Greek Colonisation *

Published July 19, 2019

Greek Colonisation is something of misnomer on two counts. First of all is the fact that there was no unified Greek state until the time of Alexander the Great. Instead the territory was fragmented into a number of competing city- states (poleis) that formed shifting alliances to meet the exigencies of the day.

Secondly, the term ‘colonisation’ did not mean the same then as it does today. Individual city states had their own expansion ambitions, which were generally concerned with trade rather than territory. It seems that most of the colonies began as trading posts, known as emporia^(a), some developing into towns, others grew into urban centres and even established colonies of their own.

In the first millennium BC, some of the Greek city-states gradually expanded their influence^(c) eastward into Asia Minor and the Black Sea and westward along the northern coast of the Mediterranean, eventually founding Massalia (modern Marseilles), which established emporia in eastern Spain.

Some writers, such as Henriette Mertz, have proposed that the ancient Greeks travelled as far as America and that Homer’s story of Odysseus was a retelling of such a voyage^(k). More recently, Minas Tsikritsis has claimed that the Greeks had contact with North America, at least as far back as 86 AD!^(d) Some time later he expanded on the idea in a paper published on the Researchgate website^(e). Manolis Koutlis went further in his book, In the Shadow: The Greek Colonies of North America and the Atlantic 1500 BC -1500 AD ^[¹⁶¹⁷^].

Even more extreme is the odd claim by Lonko Kilapan that ancient Greeks colonists settled in Chile and whose descendants are known now as Mapuche and earlier as Araucans or Araucanians^(f) . Michael Issigonis has championed the idea of early Greeks in South America and elsewhere on the Academia.edu website^(g)^(h).

Tara MacIsaac published an article⁽ⁱ⁾ supporting this idea of ancient Greeks in South America, apparently influenced by Enrico Mattievich and earlier comments by José Imbelloni.

The greek-thesaurus.gr website offers three pages of images of artefacts found in the Americas that can be interpreted as evidence of ancient Greek influence in the region(j). The compiler claims that “If these pictures are not proofs for the existence of the ancient Greeks in America the word “proof” has lost it’s meaning.”

The Phoenicians had their own city-states such a Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. They established ‘colonies along north Africa, and Spain. They competed with the Greeks, particularly in the central Mediterranean, where at one point they shared Sicily. Settlers from Tyre founded Carthage, which in turn became more powerful than and independent of its parent city and became more belligerent, eventually engaging in a series of wars with Rome, which it lost.

There is much more relevant information to be found on the excellent Ancient History Encyclopedia website^(b) .

^(a) https://www.academia.edu/1505105/The_origins_of_Greek_colonisation_and_Greek_polis_some_observations

^(b) https://www.ancient.eu/edu/

^(c) https://www.ancient.eu/Greek_Colonization/

^(d) https://canada.greekreporter.com/2012/04/21/researcher-claims-ancient-greeks-made-it-to-america-before-columbus/

^(e) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321319687/download

^(f) THE UNKNOWN HELLENIC COLONIZATION.THE CASE OF THE ARAUCANS OF CHILE (archive.org) *

^(g) https://www.academia.edu/9066795/Did_the_Mapuche_of_Chile_travel_from_Homeric_Age_Greece

^(h) https://www.academia.edu/32921347/ANCIENT_GREEKS_TRAVELLED_WORLDWIDE

⁽ⁱ⁾ https://web.archive.org/web/20220608023046/https:/www.theepochtimes.com/ancient-greek-legend-seems-to-describe-a-place-in-peru-early-contact_1362438.html

^(j) https://www.greek-thesaurus.gr/Ancient-Greeks-existence-America.html

^(k)ANCIENT GREEKS IN AMERICA? (archive.org)

Tagged Alexander the Great, Araucans, Black Sea, Byblos, Carthage, Chile, city-state, emporia, Enrico Mattievich, Greek Colonisation, Henriette Mertz, Jose Imbelloni, Lonko Kilapan, Manolis Koutlis, Mapuche, Massalia, Michael Issigonis, Minas Tsikritsis, Odysseus, Phoenicians, Sicily, Sidon, Spain, Tara MacIsaac, Tyre

