Re: has montezuma's tomb been found ...?
Greetings Lamar (and everyone),
This will be a pretty long reply, so I beg your indulgence.
Lamar wrote:
The fallacy of your position becomes readily apparent once you attempt to look at the big picture, my friend. You seem to entertain the notion that an ancient Middle Eastern society somehow traversed the Atlantic ocean, then upon arriving in South and Central America, proceeded to teach the local natives the intricate art of pyramid construction, or perhaps that even the reverse occurred, which is the natives of the Americas somehow managed to travel to the Middle East and thus learned the art of pyramid building firsthand.
It appears that you have misunderstood my previous posts. Nowhere did I suggest that any Middle-eastern or Amerindians crossed the oceans to TEACH people on the other side.
Lamar also wrote:
If you've had the opporutunity to visit one of the replica ships that were used during Columbus' first voyage to the Americas, then you would have been immediately aware at just how duanting a task that a transoceanic was during the late 1440s my friend. The largest vessel in the fleet was scarely larger than a modern shrimp boat without all of the modern amenities and the navigational equipment of the ear was appalling crude as well. That the fleet made land on the shores of the New World islands is no mean feat and it can be considered as a small miracle, once all of the prevailing factors are included into the equatation.
Actually I have studied ships of the "Age of Discovery" as well as those of the ancient world, your conclusions about how inadequate the ships of the 1400's were for trans-oceanic travel are well founded, but quite off the mark for earlier ships. Ships of the Classical age were larger and more seaworthy than those of the Medieval period or the age of Columbus. The grain ships of Alexandria were huge by comparison with the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.
Lamar also wrote:
Let's assume for a moment that a society from one part of the world somehow managed to make berth on a distant shore. Then what? Then nothing, my friend. It's really as simple as this, my friend. Let's assume that a group of Eygptian explorers made landfall on the shores of Peru. Then what happened after that? Nothing happened. The reason WHY nothing happened is simply because the people of South America were not technologically PREPARED for any sort of advanced technology, my friend.
I am not proposing any Egyptians reaching Peru, though their voyages to Punt were impressive. (Punt was known to the Greeks as Panchaea, we can identify today as Sumatra.) I do not understand your point about South Americans not being "technologically prepared" for advanced technology.
Lamar also wrote:
The only known ancient society which had the technology, skills, wherewithal, means and sheer cajones to travel to the Americas during ancient times were the Norse, which are collectively referred to as Vikings, which is a very incorrect label, I might add. We know for a fact that the Norse were the most widely travelled of all ancient peoples and this fact is evidenced by the myriad of written documentation and from the physical artifacts which they left behind, most notable among them being coinage and weapons.
I respectfully disagree amigo, the Norse were hardly the only ancient society with the requisite technology, skills, resources and courage for such voyages. Phoenicians and Carthaginians certainly were capable of such voyages (and did) as were the Greeks. Even the oceano-phobic Romans made at least one attempt to cross the Atlantic, and sailed as far as "Ultima Thule" - Iceland - where Roman coins were recently found. (They are currently in the national museum in Reykyavik) (for documentation of Roman voyage, read Wars of the Jews book II, chap 16, by Flavius Josephus quote:
Hath not your army been often beaten even by your neighboring nations, while the power of the Romans is invincible in all parts of the habitable earth? nay, rather they seek for somewhat still beyond that; for all Euphrates is not a sufficient boundary for them on the east side, nor the Danube on the north; and for their southern limit, Libya hath been searched over by them, as far as countries uninhabited, as is Cadiz their limit on the west; nay, indeed, they have sought for another habitable earth beyond the ocean, and have carried their arms as far as such British islands as were never known before.
It is funny that you should mention the Norse coinage and weapons that have been found at sites visited by Norse explorers, since we also have Carthaginian and Greek coinage and weapons that have been found at sites visited by their explorers.
