by
Damien F. Mackey
“After the Shang army was routed and the emperor killed … some
loyalists might have sailed down the Yellow River and taken to the ocean.
There, perhaps, they drifted with a current which skirts Japan's coast, heads
for California and peters out near Ecuador”.
Dr. David
Livingston
Evidence seems to be mounting for one of the early
civilizations of Mesoamerica, the Olmecs, to have originated from China
following the fall of the Shang dynasty. Conventionally dated c. 2000-1650 BC -
corresponding to Middle Bronze I-II in Levantine archaeology - the latter part
of the Shang dynasty would have overlapped with Hammurabi of Babylon (d. 1750 BC).
{Though another chronology would date Hammurabi’s
death closer to c. 1685 BC}.
The dynasty of Hammurabi is considered to have terminated
with the Sack of Babylon during the reign of:
c.
1562—1531 BC
|
Sack of Babylon
|
roughly a century after the fall of the Shang
dynasty.
In revised terms, though, the era of Hammurabi
belongs much later, to the approximate time of kings David and Solomon of
Israel:
Hammurabi and Zimri-Lim as Contemporaries of Solomon
This was, in fact, the Late Bronze – and not
the Middle Bronze – Era of history.
The massive time shift required (approximately
eight centuries), and its corresponding stratigraphy, would need to be taken well
into account when studying the Shang dynasty, and – presumably – the origins of
the Olmecs.
With this in mind, we can consider yet another article
on Shang dynastic origins for the Olmecs, this one written by Dr. David
Livingston, entitled “The Flood
and Subsequent Civilization”: http://davelivingston.com/postfloodciv.htm
….
Tale of Two Cultures: Ancient Chinese Dynasty Linked to
New World's Earliest Civilization
Abroad for the first time in his life, Han Ping
Chen, a scholar of ancient Chinese, landed at Dulles International Airport near
Washington, D.C., the night of September 18, 1996. The next morning, he paced
in front of the National Gallery of Art, waiting for the museum to open so he
could visit an Olmec exhibit -- works from Mesoamerica's spectacular
"mother culture" that emerged suddenly with no apparent antecedents,
3,200 years ago. After a glance at a 10 ton basalt sculpture of a head, Chen
faced the object that prompted his trip: an Olmec sculpture found in La Venta,
10 miles south of the southernmost cove of the Gulf of Mexico.
What the Chinese scholar saw was 15 male
figures made of serpentine or jade, each about 6 inches tall. Facing them were
a taller sandstone figure and six upright, polished, jade blades called celts.
The celts bore incised markings, some of them faded. Proceeding from right to
left, Chen scrutinized the markings silently, grimacing when he was unable to
make out more than a few squiggles on the second and third celts. But the lower
half of the fourth blade made him jump. "I can read this easily," he
shouted. "Clearly, these are Chinese characters."
For years, scholars have waged a passionate
debate over whether Asian refugees or adventurers might somehow have made their
way to the New World long before Columbus, stimulating brilliant achievements
in cosmogony, art, astronomy and architecture in a succession of cultures from
the Olmec to the Mayan and Aztec. On one side are the "diffusionists,"
who have compiled a long list of links between Asian and Mesoamerican cultures,
including similar rules for the Aztec board game of patolli and the Asian
pachisi (also known as Parcheesi), a theological focus in ancient China and
Mesoamerica on tiger-jaguar and dragonlike creatures, and a custom, common both
to China's Shang dynasty and the Olmecs, of putting a jade bead in the mouth of
a deceased person.
"Nativists," on the other hand,
dismiss such theories as ridiculous and argue for the autonomous development of
pre-Columbian civilizations. They bristle at the suggestion that indigenous
people did not evolve on their own.
Striking Resemblances
For diffusionists, Olmec art offers a tempting
arena for speculation. Carbon-dating places the Olmec era between 1000 and 1200
BC, coinciding with the Shang dynasty's fall in China. American archaeologists
unearthed the group sculpture in 1955. Looking at the sculpture displayed in
the National Gallery, as well as other Olmec pieces, some Mexican and American
scholars have been struck by the resemblances to Chinese artifacts. In fact,
archaeologists initially labeled the first Olmec figures found at the turn of
the century as Chinese. Migrations from Asia over the land bridge 10,000 -
15,000 years ago could account for the Chinese features, such as slanted eyes,
but not for the stylized mouths and postures peculiar to sophisticated Chinese
art that emerged in recent millennia.
