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Tobacco in Ancient Egypt
In 1976, the mummified remains of Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II was shipped to Paris for tests on an area of deteriorating skin (found to be bettle invasion). One of the 20 French scientists involved was Dr. Michelle Lescot of the National History Museum in Paris.

Examining the wrappings for bacteria, she was stunned to find samples of the tobacco plant. Naturally, she was immediately ridiculed by her fellow academics who suggested that the mummy was contaminated in 1881 when the tomb was first discovered.

To defend her findings, Dr. Lescot was allowed to perform further tests from deep within the body. These examinations reproduced the initial findings and dispelled the possibility of simple contamination. It also revealed that the plant was introduced during funerary procedures.

Further tests showed that where the internal organs were removed for placement in canopic jars, a stuffing was used which included plantain, flax, black pepper seeds, camomile and chopped tobacco leaves. It seems the tobacco was used as an insecticide and preservative.

The presence of tobacco in an Egyptian mummy cannot be explained as according to orthodox academia, the plant was unknown in the ancient world. That it is considered indigenous to the Americas is however a misnomer as there is a form of wild tobacco found in Africa called Nicotiana rustica as opposed to the Nicotiana tabacum of the Americas.

It was used by African cultures and as an Arabic smoke medicine in Sudan long before Columbus. It was known in a number of dialects as taba, tawa, tabgha and tama. That these terms are so similar to the pre-columbian 'tobacco' used by the indigenous Carribean peoples for the act of smoking, strongly suggests that the plant crossed the Atlantic either moving eastwards or westwards from Africa many centuries before Columbus.

This African variant of the plant might tempt us to explain Ramses' tobacco as being introduced to Egypt from the south, but this solution is complicated by the presence of Cocaine in other Egyptian mummies - the coca plant is certainly native only to South America.

 

Cocaine in Ancient Egypt
In 1992 , German toxicologist Svetlana Balabanova was testing the Egyptian mummified remains of nine individuals from the Munich Museum among them the complete body of Henuttawy, a priestess of the temple of Amun at Theses c. 1000 BC.

The results were so extraordinary that she sent samples to three other labs who confirmed her findings - that the remains contained large quantities of drugs. These included hashish (accepted as present in ancient Egypt), nicotine (from tobacco), and in every single individual - cocaine! This psychoactive alkaloid comes from the leaves of the coca plant and was officially produced for the first time in 1859.

The implications of these tests were profound and predicatably, accusations of incompetence and fake mummies were levelled at Dr. Balabanova (a respected forensics expert often working with the police). In response she, with colleagues ran a further 3,000 tests on a variety of preserved remains from a number of countries such as China, Germany, Sudan as well as Egypt. A high level of these specimens showed the presence of nicotine and /or cocaine.

Some of these apecimens went back 7,000 years, making them older than the Munich mummies. An investigation on the authenticity of the mummies was also conducted by Egyptologist Rosalie David of Manchester museum, who concluded that they were not likely to be fakes.

Mainstream Egyptology has been unwilling to accpet these discoveries and yet is unable to offer an explanation. The only possible answer is that there was trading contact between the two continents. That nicotine and cocaine has been found in the same Egyptian individuals as well as the similarity in the root name for tobacco on both continents implies pre-columbian contact.

So is there any more evidence of ancient transatlantic trading and who might have been responsible for these shipments? Was it a seafaring culture of American origin, or one from the Ancient world?

Voyagers
In 1976, Jose Robert Teixeira was spear-fishing in the Bay of Guanabara about 24 kilometres outside the port of Rio de Janeiro, when he spotted something unfamiliar on the seabed. Closer examination revealed 3 huge jars covered in crustaceans.

They were bought off him by an antiques dealer who took them to the Brazilian Institute of Archaeology where scientists reluctantly admitted that they were ancient 'Greek' amphorae, used to transport commodities between ports in the ancient world.Amphorae

Explained away by Brazilian scholars as disgorged cargo from colonial times, it was another 5 years before the director of Rio de Janeiro's Maritime Museum hired world-renowned underwater archaeologist Robert F. Marx to find the wreck. By this stage, many local divers had retrieved many jars from the area.

Examining these, Marx determined that they were not Greek but infact Moroccan - manufactured about 2,000 years ago. Showing the jars to oceanographers, he was told that the encrustation on the surface was of a type unique to the Bay of Guanabara - meaning they had been in situ for thousands of years. The implications were so huge that Marx sent samples of the encrustation to Harvard's Museum of comparative Zoology and the University of Miami's Marine Lab.

Both were not only able to confirm the initial findings but also dated the samples through carbon-14 dating to about 1,500 years old. Using sonar surveys, two sunken targets were located on underwater reefs and thought to be certainly one if not two wrecks.

On Marx's request for permission to investigate further, the Spanish and Portuguese governments intervened, persuading the Brazilian authorities to stop the whole project. they considered that confirmation of a roman wreck in Brazilian waters would invalidate not just Pedro Alvarez Cabal's claim to have discovered

Brazil, but also Spain's claim to have discovered the New World in 1492. Brazilians were also outraged by what they saw as Marx's wish to rob them of their heritage! There were protest marches and when Marx asked a Brazilian archaeologist to examine what looked like Phoenician jewellery discovered in Brazil, he seized the goods and said "Cabal discovered Brazil, and let's leave it like that".

Even the then Brazilian Minister if Education is reported to have told Marx, "Every plaza in Brazil has a statue of Cabal, the real discoverer of Brazil, and we are not going to replace these with monuments to some annonymous Italian pizza vendor just because you've invented a roman shipwreck where none exists".