Byblos

Published May 31, 2010

Byblos is an ancient Phoenician city in modern Lebanon. Emilio Spedicato has pointed out that since this harbour city dates back to at least the third or fourth millennium BC, it can be used to demonstrate the relative stability of Mediterranean Sea levels over that period. The proponents of the idea that there had been a Sicilian Landbridge that was destroyed in the second millennium BC will have to consider either:

(i) Revising the dating of the existing harbour in Byblos,

(ii) the Sicilian landbridge was destroyed earlier than the building of the harbour, or

(iii) the landbridge did not exist within human memory.

>Emmet Sweeney in Empire of Thebes ^[1867] returned to the debate regarding the identity of the Queen of Sheba where he follows the conclusions of Immanuel Velikovsky and argues for her having been the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, whose funerary monument details her trip to the land of Punt. Sweeney offers Byblos, in modern Lebanon as the location of Punt, which is also similar to the theories of Velikovsky.<

Temple of the Obelisks – Byblos

Twenty years ago the underwater archaeologist Ibrahim Noureddine had voiced the opinion that the current port at Byblos is too small to have accommodated the Phoenician fleet as recorded by the likes of the Palermo Stone^(b)^*. The current harbour is only 2.8 meters deep and with a solid rock floor could not have been deeper in the past. Noureddine is now researching alternative sites. If the content of the Palermo Stone is accurate and not an exaggeration it would appear that the matter of ancient Mediterranean sea levels may be still open to question. The resolution of this matter is critical for supporters of a Mediterranean Atlantis.

>He returned to the subject in a 2010 paper^(c) noting that “in the Phoenician heartland, today’s Lebanon, no Phoenician harbor structure has been clearly identified to date in the main cities of Tyre, Byblos, Beirut, and Sidon. Tyre, the most famous Phoenician city, has particularly attracted many scholars who dedicated their efforts to finding remains of its illustrious harbor. Some of them failed in their quest, while others were able to secure some, but certainly not all, of the answers.”<

A November 2016 report claims that the discovery of the ancient port “is close”, quoting George Papatheodorou, professor of environmental and geological oceanography at the University of Patra’s Department of Geology^(a).

^(a) https://www.ekathimerini.com/213862/article/ekathimerini/life/patra-university-experts-helping-establish-location-of-ancient-byblos-harbor

^(b) https://www.stonepages.com/news/archives/000755.html *

^(c)https://www.academia.edu/3305769/New_Light_on_the_Phoenician_Harbor_at_Tyre *

Tagged Byblos, Emilio Spedicato, Emmet Sweeney, George Papatheodorou, Hatshepsut, Immanuel Velikovsky, Lebanon, Mediterranean sea levels, Palermo Stone, Phoenicians, Queen of Sheba, Temple of the Obelisks

Phoenicians

Published May 30, 2010

The Phoenicians or Canaanites are linguistically regarded as Semitic people, who among their many achievements are credited with giving us our alphabet (without vowels). Both Strabo and Herodotus claim that they originally came from Bahrain^(p), but this origin is denied by the phoenicia.org website^(q). The correctness of these two ancient writers has been heavily criticised^(r).

Dr. M. D. Magee in a 2001 paper^(ak) wrote “The identity of the Israelites and the Canaanites is falsified in the scriptures, doubtless to justify the biblicists in painting the Israelites as worshippers of True God and the Canaanites as monstrous idolators to be suppressed. They are the same race as the Jews, Semites, but Genesis makes them sons of Ham.”

Nevertheless, Dhani Irwanto in a 2019 article^(ab) on his website insists that the Phoenicians originated somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Irwanto suggests “that perhaps the most significant contribution of the Phoenicians was an alphabetic writing system that became the root of the Western alphabets.” However, Irwanto has gone further and proposed that the Phoenicians also influenced the development of at least three of the scripts of South Sumatera in Indonesia!

