Did Phoenicians discovered America before Columbus ?
“We are children of Canaan who came from Sidon, the city of the king. Trade has brought us to these remote shores, to a land of mountains. We sacrificed a young man to please the Gods in the 19th year of Hiram, our mighty ruler. We embarked from Ezion-Geber, crossed the Red Sea, and traveled with ten ships. We spent two years in the sea, around the land that belongs to Ham, but we were divided by the hand of Baal and lost many companions. Here we came, twelve men and three women, to a beach which I control. With the protection of the gods we will be favored.”
What you have just read is the translation of a Phoenician tablet found in 1872, so far nothing strange, we know that the Phoenicians were great navigators (even if we know very little about these people) but we certainly never expected to find one of these tablets in a place so far from their homeland.
However, the place where this tablet was found appears very strange: Brazil, in the city of Paraiba. We are better able to conceive this event as exceptional by thinking about the, albeit relative, recent discovery of this territory.
As usual it was thought to be a fake, so the researchers and scholars of the time skilfully worked to look for possible evidence that would discredit the credibility of the find. What we possess today, moreover, is only a copy of the original inscription, which was lost and never found again, or perhaps we should even say: hidden.
In any case, what gives validity to the tablet is first of all the terminology it presents: in fact, philologists were not aware of some words in 1572 because they were discovered and studied only many years later, therefore a possible falsification by a hypothetical Brazilian in the mood for jokes, as it would have required a knowledge of perfect Phoenician writing, impossible for the aforementioned reasons.
Secondly, if the tablet was a fake, how do you justify an engraving of ancient Phoenician ships found on a rock in Lake Assawompset in Massachusetts?
The tablet was also found under the surface of the water and was discovered only in 1957, because, due to the strong drought of that year, the water level dropped considerably; a possible forger, therefore, would have found it very difficult to complete his undertaking: if the lake had never subsided, no one would have been able to fall for his mockery.
This discovery changed many things, until then taken for granted, such as, precisely, that America was discovered for the first time by Christopher Columbus in 1492, but this is a fact after all, so much so that the Vikings of Northern Europe had already left traces in a stele with their reports in America.
Today we know that before Columbus, the American continent, in addition to the natives, was therefore subject to visits by the Vikings, the Phoenicians but also by the Chinese and who knows how many other peoples, advanced peoples who stimulated and caused historical enigmas and cultural and artistic affinities across the globe.
Perhaps "prehistoric" man had something better and more knowledgeable to do than wander around with a club in the African steppes.