Lamar also wrote:
The Norse ventured from their home ports in modern day Scandanavia to lands as far away as Africa, Russia and the Far East in their pursuit of trade goods. That they set foot on North America centuries before the Spaniards or English is becoming accepted as a distinct possibility, and why shouldn't it? The Norse had all of the necessary at their disposal to survive such a journey and most important of all, they had the TECHNOLOGY to make such a voyage a reality.
The secret to their success lay in the design of their longboats. They were the only shipbuilding society to use the lapstrake hull construction, and coupled with the long, flatbottomed design of their longboats, voyages of long durations became possible. Also, the Norse were able to travel very close to the shoreline, owing to the fact that the draft of their longboats was very shallow.
The Norse had LESS technology at their disposal than the Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Phoenicians or Egyptians amigo - and their primary "compass" - the so-called Sun-compass was a Phoenician invention. The Greek explorer Pytheas used one to sail round the British isles. Your presumption about the Norse using their longboats for exploration is incorrect, the longboats were used for warfare primarily and the exploration was done with a different type of ship known as a Knarr, which is the ship they used to cross the Atlantic and was actually smaller than Phoenician trading ships two-thousand five hundred years earlier, circa 1500 BC
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Norse trading ship, a Knarr
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now compare to a Phoenician trading ship, 1500 BC
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An average Knarr was about 54 feet long and had a beam of 15 feet. The cargo capacity of a Norse trading ship was 24 to 30 tons, while the Phoenician ship was 75 to 110 feet in length, with a cargo capacity of 100 tons or up to 500 tons for the massive grain ships.
Even in warship design there are striking similarities,
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Norse longship
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Phoenician bireme
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A
key difference between Norse warships and those of the Phoenicans, Greeks, Romans etc is that Norse ships were NOT designed for ramming enemy vessels, being more flexible, but far less sturdy than the ancient Phoenician etc ships.
I would repeat that traveling close in to shorelines is not a practice that most seafarers would practice. Most trading ships of the ancient world carried along a smaller boat which served as a landing craft, "lighter" (for transferring cargo ashore), life-boat and riverboat as the occasion called for.
The Norse shipbuilding method is called "clinker" and is used for house-siding even today, referred to as "shiplap" - while Phoenician shipbuilding was by mortise and tenon joining all the planking of the sides, which is a far stronger method.
Lamar also wrote:
And so, we now understand that the Norsemen, because of their superior shipbuilding skills, coupled with their extremely reliable navigational skills, were able to expand far beyond their native borders and into the unknown. So, let's assume the Norse actually did set foot on the North American mainland. What happened next? Absolutely NOTHING!
Do you make note of the types of interactions that Norse had with new peoples they discovered, compared with the types of interactions that ancient Phoenicians, Greeks, or Carthaginians had? The Norse had very little interaction with Amerindians, most of that being violent confrontations with few exceptions, while the ancient Phoenicians were traders first and foremost. Based on the quite
different cultures of the Norse compared with Phoenicians, we should not have much evidence of any exchange of technology where the Norse are concerned. Besides, I am not trying to say that Middle Eastern seafarers actually TAUGHT any Amerindians how to build pyramids (or any other technology with a single exception, sorry but am saving this exception for my own book project) rather that just the idea to build such structures was transmitted. Or do we write off as "coincidence" the fact that the base measurements of the Great Pyramid in Egypt are nearly identical with the base measurements of the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico? We have a similar situation with other subjects such as the aforementioned dragons - IDEAS are transmitted very easily, without any need of actual technological interchange.
Lamar also wrote:
The argument that the intermingling of societies begat technological achievements such as pyramid construction should also hold true if the Norse did in fact intermingle with the natives North America. The Norse had many items of a highly technical nature on their persons, such as steel edged weapons, vastly superior bows, cooking utensils, axes and chain mail armor, and yet, for all of those marvellous technologically superior weapons and tools which they most assuredly carried with them, the natives of North America were unable to make use of these marvels and incorporate them into their own societies.