The widespread idea that Phoenician writing inspired the development of European alphabets, such as that of the Greeks, conflicts with the discovery of the Dispilo Tablet^(ad) in Greece which has pushed back the use of writing in Greece to around 5200 BC, which is long before the people recognised as Phoenician emerged in the 2nd millennium BC^(ac)!

A recent essay explicitly claims that there was never any such entity as ‘Phoenicia’! It also charts the manner in which ‘Phoenicians’ have been arbitrarily claimed as ancestors by distant nations, having been “enlisted in support of the nationalist histories of Lebanon, Britain, and Ireland, and in some cases seriously distorted by them. Despite claims by various partisans of Lebanese, British and Irish nationalism to enlist the Phoenicians as their ancient progenitor, the Phoenicians never existed as a self-conscious community, let alone a nascent nation.” ^(y)

The Phoenicians flourished during the 1^st and 2^nd millennia BC. The late Joseph Robert Jochmans has suggested^(c) that similarities between Phoenician names and those of the sons of Poseidon are more than coincidental. The descendants of the Phoenicians are still to be found in great numbers in modern Lebanon as well as elements of the Phoenician language. Contrary to popular belief the Maltese language is more related to Phoenician than Arabic^(g). Similarly, in a mountainous and isolated northeast corner of Asia Minor, its people still speak Greek in a dialect known as Romeyka^(l). Dr Ioanna Sitaridou of Queen’s College, Cambridge explains that ‘Although Romeyka can hardly be described as anything but a Modern Greek dialect, it preserves an impressive number of grammatical traits that add an Ancient Greek flavor to the dialect’s structure – traits that have been completely lost from other Modern Greek varieties.’

A more radical view of the Phoenicians has been expressed by Professor Josephine Quinn^(o) who declared “the Phoenicians never existed as a self-conscious community, let alone a nascent nation.” In a lengthy article, she suggests that “‘‘Phoenician’ was just a generic label invented by ancient Greek authors for the Levantine sailors they encountered in their own maritime explorations. Although some of these Greek writers entertain a mild stereotype of these Phoenicians as rather cunning or tricksy, they never use the term as a description of a distinct ethnocultural community.”

The Phoenicians have been frequently identified as the Atlanteans of Plato’s narrative. Peter Dawkins’ Zoence Academy website has the following logic-stretching gem – “Atlas also is known by other names, such as Enoch or The Phoenix, (hence Atlantis is Phoenicia, the land of the Phoenix)^(v).

Keith Hunt noted on his website that “Prof. George Rawlinson (1812-1902), in his “Story of Phoenicia,” tells us that Phoenicia derived its name from the forests of date or Phoenix palms which grew there in great luxuriance. So far so good; but whence did the Phoenix palm derive its name? Horapollo says: “A palm branch was the symbol of the Phoenix.” Yes, but what or who was the Phoenix? Sanchomathon, the Phoenician writer, states that “Phoenix was the first Phoenician.” Phoenix, then, was a man. Now, the word Phoenix is the Greek form of the Egyptian term “Pa-Hanok,” the house of Enoch. In Hebrew Enoch also is Hanok. Thus the mystery of that ancient race is solved: they were the sons and descendants of Enoch and of Noah and his three sons, who after the Flood started their westward march. Their descendants have kept it up since, settled, first north of the Persian Gulf in the bushlands of Mesopotamia, where they found a dusky race in occupation of the land, the ancient Sumerians, and from thence towards the Mediterranean.” ^(w)

James Nienhuis, a young-earth creationist, has identified the Canaanites as Atlanteans^(m)! The supporters of a Bronze Age date for the invasion of the Atlanteans see in the Phoenicians the powerful far-flung maritime civilisation described by Plato. In 2022, Matthew P. Courville devoted his Ancient Navigators ^[^1960] to demonstrating that Atlantis was a Phoenician colony, located on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

However, this identification is in conflict with Plato’s statement that Atlantis or its influence extended as far as Tyrrhenia and Libya, whereas the Phoenicians had their original base further east in the region of modern Lebanon and Israel. In the western Mediterranean, Carthage did not develop into a military power until the first millennium BC.

