Cuba's Gateway
To Atlantis P.2: Cocaine
For Collins
the considerable distance between the Sargasso and the Bahamas is accommodated
by the suggestion that "in singling out the Sargasso Sea" (which is a
huge assumption on Collins' part since there is nothing at all to suggest Plato
was talking about the Sargasso) Plato was just trying to indicate the general
location of his sunken island.
A similar case
of a late authority quoting an earlier one is offered in a further effort to
bolster the idea that some people of the classical world knew about the far
western reaches of the Atlantic. This time it's thinner than with Pliny and Solinus. Proclus, we may recall, of about AD 450, writes
about an obscure Roman historian of perhaps 100 BC who apparently mentioned
some islands of the "external sea," of which three were of immense
extent, the middle of these being sacred to Neptune who is our old friend
Poseidon in Roman guise. The inhabitants of these islands were said to preserve
the memory of a former island 'which was truly prodigiously great', dominating
all the islands of the Atlantic. Collins wants to see in all this evidence for
knowledge in Roman times of an island group which he readily identifies with the
West Indies, where memories of old Atlantis were still being handed down.
We might think
it difficult to avoid the conclusion that, like everyone else touching on
Atlantis in the classical world, Marcellus was simply building on Plato with no
other source material to go on. Or that Proclus was doing that, with or without
any Marcellus for Proclus starts off referring merely to "certain
historians," only bringing in mention of Marcellus and his Ethiopic
History at the end of his remarks. What the West Indies would be doing in a
book about Africa is not obvious. At all events, Collins thinks the three big
islands of Proclus-Marcellus were Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico (the Greater
Antilles) and the rest were the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies. Flood
stories of the native Caribs of these islands, allegedly related to the
Spaniards after the European discovery of the New World, are held by Collins to
suggest that postglacial flooding may have broken up a greater landmass into
separate islands - and then Phoenician sailors visiting the West Indies before
Plato's day may have taken stories of these, floods and lost lands back to the
Mediterranean world of classical times. This is turning out to be a
modification of Lewis Spence's Antillean speculations, with behind him le Plongeon, Brasseur and, it seems, a chap called Hyde Clarke
whom Collins has tracked down as the first proponent of Atlantis in the
Antilles in 1885. (Let's remember that all flood stories told by natives to
Christians are open to suspicion.)
If we are
invited to believe that Atlantis was in the West Indies and the later
inhabitants of those isles still remembered it, even only folklorically,
thousands of years after it was gone, and if their stories are supposed somehow
to have been taken across the Atlantic in time for Plato to write them into his
Timaeus and Critias, then we really do need some
evidence to show that transatlantic voyages were being made in ancient days.
Ideally some sound archaeological evidence of, say, Egyptian or Phoenician
materials in the Americas or American materials in North Africa would come to
light. And not just stray finds, either, of perhaps coins that could have come
from much later collections or the odd Roman lamp or some such one-off item:
what we really need is proper archaeological contexts in which whole
assemblages of foreign goods are found in properly dated situations in
association with native material. It can be confidently said that no such
archaeological contexts have ever been demonstrated in the Old World or in the
New where dated assemblages of goods from one world have been found in dated
situations in the other - not even in one case, let alone the several we should
ideally require. This stark fact alone makes the idea of regular intercourse
between the western Atlantic and the Mediterranean before Columbus hardly worth
entertaining. In the Delta of the Nile, Minoan materials have been turned up in
dynastic Egyptian contexts: all well and good, trade and perhaps even
immigration from Crete are indicated. Nothing like this is known in the
Americas and no American products have been found in an Old World
context.
