by
Damien F. Mackey
“De Soto’s expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years
in the early 16th century and saw hordes of people but apparently did not see a
single bison.”
~ Charles Mann, 1491: New
Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
Introduction
What if some of what we have been
taught as pertaining to AD history was simply a fabrication, based on incidents
that had happened in BC time?
An entire elaborate history has been created concerning the supposed
Spanish conquests of Mesoamerica, according to which small European forces, employing
armour and a more sophisticated weaponry, were able to overcome, in a
remarkably short time, brilliant but less developed nations, which, nonetheless,
could boast forces of warriors numbering tens to hundreds of thousands.
Spaniard Francisco Pizarro, at the highly successful (for him) battle of
Cajamarca, in 1532, had reputedly led a mere 168 men, his force of Spaniards
outnumbered by the Incas 45 to 1.
This defies credibility!
The Incas are known to have been a most resourceful and skilled people. Surely,
they would have been able to have dealt with only 168 men even if all of these
had been carrying shotguns.
The conquest of
the seven islands of the Canarians, who lived life at a most primitive level,
by contrast to the most sophisticated Incas and Aztecs, “spanned almost a
century (1402-1496) and was met with fierce resistance in at least four of the
seven islands”.
Historians have to posit a whole lot of extra factors to account for the
Spanish victories by the likes of Pizarro, and, slightly earlier (1521), Hernán
Cortés. Admittedly, the latter had managed to win over a number of tributaries and rivals of the Aztecs – such as the Totonacs, the
Tlaxcaltecas and the Texcocans, who, it is said, provided the Spanish with handy extra forces. But other
factors have to be thrown in, as well, to make the whole epic seem more credible:
smallpox decimating the Aztecs; paralysing fear of an unknown white people
riding large, unidentifiable creatures (horses); invaders who might even be
gods; ominous eclipses; famine.
These factors remind me of the supposed plague of mice that the Greek
historian Herodotus thought had set for destruction Sennacherib’s army of
185,000, by gnawing at their bowstrings. Similarly fanciful are the views of
others who think that the same massive Assyrian army was just zapped on the
spot, by a great bolt of lightning, or some other natural phenomenon.
The hypothesised collision of a sophisticated European ‘Old World’ culture
with ‘New World’ civilisations in America, that still, however, bore the stamp of
ancient cultures like in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or China, is quite confronting, even
surreal.
But is it really credible? Was this the case of Old World Europe meets
New World America?
Or could the true situation in Mesoamerica rather have been more like
this?:
A
different explanation
At some point after the great Noachic Flood, not far removed from the
Stone Age Acheulean phase, humans had managed to find their way into the
Americas.
Dr. John Osgood has put the Acheulean phase into a biblically-friendly
perspective as follows (“A Better Model for the Stone Age”: https://creation.com/a-better-model-for-the-stone-age):
From
the dispersion of Babel into the virgin forested lands of Palestine came the
families of Canaan – Genesis 10:15-19. The initial number of
families is unknown, but they are represented culturally by the Palestinian
Acheulean artifacts.
Their
culture was consciously adapted to their new environment of heavily forested
country and wet climate with large lakes in land basins, much of the water
being left-over from the great Flood. The wet climate would have produced heavy
sedimentation of the open land and friable conditions in many caves, which
nonetheless were good protection from the climate.
From
the Acheulian background two different developments came – the Mousterian and
Aurignacian of Palestine. At Carmel the Mousterian shelters suffered collapse,
possibly from earthquake … ending Mousterian habitation in them. Geographically
at least, the Aurignacian appears to have given rise to Kebaran culture. ….
The most notable early American culture, formerly considered to have been
the very first one - but no longer - was the Clovis culture: http://www.crystalinks.com/clovis.html
“The Clovis culture
is a prehistoric Native
American culture that first appears in the archaeological record of
North America around 13,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.
