operations of the Sicilian War and later the First Punic War.
Barry Fell goes much deeper into this than I will,
including an excellent argument for their ships picking up gold in Central and
northern South America, then swinging up to Maine and other northeast states in
North America to pick up pine timbers for ballast as these ships carried both
across the Atlantic. Archaeologists are quick to point out that all the coinage
and bronze artifacts and pottery, etc. are forgeries. But archaeologists
continue their tendency to call anything they do not understand a
"forgery." Many of them still call the Ogam, runic, Tifinag, and
other writings on stones in America marks made by the plowshares of early
Pilgrims or etchings made by tree roots growing down into the ground. 16 (Bold is mine
throughout)
Not only were Plutarch's writings confirmed by the
American examples of Carthaginian coinage and trade goods, but in his
continuing investigation, Mr. Fell became further convinced that Plutarch was
speaking the truth when he said that Greeks had settled among the barbarian
peoples of the Western Epeiros (the continent that rims the Western Ocean, as
Plutarch called it--we call it America). He says these Greeks had intermarried
with these barbarians, had adopted their language, and had blended their own
Greek language with it. The Greek settlements were about a bay in the same
latitudes as the Caspian Sea, indicating New England, New Brunswick, and Nova
Scotia. 17
"Plutarch was writing at the beginning of the
second century C.E. At that time, the world had long been known to be a globe
(My note: this later was forgotten during the "Dark Ages," when
knowledge, education, and books were forbidden the common people in Europe and
many began believing the world was flat), and lines of latitude and longitude
had been invented back in the third century C.E. by the North African
mathematician-geographer-astronomer Eratosthenes. Because of the depth of
ignorance into which Europe fell in the Dark Ages, at times we are apt to
forget how advanced were the ideas of the ancients, and how much they knew
about the earth and about astronomy and navigation." 18
Now
a note to the reader. In an earlier section, "Dan in Greece," I
included some interesting information and conclusions. First of all, the Greeks
of Europe said nothing about Plutarch's comments. Secondly, since it was
the Greeks of North Africa who took the path of science leading to the
discovery that the earth was a globe, and who set about mapping the globe, I
agree, along with Fell and others, that the Greeks of the American Epeiros
would have to be North African Greeks. Plutarch regarded these Greeks as
a people now considerably different from the Greeks of Greece. They called
themselves Greeks, but (according to Polybius) were olive-skinned and were a
fusion of Greek and North African (European, Arab, and Berber, according to
Barry Fell--European Danites, Phoenician Danites, and Berber Danites, according
to me). They were, then, Libyans. These people lived in a 2,000 mile
stretch along the North African coast east of Egypt, encompassing today's
Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. This olive-skinned "mixed" race
of people were totally different from the Aethiopes, the dark-skinned
Africans whose homeland lay to the south of the Sahara Desert. Neither then,
nor today, were the Mediterranean African people part of the Black race. How
they loved the sea, how their white marble and limestone cities gleamed in the
desert sun, how they conquered and ruled in Egypt for two centuries, how Egypt
became a great maritime power under them, how the name Shishonq (carried by at
least four Libyan pharaohs) has been found in American inscriptions, how they
were a noble civilization--these have been mentioned already. (See "Dan in
Greece")
Time does not permit our "re-creating the
wheel" by showing the labyrinth patterns, derived from the religious art
of Knossos, in Crete, and with occurrences in the Mediterranean, Britain,
Scandinavia, and North and South America; the "Plutarch's Greek"
vocabulary among such tribes as the northeastern Algonquians and including
words of Coptic and Arabic derivation as well as recognizable Greek elements
detected by Silas Rand over a century ago when he compiled the Micmac
dictionary; identical (and similar) pottery decorations in Arizona and Greek
Mediterranean sites (long after these styles had passed out of fashion in
Greece itself)--such things as swastikas from Athenian vases, proto Corinthian
Greek male dancing figures in geometric style, Greek meandering, sacaton
red-on-buff paintings, Attic (Greece) geometric styles, plus many more styles;
inscribed gold plates unearthed near Cuenca, Ecuador, bearing inscriptions in
Libyan and hieroglyphic lettering the names of notable Numidian kings and their
Mauritanian descendants of Roman times; identical beehive tombs (tholos),
from Cyrene, Libya, and Crete, in Massachusetts; Spartan warriors of Libya
depicted on vases from Cyrenian tombs (and dating from about 550 B.C.E.)
