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310 Mediterranean Reception in the Americas
the current sympathizers of the cause—not a few of whom still
exist. 31
Nowadays the most famous place in the Phoenician cartography
in Brazil is the Pedra da Gávea, in Rio de Janeiro, where
there is a supposed Phoenician inscription. Most probably fake
or false, the writing is mysterious enough to bring many curious
people, especially tourists, to the place, a very scenic spot. The
myth of Phoenician origins is a living force in Brazil, and there
is little space for scientific contradiction. A whole literature on
the topic grows at its own pace, and it does not matter if the
supposed Phoenician inscriptions have been demonstrated to be
the remains of Masonic dramatizations or just natural rock
formations. The same happens in the cases in Piauí and Paraíba
(north-north-eastern states of Brazil), where the signature of
the Austrian ancient historian Ludwig Schwennhagen provided
the necessary support to confirm that there were ruins of
Phoenician cities, in a place later called Sete Cidades, a National
Park in Piauí which is much visited. 32
By the time of Bernardo Ramos, the state of Amazonas was
experiencing a great wave of development, the so called Rubber
Cycle, with the rise of newly enriched elites eager for their own
distinction. These men were ready to give up, or to enhance,
their own local and Portuguese colonial identity and build a new
image of themselves, based on the best icons of civilization
coming from the North. The consequence of that was a cycle
of neoclassicism, with its most vehement expression in architecture,
sustained by a project full of ideological meaning. The
greatest example is the magnificent building of the Teatro de
Manaus, a great Opera House built in 1896, where in the first
decades of the twentieth century the greatest Mediterranean
31 The text would say: ‘Tyro, Phoenicia, Badezir, first-born of Jethbaal’, as
Ramos ‘transliterated’ and ‘translated’ it (Inscrições e tradições, i. 436). There
are variants.
32 L. Schwennhagen, Fenícios no Brasil: antiga história do Brasil, de 1100 a.C.
a 1500 d.C.: tratado histórico (Rio de Janeiro, 1976). The researches and articles
of Schwennhagen date from the 1920s and 1930s. Cf. also C. Gordon, ‘The
Cannanite Text from Brazil’, Orientalia 37 (1968), 425–36, and the response of
F. M. Cross Jr., ‘The Phoenician Inscription from Brazil: A Nineteenth-
Century Forgery?’, Orientalia 37 (1968), 437–60, followed by C. Gordon, ‘Reply
to Professor Cross’, Orientalia 37 (1968), 461–3, and by F. M. Cross Jr.,
‘Phoenicians in Brazil?’, Biblical Archaeology Review (Jan./Feb. 1979), 36–43.