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And, yes, there have been depictions of horses in Mesoamerican art. (The man riding the horse at Chitzenitza is a famous example; the toy horse pulling the cart is another; see references in Cyrus Gordon's book, "Before Columbus").

I'm not sure depictions in art have much meaning here. The Museum of Anthropologie in Mexico City (I've been there; seen them myself) have a depiction of a bearded European man dating back to around 600 AD to 1000 AD; there is a mural depicting two races of people, white and brown, fighting each other. My guide (a moonlighting university professor) at the Museum told me that these pieces of art demonstrated (1) Europeon contact with MesoAmerica long before Columbus, and (2) a now-extinct light-skinned peoples. But, what of it?

What do you mean by "literature?" The only "literature" of which I am familiar is Popul Vuh and since that post dates the conquest I put little faith in it.

You put no faith in the observations of the conquistidors?

The wheel in pre-Columbian America was restricted to toy wagons as far as archaeological study now records. The lack of draught animals may have ruled out the use of wheeled vehicles for practical purposes, but it is wrong to say that pre-Columbian Americans were ignorant of the wheel.

In the Andes the native llama and alpaca were used as pack animals for carrying burdens. The impression those small beasts make on visitors used to seeing sturdy Old World beasts of burden (such as camels, oxen, horses, mules, or donkeys) is that they are more akin to sheep and goats than to real pack animals. Indeed they are not capable of carrying loads comparable with those a normal donkey can transport. We may be accordingly confronted with another example of translation. Old World people used to pack animals, on coming to the Andes, trained the little cameloids to carry burdens, not because they are well suited for that role, but because they were the best available substitute.

Copper chariot and warriors, from Anatolia, end of third millennium BC. Wheeled animal-drawn vehicles in miniature have been found in Mesoamerican excavations, showing Old World influence precisely because draft animals and wheeled vehicles were not used in pre-Columbian America.

The remarkable fact of the countless Mesoamerican ceramic figurines is that they portray few, if any, American Indian types (such as the Aztec or the Maya) before A.D. 300. Those that appear prior to that date (and many that appear for a thousand years thereafter) belong to other races such as Far Eastern, African Negro and Caucasian. Among the latter are a number of Mediterranean types, especially Semites. ‘

The evidence for the preceding is on record in an important and handsomely illustrated book by Alexander von Wuthenau, The Art of Terracotta Pottery in Pre-Columbian Central and South America. We shall review some of the ceramic sculptures to get an idea of their implications.

We start with the large Mixtec Negro heads fro Oaxaca. It is postclassical, 19 cm high and belongs to the Josue Saenz Collection in Mexico. The black color and the features, such as the thick lips, leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that the artist has portrayed a Negro. No artist can “invent” authentic races of mankind, such as the types we are examining. The implication is simply that early America was the meeting ground of various races of men from the Old World who were eventually absorbed into the modern Indian populations. (p 220

From the Maya area of Iximche, in the province of Chimaltenango (Guatemala), comes a superb incense burner, probably of preclassical date. It is 33.5 cm high and belongs to the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. Everything about the sculptured head – nose, beard, expression – would fit a Northwest Semite. Whether he was a Phoenician, Syrian, Israelite, Greek, or even an Etruscan is not important, for delving into such problems often degenerates into unprofitable hyperfiness. If we be impelled to define him specifically, we may tentatively call him “an ancient Mediterranean merchant prince.” From the Early Iron Age into Roman times, people of his type maintained creative contacts with middle America. He typifies an important group of the merchant mariners who linked the Mediterranean with the New World. His motives may have been trade, but trade for him meant the development as well as exchange of natural resources – all of which required the spread of science and technology. No physical anthropologist will try to change his classification from Mediterranean to American Indian. And the incense burner is related to similar ones from Veracruz. Accordingly in our “merchant prince” we have a specific link between preclassical Mesoamerica and the ancient Mediterranean.

In the private collection of Alexander von Wuthenau is a Mayan head, larger than life-size, of a pensive, bearded Smite. The dolichocephalic (“long-headed”) type fits the Near East well. He resembles certain European Jews, but he is more like many Yemenite Jews. In Maya fashion his nose appears to extend up to the middle of his forehead. This Maya custom is best explained as an exaggerated imitation of the prominent nose that characterizes so many Near Eastern types. It was precisely because men like the Mediterranean merchant princes were aristocrats in the Mesoamerican Order tha ttheir features were emulated by their Maya Indian successors. (p26)

The testimony of ancient American sculpture is complex but clear to this extent: Long before the Vikings reached America around AD 1000, Mesoamerica had long been the scene of the intermingling of different populations from across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Some of the most creative people in America came from the Near East; but no one group monopolized the scene. Caucasians from one end of Europe and Japanese types, from the Far East; from the Mediterranean at different times came various Semites including Phoenicians and Carthaginians, as well as Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans and still others. In general, the main consequence was the mingling of highly civilized people from all over the world, creating on American soil, through the pooling of their cultural resources, a galaxy of brilliant old American civilizations, whose final phases are known to us as Inca, Maya, and Aztec. In culture, as in the physical universe, out of nothing comes nothing. The breathtaking achievements of the Mesoamericans could not be, and were not, the works of savages who lifted themselves up by their bootstraps. Instead they are the culminations of mingled strands of civilization brought to these shores by a variety of talented people from Europe, Africa, and Asia. (p 30)

In culture, as in the physical universe, out of nothing comes nothing. The breathtaking achievements of the Mesoamericans could not be, and were not, the works of savages who lifted themselves up by their bootstraps. Instead they are the culminations of mingled strands of civilization brought to these shores by a variety of talented people from Europe, Africa, and Asia. (p 30)

While looking for stones to make a barbecue pit in 1966, Manfred Metcalf picked up a slab of sandstone about 230 mm square at Fort Benning, near his home in Chattahoochee County, Georgia (USA). It carries an inscribed text that Cyrus Gordon (1909-2001) examined after being sent a cast in 1968 by Joseph B Mahan (1921-1995) of the Institute for the Study of American Cultures. He thought might be an inventory, using a form of the Minoan Linear A script that was developing towards a true alphabetic script, the origin of the Classical Greek alphabet. He linked it with the Yuchi Indians, claiming that, according to their oral history, they originated in the Mediterranean region, and suggested that it was of Canaanite style. Stanislav Segert (1921-2005), a professor of North-West Semitic languages at the University College of Los Angeles (USA), also identified the script as a version of Linear A.

In an interview with William F Dankenbring, Cyrus Gordon is on record as stating that “There is no doubt that these findings, and others, reflect Bronze Age transatlantic communication between the Mediterranean and the New World around the middle of the second millennium BC.” He also believed that there might be a connection between Linear A and other Bronze Age Aegean scripts and those of the New World, Mayan and Aztec and that knowledge of the European scripts would assist in deciphering the American; this was written in 1969, before significant progress was made in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs, which owe nothing to any Old World types.

There are several things worth noting. The ‘text’ has only eight symbols, which is hardly enough to be confident about ascribing it to any particular writing system, least of all one from the other side of the Atlantic! Secondly, the two scholars who passed opinions on it were Semiticists, whose expertise is not in the Aegean script they claim to detect on the stone. Thirdly, Cyrus Gordon believed fervently in Bronze Age contacts between the eastern Mediterranean and North America, a variant of the ‘Lost Tribes of Israel’ theory, despite a complete lack of stratified archaeological evidence for such contacts. Whether the stone is a hoax or a misidentification of meaningless scratches (natural or deliberate) is unclear, but it is certainly not a Cretan Linear A inscription.