TRACING DAN – (4)

By Walter W. Baucum

“If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” – (II CHRONICLES 7:14)

TRACING DAN – PART 2
This is the first installment of an article titled Tracing Dan published and copyrighted by United
Hebrew Congregations of Picayune, MS. and is reproduced with their kind permission.

DAN IN AMERICA

“Send these the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” When Emma Lazarus penned these famous lines in 1903, she might have been reflecting an ongoing situation through much of recorded history. This is that America, for well over 2,000 years, has served as a place of refuge for Old World peoples driven from their homes by conquest or persecution.(1) Evidence abounds that many of these visitors to America were Israelites, Dan being just one tribe among them. A clay tablet found in a rock crevice near Big Bend, Texas, tells of Zoroastrians (followers of Mithraic sun worship) who came once to America, probably from Iberia. Dr. Henriette Mertz, Professors Cyrus Gordon and Cyclone Covey, and Dr. Robert Stieglitz discovered an immigration to Tennessee and Kentucky of homeless Jews after the many pogroms of Antiochus in Syria and Nero and Hadrian in Rome. Some were here already when, in 69, during the First Revolt of Jerusalem against the Romans, others came over. Flavius Josephus, who himself took part in this revolt, mentions that through the year 69 a great comet hung like a flaming sword over Jerusalem. Some Zealots took it to be the sign of the coming of the promised Messiah and rebelled. Today we know that it was Halley’s Comet, making one of its many returns. A stone excavated from a burial mound at Bat Creek in Tennessee tells us that Jews in Tennessee recognized the sign and inscribed the stone “The Comet for the Jews.” This strongly suggests that Tennessee and Kentucky became havens of refuge for these persecuted Hebrews. A later influx of Jews came to the same place after the next, and last, revolt against Rome over a hundred years later. Hebrew shekels dating from the Second Revolt in 132 occur in many parts of Kentucky and a nearby district of Arkansas. Dr. Joseph Mahan is presently researching these matters in the language and traditions of the southeastern tribes. He also is investigating Hebrew religious ceremonies found among the Yuchi Indians there.(2)

At Los Lunas, near Albuquerque, is a version of the Ten Commandments engraved on rock and another similar inscription has been found on a stone tablet found in a burial mound at Newark, Ohio. These are ancient inscriptions using a north Canaanite script and old Hebrew language.(3)

These petroglyphs date to 800-900 B.C.E. and are in the Old Hebrew language and using a Phoenician alphabet.(4)

Note the date. This was in the times of King Solomon and the Phoenician King Hiram. The authors believe this region in New Mexico to have been the destination of the “Ships of Tarshish” in I Kings 10:22. The Old Hebrew language was not used by the Jews after the Babylonian exile. Aramaic replaced it. The old script was replaced in the last century B.C. E. by the quadratic script, which is still in use today. Rabbis, though, still understand the Old Hebrew, in which the first five books of Moses are written.

The Phoenician language and script had spread through the Mediterranean area by the turn of the first millennium B.C.E., was the basis of the Hebrew, Greek, and other alphabets, had been supplanted in the old Phoenician territory around Tyre and Sidon by the time of Alexander, but had remained dominant in Carthage (called Punic language) until the city’s destruction by Rome in 146 B.C.E. In other North African and American colonies of the Phoenician-Danites, the language remained in use until the 4th century C.E. Then it, along with Cuneiform writings and Egyptian hieroglyphs, vanished into oblivion. About 200 years ago the Phoenician script was deciphered.

