Chinese Discovery America in 1421

[Drake Tungsten]

I don't know what you guys are arguing about. Everyone knows that the Welsh were the first to make it to the New World (after the natives, that is).

[Wernazuma III]

OK, actually I wonder why I'm playing the enlightening person here, but well.

GePap: When Cook set sail for Australia, he didn't completely discover it. Parts of the Australian coast had been discovered over 100 years before him. Maps of the seventeeth century clearly show the Australian north coast and parts of New Zealand's coast as parts of Terra Australis. What Drake did was surrounding Australia, so he could proof it to be a seperate continent.

About Tenochtitlan: I thought you were following the strange idea, that the ending -lan is similar to Germanic "-land", which is obvious stupid. Well, Enoch isn't any better.

It means "Place of Tenoch" (not Cactus), Tenoch being the first Aztec king and founder of the city. But unless the biblical Enoch lived around 1350AD (hell, I know these biblical persons have a long life, but that beats even Methusalem) and is pronounced "Ehnotsh" you won't have even the slightest point.

About Votan: tolls, you're wrong there, it's a specific of Mesoamerican cultures that highly important rulers were considered avatars of deities (like the historical prince Quetzalcoatl being quasi-identical with the mythological God who created men...)

The quote from the geocities quote points to the work of Lord Kingsborough, who in the 19th century used all his money to proof the lost-tribes theory. He made unimaginably contradictory statements. He stands in the same tradition from where the Momons come from (who hold a similar claim). If you read further, he proposes not that only someone came to the Americas, but that actually it had been settled around 1000BC by Jews!
Reading the article further (it's in the quote!), you will see that Votan's animal is the serpent, which the Mayans call can, which equals Canaan. So Votan is a Canaanite now, or a Jew, or a Norse? Again funny the equivalating of "Nachan" with "Nachash". They're transcribed equally, but spoken very differnetly, such claims in linguistic connections is utterly naive and amateurish.
I don't know about Votan, but he's not that civilazatory hero of the Mayans like Quetzalcoatl for the Toltecs, just a minor God obviously (after having checked him up, before I had never heard of him and I do know the major players in Mayan pantheon) Still it's a pathetic conjecture from a minor earth God in Yucatan to get to the Norse God who was their most important God, who had nothing to do with earth.

drake tungsten: I think you refer to the Madoc legend, not at all a likely tale. It also came up with British efforts to justify their possessions in America and because they wanted the glory of discovery themselves.
The legend first appeared in the late 16th century English translation edition of a medieval Welsh chronicle.
Wonder over wonder, it's absent in all versions of the chronicle we have from before 1500 and in it's narrative patterns is very similar to a story attributed to Aristotle about a Carthaginian travel to a non-inhabited island in the Atlantic (which has also been used to show that Carthaginians arrived in the New World, please spare me!)

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Berzerker
But when we start combining these anomalies with legends of bearded white men from the east, the case for pre-colombian contact grows stronger.

No, not really, because this "bearded men from the east" legends are not told like this, they've been changed to fit the theory. OF COURSE there are stories about men coming from the east, but there's also stories from peoples coming from north or mythological persons coming from west or south, depending on their role in the Mesoamerican cosmos, where each direction also carries meaning - the east being associated more with men, the west with women e.g. No tale said that Quetzalcoatl was bearded! If a man from the Old World brought civilizatin to them around 1000AD (the time Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl lived), then why no writing, why no stock-crops, no domesticated animals, no cultural exchange. If you find statues, extensive trade contact has to have taken place with all it's facettes, but all we have are a few coins and a statue which are much more easily to be explained by "they've been put there later" than suggesting an intensive contact that obviously didn't happen (again: crops, germs and writing, get it!)

His name in Mayan religion was Kukulcan, Quetzalcoatl was his Aztec/Toltec name and I believe "Quetzalcoatl" means "feathered water serpent" with "Quetzal" taken from the feathered quetzal bird and "co" and "atl" being serpent and water.

Quetzalcoatl means only Feathered Serpent or Bird-Serpent
quetzalli=Quetzalbird
coatl=snake

Okay (edited here), the version I have (p352 - "The Flayed God"), Quetzalcoatl crafted a raft of serpents and set out across the eastern sea to return one day.

Yes, this version exists, but 3 points: a) that doesn't say he came from the east in the first place
b)that he went east I already explained as consistent with the Mesoamerican cosmos and transcendend places
c) obviously he didn't keep his promise, unless you consider Cortes to be Quetzalcoatl...

Atl means water, so we don't know if the word comes from a name given to the Atlantic or if it came from some other source of water. I have to track down the Nahuatl word for the Atlantic, but even that wouldn't tell us the origin of the word.

