Cuban Atlantean Bronze Age Evidence

Those who have followed my blogknow that we have built up a mass of evidence that supports the existence of aEuropean Bronze Age culture that was sea borne and exploited the Atlanticlittoral.  It lasted at least onethousand years and was struck down at its heart by the tsunami produced byHecla in 1159 BC.  Its capital ofAtlantis has been discovered as described in the river mouth of the Guadalquiviroutside of Gibraltar and well downriver from Seville at sea level.

Here we have a major periodstructure reported in Cubathat again conforms to what are becoming numerous unaccepted Bronze Agecultural artifacts.  Additional culturalartifacts are also reported on, particularly the continuation of the bull cultor perhaps more properly the cult of Baal so well known from biblical referencesand strongly supported by Mediterranean archeology.

You may recall that this palacebased antique empire was a trading empire supported by the sea borne coppertrade.  We have the mines in the Americas, wehave the trading factories in the palaces and we have a remnant in thePhoenicians.  Script existed and a commonreligion(s) appear to exist.

Some of its history trickled intothe Bible and the Homeric inheritance is certainly from the generation before1159 BC and drawn from the Baltic palace culture.

It is also apparent that the Atlanteanempire was expansionist and was in the midst of a major assault on the littoralof the Mediterranean and could easily drag inhuge numbers of warriors from its trade empire. Thus the impact of both the Sea Peoples on Egyptand the Philistines on the Levant becomesclear as does their subsidence.

Without 1159 BC, European historywould have got rolling a thousand years sooner as would that of the Americas 2500years sooner.  It is only by extraordinaryluck that we have the Greeks acting as a partial conduit of this culturalhistory so that we even know to look for it

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Riddles of the Distant Past

SUNDAY, MARCH 06, 2011

http://inexplicata.blogspot.com/2011/03/riddles-of-distant-past.html

By Scott Corrales

While many may find the concept of sunken lands a trifle disturbing (or as anold college instructor of mine would say, when questioned about Atlantis,"continents made of granite don't sink into tectonic plates made ofbasalt"), the need to explain many of the ancient features of the Americancontinent almost inevitably leads to the realization that older, advancedcivilizations may have flourished on both landmasses earlier thananthropologists and ethnographers are willing to accept, or that such featurescould be the remains of more advanced visitors from the Old World...or a worldthat no longer exists.

Abel Hernández Muñoz, a member of the Sociedad Epigráfica Cubana(CubanEpigraphic Society) has drawn attention throughout Latin America and Spain tothe highly curious "Taguasco Dolmen", located near the village of thesame name in the Cuban province of Sancti Spiritus, close to the island'sgeographic center.

The Taguasco Dolmen is, in fact, a tower made of superimposed megalithscontaining a small chamber running in an east-west direction. According toHernández, the eastern opening of the chamber points toward a tiny circle ofstones or Cromlech, consisting of one central stone and two menhirs standingsome 10 feet tall. The overall style and composition of this monument isdisturbingly similar to the megalithic alignments of the Balearic Islands (off Spain'seastern coast), giving rise to all manner of speculations by its veryappearance.

But as if the mysterious structure's aspect weren't controversial enough, theTaguasco Dolmen bears on its surface some very curious inscriptions which Cubanepigraphers have associated with Phoenician script employed in theirMediterranean posessions around the 8th and 7th centuries B.C., respectively.Other inscriptions appear to correspond to the Irish Ogham script whichaccording to experts, was not in use prior to the 10th century of the ChristianEra.

Regardless of the obvious descriptions, the Ogham inscription reads"B-L", which has been interpreted as "BEL" or"Bel", the name of the solar deity of the sea-faring Phoenicians. Ifcorrect, this identification would match similar instances of "B-L"found in North America. The other inscriptionis rendered as "Q-B" and vocalized as the word coba, an old Arabicword describing a turret or small watchtower. Could this, Hernández speculates,be the source of the word Cuba,which identifies the largest of the Greater Antilles?

The epigraphical findings can be corroborated by archaeological ones, such asthe discovery of a clearly female European skeleton in a Taino/Siboney burialyard, and the existence of a Celtiberic-Phoenician sanctuary near Cuba's world-famous Varadero Beach.

Traces of Phoenician involvement in the Caribbean go beyond Cuba, appearing in the the strange"bearded" petroglyphs of the islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. These images show strange figures of beardedmen, often wearing turbans or thoroughly non-Taino Indian headgear. Revisionisthistorians have often used the existence of these stone carvings to launchtheories of Phoenician visits in antiquity to these islands; In a paper presentedto the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y El Caribe, scholarRoberto Marínez Torres points out the existence of 17th century historicalreferences to unusual divinities visiting the islands that form part of theoral traditions of the Carib indians of the isle of Tortuga: these whitedivinities taught the Caribs the building of huts, agricultural techniques andthe manipulation of poisonous yucca to make cassava bread. This last indicationproves both troubling and interesting, given the absence of yucca and similartubers in the Eastern Mediterranean. However,might we not assume that Phoenician traders frequenting West Africa (asdemonstrated by Hanno's expedition to the Senegal region) would haveencounters similar roots and learned how to use them? Curiously enough, theSpanish conquistadores learned the making of cassava bread quickly enough,turning it into a regular staple on their maritime explorations in the New World.