The above authors wondered if the inscriptions were made by Jews (Israelites-probably Dan), who, together with Phoenicians, made long voyages for King Solomon. After an absence of three years, they delivered 420 talents of gold (1 Kings 9:28 and 10:22). The 420 talents would be about 11,000 kg. today with a value of about 100 million dollars. Nowhere in the Bible is there a clue to where “Ophir” is. The Phoenicians, we have learned, kept their trade routes a strict secret.(5)

The authors decided to investigate further, specifically to check out the assertions by sceptics that they were a Mormon fake. At the Mormon Pioneer Museum in Salt Lake City, they found no evidence of Mormons having been in the Los Lunas area, except for one instance. The “Mormon Battalion,” which was part of the U.S. Army during the Mexican War, marched from Santa Fe down the Rio Grande Valley. They read diaries of the soldiers, reading that the officers commanding the battalion maintained strict discipline, allowing none of their soldiers to leave the column. Also, a Professor Charles S. Peterson, Mormon history specialist, told them that in the 19th century, no Mormon would have been able to write such an inscription. Joseph Smith had studied Hebrew, but had been murdered before the Mormons’ trek to the West.

Another possibility might have been when the Romans destroyed Carthage. Punic sailors and other Israelites living there might have fled across the ocean to avoid the burning of their ships, which has been reported by Livius in his History of the Punic Wars.(6)

In 1558, a French churchman, the Abbe Amiot, became the literary sensation of Europe, having just discovered ancient Greek manuscripts by a historian named Plutarch in monastery libraries in Italy. In one segment of Plutarch, he discusses an ancient Carthaginian manuscript he says he found in the ruins of that city, one dealing with voyages across the Atlantic. The islands he mentioned perfectly fit the Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes, and Iceland (Ogygia). Then, he says, if you sail along this coast in a southward direction, you will pass a frozen sea and come to a land where Greeks have settled and intermarried with the native barbarians.(7) In analyses of Norse sailing routes, George Lechler pointed out that the southern part of Davis Strait, between Labrador and Greenland, becomes an impassable mass of floating ice during the summer season, when northern navigations could be performed. The land where the Greeks had settled and intermarried with the native barbarians, Nova Scotia and New England, lies in the position Plutarch gave, for he said they lay in the same latitudes as the Caspian Sea.

I won’t go into the prevalence of Greek roots of the Micmac language, but will remind the reader that many of the Greeks were Danite Israelites. Briefly, though, Barry Fell says the Greek of Micmac is more appropriately called Ptolemaic Greek, and it came to Nova Scotia and Maine from North Africa, where many Greek-speaking communities existed in Classical times.

In “Barry Fell and His Accomplishments,” we find that the ancient San Telmo Stone of Portugal, believed to have the oldest form of Basque writing on it, was unreadable until Fell deciphered it, using the Cree Indian alphabet of North America.(8)

Plutarch records that the northern outward route followed by Carthaginian ships to America went by way of Iceland (Ogygia?), and the return route followed the anti-trade winds around latitude 40 degrees N. back to Spain and Carthage. Likely, many ships followed the outward route used later by Columbus, in tropical latitudes, thereby gaining the benefit of the westward-blowing trade winds. Diodorus of Sicily implies that this route was followed when he speaks of an island resembling Cuba that the Carthaginians discovered.

Barry Fell and others have found multiple evidence of Phoenicians in America. He and his colleagues visited the ancient sites of Carthaginian settlements in North Africa and Spain and the ruined cities of peoples who were allies of them, or whose mariners sailed on Carthaginian ships. They visited archaeologists and historians who work on Old World sites and discussed their American finds with them. Many of these came over to America to study the finds for themselves and to lend their skills.

Carthaginian coins have been found in the Azores and all over America. All have one characteristic in common. All belong to the earliest issues of Carthage, those of the fourth and early third centuries B.C.E. All are the work of highly skilled Greek artists.

According to legend, a horse’s head in the ground was the Oracle’s prediction of how the founders of Carthage would recognize the site destined for the city. It was used, with a palm tree, as the coat of arms of Carthage. Carved horse heads have been found in North Africa and America. A white limestone horse’s head was discovered in North Salem, New York, near stone chambers, both being quite ancient.

