Who discovered America? It's a simple question and one that usually brings the standard response : Christopher Columbus.
But there are some theories that says that America was actually discovered many years before Columbus sailed "The blue ocean " in 1492 .We will discus some famous theories :
1- Indigenous peoples of the America:
Many believe that immigrants from Asia came to the Americas 40,000 to 13,000 years ago, though they may have come from two separate places. Either way, they are technically the first people to discover America. Upon finding it, they began to build communities and populate the land. But many, many others would come after them.
2- Ancient Egyptian :
Ancient Egyptians may have traded with South American tribes around 1,000 B.C. Scientists can't figure out any other explanation for the amount of tobacco and coca, found only in the Americas, discovered in Egyptian mummies. It is a proven fact that ancient Egyptians traded extensively with other civilizations.
3-Ancient Mesopotamian :
Ancient Mesopotamian may also have a connection with ancient inhabitants of the Andes. It has been found that there are many Semitic words or roots underlying the local Aymara language in Bolivia. Another Reason is that Sargon of Akkad claimed to have been "Lord of the Four Quarters" just like in the Andes, the Incas were "Lords of the Four Quarters, this being the name for the later Inca Empire called Tahuantinsuyo.
Also there are a relic called "Fuenta Magna" that was discovered accidentally by a farmer working on a private estate owned by the Manjon family in Bolivia, that relic contains inscription looks like a Sumerian cuneiform .
4-Phoenicians :
Phoenicia was an ancient Semitic civilization situated on the coastal part of the Fertile Crescent, on the coastline of what is now Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Syria.
For more than a thousand years, and under several different flags, the Phoenician fleets sailed across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Their sailors could well have left Phoenician inscriptions in the countries they visited, even when they were sailing under the orders of a non- Phoenician ruler. A stone called Baal Stone found in the US on which is inscribed “To Baal on behalf of the Canaanites this is dedicated".
Writings of Diodorus Siculus (or Diodorus of Sicily was a Greek historian) mentioning Phoenicians’ discovery of a huge land with ‘navigable rivers’ . Which may be considered to be referring to America.
5- Ancient Greek:
Ptolemy was a prominent Greek astronomer and geographer. In addition to his well known works in astronomy was very important in the history of geography and cartography.
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| The Ptolemaic Cosmological model with the Planets and Sun moving around the Earth as the center of the World. The universe is divided in eight concentric spherical shells, one in which all the stars were fixed, and one for each of the seven planets (Poseidon and Pluto were not known). The sphere of the stars rotate daily around the motionless earth. |
Ptolemy knew that the Earth is a sphere, for his maps he produced one of the first known projections of the sphere onto a plane. His Geography remained the principal work on the subject until the time of Columbus. But he had Asia extending much too far east, which may have been a factor in Columbus's decision to sail west for the Indies. In the 15th century, a Latin translation of this text, with maps, proved a sensation in the world of the book. A best seller both in the age of luxurious manuscripts and in that of print, Ptolemy's Geography became immensely influential. Columbus, one of its many readers, found inspiration in Ptolemy's exaggerated value for the size of Asia for his own fateful journey to the west.
6-Ancient Roman :
Historians claim that Romans discovered America before Christopher Columbus. Scientists from the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society (AAPS) discovered a Roman sword in a shipwreck near the Oak Island south of Nova Scotia, Canada.
They also found carvings of soldiers, ancient coins and native plants. The researchers, led by historic investigator Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, said that Roman ships visited North America during the first century or even earlier.
7-Polynesian :
Polynesia is a sub region of Oceania, made up of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. All Polynesians are descended from the same seafaring people who sailed all over the Pacific. They may have made it all the way to the western shores of America.
New DNA analysis of sweet potatoes, which were first cultivated in the Americas, suggests that Polynesians reached the New World long before Columbus.Also Chicken Bones Suggest Polynesians Found Americas Before Columbus.Scientists looking into the DNA of ancient and modern chicken breeds found throughout Micronesia and Polynesia have determined that they are genetically distinct from those found in South America. The research runs counter to a popular theory that Polynesian seafarers might have reached the coast of South America hundreds of years ago, before European explorers.
8- Lehi The Mormon:
According to the Book of Mormon, Lehi was a prophet who lived in Jerusalem during the reign of king Zedekiah (approximately 600 BC).
According to the Book of Mormon, an ancient prophet and his followers sailed to the Americas around 600 B.C. Lehi built a ship and set out on a voyage across the ocean. He landed in the Americas. The story was later recorded for the Book. DNA evidence proves that Native Americans do not originate from the Middle East, however, and there are no artifacts to verify this legend.