dredged from Boston harbor; BAS reliefs in Utah identical to Libyan Shardana
(or Sherden), called Sea Peoples and wearing leather kilts and crown-shaped
feather ornaments; how various Amerindian tribes, the Arabs, the Phoenicians,
and most of the nations on earth called the "Big Dipper" the Bear
(bowl of the dipper) and the three hunters (or, the hunter and his two
dogs--the three stars in the handle); the list could go on and on. A certain
category of circular petroglyphs formerly thought to be "Indian shield
designs" or "sun-symbols" comprise something very different:
namely, representations of ancient coins. These petroglyphs are called numoglyphs
and occur both in Europe and North Africa, as well as in North America. 19
CELTS
AND BASQUES IN AMERICA
With much condensing,
and much left out, we will now jump ahead in history to the reopening of
crossings to America, this time by the Celts of Iberia and Britain. Both
history and on-site investigations have shown that Celts from the Iberian
peninsula were responsible for the Ogam inscriptions found on ancient stone
buildings in New England. In all probability, the same Celts were the actual
builders of the structures on which their inscriptions occur. These Celts, by
virtue of their own skills or those of their Phoenician neighbors in Spain,
were capable of sailing to America to colonize any lands that appealed to them.
The overwhelming evidence shows they did indeed settle here, particularly in
New England. America's Celtic inscriptions could not have been an
independent American invention. Celts came here to write them.
Ogam (Ogham--grooved
writing) is said by scholars to be derived from an ancient Greek word,
"ogme," meaning "groove." Note that Irish Ogham appears
only in inscriptions believed to postdate the time of Jesus. The Ogham
script found in Iberia (Spain) and in America has fewer consonants and omits
the vowels and appears to date from around 800 B.C.E. and upwards. I.e., it is
older in America than in Ireland. With all the studies by Barry Fell, et. al.,
it is easily seen that the Celts visited or settled in parts of the U.S. about
the same time Celts started first moving into Ireland from Iberia, thus backing
Fell's studies that our history is as ancient as that of Ireland and Europe. 20 For a thousand
years or more, ancient Hebrew-Phoenicians, Libyan, and Egyptian mariners had
visited, and in some instances established, small colonies over here. This is
evident by the hundreds of lapidary (stone) inscriptions found in several
languages (i.e., Phoenician, Iberian-Punic, Libyan, and Egyptian hieroglyphs) antedating
the Celtic Ogham inscriptions. Descendants of these visitors are found among
some of the eastern and central Indian tribes, several of which employ dialects
in part from ancient Phoenician (Esau and Dan) and North African nations. 21
By the way, the Celtic language still exists, Capt
reminds us. "Today, four Celtic dialects are spoken in Britain: Welsh,
Gaelic, Erse (or Irish), and Manx. Welsh is used in Wales for religious
services and is the official language for all documents of the Welsh
Nationalist Party."
22
"Iberes" (Gaelic name for Hebrews) was
carried by Celtic peoples from Spain to Ireland. Ireland was named
"Hibernai," which name still exists. But ancient historians apply the
name "Scotia" to it more than any other. Orosius (3rd Century
geographer) used the term, "Hibernia, the nation of the Scoti."
Ancient poets and historians claim the name "Scotia" was derived from
"Scota," queen-mother of the Milesians. Undoubtedly this was
Scota, the daughter of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah. She married a
Milesian prince in Egypt and their son, Eochaidh (Heremon or Eremon) married
Tea Tephi and founded a dynasty in Ireland. 23
That
the Sakka were a branch of the Gimiri (Israelites) is proved by (among others)
a trilingual inscription found in the tomb of Darius in southwestern Persia.
