Randall Floyd of Augusta is a syndicated writer.

Tablet tells of early New World exploration

Web posted May 31, 1998

By Randall Floyd
Special Columnist

Long before Christopher Columbus journeyed to the New World in 1492, other European, African and Asian travelers had explored the Americas.

One of the earliest groups appears to have been the Phoenicians, a hearty race of seafarers who apparently made landfall in Brazil at least 500 years before the birth of Christ.

Evidence of this remarkable journey dates from the early 1870s with the discovery of a small stone tablet, which some scholars believe was written by a group of shipwrecked Phoenicians along the Brazilian coast.

"We are the sons of Canaan from Sidon," an eight-line inscription on the stone declares.

If true, the stone memorializes one of the earliest visits to the Americas by Old World voyagers. If not, the so-called Paraiba Inscription is one of history's most remarkable hoaxes.

The stone was found in 1872 by field workers on a plantation in Paraiba (now called Joao Pessoa). Several workers tried to sell the stone before it wound up in the hands of Ladislau Neto, the director of Brazil's National Museum of Rio de Janeiro.

An inscription on the stone, written in Phoenician, describes a voyage from Africa to America. Along the way they encountered fierce storms and high seas and made human sacrifices before finding salvation on the shores of what is now Brazil.

"We survived . . . but fear for our lives daily," the inscription reads.

A long-simmering debate ensued after the inscription was branded a fraud by experts in Phoenician languages. Finally, after 10 years of professional and personal agony, Mr. Neto recanted his belief in the stone's authenticity.

There the matter rested until the late 1960s, when Cyrus Gordon, an American scholar of Semitic languages, studied the text and declared it authentic -- ironically, for some of the same reasons that it was adjudged fraudulent nearly a century before.

So-called inaccuracies of vocabulary and grammar cited by critics in 1874 had become, by 1968, mere idiosyncrasies of dialect. Similarities between the inscription and ancient Hebrew, once considered evidence of deceit, had since been documented as normal among Phoenicians, a people who mixed readily with other cultures.

Moreover, Mr. Gordon's analysis seemed to reveal no fewer than three cryptograms buried in the tale. One, typical of ancient scripts, includes numbers that, when added, confirm the date given by the writer.

The other codes, according to Mr. Gordon, tell the story once again from the point of view of both a Canaanite pagan and a Jewish crewman. The cryptograms, he claimed, were evidence of authenticity, since few counterfeiters were likely to have taken such pains with their work.

In the wake of the stone's discovery dozens of other "clues" to America's pre-Columbian past were found, including Roman and Hebrew coins from the hills of Tennessee, Egyptian relics from Florida and other stone tablets from the Great Lakes region to the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.

While most of these finds have been dismissed as hoaxes, a few, such as the Paraiba Inscription, continue to intrigue scholars. To be sure, Mr. Gordon's detailed interpretation has not settled the controversy over the Paraiba Inscription, and the debate is likely to continue for years to come.

Randall Floyd of Augusta is a syndicated writer.