It's completely arbitrary and without any reason then to say that the word for water came from the Atlantic. Why must it come from any specific source of water anyway? Do you know "Water-River" in Denmark, where the English word for water comes from? Sorry, there's not a spark of reason in this statement.

Votan is an ancient Mayan deity and he seems to be vague even in Mayan writings as if they don't know his origin that well.

Nothing outstanding, this applies to most Mayan deities: We don't know much/anything about them, because our information is scarce. And the lesser the God, the more it applies.

More work needs to be done, but peoples all over the new world - from the Hopi to the Inca - have legends of white people from the east.

No, they don't. That simple.

[Ned]

Wernazuma, is there any evidence of a primarily Mongoloid population in the Americas prior to the ending in the last ice age? I know that there have been recent discoveries of graves of people who died 30-50,000 years ago. But there's also evidence that these older people were not Mongoloid. This evidence suggests to me that the ICE AGE may have actually blocked passage into the America's from Eurasia and that migration resumed, across the Bering Strait by boat, with the ending of the last ice age

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Ned
Wernazuma, is there any evidence of a primarily Mongoloid population in the Americas prior to the ending in the last ice age? I know that there have been recent discoveries of graves of people who died 30-50,000 years ago. But there's also evidence that these older people were not Mongoloid. This evidence suggests to me that the ICE AGE may have actually blocked passage into the America's from Eurasia and that migration resumed, across the Bering Strait by boat, with the ending of the last ice age

Yes, I've heard about this one too, yet I'm not familiar with the details though. The non mongoloid origin of a part of the Indian population (not the majority anymore, but still somewhere in the genetic substrate) sounds plausible though, but I'd lying if I claimed any knowledge here. I doubt though that the ice age could have blocked any way, for in an ice age water levels drop making land movement easier, not more difficult.
The ice age though could have had a blocking effect for those groups which were "caught" in the area of the Bering strait on both sides. AFAIK, the strait was ice free, but large glaciers covered the Rockies, so they couldn't advance further. Additional migration by boat is a good possibility too, though maybe not exclusively.
But in this I can be less of help, my fields of interest are more the Aztec culture, the cultural clash and the history of European culture and thought in Renaissance until the Age of Reason (and Islam btw. as you might have noticed )

[Berzerker]

Tolls -

I believe (and any decent Nahuatl dictionary will confirm) that it transates roughly as The Place of the Cactus...all to do with their prophecy of where they would found a city or something. Been awhile since I ran through Mexican history...

The prophecy was that the Aztecs were to build their capital at the place they saw an eagle holding a snake while standing on a cactus, but it's still strange for the word enoch to appear in the word.

Whoever did your translation was doing a rubbish job of it...it's like looking at Moscow and assuming it was named after bovines...

Just because the Aztecs translated it one way doesn't mean the word didn't have a different name long ago. The reason the Aztecs were so into human sacrifice was because they butchered an earlier creation myth about how the celestial vault/sun came to have motion. The myth says a "son" of God sacrificed himself to start the heavens in motion. The Aztecs concluded humans must be sacrificed to keep the heavens moving.

wernazuma I'll get back to you on the white men legends, but check Pahana, the Hopi legend of the white brother who would return one day.

[Al B. Sure!]

Wernazuma:

Recent evidence has shown that there was considerable contact between even neolithic cultures in the Old World. That the early bronze age Indians would have had contact with the Egyptians would have been dismissed as ridiculous but evidence now shows considerable contact even earlier than scientists ever imagined... the europeans and chinese even had a pseudo-silk road at the dawn of civilization (hence white burial grounds in the Chinese Steppe).

It is conceivable that we will find evidence that Phoenicians or whoever else ventured into the Atlantic and discovered the Americas. As yet, however, I agree with you... the arguement for meso-american contact with the old world prior to the 15th century is just some interesting (and some real far-fetched) coincidences... some of these coincidences may only prove the similiarities and inevitablities of certain cultural trends.


thanks

[Ned]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
Wernazuma:

Recent evidence has shown that there was considerable contact between even neolithic cultures in the Old World. That the early bronze age Indians would have had contact with the Egyptians would have been dismissed as ridiculous but evidence now shows considerable contact even earlier than scientists ever imagined... the europeans and chinese even had a pseudo-silk road at the dawn of civilization (hence white burial grounds in the Chinese Steppe).

It is conceivable that we will find evidence that Phoenicians or whoever else ventured into the Atlantic and discovered the Americas. As yet, however, I agree with you... the arguement for meso-american contact with the old world prior to the 15th century is just some interesting (and some real far-fetched) coincidences... some of these coincidences may only prove the similiarities and inevitablities of certain cultural trends.


thanks

And, if one considers the Bering Straight as easily crossed even by primitive boats, there was a "land" route all the way from Egypt to Central America.

