Some of the more intelligent investigators have maintained, with no
little confidence, that this ancient American civilization came
originally from the Phoenicians. Among those who use reason in their
inquiries sufficiently to be incapable of accepting the absurdities of
monkish fancy, this hypothesis has found more favor than any other.
Wherever inquiry begins by assuming that the original civilizers came
from some other part of the world, it seems more reasonable than any
other, for more can be said to give it the appearance of probability.
The people known to us as Phoenicians were pre-eminent as the colonizing
navigators of antiquity. They were an enlightened and enterprising
maritime people, whose commerce traversed every known sea, and extended
its operations beyond the "Pillars of Hercules" into the "great exterior
ocean." The early Greeks called them Ethiopians (not meaning either
black men or Africans), and said they went every where, establishing
their colonies and their commerce in all the coast regions, "from the
extreme east to the extreme west." But the great ages of this people are
in the distant past, far beyond the beginning of what we call history.
History has knowledge only of a few of their later communities, the
Sabeans of Southern Arabia, the Phoenicians (meaning chiefly the
Tyrians), and the Carthaginians. What a change there would be in the
prevalent conceptions of the past if we could have a complete record of
this race from the beginning of its development!
It is not difficult to believe that communities of the Phoenician or
Ethiopian race were established all around the Mediterranean, and even
beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, in ages quite as old as Egypt or
Chaldea, and that they had communication with America before Tyre or
Sidon was built. Why did the ancients say so much of a "great Saturnian
continent" beyond the Atlantic if nobody in the pre-historic ages had
ever seen that continent? It was there, as they said and as we know; but
whence came their knowledge of it, and such knowledge as led them to
describe it as "larger than Asia (meaning Asia Minor), Europe, and Libya
together?" This ancient belief must have been due to Phoenician or
Ethiopian communication with America in earlier times, which was
imperfectly recollected, or perhaps never completely revealed to other
nations; and this must have taken place at a very remote period, for
imperfect recollection of the great continent across the Atlantic,
including what Solon heard in Egypt of Atlantis, was more ancient than
the constrained voyage of that Tyrian ship of which Diodorus Siculus
gives an account; and it can be seen that the early Greeks had a better
knowledge even of Western Europe than those of later times. A dark age,
so far as relates to geographical knowledge, set in upon the countries
around the AEgean Sea and on the coast of Asia Minor after the
independence and enterprise of Tyre and the other Phoenician cities
were destroyed by the Assyrians, toward the close of the ninth century
before Christ, which was disturbed some four hundred and fifty or five
hundred years later by the conquests of Alexander the Great.
The known enterprise of the Phoenician race, and this ancient knowledge
of America, so variously expressed, strongly encourage the hypothesis
that the people called Phoenicians came to this continent, established
colonies in the region where ruined cities are found, and filled it with
civilized life. It is argued that they made voyages on the "great
exterior ocean," and that such navigators must have crossed the
Atlantic; and it is added that symbolic devices similar to those of the
Phoenicians are found in the American ruins, and that an old tradition
of the native Mexicans and Central Americans described the first
civilizers as "bearded white men," who "came from the East in ships."
Therefore, it is urged, the people described in the native books and
traditions as "Colhuas" must have been Phoenicians.
But if it were true that the civilization found in Mexico and Central
America came from people of the Phoenician race, it would be true also
that they built in America as they never built any where else, that they
established a language here radically unlike their own, and that they
used a style of writing totally different from that which they carried
into every other region occupied by their colonies. All the forms of
alphabetical writing used at present in Europe and Southwestern Asia
came directly or indirectly from that anciently invented by the race to
which the Phoenicians belonged, and they have traces of a common
relationship which can easily be detected. Now the writing of the
inscriptions at Palenque, Copan, and elsewhere in the ruins has no more
relatedness to the Phoenician than to the Chinese writing. It has not a
single characteristic that can be called Phoenician any more than the
language of the inscriptions or the style of architecture with which it
is associated; therefore we can not reasonably suppose this American
civilization was originated by people of the Phoenician race, whatever
may be thought relative to the supposed ancient communication between
the two continents and its probable influence on civilized communities
already existing here.