9- The Norsemen (The Vikings):
Norsemen refers to the group of people who spoke what is now called the Old Norse language between the 8th and 11th centuries.
In history, "Norse" or "Norseman" could be any person from Scandinavia, even though Norway, Denmark and Sweden were different sets of people by the Middle Ages.
The story of the Viking exploration is contained in the sagas that passed by word-of-mouth from one generation to another before being committed to paper. Modern archaeological evidence has substantiated much of the saga's story.To date, the only confirmed Viking site in the New World is L’Anse aux Meadows in Canada, a thousand-year-old way station discovered in 1960 on the northern tip of Newfoundland.
It was a temporary settlement, abandoned after just a few years, and archaeologists have spent the past half-century searching for elusive signs of other Norse expeditions. We can mention some names that maybe reached America like: Erik the Red (Discovered Greenland by 985) , Bjarni Herjólfsson (Spotted North America In 985 or 986) and Leif Erikson (Established A Norse Settlement In North America Around 1000).
10-St. Brendan The Irish Navigator:
In the sixth century, Ireland’s St. Brendan embarked on a legendary voyage that some believe took him to North America nearly 500 years before the Vikings and 1,000 years before Christopher Columbus.
According to the story, St. Barinthus told St. Brendan that he had just returned from a visit to Paradise, a land that lurked far beyond the horizon. For 40 days St. Brendan fasted and prayed atop a mountain on the rugged Dingle Peninsula, a spindly finger of land on the west of Ireland that points directly at North America.
11-Prince Madoc:
Welsh lore tells of the voyage of Prince Madoc. One of the illegitimate sons of the king of Gwynedd, he sailed from the north Welsh coast in two ships.
12-The Scottish Henry Sinclair:
Henry Sinclair was Scotland's Admiral of the Seas, and tasked with pacifying Shetland around 1390.
He had 13 warships at his disposal when a fisherman showed up telling a story of an amazing land to the west. He'd been driven way off course by storms to discover it. Legend holds that Sinclair took his ships out past Greenland and discovered a "fertile land." He came back to Scotland in 1399 and told stories of his journey. He planned to return, in fact, but was killed in battle in 1400. The documents supporting this legend are in question by historians, who say they may be forged. However, there was a tribe in Nova Scotia who told tales of a King who came from an island far away, only to stay for a year and sail away again.
Sinclair's grandson built the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland which has carvings that resemble corn and cactus plants. You can only find those in America.
13- Chinese Zheng He:
Zheng He was a famed Chinese Muslim explorer, leading voyages all over the Indian Ocean.
He set out with 20,000 men and dozens of ships to the Atlantic, and definitely made it as far as Africa. He made at least seven voyages from 1405 to 1433. Zheng He was believed to be lost at sea in 1433. Some have theorized that Zheng He went all the way to America. There is a map, said to be Chinese in origin, that supports this theory.
The Chinese map, which was drawn in 1763 but has a note on it saying it is a reproduction of a map dated 1418, presents the world as a globe with all the major continents rendered with an exactitude that European maps did not have for at least another century, after Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Dias and others had completed their renowned explorations.No other evidence of Zheng He in the Americas has ever been found.
14-Muslims:
A preponderance of the voyages embarked upon by Columbus and other Spanish and Portuguese explorers toward the other side of the Atlantic were undertaken only in the light of the geographical and navigational knowledge prepared by Muslims like Al-Masudi’s (871-957 CE) work Muruj’uz-Zahab, for instance, was written with this sort of data compiled by Muslim traders from across Africa and Asia.
Also Muslim scholar Abu Raihan al-Biruni hypothesized the existence of the Americas in the early eleventh century. Having studied the works of Ancient Greek scholars like Claudius Ptolemy and Pythagoras, Al-Biruni was of the few people in that time that actually accurately estimated that the earth was round.
We should also remember that the Al-Khwarizmi map belongs to the Arab world, quite distinct from the European and Mediterranean worlds where Martellus worked.
Al-Idrisi (1090-1180), the famous Arab physician and geographer who established himself in the Arabicised court of King Roger II of Sicily, reported in his extensive work Kitab al-Mamalik wa-l-Masalik, in the 12th century on the journey of a group of seamen who reached the isles of the Americas.
15- Japanese (Jomon Period) :
Smithsonian archaeologist Betty Meggers wrote that pottery associated with the Valdivia culture of coastal Ecuador dated to 3000–1500 BCE exhibited similarities to pottery produced during the Jōmon period in Japan, arguing that contact between the two cultures might explain the similarities.
Chronological and other problems have led most archaeologists to dismiss this idea as implausible. The suggestion has been made that the resemblances (which are not complete) are simply due to the limited number of designs possible when incising clay.