[mindseye]

Molly Bloom wrote:

Large scale evidence of ocean going (rather than coast hugging) Chinese sailing craft would be welcome.
(...)
You're assuming several things, which you shouldn't- that Chinese junks are/were as seaworthy in open ocean as Viking boats

It is already established beyond question that the Chinese had large fleets of ocean-going junks, including some truly enormous ones (probably the largest wooden sailing vessels ever built).

See, for instance, Louise Levathes' "When China Ruled the Seas". Incidentally, Ms. Levathes believes Menzies' claims to be hooey.

[Tolls]

"It means "Place of Tenoch" (not Cactus)..."

I was working from memory, but I also popped out to Foyle's to check in one of their dictionaries (they've got a pretty decent archaeology department)...they agreed with me on the cactus interpretation, nochtli meaning cactus, and tenoch being some form of cactus. It wasn't entirely certain, though...

Which leads me to:
"...but it's still strange for the word enoch to appear in the word."

No it's not...as I said about Moscow, are you telling me that was based on cows?

You can't simply remove the starting letter, and butcher the syllable, in order to try and get the desired result...this does bring us nicely back to how Hapgood butchered his maps to produce the desired result. It's very poor work, and it is why it is not taken seriously in the mainstream.

As for Votan...OK, so we have a minor deity...what is it about the name that doesn't sound right? Are the syllables somehow unique?

[C0ckney]

"the vikings had the intelligence to discover america and the good sense to lose it again" oscar wilde

[Berzerker]

Tolls - Votan does not fit the language, and sure we can remove the first letter. Doing this from memory, the Aryan/Indus language has connections to Greek and latin where Deus Pater was Father Zeus and Jupiter. As for Moscow, that isn't how the word is spelled in Russian. Consider the word "Csar". I believe it comes from "Caesar" which was borrowed from the Sumerian "Sar".

And evidence of maritime archaic connections between the NE USA and Scandinavia/England have been found. Nova did a documentary on "The Lost Red Paint People", about a maritime culture dating back to 5,500 BC and may be related to the megalith culture ringing the N Atlantic. These people were deep sea fishermen and their tools are found on either side of the Atlantic.

[Tolls]

OK...what about Votan is incorrect?
Is it Vo?
Or Tan?

By the way, if you're using Sitchin for your references to ancient linguistics I would recommend you don't. He is considered to be all but incompetent when it comes to linguistic links, and translation in general.

To paraphrase one of my favourite descriptions of his work:
"Astronomers think his archaeology is excellent, and archaeologists think his astronomy is..."

[mindseye]

but it's still strange for the word enoch to appear in the word

Wait a minute, does "enoch" in any sense appear in the original Aztec word "tenoch"? I'm not familiar with the written Aztec language, but I assume "tenoch" is a written English approximation of the sound of the original Aztec characters.

[cavebear]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Wernazuma - Do you know anything about this?



http://www.nasca.org.uk/Atlantis/atlantis.html

I heard the Basque language had no linguistic affinities to any other language.

Ruhlen, in "The Origin of Languages" mentions the "Dene-Caucasian" family comprised of Basque, Caucasian, Burushasky, Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian, and Na-Dene. All these languages are isolated; separated by languages of the Eurasiatic family of languages.

The locations of these isolates are the Pyrenees, between the Black and Caspian Seas, Southern China down through Burma, a small pocket in north central Russia (intersection north of Bangladesh and west of Bering strait), Colorado to Houston, and from central Alaska through northwestern Canada.

It is therefore reasonable to assume that the Basque language is part of a very old language group of an ancient culture that was mostly overrun in prehistorical times (before the submersion of the Bering Land Bridge).

With some North American people speaking their version of their common language ancestor as the Basques, it is entirely possible for Basque sailors on Columbus' ships to have recognized vocabulary cognates and grammer and had an easier time picking up the local Indian language.

[Ned]

Originally posted by cavebear


Ruhlen, in "The Origin of Languages" mentions the "Dene-Caucasian" family comprised of Basque, Caucasian, Burushasky, Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian, and Na-Dene. All these languages are isolated; separated by languages of the Eurasiatic family of languages.

The locations of these isolates are the Pyrenees, between the Black and Caspian Seas, Southern China down through Burma, a small pocket in north central Russia (intersection north of Bangladesh and west of Bering strait), Colorado to Houston, and from central Alaska through northwestern Canada.

It is therefore reasonable to assume that the Basque language is part of a very old language group of an ancient culture that was mostly overrun in prehistorical times (before the submersion of the Bering Land Bridge).

With some North American people speaking their version of their common language ancestor as the Basques, it is entirely possible for Basque sailors on Columbus' ships to have recognized vocabulary cognates and grammer and had an easier time picking up the local Indian language.