The inscription includes a list of the nations Darius ruled over. He listed
three separate groups of "Sakkas," the "Amyrgian Sakkas,"
the "Sakkas with the pointed caps," and the "Sakkas who are
beyond the sea." In each case, the name "Gimiri," in the
Babylonian text, is translated "Sakka" in the Persian.
Capt
says these inscriptions have been known for years but the publications dealing
with them have generally passed over the translation of "Gimiri" to
"Sakka" with scarcely a comment, again showing the seemingly willing
ignorance of many "scholars" of today.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from
these inscriptions (plus the writings of Josephus) is that the Iskuza were
called "Sakka" by the Persians. This solidifies the fact that the
"Iskuza" (Israelites), the "Sakka," and the
"Gimiri" are the same people. Reviewing the Royal Correspondence of
the Assyrian Empire, it is evident that the "Iskuza," the "Sakka,"
the "Scythians," the "Cimmerians," and the
"Gimiri" are all Israelites. 24
Caesar,
Strabo, and Diodorus describe Celts as fair-haired, blue-eyed, high spirited,
boastful, quarrelsome, courageous, and a race who loved ornamentation. These
descriptions, though, relate to the Celts of France, Britain, northern Italy,
and the lands north of Greece. In Iberia, the invading Celts came in contact
with, and intermingled with, an earlier Iberian people. Wilhelm von Humboldt
believes these "original" Iberians to have been the ancestors of the
modern Basques. Fell buys into this theory, believing the dark-haired strain of
Irish and Scot Gaels, as well as the other dark-haired Celts, are the product
of ancient intermarriage of Celts with Iberian Basque stock, the language of
the Basques having all but suffered extinction in the process of integration.
It
further appears likely to him that the bands of Iberian Celts who crossed the
Atlantic must have included many brunettes of original Basque Iberian
extraction, though speaking the Goidelic branch of Celtic. They probably were
equally mixed, blonde and brunette Celts. Although no skull or skeleton remains
have been found, other similarities exist. The copper and bronze artifacts
(points and knives) of New England almost perfectly match those found on
the Iberian Peninsula. The dolmens (Breton word meaning "stone
table") of New England exactly match those known from Europe and the
Middle East. Dolmens are memorials to chiefs or important events and take
the form of a huge central boulder, sometimes ten tons or more in weight,
supported on three, four, or five vertical stones like pegs. The stone,
slab-roofed chambers over here match those in Europe. Dissenters, of
course, believe the bronze knives and daggers were brought over here by modern
collectors, then lost. (Collectors who pay thousands, even millions, for art
and other collectibles usually lose them?)
They
believe the American stone chambers to be the work of "colonial
farmers," termed "root cellars." The absurdity of this is seen
when it is found that these chambers are astronomical observatories, with
solstice and equinox alignments and other Druid or priestly functions, and,
again, matching those in Europe. The outer surfaces of the door lintels
(or other similar surfaces) contain Ogam dedications to one of the Celtic gods,
usually Bel (Beltane), the names of which are written in Phoenician letters as
well as in Ogam. The inner walls or ceilings commonly carry other inscribed
material, including phallic carvings. The rock cairns are the same. The
"May Day" phallic stones are the same. The Druids' seats are the
same. The stone "Druid circles" (called sun circles atop the Great
Divide and other high places in Eastern and Western America) are the same.
Gloria
Farley and others have discovered many Ogam inscriptions in Oklahoma, the
voyagers apparently ascending the Mississippi, Arkansas, and Cimarron Rivers,
leaving these inscriptions and burial mounds. Celtic art on walls, dishes,
pottery, and burial urns from Iberia and North America are virtually identical.
Space
does not permit all the evidence. The men of Tarshish established colonies in
eastern North America, the settlers apparently drawn from the native Iberians
(Celts and Basques) of the Guadalquivir Valley in Andalusia (Barry Fell calls
these people Celtiberians) and other areas.
