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Mediterranean Reception in the Americas 297
1. the amazon
The history of Mediterranean reception should begin outside
the Mediterranean, in places and epochs where the presence
of the Mediterranean was felt as something strong, indicating
the active presence of historical messages belonging to that sea
and the surrounding civilizations. In the Americas, the imprint
of this tradition started and developed during the period of
colonization, when institutions, legal codes, writings, schools,
myths, religious patterns, perspectives, and artistic and architectural
styles, were imported by the Europeans. Yet despite the
clarity of the historical record, diffusionists, pre-Columbian
archaeologists, and some historians have succeeded in inventing
a kind of argument about when Mediterranean cultural information
first reached America. The subject has also been a
preferred topic of ethnological fantasy ever since the fifteenth
century, blending ingenuous curiosity, homocosmic imagination,
and a kind of mysticism of origins.
Notwithstanding the permanent scepticism of the academic
mainstream, which refuses to recognize any possibility of
Phoenician travels outside the Mediterranean, there is something
like a Guinness Book of Records challenge that impels
people to claim that ancient sailors reached ever more remote
places in North and South America, Southern Africa, and even
the Far East and Oceania. It is not a surprise, therefore, to
encounter a note concerning an altar to the god Baal in New
Zealand, supposedly built around the sixth century bc by, of
course, a tribe of Phoenicians lost and detached from the expedition
of circumnavigation of Africa sent by Nekau in the
seventh century, as one home page maintains with the very
predictable help of inscriptions, old and current myths, drawings,
and secret archaeological sites. 3 Phoenician origins have
also been claimed for the Rig Vedas and the whole of Hindu
culture, 4 as well as for the Scots, Britons and Anglo-Saxons. 5
3 http://www.zealand.org.nz/history.htm [on 09/10/2002].
4 Rajeswar Gupta, The Rig Veda: A History Showing how the Phoenicians
had their Earliest Home in India, trans. into English from Bengali (Chittagong,
1904).
5 L. A. Waddell, The Phoenician Origin of Britons, Scots and Anglo-Saxons
Discovered by Phoenician and Sumerian Inscriptions in Britain, by Pre-Roman
British Coins and a Mass of New History (London, 1931).