A Mystery of Painted Stone

Brazil, best known in occult circles for its UFO cases, high strangness eventsand candomblé rituals, also holds it own when it comes to strange landmarkswhich point uncomfortably to origins that perhaps are at odds with scientificdogma.
The best known of these is Pedra Pintada ("Painted Rock") a series ofblocks and rock walls protruding from the ground and overlooking grassy plainsof the Brazilian state of Roraima (on the border with Venezuela). The rock compledpresents an array of rhomboidal shapes, triangles, what appear to be suns, andcrudely drawn figures. In 1838, German explorer Richard Schomburgk ventured upto the Amazon headwaters and was among the very first Europeans to ever gazeupon Pedra Pintada. His native retainers informed him that Pedra Pintada wasconsidered by their folk to house the spirit of Macunaima, one of the heroes ofthe Carib tribes dwelling in the northern end of the South Americanlandmass.Archaeologists have ascribed the Pedra Pintada petroglyphs to the"Rupununi phase" of the Guayanas and dated them between 2000 and 1000BCE. Contemporary native tribes often express a certain amount of fear aboutthese carvings and claim not to know their significance.

The belief that these manifestations could be far older has always beenexpressed, much to the consternation of academia. While Chilean anthrolpologistJuan Schobinger assures us that the question of "ancient vanishedcivilizations" being the responsible for this work has been put to rest,others insist that the question remains quite open and valid.

The best-known challenge to academic auctoritas came from Marcel Homet, aFrench explorer and scholar whose expedition to discover the remains of lostcivilizations in 1949 is chronicled in the book The Children of the Sun.Homet's Amazonian guides regaled him with stories of ruins far up the course ofthe Uraricoera River, and the researcher himself faced a number of perils(carnivorous plants, etc.). Homet's work has been largely discredited, but hisobservations on Pedra Pintada deserve to be commented upon. He considered theodd, egg-shaped stone to be an enormous book containing samples of all of theancient languages of mankind -- old Egyptian hieroglyphs and samples ofMesopotamian symbols. Homet couldn't emphasize enough the rock's importance asa "glyptolithic library" on humanity's past. 

Chile'sBewildering Past

The living have always had a morbid fascination with the process ofmummification. Surely ancient hunter/gatherers in the world's deserts werequite used to the prospect of natural mummification due to exposure inextremely dry and stable climates. Mummies have become an indispensable fixturein literary horror stories about Ancient Egypt and in not-quite-so literarymotion pictures such as 1999's The Mummy. Yet the fulsome and complicated techniquesby means of which the Egyptians disposed of their dead have always seemedunique to that part of the world, although some adventurous souls have claimedthat it was handed down from lost Atlantis. The sunken continent aside, whatare we to make of the mummification practices which took place in the Americas,which were just as complex and far older than any Egyptian ones?

In 1917, when anthropologist and explorer Max Uhle discovered the burial sitesof what he called "the AricaAborigines", scholars believed that these non-Egyptian mummification datedto 3000 B.C.E or thereabouts, but contemporary researchers have discovered thatit is at least two millenia older than the date first put forth (5000 B.C.E.).Mummification in Egypt can be dated back to 2400 B.C.E.

The ancient Aricans mummification techniques consisted in skinning andeviscerating the corpse, removing the muscles of the bones and legs, thensetting the insides to dry by means of hot coals. All cavities were filled withsubstances ranging from dirt and wool to feathers and natural fiber. The facewas generally painted white, black or red while a wig completed theensemble. 

Curious similarities to the mummification traditions of the Canary Islanderssoon emerged. Paleopathologist Michael Allison notes that the Chilean mummies"...were collected in family groups of three to eight people, men, womenand children, and kept upright through the use of the rods employed toreinforce them. These families were perhaps personages, healers or shamans, orgreat hunters, having special powers transmittable to the living even afterdeath as long as their bodies remained present." The custom in the Canary Islands, roughly six thousand miles away,prescribed that the new tribal leader be "advised" by the mummifiedbody of the deceased leader, who was kept at hand.

A Canarian historian, Héctor Gonzalez, believes in the possibility that"Atlantis" is source for the commonality of funeral practices.González has conducted a detailed analysis of the descriptions of mythicalcontinent given by Plato in his writings and has checked them against existingmaps and atlases. He suggests that there was never, in fact, a "lostcontinent", and that Atlantis is in South America--locatedin the still-unexplored Guyana Highlands.