"The
first find of an engraved Phoenician tablet in America was that of a Tartessian
inscription found in 1838, excavated from a burial chamber found at the base of
Mammoth Mound, in Moundsville, West Virginia." 25
The
Pontotoc stele, found in Oklahoma by Gloria Farley and Weldon W. Stout, is the
work of an early Iberian colonist in America--script is known only from the
Cachao-da-Rapa region in northern Portugal. The Iberian Punic letters are an
abstract from "Hymn to the Aton," by Pharaoh Akhnaton, and says,
"When Baal-Ra rises in the east, the beasts are content, and (when he
hides his face?) they are displeased." Although dated from the thirteenth
century B.C.E., the American version can scarcely be older than about 800
B.C.E. 26 Fell
says these Celtiberians came from Ireland and Wales, and even from Palestine.
Was
there a Phoenician-Danite and American-Celtic connection? Very probably. A city
built by people in Spain was called Tarshish (same name in "Old
Testament"). The Greeks called it Tartessos, from which comes
"Tartessian," used by epigraphers to describe the script and dialect
employed by the men of Tarshish. It is a dialectal variant of Phoenician. The
Hebrew Scriptures say the ships of Tarshish were the largest seagoing vessels
known to the Semitic world, the name eventually being applied to any large
ocean-going vessel. These ships became proverbial as an expression of sea
power. With their monopoly on the making of bronze, they traded with Celtic
peoples in Europe and Britain, and probably with people in America, which thing
they kept strictly secret. Some, including James Whittall (colleague of Fell),
think that the American Celts were deliberately brought here by Phoenicians,
who wanted mining communities to exploit American natural resources, and with
whom they could then trade. (More on this later)
Inscriptions, for example, have been found in West
Virginia and Ohio, where their association with large burial tumuli resembling
those of the Iberian Bronze Age point to important American colonies of these
Phoenician navigators and merchant princes. Merchants rather than mere
explorers, they traded with the New England Celts, who by 700 to 600 B.C.E.,
would be well-established fur trappers already and very likely were mining precious
metals on many sites where ancient workings have been discovered. 27
"The periodic arrival of Phoenician ships on
the New England coast is attested by the Ogam inscription on Monhegan Island,
off the coast of Maine. It is obvious that the flat-topped rocky islet would
not have been set aside for the loading and unloading of Phoenician ships were
they not regular visitors to America, with a predictable timetable of ports
of arrival and departure at expected dates." 28
These
Monhegan inscriptions are given in old Goedelic and were intended as a
notification for native American Celts and Amerindians too, probably, who had
goods for sale or exchange, to inform them where to bring their merchandise. They
suggest that organized international maritime commerce was well established in
the late Bronze Age, that North American ports were listed on the sailing timetables
of the overseas vessels of the principal Phoenician shipping companies, and
that the same information was circulated to customers in America.
Another
point of interest is that nearly all the rivers in the Northeast U.S. are named
with European Celtic names, not Amerindian names. Also, in the state of
Washington, alongside the Columbia River, some college students found a skull
that turned out to be 9,200 years old, and that of a white man. Now
called "Kenniwick Man," further studies presently are being done on
it. Whether the dating methods used (two different ones were used, both with
the same age-result) are completely accurate, the find lends further credence
to a Celtic presence over here much earlier than once believed.
Commander
Gene Andress, who is a Muskogee (Creek) Indian from Alabama, writes:
"Late in the summer of 1942, when I had just turned
fourteen, I went to visit relatives near Gadsden. On a nearby farm lived a lad
of my own age named Doug Davis. He began to tell me the local Indian
traditions. There were still many Cherokees and Muscogees who lived in the
area, as well as numerous village sites and Indian mounds along the nearby
Coosa River. We talked about 'lost treasure,' and met an old Muskogee chief who
told us about ancient legends of white men who had sailed up the Coosa a
thousand years ago to trade for wood, furs, and metals.
