Progressive Positive: Phoenician (Canaanite) Trade With the New World

Table of Contents (clickable)

October 7th Massacre Prompting
Canaanites
Phoenicians
- Special Section: Cedar, Ships and Coins
Departure from Accepted History
My Personal Point of Accepting Phoenicians in New World
Seafaring Maps
List of Sources
Author Support

The research and perspective in this blog post happened after the October 7th 2023 massacre of Jewish people. The next days after the massacre I saw the Hamas uploaded videos, the most horrendous videos I've ever seen. On the same day, immediately alongside this horror, massive amounts of people marched in support of the murderers. The supporters of murdering Jews were also ardent supporters of a predictable array of extreme views. It was then I saw an alliance of total perverted depraved evil, and gave me the open mind and energy to search for a historical and philosophical counter to that evil.

Throughout this post Canaanite = Phoenician. Greeks called them Phoenicians, Hebrews called the same Canaanites.

Canaanites -map and Wikipedia links

Phoenicians

The Phoenicans were the preminent seafaring explorers and traders of the Middle East/Mediterranean for most of the 1st millennium BC before being eliminated by Alexander the Great in his siege of Tyre and then Rome's final and total annihilation of Carthage in 146 BC. Phoenicia was never an empire like the Assyrians, Persians, or Romans. It did not do conquests. It did trade, it did seafaring, and did the importing of goods exotic to the people of the ancient Middle East. If you were wealthy, which was almost solely aristocrats, you bought the luxury clothes and other things that show power from no one else but the Phoenicians.

Lebanon cedar is the how and why of this unique capability of the Phoenicians. Unique to the mountains of northern Canaan, this wood is what made transoceanic travel possible.

Few in the Middle East knew where these exotic things came from. It was a trade secret the Phoenicians carefully guarded, especially from emerging seafarers such as the Greeks and the Romans.

Special Section on Phoenician
Cedar
Shipbuilding
and Coin Currency

Great reference on Phoenician cedar and even greater writing on money : How The Phoenicians Adopted Hard Money
Print of Phoenician built ships of Egypt and Canaan: Egyptian and Phoenician ships -NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
Several photos of Phoenician coins and where they were produced: A History of Phoenician coins -Reddit
The oldest, largest and best-preserved vessel from antiquity. Made with Phoenician cedar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khufu_ship
The Cedar Forest -the glorious realm of the gods of Mesopotamian mythology. Entered by the hero Gilgamesh who dared cut down trees from its virgin stands during his quest for fame:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Forest

Lebanon Cedar. Phoenicians max leveraged this for superior ships, trade and wealth.

Everything written so far in this document is widely and long accepted as historical fact. Where I go after this point is not universally accepted, and I assume not wholly endorsed or accepted in academia circa 2024. I am not going to present magical thinking, humans transported by mystical means, or anything less than what is in the scope of normal and global human endeavors of trade, seafaring, and resettlement.

We live in an era of extremely clear pictures of cultures that left no written record. Through a complex weave of DNA, artifact analysis, knowledge of exact points of origin for those artifacts, along with our precise data on climate and geology for every decade going back 10s of thousands of years - we know what people did without knowing their names or exactly how they looked. It is all forensic and conjectural. Conjectural is less than the proofs we have of activity of the Romans, Greeks, Persians or Chinese, because all those societies literally ran via a clerical bureacratic accountant class. To claim we live in uncertainty about all history outside of that over-documented paradigm should be a claim we question.

We have amazingly clear understandings of Yamnaya culture- they domesticated the horse (a very aggressive animal that solely existed on the glacial edge), invented the wheel which they used on wagons for mobile living with their herds, ancestor worship via animal sacrifices and feasts, the first instance of hoarding wealth within a family rather than communal sharing, and these cultural practices quickly spread across races going into northern India and the Zhou dynasty of China. (Yamnaya-centric Russian Steppes-centric diffusionism for those cultural traits)

It is in the spirit of how we know about the Yamnaya and imagine their lives that I would like the reader to consider and more deeply study Semitic(Canaanite/Hebrew) presence in the New World.

A counter statement to the above license and enthusiasm. Let us not want a history so much that we embrace and cling to what truly did not happen. It would be a good thing to shake incorrect histories out of accepted dogma. It is not a good thing to cling to the bizarre and exotic conjecture purely because that very bizarreness appeals to our personality and personal preferences. Proceed with caution with conjectures, acknowledging at every contemplation the difference between plausible, hard proof, and impossible without some form of magical intervention.

Personally, I operate with an attachment to trade as a fundamental need for humans, and trade itself has self-amplifying dynamics that strengthens its established channels and encourages finding more. Where there is less trade or no trade, that population falls back on the subsistence of gathering local food and reproduction. This is the most unsustainable form of human. The ideal of isolated subsistence as widespread (especially in pre-colonial America and Pacific islands), a default and a right is a perversity that has spread in popular culture. Consider anyone promoting this a liability.

Phoenicians in Azores, Brazil, Amazon River, Peru and Mesoamerica. —a list of sources

Phoenician ships on the Amazon River: (ai generated)

Below is a list of books, videos and webpages with supporting information for a Semitic presence in the New World. Some of them are major, exhaustive bodies of research and others offer a little of this and that. I wanted the readers of my blog entry to have an open ended plunge into the subject and access to other's perspective.

That said, I want to present in short what initiated my acceptance of the Phoenicians in New World theory. The initial spark was the man on a horse statue the first Portuguese voyage discovered in the Azores. Right away, I thought the Azores are adjacent (further out to sea) to the accepted sea route the Phoenicians had to use for the long accepted Britian to Canaan trade. Then a little into that research I learned seafaring requires going out to deep sea then catching winds or current driving back to shore, that one does not operate near shore in a long traverse. These maritime factors make Phoenician contact with the Azores more likely than not. To restate that, it is highly unlikely the Phoenicians could have never discovered the Azores. The Azores angle was the spark that got my attention, what came next is the larger bang that convinced me. The Phoenicians certainly went down the northwest coast of Africa. It is there that a wind and ocean current provides ships easy and sure conveyance to Brazil [link] .

It is this Azores and Morocco to Brazil seafaring information that suddenly shifted my historical worldview dramatically. Suddenly, Phoenicians not having contact and not having trade with the New World became very hard to believe.