Before Columbus: Links Between the Old World and Ancient America

A revolutionary treatise by one of the world's most eminent scholars, Before Columbus provides startling new evidence linking ancient Mesoamerica with the civilizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Thoroughly documented, the culmination of a lifetime of research, the book vividly demonstrates that transoceanic travel across the Atlantic and Pacific to the New World was taking place as long as five thousand years ago. Drawing on many previously overlooked sources. Dr. Gordon constructs his theory from a variety of cultural manifestations: sculpture; historical references; Egyptian, Babylonian, and other recondite literatures; Greek classics; the Bible; ancient maps; linguistic history; and archeological discoveries. Mesoamerican sculpture before A.D. 300 that portrayed Far Eastern, African Negro, and Caucasian races indicates that “long before the Vikings reached America around A.D. 1000, Mesoamerica had been the scene of the intermingling of different populations from across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.” In the writings of the ancient Greeks—Aristotle, Plato, and various historians—Dr. Gordon finds references to a land mass that could be only America. Reconstructing the maritime view of the world held by the ancients until Roman times, he discusses the voyages of Minoan and Phoenician ships to America made during the Bronze and Early Iron ages against the background of classical literature, starting with Homer, and of newly discovered inscriptions. Before Columbus probes the relationship between the Aztec tradition of “The Plumed Serpent” with similar legends found in the Bible, in Babylonian and Athenian culture, and in an Egyptian novelette, The Shipwrecked Sailor, showing that communications between the Old and New Worlds fostered common beliefs. The discovery of the Metcalf Stone in Fort Benning, Georgia, reflects a relationship between the Yuchis, an American tribe, and the East Mediterranean milieu of the Late Bronze Age. Dr. Gordon interprets the significance of a Canaanite inscription discovered in Brazil in 1872, telling of a Near Eastern ship that landed there in 531 B.C. He offers further proof of many cultural tie-ins with the Old World in a detailed examination of an ancient American Indian text. The Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya, which describes their ancestors as coming from the other side of the sea, and includes parallels to the book of Genesis and to the recently deciphered literatures of western Asia. By far the most dramatic and exciting discovery was made at Bat Creek, Tennessee, where a Hebrew inscription of Roman date was scientifically excavated. However, the text was published upside down and dismissed as unimportant until it was realized that, turned right side up, the script is plainly Canaanite. Dr. Gordon’s brilliant analysis of this stone inscribed in Roman antiquity attests to the astounding fact that in the second century A.D. Jews from Palestine migrated to our Southeast. Before Columbus is a searching, provocative exposition of an idea that shatters traditional approaches to pre-Columbian history. It paves the way for “the unified history of both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres,” supporting its breathtaking claims with factual evidence, logic, and the weight of controlled and careful scholarship. Written with smooth, unadorned simplicity and clarity, it will stimulate and spellbind everyone interested in exploding myths and replacing them with factual history.