"Being
even at that age of a skeptical academic bent, I checked in the local library
and found references to Welsh princes having sailed the Coosa around 500 C.E.
Even this vague literary confirmation greatly sparked my interest. Chief
Tappawingow further told us of a cave near an ancient trading village known as
Tulla, not too far away, where relics could still be found. Typically
adventuresome teen-agers, we set out to find this place, some five miles to the
south, from his fairly precise directions...I can yet feel the thrill of the
search after these 36 years."
29
He goes on
to say that they found the cave and arrowheads, broken pieces of pottery and a
small vase. These artifacts proved to be Roman, similar to some found on board
a wrecked vessel dating from Republican times, about 100 B.C.E., found in the
Mediterranean and carrying a cargo of ceramic lamps from a factory in Pompeii
in Campania, south of Naples 30
America in the fifth century C.E. had become a land
of haven and refuge for Christians all over the western part of the Old World.
From Morocco, Libya, Spain, and Britain, people took ship for Asqa-Samal (as
the Libyans called America, "The Great North Land"). 31
A version of the Ten Commandments engraved on a rock
at Los Lunas near Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a similar one on a stone tablet
from a burial mound at Newark, Ohio, are ancient inscriptions using a north
Canaanite script and old Hebrew language. 32
An Ancient Hebrew inscription, "God is the Sun,
Sacred is the Sun," is found in the Andes Mountains, the script being
early Iberic, and words being Hebrew. It is possible the black circular
sun-symbol is a mystic sign for "Yahweh," in which case the
inscription is to be regarded as Iberian Hebrew. 33
On p. 168 are discussed the Jews in Tennessee,
Kentucky, and east Arkansas, which already have been commented on. A memorial
stele in slightly illiterate North African Creed of the Byzantine period was
found at Cripple Creek, Colorado, saying, "Herein is the last resting
place of Palladis, the servant of God." 34
Salvataore
Michael Trento wrote an interesting thing in a chapter entitled,
"Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Southern New York." I quote:
"Colonel Joseph Brant was a
Dartmouth-educated Mohawk sachem (chief) whose biography was written by William
Stone in 1838. In the book Stone cites a lengthy and informative conversation
between Brant and a questioning scholar: 'Among other things relating to the
western country,' says Mr. Woodruff, 'I was curious to learn in the course of
my conversations with Captain Brant, what information he could give me
respecting the tumuli (mounds) which are found on and near the margin
rivers and lakes, from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi. He stated, in
reply, that the subject had been handed down time immemorial, that in an age
long gone by, there came white men from a foreign country, and by consent of
the Indians established trading houses and settlements where these tumuli are
found. A friendly intercourse was continued for several years; many of the
white men brought their wives, and had children born to them; and additions to
their numbers were made yearly from their own country. These circumstances at
length gave rise to jealousies among the Indians, and fears began to be
entertained in regard to the increasing numbers, wealth, and ulterior views of
the new comers; apprehending that, becoming strong, they might one day seize
upon the country as their own. A secret council, composed of the chiefs of all
the different nations from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, was therefore
convoked; the result of which, after long deliberation, was a resolution that
on a certain night designated for that purpose, all their white neighbors, men,
women, and children, should be exterminated. The most profound secrecy was
essential to the execution of such a purpose; and such was the fidelity with
which the fatal determination was kept, that the conspiracy was successful, and
the device carried completely into effect. Not a soul was left to tell the
tale.'" 35
Jean Hunt, in her book,
Tracking the Flood Survivors (1991), wrote about Prince Madoc. Madoc,
Prince of Wales, is said to have established the first European colony in the
continental U.S. A sailor who became head of the Welsh navy, he sailed during
peaceful years to the Antilles, the Bahamas, Mexico, and possibly Venezuela and
Florida. His last mission left Wales in 1170, which voyage was recorded in the
ancient maritime log of missing ships of Britain in 1171. Olson believed Madoc,
on one of his earlier voyages, to have been the white, bearded visitor to South
America called Quetzalcoatl. He made the point that the Pope of that time had
ruled that the first European explorer to visit a new land could claim
ownership for his country. The French and Spanish, he believes, would have been
very interested in suppressing evidence that a Welshman had been there earlier.
