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Mediterranean Reception in the Americas 303
and admired in many contemporary circles, 21 but both volumes
end with long compilations of the author’s struggles to sell his
theories and his fortune in the media and within the circles of
power.
In the presentation of his Inscripções e Tradições da América
Préhistórica, 22 Ramos makes much of his erudition, going back
to the work of Pietro del Vale in 1621. 23 He takes his time to
stress how much the early epigraphists had been misunderstood
by their contemporaries, despite or because of their avant-garde
spirit. There were people ready to call him the Champollion of
the Amazon, but he was not fated to be recognized as such.
His own analytical tools were derived from the methods of
the numismatist and the epigraphist: he assumed the recurrent
use of many abbreviations, acronyms, and contractions in the
texts or ‘texts’ he was working with. He established his own
code of signals, drawing up tables containing several epigraphical
variants of each sign in Greek, Hebrew, and Phoenician
scripts. The variants cover not only what we usually recognize
as letters, but also many figurative representations that were
supposedly related to ancient writings (Fig. 12.1). As the
migrations had taken place by the early Iron Age, Ramos
21
He is still found persuasive in the History Department of Wake Forest
University, North Carolina. See the website on Algonquins, Egyptians, and
Uto-Aztecs at http://www.wfu.edu/~cyclone/tifv.htm [on 21/07/2001], which
I quote verbatim: ‘Carthaginians reached South America. Old Greek toponyms
which Henriette Mertz recovered in Brazil, mostly on the Amazon—
Phedra, Hipolito, Thetys, Olimpias, Ateleia, numerous places ending opolis
or apolis, Solimoes, Ares, etc. (not to mention Cumana; an Aphrodite sanctuary
made Comana on Mt. Eryx, Sicily, the Las Vegas of Ptolemaic/Roman
times) could date Greek Archaic to Middle Ages, but Greek names in rhebuses
and other inscriptions Bernardo de Azevedo da Silva Ramos discovered
and deciphered along the Amazon system by 1929, coupled with non-Brazilian
bull and hippopotamus designs, plus funerary terms like thanatos, indicate
late-ancient African Greek in plantation cemeteries worked by Greek warprisoner
slaves or Greek-speaking Mediterranean-Roman subjects.’ And so on.
22
Ramos, Inscripções e tradições da América préhistórica (Rio de Janeiro,
1929 and 1939), 2 vols.
23
On deciphering cuneiform and on Assyriology, the main works he
drew on were Thomaz Hyde, De Caylus, Pietro Del Vale, Kaempfer, Von
Bruyn, Niebuhr, Münter, Grotefend, and Burnouf and Lassen, as well as
Westegaard, Hincks and de Saulcy, Oppert and Hincks, Fox, Talbot, and
Rawlinson.