Symbols of the goddess Tanith (spouse of Baal) and related signs have been found on Carthaginian tombstones in North Africa and in Colorado, almost identical and being another symbol of Carthage. We have shown earlier how the Tribe of Esau became the Phoenicians and how Dan was intermingled with them; how their most famous ancient cities were Sidon and Tyre; how around 800 B.C.E. they established strong trading posts on the North African coast, west of Egypt and as far afield as Morocco and southern Spain; how one of their posts grew into the powerful Kharkhedona (called by the Greeks and Romans “Carthage”) located in a bay at the northern tip of Tunisia; how they traded in purple dye and cloth and were called “Phoinikoi,” (The Purple People) by the Greeks (and from which word we get our name, Phoenician) and Punici by the Romans, which means the same.

We usually restrict the use of the word “Punic” to serve as a synonym for Carthaginian and speak of them as using the “Punic” language.(9) They were famed mariners and established a complete monopoly on the tin trade, getting it from England and areas near the British Isles. They jealously protected their monopoly on it by blockading the Straits of Gibraltar so that no foreign vessel could leave or enter the Atlantic without their knowledge and permission.

Tin, remember, is used with copper to make bronze, which was in high demand by most of the Mediterranean world of that day. Tin was mined and smelted continuously in Cornwall from Bronze Age times onward, right through the Roman occupation and on through the Dark Ages and medieval times until the modern era. Because of the mixture of Danites with Phoenicians, wherever Phoenicians went, Dan went also.

Besides searching for tin and copper, other Old World peoples came for different reasons. Religious motives caused Egyptian equipped expeditions to be sent far and wide. Pharaoh Rameses III, in his quest for immortality, sent out ships to find the celestial paradise, the Mountain of Manu, which supposedly lay in the far West. There is evidence to show that the ships reached Mexico during the 12th century B.C.E. and established the Olmec civilization, which in turn became the mother civilization of other American civilizations that followed.

Thor Heyerdahl, in the now-famous Ra-Expeditions, reported that the Palenque Pyramid in Mexico and the Egyptian pyramids are extraordinarily alike. In addition, he says, there was a priest king laid out in the coffin. “Its lid, and the walls of the tomb, were decorated with reliefs of human figures, some wearing false beards as a badge of rank, a custom duplicating an ancient Egyptian habit. Inside and outside, the sun king of Palenque had followed the ancient Egyptian formula for pyramid burial.”(10)

Concerning the density of foreign traffic along the navigable coastal and riverine waterways of North America, a map shows that the main arteries into the interior were the St. Lawrence downward and into the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River upward and eastward and westward, and the Snake-Columbia outward. Petroglyphs depicting ancient coins extend the range to the ancient equivalent of the Oregon Trail, extending across the prairies to Moneta in Wyoming (centre of the fur-trading centre in ancient America during Roman times, believed by Fell and others). Moneta lies near the North Pass in the Great Divide, making it as convenient in those days as the nineteenth-century Wyoming markets were for trappers and buyers of the Astor Fur Trading Company. This route also gave access to Nevada and Californian silver and, in the north, the Michigan copper mines linked both the upper Mississippi traders and the ships on the Great Lakes.(11)

Fell opines that many furs were taken across to the Snake River near Rexburg, Idaho, then on downriver to the Columbia and to its mouth in the Pacific. There, Arab traders in their ocean-going dhows picked them up and sold them to Asian and European markets, especially to the Romans. Tons of evidence seems to support this theory, but time and space will not permit it here. The fact is that over 22,000 deep-earth copper mines, found in Michigan alone, also tend to support Fell’s and others’ theories that the Phoenicians exploited America for centuries during its monopoly on the tin and copper trade. Amerindians did not dig deep mines to gather copper.

Everywhere they went along these river arteries, they left messages in the rocks for others coming after them. Having personally visited Wees Bar on a main trade artery, the Snake River, 25 miles below Boise, I have observed the highest concentration of petroglyphs in the state of Idaho. On one rock alone are engraved three different ancient languages: Arabic, Viking (runic), and Egyptian.

