Those faces were found were higher cultures had flourished not only before the Christian era but back in the days when 'the Eternal City' was little more than a village. And yet not the earliest.įor archaeologists hacking their way through Middle American jungles have latterly come upon great stone faces and faces tiny, hook nosed and bearded, carefully carved from jade, faces on pottery, faces on buildings - faces which bear little resemblance to those of Indians but much to a certain Old World type. Here indeed is an early American mystery. A hoard of several hundred Roman coins, the latest from about 350 AD, was dug up near the shore in Venezuela a few years ago. Going back.yet deeper into the past, we come to one of the strangest finds that American soil has yielded. The Spanish conquistadors and missionaries who came on the heels of Columbus and swarmed across the New World's wasp waste in the sixteenth century noted - in areas presumably never before visited by Europeans - hundreds of cultural similarities which bespoke to them an Old World origin. The enduring legend of a bearded Fair God who came out of the east in the misty past and departed again into the sunrise is only one of the myriad mysteries of Middle America. It is one of fate's poorer ironies that Quetzalcoatl, to whom the Mexicans attributed their culture, was even for an hour confused with Cortez who destroyed it

We likewise know that from those parts our nation was led by a certain lord (to whom all were subject) and who then went back to his native land. Long time have we been informed by the writings of our ancestors that neither myself nor any of those who inhabit this land are natives of it, but rather strangers who have come to it from foreign parts. Did some of these seafaring people cross the Atlantic a millennium or two before Columbus, bringing with them a culture whose manifestations have baffled generations of scholars? - Constance Irwin

All these disparate elements were combined in one advanced civilization - the Phoenician.

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