Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Hysterical AD ‘History’. Part One: What if?


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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.

 

Image result for alexander the great and the amazons

 

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.

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