These written messages, with their proven alphabets, are called Great Basin Curvilinear by the ostrich archaeologists, many still believing them to be graffiti markings on rocks put there by bored Indians. Eventually, though, the inter-oceanic trade ceased.

“The conquest of Egypt by Darius I in 525 B.C.E. and the successive rise of the Greek and Roman empires effectively closed the eastern Mediterranean to Carthaginian shipping. Carthage retaliated by closing the Straits of Gibraltar to all European mariners. Under the guise of supposed Spanish and North African trade, Carthaginian merchants exploited the North Atlantic resources, bringing to Cadiz the copper of the Celtiberian settlements of North America, and the tin of Cornwall, to provide the raw materials of a bronze industry, whose products were re-exported to Britain, Gaul, North America, and West Africa.The Celts of New England obtained a share of the American imports by supplying furs and hides, both of which the Carthaginians re-exported to the eastern Mediterranean as supposed products of Gaul, the furs even reaching India. By the time the Romans conquered Spain and Carthage, they had adequate alternate sources of these materials, and they took no interest in overseas shipping, having no merchant navy. The North American trade dwindled, the last phases presumably being operated by the maritime Celts of Brittany until their conquest by Caesar in 55 B.C.E. For 400 years after the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.E., the Romans had no navy, since they had no rivals, and the memory of America apparently was lost. By C.E. 200, geographers believed that a voyage westward from Spain would lead to India and China, and this was the inheritance of Columbus.”(12)

There are definite indications of North African influences on the Algonkin “Indians” of North America. Fell notes that the Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy) on a Kikapoo prayer stick preserved in the Smithsonian Institution appears three times written in Carthaginian (Semitic) letters and language. The omission of “Christ have mercy” suggested to Fell that this might be a pre-Christian formulation.

George Carter discusses cowry shells from the Mediterranean among the Objibwa. “What is indicated is some important contact with the Mediterranean, and more specifically with North Africa….”

“…Jackson reporting that the same shell is used in the same way in West African society.”

“…when it is found that Cyprea moneta was found in an Adena mound.”(13)

The Adena were builders of great mounds that were earlier and different from the so-called temple mounds of the Southeastern United States. Alphabetic inscriptions, i.e., the Grave Creek Mound inscription of probable Libyan (Northwest African) origin, as well as other traits, suggest Old World connections for this Adena culture.

Linguists had classified the speech of the Atakapa, Tunica, and Chitimacha tribes of Southern Louisiana, Southern and Delta Mississippi, and Southeast Texas as unique, having no known relationship with any known language. Fell researched this thoroughly. “But my examination of the vocabulary, particularly that of the Atakapa, since it is better known than the other two, disclosed an all embracing affinity with the known languages of ancient Egypt and the peoples of the adjacent sections of the Nile Valley.”

Continuing, Fell says that whenever an Egyptian expedition to foreign lands was imminent, the Pharoah would initiate a massive slave raid on the black tribes of the Upper Nile to provide laborers and mariners. The speech of these tribes would indicate just such a scenario if Egypt had established a trading outpost in the Lower Mississippi in ancient times, and if the members had either been abandoned or had of their own volition remained behind. He believes such a small colony could have survived only by merging with local Indians to produce a mestizo population, speaking a tongue derived from the several different contributory dialects.

Their vocabulary is seen to span elements of virtually every aspect of life in a society such as an Egyptian-led trading community in the New World 2,000 years ago. The language includes elements of Memphitic (lower Nile), Thebaic, Nubian (Blue Nile), Nuer (White Nile), and Luganda and Nandi (area around Lake Victoria).(14)

THE DANITE/PHOENICIAN TRANSOCEANIC TRADE

In a chapter entitled, “America and the Punic Wars,” Barry Fell makes a good case of America’s involvement in the three Punic wars Phoenicia fought with Rome. The dates of the Carthaginian coinage being found all over America match the sudden influx of gold in Carthage. While the initial issues of this coinage was silver, the nature of the coinage underwent a sudden and dramatic change around 300 B.C.E., when very large quantities of gold coins began to be minted. It actually was mostly gold, mixed with small amounts of silver, and which coins were called “electrum” by the ancients. Phoenician-made (or they had them made – many being traced to the workshops of Cyprus as the most-likely origins of many of these) art objects were undoubtedly held in high esteem by Amerindians, for many have been found in North and Central America.