This fiasco raises the question of how many times national politics have stood in the way of truth. Though they can't dispute the evidence, scholars explain away ancient artefacts in American waters by stating that ancient vessels may have accidentally reached the western Atlantic seaboard by being blown off course by storms or bad navigation, there floundering or being abandoned by their crews.

In the last 100 years, no less than 600 African vessels have been cast onto the South American coast. Even Cabal himself was inadvertently carried across the ocean after rounding the cape of Africa. This begs the question - how many of these vessels made it back carrying tales of an 'opposite continent'? Could these stories have prompted voyages by renowned sailors of the ancient worls such as the Carthaginians and Phoenicians?

 

The Visitors
The land of Phoenicia was located on the Mediterranean coast of modern Syria & Lebanon. In the old testament, it was known as Canaan, 'the land of purple' which translates into Greek as Phoenicia, derived from the purple dye used on very expensive textiles (hence the link between purple and royalty).

The nation evolved from a mixture of races in the Middle East in the second millenium BC. One of these was already trading with Egypt and Crete from Byblos (Lebanese coast) as early as 3000 BC. Their only interest was in trade.

In the first millenium BC they established city-ports throughout the Meditarranean as far west as Iberia (Spain) and founded the port of Carthage on the coast of Libya (modern Tunisia) c. 814 BC. From here both the Iberic Phoenicians and Carthaginians explored the outer ocean, establishing trading settlements as far south as Senegal and Guinea on the west African coast and reaching the British Isles in the north. They were master sailors, the only people in a position to trade with the Americas.Carthaginian Coins

Greek historian Herodotus tells us that the Pharaoh Netho II (c. 610-595 BC), wanting to find a way to tranfer ships between the Red Sea and Egypt's Mediterranean ports, commissioned 'Phoenician men' to circumnavigate the African continent. This they accomplished in a 3 year voyage, setting up temporary settlements on the way.

The convincing fact in the story is that Hrodotus adds a footnote which reports that the Phoenician sailors claimed that, "....in sailing round Libya (Africa), they had the sun upon their right hand". In theory, the people of the ancient world would not have known that the sun is visible in the northern sky when viewed from below the Tropic of Capricorn.

If they could achieve such feats 2,100 years before the Portuguese did it, how far could they go? This account came to us from Herodotus via the Egyptians and was not necessarily the first time such vast journeys had been undertaken. Though Greek writers such as Diodorus Siculus tell us of the Carthaginians settling on Atlantic islands with mild climates and navigable rivers (found only on Cuba or Hispaniola), there is no information on trading routes or destinations from Phoenician sources.

This is because they wanted to keep the trade from their Roman rivals. Greek geographer Strabo tells us how a Phoenician captain, on realising his ship was being tailed by a Roman vessel, led both ships onto shoals where they were both destroyed. Surviving the sinking, the captain was generously rewarded for his loss by the state. We have to look elsewhere to find evidence of their efforts.

Looking to the Americas, we are not disappointed. In 1787, a haul of Carthaginian coins was found by road builders in Massachusetts. Unidentified by the workers, they were handed out to passers by, one of whom was the Revrend Thaddeus Mason Harris, who luckily brought them to the attention of the then president John Quincy Adams. Surviving pieces were identified as coins minted in the third century BC and bore Kufic inscriptions used by the Carthaginians.

More recently, early issue Carthaginian coins were found in Conneticut and their Punic inscriptions read 'in camp' signifying their military usage. They also bore the image of a horses' head - the motif of Carthage. Though historians acknowledge the authenticity of the coins, they do not accept that they could have reached the Americas before colonial times. Yet Carthaginian coins found in the Azores have been accepted as solid evidence of contact with this nation, despite the complete lack of any other supporting evidence.

There is however, an abundance of out-of-place artefacts in the Americas. Aside from coins, there is a lamp, sword and many inscribed stones, some of which are incontestable and imply that foreign visitors from different cultures left their mark after reaching the Americas.

Olmec Stone HeadSome of the most astounding evidence is found in South America. The Olmec culture thrived in Mexico between c. 1200 - 400 BC. They produced colossal stone carvings that weigh up to 20 tonnes each. On discovery, these gigantic heads were facing eastwards and their broad faces, wide cheeks, full lips and flattened noses clearly represent black Africans. Other smaller stautes of similar design have been found in Olmec and other earlier sites, some of these also have tight curls and tribal scars.

Other figures discovered at Olmec sites bear distinctive oriental features and Betty J. Meggers of the Smithsonian proposes that there is a good case to be argued for contact between the Olmec and China's Shang dynasty, sighting similarities in writing, jade carvings and architecture. Her theories were supported by Chinese Shang dynasty specialists who found they could read stone celts unearthed at Olmec sites.

Then there is the eclipse calendar of the Maya which not just mirrors the one used by the Han dynasty in China (c. 282 BC - AD 220), but incorporates exactly the same mistakes!

Recent testing of white blood cell protiens (HLAs) directly links certain South Asian peoples, as well as certain Afro-Arabian tribes, with native americans. A genetic link that could only have come from cross-fertilisation.

So what about he Phoenicians?

bearded visitors

At the cult centre of La Venta, stone reliefs show figures with pronounced Semitic features, bushy and pointed beards & moustaches as well as Mediterranean clothing. This is more astonishing when you know that the peoples of Central America are unable to grow substantial facial hair.

Constance Irwin's book 'Fair gods and Stone Faces' (1963) also points out that these individuals are wearing shoes that have pointed upturned toes. Only 3 Meditarranean peoples wore these: the Etruscans (unlikely to have reached the Americas), the Hittites (land-bound), and the Phoenicians who as we have seen were master sailors with West African settlements, and could have introduced black African to Mexico.

Did the Phoenicians trade with the Olmecs and sell their wares on to the Egyptians?

Source: Gateway to Atlantis by Andrew Collins