The best
Collins (and all the other fans of ancient transatlantic commerce) can do is to
point to certain anomalous or ambiguous circumstances that cannot possibly
outweigh the lack of repeated context archaeology. Tobacco and cocaine are, as
we've seen, two current favourites in this line,
traces of both having been reported in some Egyptian mummies (including that of
the great pharaoh Ramesses 11), sometimes together and sometimes just the
tobacco. Tobacco is attested in Brazil at an early enough date to supply New
Kingdom Egypt, but not in Mexico until about 100 BC which is far too late. In
any case, tobacco is a plant that may once have been indigenous in Africa, much
closer to home for the ancient Egyptians. There is no literary, pictorial or
artefactual evidence to suggest the Egyptians were smoking pipes or cigars, so
the tobacco was presumably being used in the course of mummification (assuming
that its traces are not simply the result of modern contaminations, as they may
well be). The cocaine is yet more problematical, being only native to the
Americas (though there is another species of the same genus on Mauritius). As
far as I know, only one team has so far claimed to have found cocaine traces in
an Egyptian mummy and they have not been overly inclined to share their
researches with other investigators; indeed, they have gone quiet on the
matter. We shall have to await developments on that one, if there ever are any.
One might wonder why, if tobacco and cocaine could be traded across the
Atlantic from the Americas in Phoenician times, the potato and tomato had to
wait until after 1492 to make their way to the Old World. Apart from the exotic
substances, it's the usual Olmec "Negroid" heads and alleged
"Semitic" and "Caucasoid" features of some New World
statuary that have to do duty with Collins by way of further evidence for
cross-Atlantic comings and goings in ancient times, along with the shared
traits of writing and calendar-making. I cannot help remarking again that the
writing and calendar systems of the Old and New Worlds actually have no
detailed features in common at all.
An interesting
aspect of Collins' methods of argument is illustrated by his handling of the
Paraiba inscription. With other writers in this general Atlantological
field, we have already seen the tendency on occasions to put in dubious
material that they themselves will have to reject almost immediately. It looks
like the maximizing of anything and everything that comes their way, even if it
has to be dropped almost as soon as it's picked up. It also looks to me like
the exploitation of even the dodgiest material to help create a vague miasma of
possibilities in the readers' minds, when in fact the material turns out to be
quite useless. (It all helps to fill out a big book, too, of course.) The
Paraiba inscription from Brazil purports to be a Phoenician record of a voyage
from the Red Sea that ended up in South America. Even in the late nineteenth
century it was generally recognized as a hoax and is now seen to be "a
fraud perpetrated by Brazilian Freemasons," as Collins himself tells
us.
Why spend
two-and-a-half pages on it, then? In its wake he cites some coin finds, an oil
lamp, a sword blade, the odd not-very-well documented wreck in Brazilian
waters, and certain very dubious translations of alleged Punic inscriptions
from the Americas (many if not all of which aren't human inscriptions of any
sort, let alone Punic ones). Collins admits that all this can't add up to proof
of a Phoenician presence in the West Indies. Even if the occasional foundering
of a Phoenician (or Roman) ship, blown off course across the Atlantic, could
deliver Old World coins or amphorae to the American coast, we would still not
be faced with deliberate transatlantic crossings with cultural consequences in
the Old World or the New. When it comes to Roman-looking bricks in Mayan
structures (with no Latin brick marks, needless to say), I feel we are as it
were scraping the bottom of the barrel. And what is the good of Collins'
suggestion that it was trade secrecy that kept all reference to Phoenician or
Roman transatlantic commerce so successfully out of all classical literature?
On that score
a complete lack of evidence for something would become the finest available
proof of it. Plato's mention of an Atlantean name in its original, native form
impresses Collins. That name is Gadirus, for which
Plato offers his Greek-via-Egyptian equivalent of Eumelus.
Gadirus is indeed a Phoenician-sounding name, related
to the root that today gives us Cadiz out of classical Gades
for the Spanish port that faces out into the Atlantic where Atlantis is
supposed to have come close to western Europe. But there's really nothing
suggestive in Plato's use of this name: Greek Eumelus
("rich in sheep") is not a translation of the Semitic root meaning of
Gades (probably "limit,"
"hedge"); it is just a bit of exotic local colour
in his tale, taken from the name Gades. It's no proof
at all that the Atlanteans spoke Phoenician or that news of Atlantis was
brought back to Europe by Phoenician sailors.
See also:
Gateway to
Atlantis P.3: Seven Cities, El Dorado
Gateway to
Atlantis P.4: Urheimat der Arier
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