He traced Madoc's progress on his last voyage from the Gulf of Mexico inland,
always meeting and being pushed further and further inland by hostile tribes.
When the Spanish reached Mobile Bay, "they found evidence the Welsh had
been there. They found Roman coins that had been minted in Wales, and some old
coracles (the unique, round leather boats used in Wales) in a cave that was
situated along the Dog River."
Eventually,
Madoc and his colonists reached Clark County, Indiana, where Olson believed they
became known as the Mandan Indians. General George Rogers Clark reportedly
found some skeletons in armor that he thought were ancient Welshmen. Other
Welsh armor, marked with the mermaid and harp that appeared on Madoc's coat of
arms, was found near the Falls of the Ohio. Native Americans in the area spoke
of yellow-haired giants, whose kings were buried in stone cists, and of a war
of extermination waged against the "White Indians." The final battle
took place at the Falls of Ohio, where "nearly the whole of the White
Indians were driven upon an island and slaughtered." (excerpted from Jean
Hunt, quoting from Dana Olson's book, Prince Madoc: Founder of Clark County,
Indiana)
Jean Hunt further says, "George Catlin, the
painter, visited the Mandans (Jean Hunt's words--I have heard from another
source that he lived with them for two years) and painted them with blond hair
and grey or blue eyes. Reportedly, Welsh speaking people were able to talk with
them with no difficulty. They used boats like the coracles of Wales (My note:
called "bull boats"), which were propelled in the same manner: by
standing in them and drawing the paddle toward the boat, rather than with oars
extended to the sides, as was the case with Indian canoes." 36
Another
source (of mine) adds that many were red-headed and freckled-faced and were
required by the tribe to speak Welsh until age 12, after which they could learn
an Indian language. May the writer interject something of interest at this
point? We know that the Phoenicians very probably were Esau-ites, with Dan
mixed in, but some evidence exists that they might just as well have been
Israelites too. In Greek eyes, the Phoenicians-proper were the same as the
Israelite tribes inhabiting the Phoenician coast. Romans called them
"Poenes" or "Puni." The Puni (or Phuni, the descendants of
Phua) were a clan in the Tribe of Issachar (Numbers 26: 23, 24), who at one
time had conquered the "Phoenician" mother city of Sidon. The
Phoenicians also were known as the "Puni," and "Puni" is a
clan name among the Tribe of Issachar. "Of the
sons of Issachar after their families...of Pua, the family of the Puni..."
(Num. 26:23)
The
Hebrew name Pua (Phua or "Puni") is a root word denoting a
plant used to make red dye. The name "Phoenician" has the same
connotation. Even "Phoenix," from which the term
"Phoenician" is derived, is a Greek word meaning "red"
after the dye Phoenicians were famous for producing.
Note
too that Sidon once had been conquered by the "Shakalesh" or
"Saddara." Both were one and the same and were Israelites from the
Tribe of Issachar. Issachar, like Dan, was linked to his brother Zebulon. In
Gen. 49:13, Zebulon is blessed: "Zebulon shall
dwell at the haven of the sea (on the sea shores) and he shall be for an haven
of ships; and his borderland shall be unto Sidon." (See also Deut.
33:18,19)
Yair Davidy writes, "The Talmud (Megilla
6a) understood the blessing of Zebulon to entail success in sea fishing, the production
of purple dye from a sea mollusc, and the manufacture of glass from certain
sands in the Tyre and Sidon areas. Zebulon was also considered a sea merchant.
All the activities of Zebulon are those otherwise associated with the
Phoenicians."
