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SOME STARTLING REVELATIONS
ABOUT AMERICAN COLONIZATION BY Dr. BARRY FELL OF HARVARD
UNIVERSITY An
interview by Thomas Fleming with Dr. Barry Fell of Harvard University
appeared in The Reader’s Digest
in 1977. In this article Fleming
states that although most Americans believe that their history began with
Christopher Columbus, historians have lately discovered hard evidence that
Leif Ericson and his fellow Norsemen were exploring Canada and the northern
tier of the United States as earl as 1000 A.D. However, before that date the history of the New World above
the Rio Grande had been a virtual vacuum, inhibited by scattered Indian
legends.
Now the genius of Dr Fell has caused a mind-boggling change in
attitude on the subject of American colonization. In his published book, America
B.C., New Zealand-born Barry Fell, a marine biologist at Harvard,
offered astonishing evidence that there were men and women from Europe, not
merely exploring but living in North America as early as 800 B.C. This was followed by additional books in
1982, 1983, 1985 and 1989 where the dates of such colonization were pushed
back to as early as 1700 B.C. These
early settlers worked as miners, tanners and trappers, and shipped their
products back to Europe. In temples
in the rugged hills of New Hampshire and Vermont and in river valleys in Iowa
and Oklahoma they sang hymns and performed sacred rituals to honor their
gods. When their kings or chiefs
died, they buried them beneath huge mounds of earth in which they left
steles—written testimony of their grief carved on stone.
Some of these steles had been discovered as early as the 19th
Century, and people had puzzled over strange incscriptions carved on cliffs
from the Maine coast to the Rio Grande and west to Nevada and California, or
on stones which lay in obscure museums.
But archeologists could not read the ancient writings and dismissed
these mysteries as forgeries or accidents of nature. Dr. Fell’s exepertise in this field known
as epigraphy, which requires many of the gifts intelligent persons bring to
code-cracking, is the tool which has enabled him to add a thousand years or
more to America’s past. Fell first
became interested in ancient languages while a student at the University of
Edinburgh. He learned Gaelic, and
began to investigate Celtic tombs and ruins in Scotland. Then, in a study of the marine biology of
Polynesia, he found hundreds of unreadable inscriptions engraved on rocks and
painted on cavern walls.
Intrigued, Fell came to Harvard in 1964 and spent the next eight years
exploring the Widener Library’s unique collection of texts on obscure
languages and writing systems. In the
course of this effort he acquired a working knowledge of several ancient
alphabets, including the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians = Punic); the script
of the Carthaginians and Ogam, an almost forgotten script used by the
pre-Christian Celts.
Fell finally proved to his satisfaction that the Polynesian
inscriptions were written in the native language, Maori. But its vocabulary was a mixture of Greek
and Egyptian that was once spoken in Libya after Alexander the Great
conquered Egypt. The alphabet was
derived from Carthage.
The most remarkable of these Libyan texts was found in a huge cave in
New Guinea. There a navigator named
Maui left drawings of ancient but sophisticated astronomical and navigational
instruments, as well as a depiction of a solar eclipse which enabled Fell,
with the help of Harvard astronomers, to identify the year of the drawings as
232 B.C.
If these were Libyans visiting Polynesia at that time, Fell reasoned
perhaps they sailed on to South America.
He soon accumulated evidence for such landfalls and began lecturing on
it at Harvard. His talks attracted
the attention of a group of investigators led by James P. Wittall II, an
archeologist, who had noted the similarity between numerous crude stone
buildings in New England which farmers often called root cellars, and similar
ruins in Spain and Portugal. The
European buildings had been identified as creations of Celts who ruled that
part of Europe during the Bronze Age, the period of prehistory which dates
roughly from 3500 B.C.
Whittall asked Fell to take a look at the Bourne stone, which had been
discovered near Bourne, Massachusetts around 1680. No one had ever been able to make any sense of the writing on
it. Now, Dr. Fell was able to read
it. The letters were a variation of
the Punic alphabet, found in ancient Spain, for which Fell had coined the
word “Iberic.” It recorded the
annexation of a large portion of present-day Massachusetts by Hanno, a prince
of Carthage. Fell joined in a search
for additional inscriptions at one of their favorite sites, Mystery Hill in
North Salem, N.H.. This site consists
of a series of slabstone buildings, variously attributed to Norsemen,
wandering Irish monks, and a vanished tribe of Indians. Studying the inscribed triangular stones
which had previously been found a the site, Fell found a dedication to the
Phoenician god Baal, written in Iberic.