Cavebear, I would suggest that one could date the last time two languages were "common" by measuring the differences between them --almost like one can date the last time two peoples were "common" using DNA. I would suggest to the extent that there is anything at all common among these ancient languages, it dates from a time after the end of the last ice age. My reasoning for this assertion is expressed earlier in this thread. But I think it is fairly obvious that the ice blocked passage south out of the Alaska even though there was a land bridge connecting the continents. However, once the ice receded, travel south was possible. People could easily traverse the Bering Straight with even primitive rafts. Unlike the Atlantic Ocean, the journey (both ways) could be taken by the adventerous because one can see all the way across and there are inhabited islands in the middle.

[Wernazuma III]

mindseye: It's a spanish approximation. It's like "Tehnotsh" in English.

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Berzerker
"Caesar" which was borrowed from the Sumerian "Sar".

And I thought the title came from the person with the name Caesar - oh, how dumb I was!

[Wernazuma III]

One more word about Votan.
It's not typically Mayan, I agree. But what entitles you to call it "unmayan"? It could have been transcribed "Botan" too (B and V in Spanish are the same), what definitely appears to be "more" Mayan. I've found a Mayan God called Ghanan, what doesn't sound Mayan at all. Would you suggest that Mayans had knowledge of the Ghana-Kingdom in Africa?

[cavebear]

Originally posted by Ned

Cavebear, I would suggest that one could date the last time two languages were "common" by measuring the differences between them --almost like one can date the last time two peoples were "common" using DNA. I would suggest to the extent that there is anything at all common among these ancient languages, it dates from a time after the end of the last ice age. My reasoning for this assertion is expressed earlier in this thread. But I think it is fairly obvious that the ice blocked passage south out of the Alaska even though there was a land bridge connecting the continents. However, once the ice receded, travel south was possible. People could easily traverse the Bering Straight with even primitive rafts. Unlike the Atlantic Ocean, the journey (both ways) could be taken by the adventerous because one can see all the way across and there are inhabited islands in the middle.

Ned - If you are suggesting that the Americas were settled by coastal hopping rather than land travel, I won't argue for or against that as the issue isn't settled and I'd accept either method. *How* the Americas were settled isn't as important as that they *were* settled, and by whom.

But I wasn't arguing the dates so much as pointing out that relatives to the Basque language do exist in very scatterred locations across Europe, Asia, and North America.

It is difficult to date languages or even to identify genetic/ethnic connections among them. I think it was Ruhlen who pointed out that "languages don't have sex" (but it might have been the Cavalli-Sforza's).

I am very interested in ancient linguistics and human migrations from about 30,000 to the agricultural revolution.

[Tolls]

"...(B and V in Spanish are the same)..."

I was working him towards that one...
"Bo" is a perfectly valid Mayan syllable.

Had "V" been such a problem (say) then we wouldn't have the Popol Vuh!


Thank you for the notes on Tenochtitlan. I was going to hunt down the pronounciation, but you've saved me the trouble. As mindseye says, this is a (spanish) approximation of the Nahuatl original, so simply saying that "enoch" is in the word is pretty ridiculous and shows a lack of understanding behind the linguistics, or a twisting of the language to fit a theory...something Sitchin is a master of...

[Wernazuma III]

Had "V" been such a problem (say) then we wouldn't have the Popol Vuh!

Haven't you yet noticed: Popol=People, Vuh is like German "Buch" (book), it's even very simliarily pronounced. So, essentially, Popol Vuh means the People's book.

[Tolls]

Does that mean we're all really German?

[Ned]

Originally posted by cavebear


Ned - If you are suggesting that the Americas were settled by coastal hopping rather than land travel, I won't argue for or against that as the issue isn't settled and I'd accept either method. *How* the Americas were settled isn't as important as that they *were* settled, and by whom.

But I wasn't arguing the dates so much as pointing out that relatives to the Basque language do exist in very scatterred locations across Europe, Asia, and North America.

It is difficult to date languages or even to identify genetic/ethnic connections among them. I think it was Ruhlen who pointed out that "languages don't have sex" (but it might have been the Cavalli-Sforza's).

I am very interested in ancient linguistics and human migrations from about 30,000 to the agricultural revolution.

Can you even identify when language started?

But just a little more on my theory - there appears to be a worldwide myth of a great flood. If this is a memory of a real event, then it must have happened more than 11,000 years ago if the "land bridge" theory is correct. If it is not, and peoples came to the new world continuously since the end of the ice age, the great flood could have been the last several thousand years.

If the memory is of the Black Sea flooding - I believe this occurred in the last 5,000 years - I don't recall the exact date, the New World flood myths could even be of this event.

As well, the Aztec Votan actually could be the German god Votan.

[Wernazuma III]

Tolls: The Germanics and Aryans were the original race, all others are only degenerated human versions, didn't you know that?
PS for the mods: [irony][/irony]