37
To
digress further, Esau had twelve sons (Didn't everybody back then?). An
instructor of mine in graduate school, Dr. Ozerdin, himself a Turk, said that
the Mongols were one of the Turkish tribes. He said these Esau-ites (my term,
not his) had migrated into the interior of Asia. Later some of them came back
to become the Turkish tribes we are most familiar with, the Seljuks, Ottomans,
etc. In a book, The Dene and Na-Dene Indian Migration 1233 A.D.: Escape from
Genghis Khan to America, the author, Ethel G. Stewart, makes an excellent
case for the Navajo and other Athabaskan or Dene-speaking peoples in North
America and the peoples of Central Asia being related, or even the same. The
Navajo hogan, for example, is almost identical to the Mongolian yrta; the
Apache's one-stringed violin is similar to a Chinese and also a Mongolian
musical instrument; Asiatics and many Indian tribes found barbecued dog a
delicacy; the Dene peoples had knowledge of the crocodile and its habits, of
caravans, of the coastal trade of Asia, of iron knives in pre-European times,
even of iron ore; linguistically, there are 14 isomorphs (a specific word in
one language meaning the same and sounding like a similar word in another)
between Navajo and Mongolian. (The above excerpted from the book review)
While
in Turkey, I was astounded at the similarity of the Turkish and Navajo weaving
and color patterns of their rugs. Also strange to me were the definite
"reddish" color of Turks and the overall shortness of them. Because
of the blessing of Esau by Isaac, I have wondered if the Esau-ites not only
sailed westward as Phoenicians and went eastward into Mongolia and China, but
also if many of them continued onward, across the Pacific and the Bering
Strait, and became the "Indians" (red men) of the North American
continent. Some people believe Tiras, a son of Japheth, to be the father of the
Indian tribes because of the similarity of names of his sons with Indian tribes
in the western hemisphere. But every one of these tribes is in South and
Central America, not North America.
Even
skull types and physical builds have a message for us. Amerindian skulls on the
western side of America are rounded, like Siberians and other Asians; those on
the eastern side are oval, like the European Celtic. A mixture of the two
(probably much interbreeding) is found in the Rocky Mountain states.
"...American Indian tribes
varied widely in physical appearances, languages, and lifestyles, and represented
different kinds of amalgamations of earlier peoples....East Coast native
Americans resembled European and Middle Eastern populations physically more
than they did Far Eastern peoples, while the reverse was true on the West
Coast. Canadian Takhelne were related to Gaelic or some other Old World
language. Pottery abruptly appearing in the Northeast about 1000 B.C.E. was
closer in type to then-contemporary North European pottery (Vignette I) than to
other American types." 38
Could there be the
possibility that some of the "red" Indians of North America
were Esau and the "white" Indians of Jacob? Some (myself included)
have believed for years that ETERNAL gave America to Israel, the son of Isaac,
for an inheritance. It is part of our "promised land." Wasn't Esau
his son too? Perhaps some of the red Indians have a rightful claim to North
America too. (Digression ended)
Most
of the evidence, though, points to Phoenicians being Esau. Note that
"Ousoos" founded Tyre and is given the qualities of Esau, the brother
of Jacob, according to Sanchuniathon (an early Phoenician writer).
Going back to Jean Hunt, re. Israel and Phoenicia
being related and the Canaanites being (probably) Esau (Phoenicia), she
mentions a talk with one of her sources, Ivan Lissner. Lissner told her he
believed (the Masons) were wrong, that the ancient wisdom of the Masons did not
begin with the Egyptians or with King Solomon, but that it went far back beyond
that, to the megalith builders. The deciphering of the clay tablets of Ras
Shamra has opened doors of knowledge about the Canaanite mythology not
previously known. They date from the fourteenth century B.C.E., but their
content is much older, probably passed down verbally for awhile. Since the
Canaanites and Israelites inhabited the same country, led a similar life, were
familiar with the same legends, and worshiped the same god (at times), we are
forced to assume that both had a common origin. Thus the Ugarit tablets take us
back to the earliest history of the Israelite people, making their discovery
one of the most important events in "Biblical" research. The religion
of the Canaanites was not primitive, just "pagan." A tightly organized
priesthood served regular spells of duty in their numerous temples. Their
supreme deity was El, a word which means "god" in the Phoenician and
other Semitic languages.