It also runs counter to Plato’s clear account of the Atlanteans attacking from their bases in the Central Mediterranean (Tim.25b & Crit.114c).

The Phoenicians were never unilaterally at war with Greece and/or Egypt, but their successors, the Carthaginians, whose main military campaigns were directed against the Roman Empire, did clash with the Greeks in Sicily.

It is accepted that the Phoenician commercial empire began with the three cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. They expanded with the establishment of trading settlements along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa usually separated by a day’s rowing – somewhere between 30 to 60 miles.

It is claimed that the Phoenicians together with the Egyptians had an influence on the development of the Minoan culture^(e).

Jonas Bergman recently presented a paper to the 2005 Melos Atlantis Conference on the subject of a Phoenician association with the Atlantis story. He outlined how Plato’s description of Atlantis was similar to the western colonies of the Phoenicians.

“Roderic O’Flaherty (Ruaidrhí Ó Flaithbheartaigh) was the first Irish scholar to suggest in his influential work Ogygia (1685) that the Phoenicians formed part of Irish ancestry. In the 18th century, O’Flaherty’s theory of the Phoenicians as progenitors of the Irish became very popular among the Protestant Ascendancy as well as Gaelic intellectuals.”^(y)

Also in the 18th century, Charles Vallencey was convinced that “the Phoenicians had colonised Ireland in archaic prehistory: When their explorers had searched for Thule, Vallancey affirmed, they had come to Ireland; the word Thule was identical to the Irish word thua, which meant simply ‘north’.”^(al)

Joaquín Lorenz Villanueva (1757-1837) was a Spanish historian, who moved to Dublin in later life, where he wrote Ibernia Phœnicea ^[^1664], which was an attempt to prove that Ireland had been colonised by the Phoenicians. This was translated into English and published by Henry O’Brien in 1833 as Phoenician Ireland ^[^1663].

Phoenicians in America

Stephen P. Kershaw notes ^[1410.227] that Oviedo y Valdéz was a Spanish historian, who in 1519 was the author of what was probably the first literary work produced in the New World, Libro del muy esforzado e invencible caballero Don Claribalte(am) and attributed the peopling of the Americas to Phoenicians and/or Carthaginians.

Some German writers in the 19th century such as Robert Prutz and later Jakob Kruger have advocated the idea that Phoenicians had discovered America, where he also placed Atlantis. Additionally, there is the early claim in 1867, by Bishop Patrick Nieson Lynch of Charleston, South Carolina that the ancient exploitation of the Michigan copper had to be carried out by the Phoenicians.

However, in spite of the fact that there is widespread support for this concept and the even more extreme claim of Phoenicians in Australia, a Lebanese website (now offline), in the original home of Phoenicia, discounted all such claims for lack of evidence. Nevertheless, attention-seeking Rex Gilroy persists in promoting the idea of Phoenicians in Australia^(h).

Noteworthy is the fact that the world’s only traditionally-built replica of a Phoenician ship made the trans-Atlantic crossing successfully, landing in the Dominican Republic on 31st December 2019, after 39 days at sea^(ai). It moved on to Fort Lauderdale in February 2020^(u).

The expedition was titled ‘Phoenicians before Columbus’. The project’s leader was Philip Beale, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Scientific Exploration Society and sits on their Honorary Advisory Board^(aj). The ship was subsequently bought by the Mormons.

A paper by C hristian C. Karam, who believes that Atlantis had been located in the Atlantic has expanded on the idea of a Phoenician presence in Brazil three thousand years ago⁽ⁿ⁾.

In 1886, the American novelist Ann Eliza Smith (1819-1905) published a fantasy novel^(j), Atla, that tells the tale of the discovery of the Atlantis civilization by the Phoenicians.

