"… The images on such plates had nothing to do with the cultural traditions of ancient America. They were directly related to the cultures of the Old World, or rather, the civilizations of the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East. So one of the plates depicted a regular (non-stepped) pyramid, similar the pyramids of the Giza plateau. Along the lower edge of this plate there is an inscription made in an unknown "alphabet." Two elephants are depicted in the lower corners. It is clear that elephants were no longer inhabited by the time the first civilizations appeared in America …"
Carlo Crespi Croci was born in 1891 in Italy in a small town near Milan. His family was completely civilized, but from an early age Carlos chose the path of a priest for himself, helping the local padre at church services. Already at the age of fifteen, Carlo became a novice in one of the monasteries belonging to the Salesian Order (founded in 1856). However, he managed to get a secular education at the University of Padua. He initially majored in anthropology and later received his Ph. D. in engineering and music at the same time.
Crespi first came to Ecuador in 1923, not as a missionary, but to collect various data for an international exhibition. In 1931, Crespi was assigned to the Salesian Mission in Macas, a town in the Ecuadorian jungle. Here he did not stay long and in 1933 he moved to the city of Cuenca. Cuenca is located about 230 km south of the capital of Ecuador, Quito. Cuenca was the headquarters of the Inca Tupac Yupanqui, who annexed the lands of Ecuador to the Inca Empire in the 70s of the 15th century.
In Cuenca, Padre Crespi developed a vigorous missionary activity. Within ten years, he managed to found an agricultural school in the city, an institute of oriental studies to prepare young people for work in the eastern (Amazonian) regions of the country. He also founded Cornelio Mercian College to educate local disadvantaged children and became its first director. In addition to his missionary work, Carlo Crespi was fond of music. He organized a local orchestra, which performed mainly works written by Crespi himself. In 1931, Crespi filmed a documentary about the Jivaro Indians in the upper Amazon.
But his main merit consisted in the fact that all his time, Padre Crespi devoted himself to caring for local residents, first of all, teaching children from needy families. During his lifetime in 1974, one of the streets in Cuenca was named after him. The anthropological interests of Padre Crespi led to the fact that from the very beginning of his missionary activity, he began to buy antiquities from local residents that they found in the fields or in the jungle. The terrible poverty of the local population allowed it to acquire tremendous value from the peasants of antiquity for mere pennies. At the same time, Crespi bought modern crafts and objects of Christian art from the Indians in order to at least somehow support his parishioners.
As a result, his collection took up three huge rooms at Cornelio Merchan College. Local residents dragged him everything - from Inca pottery to stone slabs and thrones. The padre himself has never dealt with accounting, let alone cataloging his collection. That is why it is difficult to call it a collection. It was precisely a collection of things, the total of which no one counted. In general, however, Padre Crespi's collection can be divided into three parts. The first part consisted of items of modern production - handicrafts of local Indians, imitating either samples of ancient Ecuadorian art, or made in the Christian tradition. Numerous objects made in the 16th-19th centuries can also be included here. The second part, the most numerous, consisted of items from various pre-Spanish cultures of Ecuador,which local residents have found in their fields or during unauthorized excavations. So in the collection of Crespi was presented the ceramics of all Indian cultures of Ecuador (with the exception of the earliest - the culture of Valdivia).
But the most interesting is the third part of the collection. It includes items that cannot be attributed to any of the famous archaeological cultures in America. These were mainly objects made of copper, copper alloys, and sometimes gold. Most of these artifacts were made by minting on metal sheets. The collection included masks, crowns, chest discs, etc. But the most interesting were numerous metal plates covered with plot images and … inscriptions. Padre Crespi has collected, probably, more than a hundred such plates. Some of them had solid dimensions - up to 1.5 m in width and up to 1 m in height. There were also smaller plates, metal plates (apparently used to decorate wooden items).
The images on such plates had nothing to do with the cultural traditions of ancient America. They were directly related to the cultures of the Old World, or rather, the civilizations of the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East. So on one of the plates a regular (not stepped) pyramid was depicted, similar to the pyramids of the Giza plateau. Along the lower edge of this plate there is an inscription made in an unknown "alphabet". Two elephants are depicted in the lower corners. It is clear that by the time the first civilizations appeared in America, elephants were no longer found. But their images are by no means unique in the Crespi collection. The unknown "alphabet" with which the inscription is made is found on other objects as well. This type of writing is not known to modern researchers. At first glance, it bears a certain resemblance to the writing of Mohenjo-Daro. On other plates, there is another type of writing, which, according to rare researchers, resembles either Early Libyan or Proto-Minoan writing. One of the American researchers of the Crespi collection suggested that the inscriptions were made in "neo-Punic" or Cretan script, but in the Quechua language. However, I am not aware of any serious attempts to decipher these inscriptions.
Promotional video:
A very small number of researchers, mainly from the United States, tried to study the Crespi collection. Representatives of the Mormon Church in the USA showed great interest in him, but the dramatic history of the meeting of Padre Crespi did not allow any serious research.
Representatives of official science simply ignored this meeting. And some church representatives said that all things are modern products of local peasants. At the same time (according to some fragmentary data), many things from the collection of Padre Crespi after his death were secretly taken to the Vatican.
Naturally, data that goes against the official concept are ignored or hushed up. But the huge number of items in the Crespi collection make us rethink our ideas about contacts between the Old and New Worlds in ancient times. Interestingly, the collection contained metal plates depicting the well-known winged bulls from the palace of Nineveh, as well as winged griffin-headed "geniuses", which are striking examples of ancient Babylonian art. One of the plates depicts a priest wearing a tiara similar to the papal one, or resembling the crown of Lower Egypt. On a huge number of plates there is always an image of a writhing snake - the symbol of the cosmic serpent. Most plates have holes in the corners. Obviously, the plates were used for cladding wooden or stone objects or walls.
In addition to plates of copper (or copper alloys), the Crespi collection contains many stone tablets engraved with images and inscriptions in unknown languages. It is noteworthy that it was these categories of objects, according to Padre Crespi, that the Indians found in the jungle in underground tunnels and chambers. Padre Crespi claimed that an ancient system of underground tunnels stretching for more than 200 km from the city of Cuenca into the jungle. He wrote about a similar system of tunnels back in 1972. Erich von Daniken in his book The Gold of the Gods. He also brought the first images of things from the collection of Padre Crespi.
In 1962, the Cornelio Merchan College was destroyed by fire as a result of an arson attack. Most of Crespi's collection was saved, but a room containing the most valuable and highly artistic items was destroyed in the fire. On the ruins of the college, Padre Crespi erected the church of Maria Auxiladora, which still stands today. Padre Crespi himself died in 1982. at the age of 91. Shortly before his death, in 1980. he sold most of his collection to the Museum of the Central Bank in Cuenca (Museo del Banco Central). The bank paid Crespi $ 433,000. This money went to build a new school. The museum began to select items from the Crespi collection in order to separate valuable antiquities from modern crafts. In the course of this process, a lot of artifacts "went to the side". Obviously, the museum was selecting items for itself,belonging to the famous archaeological cultures of Ecuador. According to some reports, most of the chased metal plates were returned to the church of Maria Auxiladora, where they are probably kept today. Unfortunately, I do not have any detailed information about the current state of the Crespi collection. This is a matter for future research.
Candidate of Historical Sciences
Andrey Zhukov