Marduk Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sorry if i misquoted
> i wasn't trying to be evasive
> i personally don't put much faith into any Spanish
> retellings of indian myths
> i doubt their motives in most cases
> but this legend is pretty much standard through
> all indian tribes on the continent

Okay … the ones I know of are at Tiwanaku and at Teotihuacán … at Tiwanaku in current day Bolivia I have heard (never read this evidence for myself however) that the native peoples there said that they didn’t build it. Tiwanaku “fell” around 1000 AD the Spanish arrived roughly 500 years later, besides that being a fairly substantial time frame you also have the Inca between them moving bodies of people around intentionally to hold down fighting and resistance (esp in this area as the Aymara fought them quite well). Purposefully stamped out the local legends and supplanted their own. Its not surprising at all that 500 years later (and with shorter life spans that means many more generations than 500 years would be for us) that the people of the area didn’t know who had built Tiwanaku.

At Teotihuacán the Aztecs told the Spanish that they didn’t build it … which was quite right! They didn’t. They found the city abandoned when they made their migration south towards present day Mexico City. But archaeological research has shown us that the city was built by the local population. We have, after all, recovered bodies not only of regular burials and sacrifices but now have bodies of the rulers who were found buried in the pyramids.



> .
> Dilmun the fabled Sumerian eden is also described
> as being the land where the sun sets


Wouldn’t that be west of the Sumerians rather than east? At any rate there’s nothing to suggest that this place is the Americas OR for that matter that this journey ever occurred at all.


> the description of the Sumerian UNDERworld
> which has the following elements
> Great Rivers
> Huge Forests
> Cedar Woods
> Mountains full of silver
> monkeys
> red snakes
> Lots of snakes
> colourful birds
> mountain temples
> and special flowers that grow there and nowhere
> else


Do these things ONLY exist in the Americas?


> there also of course is the tree of life
> heres a picture of an assyrian carving of it which
> is the same as the sumerian depictions but with
> more detail
>
> its also shown as being bush sized and so not a
> tree at all
> and then theres this flower
>
> from the coca plant


Then why don’t we find coca growing in the area if Gilgamesh went and brought it back. Is coca the only medicinal plant with a yellow flower?


> remember Gilgamesh and his quest for a special
> yellow flower that gives life to the afflicted
> and of course you have you're very own cocaine
> mummies in a later period with the hanging gardens
> of babylon just down the road
> must have got their coke from somewhere


Here’s a previous posting at Ma’at that mentions SOME of the plants native to Africa and Asia area that contain akaloids (aka gives a cocaine reading in tests) [www.hallofmaat.com] before nicotine is mentioned let me point out this post [www.hallofmaat.com] and remind you that in the early days of Egyptology it wasn’t uncommon for mummies to be sprayed with tobacco to keep down infestations of bugs.


> the amount of sumerian texts that mention abundant
> fields built on a huge flood plain are too
> numerous to mention in addition to mentioning
> crops of corn and special barley
> special figs

You do know that in certain parts of the world (Europe being one of them) in the past wheat was often called corn don’t you? Who did your translation?




> or the fact that they all say the same thing
> "we were civilised by white skinned gods who
> travelled from the west and headed east towards a
> great continent. They took and killed most of our
> men and all of our women and then gave us their
> own women to repopulate our islands with"


Bernard’s previously shown this to be wrong …. and there's nothing that's been found in the studies of any remains found in the Americas to suggest that this is correct.

Kat

Ma'at Moderator

Founder and Director of The Hall of Ma'at

Contributing author to Archaeological Fantasies:
How pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and misleads the public
"If you panic, you're lost" -- W. T. 'Watertight' Southard



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/28/2005 08:59AM by Katherine Reece.