Then promptly other people began to see hitherto unnoticed
inscriptions in the area. The owner
of Mystery Hill, Bob Stone found another table in an adjacent drystone
wall. When Fell brushed away the
adhering soil, he was able to read a line of Ogam script that read “Dedicated
to Bel.”
Students of ancient mythology had long suspected that the Celtic sun
god Bel and the Carthaginian-Phoenician god Ball were identical. Here, for the first time, there was
evidence not only of this fact, but of a Celtic-Carthaginian partnership in
exploration and settlement on a scale previously never even imagined. In
the following days Other Ogam inscriptions were located at another site in
central Vermont. Fell noted that it
became clear that ancient Celts had build these stone chambers as religious
shrines, and the Carthaginian mariners were visitors who were permitted to
worship at them and make dedications in their own language to their own gods.
Then Whittall showed Fell a photograph of an inscription engraved on a
cliff above Mount Hope Bay, in Bristol, Rhode Island, which was discovered
and recorded in 1780. Because of
vandalization, it was necessary to work from the photograph. Fell soon translated a single line, which
was written in Punic: “Voyagers from
Tarshish this stone proclaims.”
Tarshish was a Biblical city on the southern coast of Spain, and its
citizens were among the boldest sailors of antiquity, famous for the size of
their ships. In 533 B.C., Tarshish
was destroyed by the Carthaginians and their trade taken over by these
ambitious, daring sailors. Here was
evidence of how the partnership between Celts and the Carthaginians began. On
Monhegan Island, 12 miles off the coast of Maine, another inscription was
brought to Dr. Fell’s attention. It
was written in Celtic Ogan and read, “Cargo platforms for ships from
Phoenicia.” [see] From these and
other inscriptions, as well as an intensive study of historical data on the
seafaring ability of the men of Tarshish and Carthage, Fell concluded that
there was a highly developed trade route between America and the
Mediterranean for at least 400 years before the birth of Christ. The principal products from North America
were probably copper, furs and hides.
Fell noted that there was evidence of very early mining in the copper
fields of Minnesota as well as of an extensive fur trade. The Carthaginians used to proclaim that
they obtained their furs from Gaul.
But when the Romans inally invaded Gaul, they found very little
evidence of a fur trade. Thus, Gaul
might have been a code word for America.
Data from America now began to multiply. Most important was Fell’s translation of the Davenport stele,
which some people compare to the translation of the Rosetta stone—the 19th-Century
breakthrough which enabled a reading of hieroglyphics and to grasp the
awesome sweep of Egyptian history. On
this inscription, which was found in a burial mound near Davenport, Iowa in
1874, Dr. Fell was able to read three kinds of writing. At the top were Egyptian
hieroglyphics. Below them was the
Iberic form of Punic writing found in Spain.
The third line was in Libyan script.
This mean that there were Egyptians, Libyans and Celtic Iberians
living together in a colony in Iowa in 900 B.C. It also means that we have to revise a lot of our ideas about
American history in general and the culture of the Amerindians in particular.
Paying closer attention to native Amerindian languages, Barry Fell
next reasoned that if these pre-Christian visitors actually colonized parts
of America, they mush have left behind them a deep impression on the language
and beliefs of the people they encountered.
He soon found abundant evidence to support this conclusion.
One of Fell’s colleagues brought him a book from Harvard’s Widener
Library, that was written by a missionary priest and published din 1866. It contained a document titled “The Lord’s
Prayer in Micmac Hieroglyphics.” Fell
saw that at least half of these hieroglyphics were Egyptian. He was able to prove from the written
testimony of other priests that the Micmacs were using this writing when the
first missionaries arrived. In fact,
all the Northern Algonquians, the family of tribes to which the Micmacs
belonged, apparently used it, having acquired this language from Libyan
mariners and preserved it for over 1000 years. As
Fell began to study the Algonquian language, he found hundreds of Egyptian
words in the dialects of the Northeastern Algonquians. The verb na,
to see, is the same in both languages.
So is nauw, which means
to be weak, and neechnw, which
means child. Celtic is also
plentiful. The names of many New
England rivers, one thought to be Amerindian, turn out to be Celtic. Merrimack,
for instance, means “deep fishing” in Algonquian. It is too close for coincidence to the Gaelic Mor-riomach, meaning “of great depth.” ------------------------------------------------ Reference: Fleming, Thomas. 1977. Harvard scholar
feels America discovered as early as 800 B.C. The Reader’s Digest Assoc., Inc., Pleasantville, NY. |