Fell further suggests that these art artifacts were offered for barter at landing points in Panama or the Caribbean coast of Colombia or Venezuela and were traded for gold. Gold was not highly regarded over here, save as a metal easy to work into complicated jewelry or cast or hammered into figurines. Nevertheless, the dates of Carthaginian contact with North America, yielded by the coinage now being recovered so massively, match the sudden influx of gold in Carthage.(15)

So Fell proposes that an American source for the Carthaginian gold coinage should seriously be considered, and that the gold was bartered for the bronze art manufactures of the Cypriot Phoenicians. He further proposes the source of the pine lumber which built the great fleets of Carthage, and whose supply suddenly dried up at the end of the First Punic War in 241 B.C.E. Along with the bronze art replica-gold trade going on, the Phoenician ships also picked up shipments of large pine logs from the Algonquian tribes of Northeastern North America, to whom they traded adequate stocks of iron cutting-tools, axes, and other desirable items. This included occasional bronze art replicas, since so many have been found in New York and other places, low-value Carthaginian coins of attractive appearance, glass beads, and so on. Such trade, profitable alike to the Amerindian and the Carthaginian, would result in a steady input of gold and lumber on the home markets in Carthage, would yield the timbers needed to build ships, and would provide them with straight masts and oars, plus the gold ingots required to produce the coinage that financed the military and naval operations of the Sicilian War and later the First Punic War.

Barry Fell goes much deeper into this than I will, including an excellent argument for their ships picking up gold in Central and northern South America, then swinging up to Maine and other northeast states in North America to pick up pine timbers for ballast as these ships carried both across the Atlantic. Archaeologists are quick to point out that all the coinage and bronze artifacts and pottery, etc. are forgeries. But archaeologists continue their tendency to call anything they do not understand a “forgery.” Many of them still call the Ogam, runic, Tifinag, and other writings on stones in America marks made by the plowshares of early Pilgrims or etchings made by tree roots growing down Into the ground.(16) (Bold is mine throughout)

Not only were Plutarch’s writings confirmed by the American examples of Carthaginian coinage and trade goods, but in his continuing investigation, Mr. Fell became further convinced that Plutarch was speaking the truth when he said that Greeks had settled among the barbarian peoples of the Western Epeiros (the continent that rims the Western Ocean, as Plutarch called it-we call it America). He says these Greeks had intermarried with these barbarians, had adopted their language, and had blended their own Greek language with it. The Greek settlements were about a bay in the same latitudes as the Caspian Sea, indicating New England, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.(17)

“Plutarch was writing at the beginning of the second century C.E. At that time, the world had long been known to be a globe (My note: this was forgotten during the “Dark Ages,” when knowledge, education, and books were forbidden the common people in Europe and many began believing the world was flat), and lines of latitude and longitude had been invented back in the third century C.E. by the North African mathematician-geographer-astronomer Eratosthenes. Because of the depth of ignorance into which Europe fell in the Dark Ages, at times we are apt to forget how advanced were the ideas of the ancients, and how much they knew about the earth and about astronomy and navigation.”(18)

Now a note to the reader. In an earlier section, “Dan in Greece,” I included some interesting information and conclusions. First of all, the Greeks of Europe said nothing about Plutarch’s comments. Secondly, since it was the Greeks of North Africa who took the path of science leading to the discovery that the earth was a globe, and who set about mapping the globe, I agree, along with Fell and others, that the Greeks of the American Epeiros would have to be North African Greeks. Plutarch regarded these Greeks as a people now considerably different from the Greeks of Greece. They called themselves Greeks, but (according to Polybius) were olive-skinned and were a fusion of Greek and North African (European, Arab, and Berber, according to Barry Fell – European Danites, Phoenician Danites, and Berber Danites, according to me). They were, then, Libyans. These people lived in a 2,000 mile stretch along the North African coast east of Egypt, encompassing today’s Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