In 1889, Enrique Onffroy de Thoron proposed^[0901] that Atlantis had been Phoenician and situated in America. Indeed, claims still persist that the Phoenicians did reach South America^(f). However, Onffroy was not the first to suggest this, as he was preceded by Robertus Comtaeus Nortmannus as early as 1644 and Georg Horn in 1652.

Paul Gallez (1920-2007) was a Belgian-born cartographer, historian and linguist. Atlantisforschung noted that “On the occasion of the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the alleged discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (the ‘Columbus Day’ of the year 1992), Gallez wrote and published in 1996 a whole series of articles about much earlier voyages of discovery, e.g. by Phoenicians, Egyptians, Chinese and Vikings in the journal La Nueva Provincia , in which he also considered proto-Semitic influences in pre-Columbian America“^(ah).

Arguably, the best-known exponent of the ‘Phoenicians in America’ school of thought was Bernardo Silva Ramos⁽ⁱ⁾. In the 1930s he studied inscriptions at Pedra de Gavea and concluded that they were Phoenician and offered a translation that reads “Tyre, Phoenicia, Badezir, Firstborn of Jethbaal”. This supposedly refers to a ruler of Phoenicia named Baal-Eser I, who ruled Tyre in the mid-9th century, c. 850 BC. Jacques de Mahieu decided that the inscriptions were not Phoenician but, in keeping with his Nazi background, they were Nordic runes!^(ae)

Otto Muck also bought into the idea of Phoenicians in Brazil having accepted the translation of Bernardo Silva Ramos^(af).

James Bailey, devoted Sailing to Paradiseto a study of the evidence for cultural importations from across the Atlantic. Drawing on the work of Silva Ramos he highlights some of the many inscriptions found in America and allegedly written in various Old World scripts, such as Phoenician, Cretan or Hebrew. Bailey was also convinced that Phoenician influences can be found in Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula ^[149][150].

Paul Gaffarel wrote a number of papers between 1875 and 1890 on pre-Columbian trans-Atlantic voyagers from Europe. He presented a 38-page paper on the Phoenicians’ voyages to America to the Congrès International des Américanistes in Nancy (France) in 1875. Other essays concerned the Vikings and ancient Irish^(ag).

Nevertheless, John Denison Baldwin, writing in the late 19th century, was highly critical of the Phoenicians being early colonisers in America and after reviewing the arguments in favour of the idea, he concluded that “if it were true that the civilization found in Mexico and Central America came from people of the Phoenician race, it would be true also that they built in America as they never built anywhere else, that they established a language here radically unlike their own, and that they used a style of writing totally different from that which they carried into every other region occupied by their colonies. All the forms of alphabetical writing used at present in Europe and Southwestern Asia came directly or indirectly from that anciently invented by the race to which the Phoenicians belonged, and they have traces of a common relationship that can easily be detected. Now the writing of the inscriptions at Palenque, Copan, and elsewhere in the ruins has no more relatedness to the Phoenician than to the Chinese writing. It has not a single characteristic that can be called Phoenician any more than the language of the inscriptions or the style of architecture with which it is associated; therefore we can not reasonably suppose this American civilization originated by people of the Phoenician race, whatever may be thought relative to the supposed ancient communication between the two continents and its probable influence on civilized communities already existing here.”^(x)

Jason Colavito published articles written by Thomas Crawford Johnston in 1892^(z). that he later developed into his 1913 book Did the Phoenicians Discover America ^[1902+] which is available online^(aa).

In his 2009 book, Uncovering Archaeology^[1612], Dennis Cassinelli outlines in some detail his Atlantis theory, which he locates in Central America^(s). He suggests that the Phoenicians landed in Central America and on seeing the Mayan cities concluded that they had landed in Atlantis. Not unexpectedly, Jason Colavito had a few words to say about this idea^(t).

