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Mediterranean Reception in the Americas 309
work of Enrique Onffroy De Thoron. 26 He of course anticipated
some of the work produced some 50 years later by Cyrus
Gordon 27 and the modern diffusionists. 28
This amazing work cannot properly be seen as a merely
individual eccentricity, for Ramos’s work over many decades
took place against an academic background that supported such
discourse and even favoured his interpretations. Furthermore,
his books have a perfectly academic form, and were published
by the National Press, receiving a great acclaim in Rio de
Janeiro and beyond, as well as in his home town Manaus. In
his fight to have the work published, during the twenties, he
presented the material to two presidents of the Republic of the
United States of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, 29 as well as to many
senators, journalists, and scientific members of geographical
societies. But he faced the open resistance of another diffusionist,
Alberto Childe, 30 the scholar in the Museu Nacional in Rio
de Janeiro who had to approve the text before the government
would allow it to be printed. So, after all the struggle, and its
final posthumous publication, the book became a cultural landmark
of a collective dream of the early Mediterranean origin of
an American people, and was, and is, used as a key reference by
1892); Gabriel Marcel, Sur quelques documents peu connus relatifs a la découverte
de l’Amérique (Paris, 1893); Candido Costa, As duas Americas, (2nd edn.
(Lisbon, 1900); Thomas Crawford Johnston, Did the Phoenicians Discover
America? (London, 1913).
26 Cf. E. Onffroy De Thoron, Les Phéniciens à l’Isle d’Haiti et sur le
Continent Americain: Les Vaisseaux d’Hiram et de Salomon au Fleuve des
Amazones (Ophir, Tarschich, Parvaim) (Louvain, 1889). De Thoron visited
Manaus in 1876, and Bernardo Ramos was later considered his successor.
27 C. H. Gordon, Before Columbus: Links between the Old World and Ancient
America (New York, 1971). Cf. also Joseph Corey Ayoob, Ancient
Inscriptions in the New World: Or were the Phoenicians the First to Discover
America? (Pittsburgh, 1951).
28 Cf. E. R. Fingerhut, Explorers of pre-Columbian America? The Diffusionist-Inventionist
Controversy (Claremont, Calif., 1994). Other relatively recent
diffusionist outpourings: Eduardo de Habich, Los fenicios en la historia del
Perú (Lima, 1972); J. Yaser, Fenícios y árabes en el génesis americano (Córdoba,
Argentina, 1992).
29 To Epitacio Pessoa in 1922, and to Arthur Bernardes in 1926.
30 Childe became the chief conservator of the Museu Nacional in 1922; this
was the name the Russian Egyptologist Dmitri Vonizin adopted after migrating
to Brazil.