There must be a reason WHY the North American natives did not take advantage at all of those wonderfully advanced tools and weapons, my friend, and the reason is simply because the North American natives were unable to grasp the technological concepts which the Norse utilized. In other words, the natives of North America had not attaineded a high enough technological degree in order to be able to take advantage of the wonders of steel production, modern shipbuilding, navigation, writing, etc.
Merely co-mingling societies was simply not enough to be able to exchange ideas of such a profound technological degree, my friend. The type of intemingling which you are proposing would have taken GENERATIONS of intermingling in order to have produced results on the scale of pyramid construction, yet we are able to ascertain that generations of intermingling did not occur.
Again, allow me to refer back to the Norse for a minute more, my friend. The Norse had a far superior hull design than any of their seagoing counterparts, and they intermingled with many, many seagoing societies for centuries, yet the Norse remained the only society in the world to use lapstrake construction. If one were to follow YOUR chain of logic, then it would make sense that at least several ancient shipbuilding peoples would have taken advantage of the Norse hull design, yet we know this did not happen, my friend, and the reason why it did not happen is because other ancient societies simply had not attained the degree of technical expertise necessary in order to grasp the CONCEPT of the lapstrake hull.
In other words, before a society could have undertaken such a monumental aritectual feat as building a pyramid, they would first had need to gain the necessary technological expertise. There are only two ways to accquire this expertise, my friend. The first way is empherically, by progressing in small steps and the second way is academically, whereas the architects and engineers are taught in a formal setting.
To sum up, in order for one society with a completely different language, religious beliefs, etc to have been able to teach another society their technology, it would have taken several generations of dedicated instruction and this could have occurred seems to be HIGHLY unlikely. The most likely reason is because the society had evolved to a technological point where it was ABLE to start constructing pyramids, and therefore it did so.
It is readily apparent that you have quite misunderstood what I have proposed here, on several points. I have not proposed ancient Egyptians traveling to Peru to teach Amerindians how to build pyramids, rather that the IDEA of building pyramids got transmitted, very much as the idea got transmitted to Nubia, China, Korea, etc. There was no ocean to cross for any Egyptian to reach China (and we do have documentary evidence of contact between China and Egypt in ancient times) so they could have walked there, yet we find pyramids in China. They are built differently from those in Egypt, with different materials, but no historian (that I am aware of) will debate the fact that the IDEA of building pyramids in China came from elsewhere. It is not a case of "all or nothing" - that we MUST have massive proof of contact in ancient times or it did not occur, in fact we MUST have NO evidence of any kind of contact in ancient times if we are to hold with the Isolation theory, which is the version we find in our history books. Unfortunately for that theory, there is quite a fair amount of evidence that contact was in fact taking place in ancient times, contact that was by no means large nor sustained, but rather
sporadic and quite small scale. I am presenting a fair amount of the evidence in a book I have been working on for over eight years now, and includes not just a few coins, amphoras or passages in ancient texts but even ancient shipwrecks here in the Americas. For one example (out of several) a Phoenician shipwreck was found by scuba divers off Bimini island, (they were examining the so-called "Bimini road" formation) which ship was examined by a Yale professor who dated it to at least 1500 BC. Contact on the level we have evidence for would not leave us with huge stone ruins, in fact it seems a certainty that at least some was purely accidental. In fact Diodorus tells us that the Carthaginians discovered America quite by accident, very much as Cabral discovered Brazil, Jean Cousin or Bjarni Herjólfsson found America - however both Jean and Bjarni failed to go ashore so are a footnote to history.
My apologies for such a lengthy reply, just hoped to explain things a little better. Good luck and good hunting amigo (and everyone reading this) I hope you find the treasures that you seek.
your friend,
Oroblanco
(I thought the top of a hot-water heater would be an excellent place to keep it warm!)
![:-\](https://www.treasurenet.com/smilies/undecided.gif "Undecided :-\")
