Trevor wrote:The Nehor wrote:I actually did read it, I'm giving you a hard time.
As I am not an apologist I don't think I have to.
So you just play one until you are asked to back up what you are saying? ;-)
beastie wrote:I am not impressed with your internet scholarship, nor am I impressed with newspaper articles with one scholar criticizing another. Michael Coe certainly has his enemies; that doesn't make him less of an expert in my eyes.
In other words, no, you're not going to back up your earlier assertions. I'm shocked, I tell ya, just shocked. But tell ya what - you name some Mesoamerican experts who respect or use Gordon's findings, and you'll have a point.
I would ask how in the heck your reconcile your insistence that the Maya had no written language with Coe's Breaking the Maya Code, but I won't waste my time.
Haywood's work was published before the scientific method was applied to anthropology and archeology, when anthropologists were amateurs in the main (he was a Supreme Court justice).
Some of the writers of the period, such as Augustus le Plongeon and Desire Charnay, were prone to imaginative digressions and drawn to wild speculations on the ancient Maya. Le Plongeon, James Churchward, and many others attributed the origins of achievements of the Maya and other New World civilizations to lost tribes from the Old World or from sunken continents. Unfortunately, such fantastic speculations are very effective in capturing public interest. Just as this epoch of popular antiquarian writings had launched modern scientific archaeology, it also seeded the development of the lunatic fringe of Maya archaeology (who even today besiege archaeologists with letters and emails on extraterrestrial influences, Atlantis, and the lost Semitic tribes!)
beastie wrote:As I suspected, you cannot cite a single Mesoamerican expert that respects or uses Gordon's work. I have never seen a single reference to an item that could reliably be traced to the mid-east in all the books I have read on the subject. You, like other apologists, tend to rely on very old, dated material that has since been disregarded as inaccurate. John Haywood (from the 1800's) also claimed that he found iron and steel bows. Just what process did he use to accurately identify these objects? Where are they today? Why do scholars universally assert that Mound Builders did not have the technology to make iron or steel? It was a very popular myth during Joseph Smith' time period, that much is true, but today's scholars reject the idea. And why do scholars today universally (outside the Barry Fell fringe) assert that there is no tangible evidence of Old World contact?
Gordon relied on artifacts that were later shown to be hoaxes, like the Bat Creek stone. Now I know you can still find fringers who insist they were real, but the experts in the field dispute that.
http://www.ramtops.co.uk/bat2.html
Why do you expect to be taken seriously at all when your sources are as old as they are, and regarded as erroneous by modern experts, who have access to superior technology that enables them to access these claims?
(edit on: at last we agree on one thing:Haywood's work was published before the scientific method was applied to anthropology and archeology, when anthropologists were amateurs in the main (he was a Supreme Court justice).
It should be a tiny clue to you that you keep having to rely on amateurs, working outside their area of expertise.
Gordon relied on artifacts that were later shown to be hoaxes, like the Bat Creek stone.
Gordon can't be dismissed that easily. And my posts cite numerous experts who rely upon him and cite him. You just haven't read my post. He was a giant of this time with an odd hobby horse of Americanism.
Nonetheless, Haywood exhibits the state of the art for what was then known as ethnology.
But tell ya what - you name some Mesoamerican experts who respect or use Gordon's findings, and you'll have a point.
I've cited Gordon to you.
Pohl, Atlantic Crossings Before Columbus
Frederick Julius Pohl (1889-1991) was a prolific playwright, literary critic, editor, and book writer. He is best known for his books espousing speculative and controversial historical theories of Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact by Europeans, including the Vikings and others.
Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Cannan
Darlington, The Evolution of Man and Society
Cyril Dean Darlington (19 December 1903 - 26 March 1981) was an English biologist, geneticist and eugenicist, who discovered the mechanics of chromosomal crossover, its role in inheritance, and therefore its importance to evolution.
Bruce, Israel and the Nations
Frederick Fyvie Bruce (12 October 1910 – 11 September 1990) was a Bible scholar, and one of the founders of the modern evangelical understanding of the Bible. His work New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? is considered a classic in the discipline of Christian apologetics.
As I suspected, you cannot cite a single Mesoamerican expert that respects or uses Gordon's work.
What part of Gordon's work do you believe has been discredited?
There the story might have rested, had Piccus not sent a copy to Cyrus H Gordon (1909-2001), head of the Department of Mediterranean Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham (Massachusetts, USA) and an expert in ancient Semitic languages. Unlike Renan, he thought the Paraíba inscription contained elements of Phoenician style that were unknown in the nineteenth century and concluded that it was genuine. His translation of the stone runs: “We are Sidonian Canaanites from the city of the Mercantile King. We were cast up on this distant shore, a land of mountains. We sacrificed a youth to the celestial gods and goddesses in the nineteenth year of our mighty King Hiram and embarked from Ezion-geber into the Red Sea. We voyaged with ten ships and were at sea together for two years around Africa. Then we were separated by the hand of Baal and were no longer with our companions. So we have come here, twelve men and three women, into New Shore. Am I, the Admiral, a man who would flee? Nay! May the celestial gods and goddesses favour us well!”
Despite Gordon’s certainty about the genuineness of the inscription, he failed to find support from colleagues and, notably, entered into a bitter dispute with Frank Moore Cross Jr (born 1921), Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages Emeritus at Harvard. Attempts have been made to link the text with Brazilian freemasonry, but they are perhaps a little vague. Nevertheless, with no trace of the stone, its alleged discoverer or the place of discovery, it is difficult to accept this as anything other than a hoax.
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 that their 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)