crossing to ophir: who came first?

Who got here first? Refugees from Atlantis? Phoenicians piloting the children of Israel? Chinese? Egyptians? Or none of them? Is it possible to conceive of the unthinkable with regard to the discovery of America?

In 1641 a Portuguese Jew named Antonio Montezinos, while journeying near Quito in Ecuador, met up with a native who, he was flabbergasted to discover, was Jewish. What is more, the man took him on an arduous week-ling trip through the hinterland to a remote spot where an entire community of jews was living; Antonio actually heard them recite in Hebrew the traditional prayer, “Hear,O Israel.”


Courtesy Wardell Milan and Taxter & Spengmann, New York
“Christopher Columbus’ Discovery of the New World” by Wardell Milan depicts an astronaut in a strange land.
Colonization works first through imperialism and then through popular culture in an increasingly permeable flow, yet no force, it seems, mutes the voices of the wretched of the Earth.
That statement may seem like a serious, if not ponderous, conclusion to reach after viewing Wardell Milan’s exhibition, “Landscapes! Romance, Rottenness,” at Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College, yet the title itself alludes to a paradoxical complexity that encompasses art history; beauty and emotion; and political, social and cultural corruption.—Read More:http://www.gomemphis.com/news/2010/nov/26/milan-collages-detail-clashes-of-cultures/

Returning to Europe, he reported this spectacular news to Manasseh ben Israel, the most eminent Jewish scholar of the day. Manasseh published it in a slim volume called The Hope of Israel, which was swiftly translated from Spanish into Latin, Hebrew, and English; the English version went into three editions within two years. Manasseh was not the first to claim that the Lost Tribes of Israel had crossed the ocean to America, but he was the one who really launched the notion on its long-lived career.

The theory that wandering Israelites were among the founders of New World civilization reached its heyday in the last century. Lord Kingsborough of England, for example, went through the family fortune and landed in debtors’ prison no less than three times in order to publish deluxe volumes proving that the Mexican Indians were descendents of the Lost Tribes. And the Mormon sacred writings speak of two waves of Israelite migrants, an early wave of Jaredites, who found their way across the Atlantic during the confused times after the toppling of the Tower of Babel and a later one made up of the followers of a certain Lehi, who left Jerusalem about 600 B.C. , shortly before the rest of the city was led off into the Babylonian captivity.

—The discovery of the New World implied the discovery of a new world of no-no’s, a recently inaugurated exhibit of religious art shows. Transgression and Temptation in New Spain, now showing at Tepotzotlan’s National Viceregal Museum near Mexico City, illustrates the array of sins, peccadilloes and offenses that preoccupied the clergy and ruling classes in colonial-era Mexico, including some that were never an issue before, such as indulging in too much chocolate or pulque, two staples of the pre-Hispanic diet that were unknown in Europe. Both were believed to boost your energy levels, but also your libido if taken in excess, so prohibitions soon followed.—Read More:http://mexico-ink.com/2012/02/22/new-world-gave-old-world-new-no-nos/


How the emigres negotiated the thousands of miles of open water bothered no one, since the Bible provided a built-in expanation. The Lost tribes had presumably gotten themselves lost sometime after 721 B.C., the year that Sargon II of Assyria conquered the northern part of Palestine and resettled its inhabitants in the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. At least two centuries before this, Solomon had “made a navy of ships in Ezion-geber… on the shore of the Red Sea,” which he manned with Phoenician “shipmen that had knowledge of the sea” and which “came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold… and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.” If the ships of the day could make it to Ophir and back- a three years’ journey, we are told- obviously they could take an Atlantic crossing in stride.

—The discovery of the New World, symbolised by the youthful Christopher Columbus, unfortunately accompanied — not to say dominated, as here above in Dali’s painting and at both recent political conventions — by the Old Time Religion of the Old World, a bacillus which still infects and undercuts America today.
There is of course an alternative view; that “Religious teachers predominantly in America, compared to Europe, are good healthy materialists. They … go with common sense.” Guess who had this view, 47 years ago at least.—Read More:http://pc.blogspot.ca/2008/09/discovery-of-america-salvador-dali.html

The Bible pointedly mentions that Solomon used Phoenician crews. The Phoenicians were for a long while the mariners par excellence of the ancient world. They even boasted considerable oceanic expertise: not only did they sail to Ophir but, according to a tale reported by Herodotus, around 600 B.C. a fleet of Phoenician galleys successfully circumnavigated the continent of Africa. ( to be continued)…

Related Posts

This entry was posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>