The descriptions given by the Greek philosopher, says González, match thephysical features of the PanamaIsthmus, the Matto Grosso region and the bordering Andean range. Ascontradictory as this conclusion may seem, the Canarian historian has arguedthat at no point do any of the classical sources refer to Atlantis as "acontinent", but rather a massive expanse of land surrounded by water.

The simultaneous creation of inventions and the discovery of new concepts inseparate locations is nothing new, and certainly the primitive inhabitants ofthe salt flats of northerh Chile were bright enough to come up with their ownmummification techniques, owing nothing to an improbable "mothercivilization". But why engage in exceedingly and exceedingly complex andgrisly task when their very environment would take care of the job for them?The dryness of the atmosphere was a key factor in preserving another set ofvery ancient and sensational burials which have become known as the"mummies of Urumchi" -- the remains of a tall, caucasian group oftribesmen dwelling in what is now Western China.The complex mummification practices of South Americamust be included, therefore, into our continent's gallery of mysteries.

A Forgotten Kingdom Speaks

An Aztec map would probably have portrayed the area currently known as Northern Mexico in the same terms used by Medievalcartographers for the vast uncharted lands on their portulans: terra incognita.Indeed, while the Aztecs were clearly aware of having come from a place calledAztlan somewhere in North America, their ownidea of where it could be was quite sketchy. Spanish friar Diego Durán, writingin the late 1500's, notes that Aztec monarch Moctezuma Ihuilcamina ordered hiswise men to engage in what we would call a "fact-finding" mission onthe origins of their people. The scholar in charge, Coauhcoatl, informed hisking that Aztlán meant "whiteness" and had been a land filled withall manner of waterfowl, fish and riverine vegetation, but that little else wasknown about it. The Spanish conquest of the region occupied by the state ofQuerétaro (just slightly to the north of Mexico City) were aided by othernative tribes who had knowledge of what lay beyond, given the Aztecs'geographic shortcomings.

Despite the fact that the Mexican highlands had sustained commercial relationswith the mysterious city of Paquimé (part of theCasas Grandes culture of the desert), northern Mexico beckoned as a place of greatmystery and even high strangeness. It's allure caused even the most ruthless ofall the conquistadores, Nuño de Guzmán, to push his bedraggled band of soldiersever northward into modern Sinaloa, hoping to find "the country of theAmazons".

Had his desert-weary troops not rebelled against him, Guzmán may have reachedthe mountainous dwelling places of the Tarahumara Indians, which some believeto have direct ties to forgotten Atlantis.

It would fall to an artist, not a warrior, to share this significantexperience. In 1936, the surrealist French poet and playwright Antonin Artaudvisited northern Mexico consumed by a burning desire to see the Tarahumarapeoples and, in his own words, to "seek the roots of a magical traditionwhich can still be found in their native soil" (Voyage Au Pays desTarahumaras, Parisot, 1944) Artaud's quest took him through the bottom ofCopper Canyon and some of the most perilous landscapes on the continent, alwayson horseback and led by a native guide. He eventually reached the heart of theTarahumara mountains in the state of Chihuahuaonly to witness a native ceremony that amazed him beyond words--the ritualslaying of a bull which was identical to a similar ceremony described inPlato's Critias.

The first of Plato's two dialogues on Atlantis describes how theAtlantean rulers would gather together at sunset before a freshly-killed bullwhile their servants butchered the animal and collected its blood in goblets,chanting dirges well into the next day. They would subsequently cover theirheads in ashes and the dirge would change pitch as the circle around thesacrificed animal grew closer. Artaud would later write: "The Tarahumaras,whom I consider to be direct descendants of the Atlanteans, still pursue thismagical ritual." The poet goes on to describe the rictus of indescribablepain on the animal's mouth, the natives gathering its blood in pitchers, anddancers in mirror-studded kings' crowns, wearing triangular aprons similar tothose worn in Freemasonry, encircled the bull. Musicians engaged in repetitive,hypnotic strains on fiddles and an assortment of percussion instruments."They then sang a mournful chant, a secret call from some unimaginabledark force, an unknown presence from the hereafter..." writes Artaud, whowould for the rest of his life be troubled by nightmarish images of hisexperiences among the Tarahumaras, particularly due to his use of the sacredhallucinogen known as peyote.

Many cultures have rituals in common which originated separately. For example,adherents of the Mithraic cult of late Roman times practiced the taurobolia--averitable baptism in the blood of a freshly-slain bull. Was Artaud's experiencepure coincidence coupled to the artistic genius's volatile temperament, or oneof the most astonishing discoveries of our time?