Riddles in History

Ever since the Early Bronze Age, transatlantic crossings were made by men who left only a few fascinating and mysterious clues to their presence, riddles which baffled even the most adept scholar. Now, in his first book since the controversial best seller Before Columbus, the distinguished linguist and historian Dr. Cyrus H. Gordon documents a dramatic breakthrough in the discovery of man’s past, revealing how ancient cryptograms can be decoded to prove the actuality of pre-Columbian contacts between the Old World and the New. Dr. Gordon skillfully explores the reasons why esoteric messages were cleverly imbedded in ancient inscriptions as well as in medieval Norse texts found from the coast of Maine to central Minnesota, and dating from the early twelfth to the late fourteenth century. In ancient times, literacy was limited to professional scribes, extremely clever men who enjoyed showing their cleverness in their compositions. They wrote for an elitist segment of the population who were taught to master riddles and cryptograms and grasp the deeper meaning subtly concealed beneath the surface meaning of their texts. Recounting the intriguing stories behind the discovery of these ancient puzzles, the author concentrates on four specific cases and shows how they fit into historical perspective with one another, bringing an astounding and heretofore little-known aspect of research into sharp focus for the first time. These unexpected discoveries were: The Paraiba text, a stone found in 1872 in Brazil that records an ancient sailing from the Red Sea to Brazil, bearing witness to the fact that a group of Sidonian subjects made a transatlantic crossing as early as 534-531 B.C. The Kensington Stone, discovered by a farmer in Minnesota. The stone was imbedded in the roots of a tree and commemorated an expedition of Scandinavians who reached Minnesota in 1362 from Vinland. The Spirit Pond Inscriptions, three runestones found by a carpenter in Maine which reveal that Norsemen endeavored to establish permanent Christian colonies in Vinland and other parts of Continental North America in the twelfth century. The Vinland Map with a Latin inscription that attributes it to the first recorded Bishop in America. The latter is none other than Eirikr Gnupsson, also known as Bishop Henricus, the author of the Spirit Pond runestones which have the enciphered date of “6 October 1123.” Up until the present time, many routes of exploration have been employed to prove the hYpothesis that a flow of transoceanic visits to the Western Hemisphere took place long before the fifteenth century. In Riddles in History, Cyrus Gordon has chosen what is surely the most compelling data yet uncovered: hard evidence that fixes specific contacts by definite people at definite times. It is a book that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are truly on the threshold of a new era of man’s search for himself, a quest that will take him not into the future but into the exciting labyrinth of his own undiscovered past. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Cyrus H. Gordon was educated in his native city of Philadelphia. There, at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned the degrees of A.B., M.A., and Ph.D., he studied Akkadian, Hebrew, Latin, Scandinavian, and other languages used in this book. Then he went to the Near East for four years of excavating at a variety of ancient sites, and exploring new regions for archaeological development. More recently he has extended his fieldwork to the New World. Among the many awards he has won, a fellowship of the American-Scandinavian Foundation that brought him to Sweden proved to be particularly fruitful, for it was there that he wrote the Ugaritic Grammar while deepening his knowledge of Scandinavian languages. During World War II his linguistic accomplishments were applied by the Army Signal Corps to breaking enemy codes and ciphers. The different strands of his career have uniquely equipped him to write this book on the Semitic, Classical, and Nordic plaintext and cryptograms recording transatlantic sailings before Columbus. Dr. Gordon holds the Gottesman Professorship at New York University.