This olive-skinned “mixed” race of people were totally different from the Aethiopes, the dark-skinned Africans whose homeland lay to the south of the Sahara Desert. Neither then, nor today, were the Mediterranean African people part of the Black race. How they loved the sea, how their white marble and limestone cities gleamed in the desert sun, how they conquered and ruled in Egypt for two centuries, how Egypt became a great maritime power under them, how the name Shishonq (carried by at least four Libyan pharaohs) has been found in American inscriptions, how they were a noble civilization – these have been mentioned already. (See “Dan in Greece”)

Time does not permit our “recreating the wheel” by showing the labyrinth patterns, derived from the religious art of Knossos, in Crete, and with occurrences in the Mediterranean, Britain, Scandinavia, and North and South America; the “Plutarch’s Greek” vocabulary among such tribes as the northeastern Algonquians and including words of Coptic and Arabic derivation as well as recognizable Greek elements detected by Silas Rand over a century ago when he compiled the Micmac dictionary; identical (and similar) pottery decorations in Arizona and Greek Mediterranean sites (long after these styles had passed out of fashion in Greece itself) – such things as swastikas from Athenian vases, proto-Corinthian Greek male dancing figures in geometric style, Greek meandering, sacaton red-on-buff paintings, Attic (Greece) geometric styles, plus many more styles; inscribed gold plates unearthed near Cuenca, Ecuador, bearing inscriptions in Libyan and hieroglyphic lettering the names of notable Numidian kings and their Mauritanian descendants of Roman times; identical beehive tombs (tholos), from Cyrene, Libya, and Crete, in Massachusetts; Spartan warriors of Libya depicted on vases from Cyrenian tombs (and dating from about 550 B.C.E.) dredged from Boston harbour; BAS reliefs in Utah identical to Libyan Shardana (or Sherden), called Sea Peoples and wearing leather kilts and crown-shaped feather ornaments; how various Amerindian tribes, the Arabs, the Phoenicians, and most of the nations on earth called the “Big Dipper” the Bear (bowl of the dipper) and the three hunters (or, the hunter and his two dogs – the three stars in the handle); the list could go on and on. A certain category of circular petroglyphs formerly thought to be “Indian shield designs” or “sun-symbols” comprise something very different: namely, representations of ancient coins. These petroglyphs are called numoglyphs and occur both in Europe and North Africa, as well as in North America.(19)

REFERENCES

(1) Fell, Barry, Saga America, Times Books, 1980, chapter entitled, “Refuge America,” p.166.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid., p.167.

(4) Nollau, Dr Guenther; Utriusque, Dr Iuris, Ten Commandments in the New Mexico Desert, ESOP, 1986, p. 142.

(5) Ibid., p. 143.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Fell, Saga, p. 6.

(8) McClone, William R.; Leonare, Phillip M., The Epigraphic Controversy, ESOP, 1986, p. 125.

(9) Fell Saga, p. 50.

(10) Kraus, Gerhard, In Honor of Elliot Smith & William James Perry, Founders of Diffusionist Theory, ESOP, 1986, p. 183.

(11) Fell, Saga, p. 35.

(12) Fell, Barry, America B.C., Pocket Books, 1976, p. 106.

(13) Carter, George F., The Money Cowry and the Midewiwin Society, ESOP, 1986, p.160.

(14) Fell, Barry, Etymology of the Lower Mississippian Languages – Part 1: Introduction, ESOP, 1990.

(15) Fell, Saga, p. 85.

(16) Ibid., p. 87.

(17) Ibid., p. 88.

(18) Ibid.

(19) Fell, Saga, pp. 93-114.

TO BE CONTINUED