Greeks, Romans, Egyptions and Chinese in the New World?

History Mystery: Ancients in America

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue...

Many of us learned that rhyme, part of a longer history poem, when being taught in school that Christopher Columbus discovered America. Although nothing can be taken away from Columbus' daring voyage, he certainly was not the first to arrive on the shores of the Americas. For one thing, there were already people here - many Native American nations inhabited what later became North and South America and even the Caribbean islands where Columbus landed. Columbus probably wasn't even the first "white man" to make it here. It's fairly well documented that Icelander Leif Ericsson successfully sailed to North America in the year 1000 - almost 500 years prior to Columbus's voyage.

In fact, there's a growing amount of proof suggesting that a lot of the familiar history of human exploration and "discovery" by our ancestors as we were taught it may be quite wrong. There is hard evidence of ancient civilizations making their mark in places where, according to traditionally accepted history, they just shouldn't be. Here's an overview of some of the most remarkable and fascinating cases.

Greeks and Romans in the New World

• Coins: 
  • Roman coins have been found in Venezuela and Maine.
  • Roman coins were found in Texas at the bottom of an Indian mound at Round Rock. The mound is dated at approximately 800 AD.
  • In 1957 by a small boy found a coin in a field near Phenix City, Alabama, from Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, and dating from 490 B.C. 
  • In the town of Heavener, Oklahoma, another out-of-place coin was found in 1976. Experts identified it as a bronze tetradrachm originally struck in Antioch, Syria in 63 A.D. and bearing the profile of the emperor Nero.
  • In 1882, a farmer in Cass County, Illinois picked up bronze coin later identified as a coin of Antiochus IV, one of the kings of Syria who reigned from 175 B.C. to 164 B.C., and who is mentioned in the Bible.
• Pottery: Roman pottery was unearthed in Mexico that, according to its style, has been dated to the second century A.D.
• Inscriptions:
  • In 1966, a man named Manfred Metcalf stumbled upon a stone in the state of Georgia that bears an inscription that is very similar to ancient writing from the island of Crete called "Cretan Linear A and B writing."
  • In the early 1900s, Bernardo da Silva Ramos, a Brazilian rubber-tapper working in the Amazon jungle, found many large rocks on which was inscribed more than 2,000 ancient scripts about the "Old World."
  • Near Rio de Janeiro, high on a vertical wall of rock - 3,000 feet up - is an inscription that reads: 'Tyre, Phoenicia, Badezir, Firstborn of Jethbaal..." and dated to the middle of the ninth century B.C.
  • Near Parahyba, Brazil, an inscription on Phoenician has been translated, in part, as: "We are sons of Canaan from Sidon, the city of the king. Commerce has cast us on this distant shore, a land of mountains. We set [sacrificed] a youth for the exalted gods and goddesses in the nineteenth year of Hiram, our mighty king. We embarked from Ezion-Geber into the Red Sea and voyaged with ten ships. We were at sea together for two years around the land belonging to Ham [Africa] but were separated by a storm [lit. 'from the hand of Baal'], and we were no longer with our companions. So we have come here, twelve men and three women, on a... shore which I, the Admiral, control. But auspiciously may the gods and goddesses favor us!" 
  • The Kensington Stone, discovered in Kensington, Minnesota in 1898 contains an inscription describing an expedition of Norsemen into the interior of what is now North America. It's estimated that this expedition took place in the 1300s.
  • In 1980, P.M. Leonard and J.L. Glenn, from the Hogle Zoological Gardens, Salt Lake City, visited a rock outcropping in Colorado that was reputed to be inscribed with "peculiar markings." Leonard and Glenn believe they are excellent examples of Consainne Ogam writing - a type ascribed to ancient Celts. One of the many inscriptions was translated as: "Route Guide: To the west is the frontier town with standing stones as boundary markers."
  • A fist-sized, round stone was found during the early 1890s in an cemetery near Nashville, Tennessee. Its front was inscribed with symbols thought to be Libyan, pre-100 A.D. style. It translates as: "The colonists pledge to redeem."
• Pictures: An experienced botanist has identified plants in an ancient fresco painting as a pineapple and a specific species of squash - both native to the Americas. Yet the fresco is in the Roman city of Pompeii.
• Statues: In 1933, in a burial at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico, archaeologist Jos� Garc�a Pay�n discovered a small carved head with "foreign" features in an undisturbed burial site. It was later identified by anthropologist Robert Heine-Geldern as "unquestionably" from the Hellenistic-Roman school of art and suggested a date of "around AD 200."
• Structures: Many stone chambers dot the New England countryside and most archaeologists insist they are all potato cellars built long ago by farmers. Others argue that they are too sophisticated for such a mundane application. One, is built into a hillside at Upton, Massachusetts, has sophisticated corbelling that follows they style of Irish and Iberic chambers. It's theorized that it was really built by Europeans around 700 AD - long before the Leif Eiriksson.
• Ships: In 1886, the remains of a shipwreck was found in Galveston Bay, Texas. Its construction is typically Roman.
• Toys: A doll made of wood and wax was found deep in a "Well of Sacrifice" at Chich�n Itz�, Mexico, on which is written Roman script.
• Tombs: In the Mayan ruins of Palenque, a stone sarcophagus was found that is very much in the style of the ancient Phoenicians.