The culture is
named for artifacts found near Clovis, New Mexico, where the first evidence of
this tool complex was excavated in 1932. Earlier evidence included a mammoth
skeleton with a spear-point in its ribs, found by a cowboy in 1926 near Folsom,
New Mexico. Clovis sites have since been identified throughout all of the
contiguous United States, as well as Mexico and Central America.
The Clovis
people, also known as Paleo-Indians,
are generally regarded as the … first human inhabitants of the New World, and
ancestors of all the indigenous cultures of North and South America. However,
this view has been recently contested by various archaeological finds which are
claimed to be much older”.
{I would immediately reject as far too inflated, though, the “13,500
years ago”}.
Just as in ancient Egypt, Syro-Palestine, and Mesopotamia, so in the
Americas, had the original so-called ‘Stone Age’ peoples progressively developed
and increased in their technological expertise eventually giving birth to a more
sophisticated dynastic phase of their history. Whilst historians have a tendency,
evolutionary-based, to consider Stone Ages, Archaeological Ages, and Dynasties,
all as if in single file, one following after the other, the truth can be that
some of these overlap. For instance, whilst the early tendency had been to
consider the Olmecs of Mesoamerica as being the “Mother Culture” of the other sophisticated
cultures, some now think that the Maya, at least, may have developed alongside
the Olmecs.
And so it may basically have been the case with some of those other
nations of different regions.
These mighty cultures all flourished in their time - just as had the
ancient Egyptians, Syro-Palestinians and Mesopotamians - but then they died
out, for whatever reasons: conquest, famine, migration, etc. Other cultures
took their place, only to be replaced in time by yet others.
That is how history goes.
In the case of the ancient Americas, their histories were generally not
recorded in detail and so were lost. Today they have to be pieced together from
folklore from the indigenous peoples and from fragmentary monuments.
More detailed accounts, supposedly post-Conquest, are thought to have
been written by the Spanish themselves – this, presuming that a Conquest had
really occurred.
History tells us of this unlikely detail about the cruel Spaniard, Hernando
de Soto, a member of Pizarro’s expedition: “Hernando
De Soto’s expedition staggered through the Southeast for four years in the
early 16th century and saw hordes of people but apparently did not see a single
bison.” ~ Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
The SE of America was actually crawling with these
fine animals.
The
Comanche alone killed more than 280,000 buffalo a year.
One has to wonder did a Hernando de Soto really go there at all?
Spanish conquistadores, supposedly
loathing the pagan shrines and temples of Mesoamerica, the human sacrifices, were
charged to tear them down. But these were so perfectly made that, it is said,
the Spanish were not able successfully to achieve this. However, great Egyptian
pharaohs, such as Thutmose III and Ramses II, did not seem to have had too much
trouble tearing down and re-using for their own glorification the older grand pharaonic
edifices. Maybe there were never any conquistadores
to attempt to tear down those ancient structures, which were still standing
when modern European and Asian explorers came and began to settle in the land. Only
then did Christian churches and European-style edifices begin to be constructed.
And the pyramids and temples of the Mesoamericans still stand to this day.
But where are all the Spanish conquistador
forts and defence srtuctures?
In my article”
Alexander the Great and Hernán Cortés
the two great and virtually unconquerable military leaders, Alexander and
Cortés, were compared and found to be uncannily similar. It was just as if
someone was - or some ones were - writing ancient Greece into a supposedly
modern environment and in a different world.
Even to the extent of remembering to include Amazons again.
Adding to this perception of BC projected
into AD time was my likening of a gold-greedy Cortés to a
gold-greedy Choresh, or Cyrus – emperor Montezuma, in the Mesoamerican account,
now replacing the Golden King “Rich As” Croesus:
Croesus and Montezuma
Following
this trend of Greco-Macedonian BC re-emerging in Mesoamerican AD, supposedly, with
whom in Greek antiquity should we compare Pizarro? Pisistratus?
Readers
are invited to make a suggestion.
No comments:
Post a Comment