39
The
Phoenicians, remember, brought the alphabet to Greece, and it became the same
alphabet for all Europe. Herodotus says in the fifth book of his histories that
the Greeks got their written script from the Phoenicians, who came to Greece
with King Cadmus, bringing with them many branches of knowledge. Israel also
was a seafaring race, renowned for their hardiness, daring, and commercial
enterprises. The Ostimians, the spiritual ancestors of the Frisians, Saxons,
Vikings, Dutch, and English, used large leather-covered boats. These boats also
were used by the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Ireland, and the aboriginal Irish
were called Fir-bolg ("people of the hide-boats") by the Celts (these
boats being the same as those used by St. Brendan, the Welsh, and the Mandan
and other plains Indians).
"Apparent trips to America have been recorded in
Viking sagas such as Hauksbok and Eyrbyggia, by Greek historians
Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, in several Chinese documents, and in medieval
European accounts of voyages by Irish St. Brendan, Welsh Prince Madoc, and Scot
Henry Sinclair. Artifacts have been found in America that accord with each of
these accounts. Barry Fell deciphered also an in situ engraving on a large
cliff face at Figuig, Morocco, that told of 'A Fifth-Century Moroccan
Emigration to North America.'" 40
Tracing Dan -
Part 2 Chapter 2 Tracing Dan -
Introduction Index Page
Footnotes
1. Fell, Barry, Saga America, Times Books, 1980,
chapter entitled, "Refuge America," p. 166.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid. p. 167.
4. Nollau, Dr. Guenther;
Utriusque, Dr. Iuris, "Ten Commandments in the New Mexico Desert," ESOP,
1986, p. 142
5. Ibid., p. 143.
6. Ibid.
7. Fell,
Saga, p. 6.
8. McClone,
William R.; Leonare, Phillip M., "The Epigraphic Controversy," ESOP,
1986, p. 125.
9. Fell,
Saga, p. 50.
10.
Kraus, Gerhard, "In Honor of Elliot Smith & William James Perry,
Founders of Diffusionist Theory," ESOP, 1986, p. 183.
11.
Fell, Saga, p. 35.
12.
Fell, Barry, America B.C., Pocket Books, 1976, p.
13.
Carter, George F., "The Money Cowry and the Midewiwin Society," ESOP,
1986, p. 160.
14.
Fell, Barry, "Etymology of the Lower Mississippian Languages--Part 1:
Introduction," ESOP, 1990.
15.
Fell, Saga, p. 85.
16.
Ibid., p. 87.
17.
Ibid., p. 88.
18.
Ibid.
19.
Fell, Saga, pp. 93-114.
20.
Capt, E. Raymond, Missing Links Discovered in Assyrian Tablets,
U.S.A., 1995, p. 152.
21.
Ibid., p. 154.
22.
Ibid.
23.
Capt, Op.cit., p. 150.
24.
Ibid., p. 140.
25.
Fell, ABC (America B.C.), p. 157.
26.
Ibid., p. 159.
27.
Ibid., pp. 53-54.
28.
Ibid., pp. 100-101.
29.
Fell, Saga, p. 118.
30.
Ibid., p. 120.
31.
Ibid., p. 121.
32.
Ibid., p. 167.
33.
Ibid.
34.
Ibid., p. 168.
35.
Trento, Salvataore Michael, The Search for Lost America: The Mysteries
of the Stone Ruins, p. 93.
36.
Hunt, Jean, Tracking the Flood Survivors, 1991, p. 128.
37.
Lost Israelite Identity, Russell-Davis, 1996, p. 161.
38.
Totten, Norman, "Old World Contacts with America," ESOP,
1986, p. 81.
39.
Hunt, Tracking, p. 38.
40.
Totten, Op.cit., p. 83.