Jean Mazel favourably discussed the idea of the Phoenicians in South America in his 1968 book Avec le Phéniciens.

Lucio Russo (1944- ) is an Italian mathematician, physicist and science historian. In his 2013 offering L’ America dimenticata [1060] (The Forgotten America) he bravely suggests that America was discovered by the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians.

Hugh Fox (1932-2011) wrote of the early peoples of the Americas in his well-received Gods of the Cataclysm^[¹¹⁷¹^]. The ‘cataclysm’ referred to is the biblical Deluge, in respect of which he follows the ideas of Velikovsky and the Christian catastrophist Donald W. Patten (1929-2014), who attributed Noah’s Flood to a close encounter with a massive extraterrestrial body around 2800 BC. Fox explicitly claims that before the Flood, transoceanic travel was commonplace, with the Chinese in America, Indian theology in the Mediterranean and that after the Flood we had the Phoenicians and Odysseus in America.

More recently, Andrew Collins has drawn attention to the extraction of purple dye from shellfish in a number of Central and South American countries ^[072.357], commenting that “quite clearly, the presence of purple dye processes in Costa Rica, Mexico and Ecuador, as well as in Peru, could well constitute positive proof of transoceanic contact with ancient seafarers from the eastern Mediterranean.” Collins also quotes Thomas Crawford Johnston’s Did the Phoenicians Discover America ^[1902+] – “There is probably no stronger evidence of the presence of the Phoenician in the New World than can be drawn from the use of dyes.” Collins also notes that similar sentiments were expressed by Wolfgang Born in a 1937 paper.

Collins has also noted ^[p361] how cotton was widely produced in the Americas before the Spanish conquest and that genetic studies have shown “that the variety of cotton cultivated in the New World from very earliest times is a hybrid form derived from an Old World species crossed with species native only to the American continent. Crawford Johnston also claimed that the compass had been invented by the Phoenicians!

Peter de Roo, writing in 1900 ^[890.1.195] stated “that the Phoenicians at some time landed on American soil could not well be denied in the presence of ancient reports; but as Gravier justly observes. if any vague account of their discoveries was kept, it reached us disfigured by Hellenic fanciful imagination.”

The late Sabatino Moscati, a renowned linguist and archaeologist, wrote a highly regarded work^[505] on the subject of the Phoenicians. Additionally, there is an invaluable website^(a) on offer from Salim George Khalaf, a modern Phoenician from Lebanon. This huge site with its 2,000 pages covers all aspects of Phoenician culture. This same site^(b), drawing on the work of Ignatius Donnelly, identifies the kings of Atlantis with the Phoenician pantheon and claims that the gods of the Greeks were also the deified Atlantean kings.

Jacques Hébert, who places Atlantis in the Indian Ocean on the island of Socotra, suggests that the Atlanteans had a colony in the Eastern Mediterranean whose inhabitants developed into the Phoenicians!

^[1902]+ Did the Phoenicians discover America? : Johnston, Thomas Crawford : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

^(a)https://phoenicia.org/index.shtml

^(b)https://phoenicia.org/atlantisplato.html

^(c)See: https://web.archive.org/web/20101112211128/https://www.forgottenagesresearch.com/vanished-civilizations-series/The-Atlantis-Genesis-ConnectionParallel-Memories-o.htm

^(e)https://www.phoenician.org/minoans_phoenicians_paper.htm

^(f)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Phoenician_discovery_of_the_Americas

^(g)See: Archive 2852

^(h) https://www.mysteriousaustralia.com/pyramid-sequel/chapter16.html

⁽ⁱ⁾https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_de_Azevedo_da_Silva_Ramos (Portuguese)

^(j) https://archive.org/details/atlastoryoflosti00smitrich

^(k)https://www.pappaspost.com/fascinating-cambridge-university-research-links-endangered-pontic-greek-dialect-to-ancient-greek/

^(l) https://www.pappaspost.com/fascinating-cambridge-university-research-links-endangered-pontic-greek-dialect-to-ancient-greek/