Oh, Im sorry. Here is the site

http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa080700b.htm

Where is the solid archaeological evidence?  Oh - there is none? HMMM 

Usually an out of place artifact is just that - out of place.  Even in the 18th century there were antiquaries in North America, and collectors of antiquities were common through the 19th and 20th centuries.  They were importing Greco Roman artifacts for those collectors before the Revolutionary War.  Ancedotal stories of ancient coins or objects "found" by local children, farmers, (anyone - as long as they were illiterate and unable to leave their own story for posterity) abound - I have heard of none that have been in any way substantiated.

I would need to see more on the pottery - almost every culture in the world has gone through a "geometric" phase - I believe that it has to do with the limitations of ornmentation on certain kinds of pottery - there are a finite number of possibilities - and therefore no surprise that pottery in one place seems to superficially resemble pottery in another.  I challenge anyone to wrap a coil - throw it on a wheel, and come up with something that isn't round.

Most of the inscriptions listed above have already been debunked.  Petroglyphs scattered across North America are often used as evidence for cultural contact.  I recently (this past summer) saw petroglyphs carved by a river in Maine that showed great Viking ships alongside Thunderbirds and Katchina figures - interesting - but not in the Algonquin mythology as far as I know.  Must be a sign that the Pueblo had contact with the Vikings along the Maine coast?  Or?

The same is true with the "stone chambers" which archaeologically usually turn out to be cellar holes of 18th and 19th century farmsteads.  I have already heard recent transplants to New England argue that the stone walls found running through the woods and forests are a sure sign that Viking fortifications were here.  (The walls were all built by 17th - 19th century farmers clearing rocks from fields that have since overgrown into forest again.)  Early records of any of these towns do not show any sign of the petroglyphs or stone chambers or other oddities - it is usually only after many years of habitation by colonials that such things begin to turn up - often well into the 19th or 20th century.  How could an area be inhabited for so long before anyone noticed?

Stone anchors along the California coast were already proven to be Chinese.  Chinese immigrants built fishing fleets along the coast in the 19th and early 20th century.  As for "foreign" contact with Native Americans - American contact with many groups goes back only to the 19th century - how would we know who else they may have had contact with 20 years before they met Lewis and Clarke.  It wouldn't have to be ancient contact to leave behind most of these artifacts.

And so it goes.  

How do these rumors and myths acquire lives of their own, and how are they able to live on for so long after they have been disproven? 

Why must it be necessary for others to have built the civilizations in North America?  It does a great disservice to all Native American cultures to say that they were incapable of independent invention. 

Sorry - but I'm not with you on this one - it makes good campfire stories - but it makes terrible history.

"gee, I wonder why no one has considered that later settlers from Europe post 1492 or perhaps Vikings brought some old coins and things to trade with anyone they might find with them and hence these things ended up in the local economy ?"

I don't think the Vikings did bring some ancient Chinese coins with them to trade on the west coast.

Doubt it's true, although there have been reacords found about Roman ships sailing 'round Africa to China.

"People from all over the world built pyramids. Because for ancient civilizations it was the best way to make tall (=close to the gods) buildings. That has nothing to do with contacts between Egyptians and ancient Mexicans (Aztecs didn't exist yet when the Egyptians built their pyramids)."

The Chinese never built pyramids. They had their underground Imperial tombs. They also built oriental-style towers with wood.