Yet, until Chen made his pilgrimage to the
museum, no Shang specialist had ever studied the Olmec. The scholar emerged
from the exhibit with a theory. After the Shang army was routed and the emperor
killed, he suggested, some loyalists might have sailed down the Yellow River
and taken to the ocean. There, perhaps, they drifted with a current which
skirts Japan's coast, heads for California and peters out near Ecuador. Betty
Meggers, a senior Smithsonian archaeologist who has linked Ecuadorian pottery
to 5,000 year old ship wrecked Japanese pottery, says such an idea is
"plausible" because ancient Asian mariners were far more proficient
than given credit for.
But Chen's identification of the celt markings
sharpens the controversy over origins even further. For example,
Mesoamericanist Michael Coe at Yale University labels Chen's search for Chinese
characters as insulting to the indigenous people of Mexico. There are only
about a dozen experts worldwide in the Shang script, which is largely
unrecognizable to readers of modern Chinese. When Prof. Mike Xu, a professor of
Chinese history at the University of Central Oklahoma, traveled to Beijing to
ask Chen to examine his index of 146 markings from pre-Columbian objects, Chen
refused, saying he had no interest in anything outside China. He relented only
after a colleague familiar with Xu's work insisted that Chen, as China's
leading authority, take a look. He did and found that all but three of Xu's
markings could have come from China.
Xu was at Chen's side in the National Gallery
when the Shang scholar read the text on the Olmec celt in Chinese and
translated: "The ruler and his chieftains establish the foundation for a
kingdom." Chen located each of the characters on the celt in three
well-worn Chinese dictionaries he had with him. Two adjacent characters are
usually read as "master and subjects," but Chen decided that in this
context they might mean "ruler and his chieftains." The character on
the line below he recognized as the symbol for "kingdom" or
"country" -- two peaks for hills, a curving line underneath for
river. The next character, Chen said, suggests a bird but means
"waterfall" completing the description. The bottom character he read
as "foundation" or "establish," implying the act of
founding something important. If Chen is right, the celts not only offer the
earliest writing in the New World, but mark the birth of a Chinese settlement
more than 3,000 years ago.
At lunch the next day, Chen said he was awake
all night thinking about the sculpture. He talked about how he had studied
Chinese script at age 5, tutored by his father, the director of the national
archives. But Chen's father did not live to enjoy the honors the son reaped,
such as a recent assignment to compile a new dictionary of characters used by
the earliest dynasties -- the first update since one commissioned by a Han
emperor 2,000 years ago.
Color Nuances
Chen was so taken with the Olmec sculpture that
he ventured beyond scholarly caution. The group sculpture, he said, might
memorialize "a historic event," either a blessing sought from ancestors
or the act of founding a new kingdom or both. He was mesmerized by the tallest
figure in the sculpture -- made from red sandstone as porous as a sponge, in
contrast to the others, which are highly polished and green-blue in hue. Red
suggests higher status, Chen said. Perhaps the figure was the master of the
group, a venerated ancestral spirit. The two dark blue figures to the right
might represent the top noblemen, more important than the two others, carved
out of pale green serpentine.
The Smithsonian's Meggers says that Chen's
analysis of the colors makes sense. But his reading of the text is the
clincher. "Writing systems are too arbitrary and complex. They cannot be
independently reinvented." More than 5,000 Shang characters have survived,
Chen says even though the soldiers who defeated the Shang forces murdered the
scholars and burned or buried any object with writing on it. In a recent
excavation in the Shang capital of Anyang, archaeologists have found a buried
library of turtle shells covered with characters. And at the entrance lay the
skeleton of the librarian, stabbed in the back and clutching some writings to
his breast.
The Olmec sculpture was buried under white sand
topped with alternate layers of brown and reddish-brown sand. Perhaps it was
hidden to save it from the kind of rage that sought to wipe out the Shang and
their memory. (U.S. News & World Report, 11/4/96.)
Dr Livingston’s conclusion (and his
date):
Why This is Important
1.
It
demonstrates that shortly after Noah's Flood, there was wide migration of the
families who were descendants of Noah. They were intelligent -- not evolving
brute beasts -- and by 1200 BC (actually even much earlier) were able to
navigate on the world's oceans.
2.
This
diminishes the need for a Siberia-to-Alaska ice/land bridge crossing. In fact,
the scanty evidence we find for ancient settlements in Alaska could even be the
remains of migrants coming from south of Alaska instead of from Siberia.
The Native Americans,
then, were probably of oriental descent and did not "evolve" locally
from some lower form of life in the Americas.
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