It is generally accepted that the era of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean began at the very end of the 15th century, after the discovery of the New World by Columbus. But there are facts that allow us to doubt this. Perhaps transatlantic travel began much earlier?
Reluctant sailors
The belief that unknown lands lie to the west of the shores of Europe existed even in Antiquity and continued to persist in the Middle Ages. Most likely, it arose under the influence of the fact that the ocean sometimes brought strange objects to the shores. In the days of Christopher Columbus, Captain Martin Vincent, who served the Portuguese crown, picked up a fragment of an unknown wooden carving from Cape San Vicente, the extreme southwestern point of mainland Europe. A similar piece was then washed up on the shores of the island of Madeira, where it was discovered by Pedro Correa, a relative of Columbus.
The inhabitants of the Azores said that when the wind blows from the west, bamboo and sticks with inscriptions in an unknown language are thrown onto the shore. In the sands of the island of Flores, part of the western group of the Azores, the remains of two people were once found with features very different from those of Europeans.
In the Middle Ages, a fragment of the work of the Roman historian Cornelius Nepot (99-24 BC) contributed to the development of the idea of the possibility of a western route to India. The German geographer and traveler Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) wrote in his notes regarding that fragment: “Pomponius Mela, who lived in a time relatively close to the time of Cornelius Nepos, tells (and Pliny repeats this) that Metellus Celer, as a proconsul Gaul, received as a gift from the king of the Boys, or Boets (the name is unclear, Pliny calls him the king of the lights), several people brought by the storm from the Indian seas to the shores of Germany … With certainty, we can only say that from the chain of ideas that led Pomponius to mentioning this fact as indisputable, we can conclude that in his time in Rome they were sure that these dark-skinned people,sent from Germany to Gaul, crossed the ocean that washed East and North Asia."
Transatlantic parallels
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Back in the 70s of the XX century, the Norwegian traveler Thor Heyerdahl in his book "Ancient Man and the Ocean" called 53 categories of similarity between the pre-European, as he called them, civilizations of Asia Minor, Ancient Egypt, Cyprus and Crete with ancient civilizations on the other side of the Atlantic - in Mexico and Peru. Here are just some of the similarity parameters from such a wide range:
- a hierarchy based on sun worship and complex government, headed by an absolute deified monarch, whose dynasty calls the Sun its ancestor;
- marriages between brothers and sisters of the ruling dynasty to preserve the purity of the "solar" blood;
- the use of a huge amount of organized labor to build colossal structures, seemingly devoid of any practical function;
- technical knowledge that allows to transport stone blocks weighing up to 100 tons, and sometimes even more over rough terrain, through swamps, rivers and lakes;
- mummification of high-ranking deceased with the extraction of entrails and the use of certain resins, cotton padding and bandages;
- false beard as a ritual dress of the high priests;
- the similarity of clothing made of cotton fabric: loincloths and cloaks for men, a dress with a belt and buckles on the shoulders for women;
- the image as regal symbols of the same three animals: a snake, a bird of prey and a cat. In both regions, the snake was sometimes depicted as horned. In the place of the eagle of the Old World across the ocean, you can see a condor, and in the place of a lion - a puma;
- value XXXI century BC as the time with which they associate their ancestors.
- the presence on both sides of the Atlantic of the same favorite type of ships: a reed boat with sea crescent lines, a composite hull of riots skillfully linked in a spiral rope (bundles of stems) and a canvas sail on a two-legged mast resting on the main riots.
If the Gulf Stream involuntarily brought American guests to Europe in the North Atlantic Ocean, then at tropical latitudes in the opposite direction there is a "sea conveyor" of favorable winds and currents, which helped Columbus to get to the Gulf of Mexico and, possibly, could assist the sailors of Antiquity and deep antiquity. In any case, by their voyage on the papyrus boat "Ra-II" Thor Heyerdahl and his associates proved the possibility of such a thing. At the same time, five of the eight members of the Ra-I crew were newcomers, and one had never even suspected that the sea water was salty.
Phoenicians and not only?
Reed boats and their images are known in the Mediterranean and adjacent areas: from Mesopotamia, Egypt, the shores of present-day Syria, Lebanon and Israel to Cyprus, Crete, Corfu, Malta, Italy, Sardinia, Libya, Algeria, and beyond Gibraltar - on the Atlantic coast Morocco. Rock carvings of such boats in Egypt and the Algerian Sahara indicate that they were used almost seven thousand years ago. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, shipbuilding began with reed boats, which later served as prototypes for the first plank structures.
The ships of the ancient city of Ur (Mesopotamia) were often mentioned in the most ancient Sumerian clay tablets. The texts spoke of reed merchant ships with a carrying capacity of 300 gur, which corresponds to nearly 100 tons. As Heyerdahl emphasizes in the book mentioned above, a large wooden ship can be destroyed by a strong wave, which limits its size. There is no such limit for a papyrus boat. In theory, a ship made of riots can reach the size of a modern ocean liner, as long as the shipowner has the right amount of raw materials and labor.
Heyerdahl pays special attention to the ancient city of Like (Larash) in the northwest of modern Morocco, since it is located almost at the base of the "sea conveyor" to the Gulf of Mexico. The ancient Romans only called Lyke, like Rome itself, "the eternal city" and the burial place of Hercules. The Phoenicians knew it under the name of Mac Semes - "the city of the Sun".
It is believed that Lyke was founded by the Phoenicians in the 12th or 11th century BC, at an early stage of their colonial expansion. They needed Lyque as a base on the approaches to the Spanish silver mines and as an intermediate point for sailing to the Canaries and the island of Madeira, from where the Phoenicians obtained dyes for their famous purple fabrics. But he could serve as an intermediate point on the transatlantic path. After all, around 1200 BC, almost simultaneously with the founding of Lix, the Olmec culture suddenly flourished on the opposite side of the Atlantic, and this may be more than just a coincidence.
It must be said that not only the Phoenicians could have played the role of the ancient transatlantic seafarers. After all, it is still an inexplicable fact that the French scientist Auguste Le-Plongeon, while studying the Mayan language, managed to reveal that more than a third of the words have Greek roots.
Another Frenchman, Michel Lescaut, made an amazing discovery while examining the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II. He found traces of tobacco in it, and later proved that nicotine was an indispensable component of embalming formulations. But after all, according to the established opinion, tobacco became known in the Old World in the 16th century, more than 28 centuries after Rameses, and was brought from America. As, perhaps, in very ancient times it was delivered to Ancient Egypt.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №45. Author: Andrey Chinaev