Lost Empire of Atlantis with Gavin Menzies

I promised to review this book after I got a chance to actually read it because we have extensively posted on the European Bronze Age here on this blog and have made a number of informed conjectures.  The book is excellent and collects an ample mound of evidence and makes some fresh conclusions that I fully support. 

The actual gap in the story that is missed in this book is centered on the Atlantis Bimini axis that we have established that sustained the Atlantic copper trade from the loss of Thera in 1450BC to the Hekla eruption in 1159BC.

A lot can now be said as established fact.

Bronze in some form or the other had made its way into Minoan trade by 2450BC and this generally covered the Levant and Egypt.  However, it was beset with a range of impurities depending on the source of the copper itself.  This is a serious issue as quality would actually be all over the map.

Three important carbon dates in different locales need to now be discussed.  They all come in at 2450BC.

1                    The Great Pyramid was build using cut stone.  This meant that a huge demand was created for bronze saws then and there.  This demand was supplied by the Minoans who controlled all sea trade.  They were most likely the original sea peoples spoken of at length in the literature.

2                    The Great Orme Copper Mine was established in Wales and the major stone ring at Stonehenge was build right in the middle of the locaql tin mining district.

3                    Mining operations began in Lake Superior to acquire what was and is the largest natural native copper deposits ever unearthed.  The quality exceeds 99% copper and was perfect for the consistent manufacture of high quality tools.

Quite simply a large government contract jump started the European Bronze Age and set up the necessary trade routes.

We also learn that the navigation methods gave special place to Lewis island on the return swing of the copper route.

Ships would sail from Atlantis at Gibraltar near Seville today to a base on Bimini.  Bimini was the launch point for the return trip that then used the Gulf Stream to reach Lewis.  From Lewis the ships would proceed south past Great Orme, perhaps stop at Stonehenge and continue on back to Atlantis.  From there the metal would be transshipped to Crete for ultimate delivery ot buyers in Egypt, the Levant and also India in later Years.

As stated, Gavin does not pick up on the Atlantis site reported four years ago or grasp the necessity of stations there and in Bimini. 

It is also not obvious that the same impulse to source copper rolled out throughout the entire Atlantic sea board and surely jump started the Olmec and the Andean Cultures as well.

It turns out that excavations in Lake Superior turned up over 10,000 Bronze Age artifacts as well as thousands of production pits.  These artifacts are presently in a museum in Milwaukie.   

What Gavin has done for us is to spend a lot of money to visit every museum that mattered and look at their collections.  It is all Minoan and it establishes a trade factory system in place throughout the Middle East and into India and plenty of suggestions that the Minoans at least explored everywhere else.  They did have a thousand years in which to do it.  There can be no serious question of the reality of the Minoan ascendancy in global trade over a thousand years. 

Confirmation includes DNA shared with Lake Superior Indians and Crete and only Anatolia.  It includes Lake Superior copper ingots on a shipwreck near Cyprus.  It includes crop distributions and other natural odds and ends and I am sure in time we will dig up uncountable links.

The copper itself was mined in Lake Superior, transported down through Lake Michigan to the winter base which certainly was a farming base that was permanent.  The accumulated raw copper and could then be transported down the Mississippi on log rafts to poverty point in which a major kiln has been uncovered.  There it was reduced and purified of waste rock and turned into shippable ingots.

From there ships could transport it all to Bimini.

My key take home is that the European Bronze Age was hugely organized and managed from Crete.  Crete kept the peace with its navy stationed forward at Thera.  Thera’s eruption ended all that in 1450BC.  Thereafter, the Mycenaeans took control in the Eastern Mediterranean while Atlantis took control of the Atlantic Part of the enterprise and continued on generally for another three centuries and we do hear of wars between the two for dominance.  Hekla ended that in 1259BC at which point Great Orme was abandoned and so were operations in Lake Superior.

Before this work, I had recognized the importance of Atlantis, Bimini and Lake Superior but not Britain.  That the economic driver behind it all was originally Crete was not obvious.

Gavin goes out to show us that ancient reports from Plato nicely describe the destruction of Crete while plausibly mixing the two eruptions.  These are all natural errors a thousand years later.

Sailing Against Conventional Wisdom

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126593477531544685.html

Author Gavin Menzies Is Determined to Prove That Minoans Discovered the New World 4,000 Years Ago

By DALYA ALBERGE

It takes a brave soul to rewrite history by sailing against current thought. More than 500 years after Christopher Columbus "discovered" America, another seaman is doing just that, entering previously uncharted academic waters with claims that other "Europeans" -- the Minoans -- got there first, thousands of years earlier.

Gavin Menzies, 72 years old, is drawing on his experience as a former British Royal Navy submarine commander to prove in a book he is writing that the Minoans were such supreme seafarers that they crossed an ocean and discovered the New World 4,000 years ago.

Eight years after he made controversial headlines with his first American history book, "1421: The Year China Discovered America," which sold more than a million copies in 130 countries, he may spark debate anew by claiming that the Bronze Age civilization of Crete, which built magnificent palaces, devised systems of writing and developed a trading empire, got rich on vast quantities of copper mined in America.

Transworld Publishers undertook his first book, in which he claimed that a Chinese eunuch led a fleet of junks to America 71 years before Columbus. The book led to invitations to lecture at universities including Harvard, to an honorary professorship at Yunnan University in China, to the sale of film rights to Sky Motion Pictures and to HarperCollins snapping up the sequel in 2008, "1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance."

"Revisionist history tends to sell exceptionally well," says Luigi Bonomi, a leading literary agent who represents Mr. Menzies. "There is a huge audience eager to read new things about history."

Criticism ensued, with several academics dismissing Mr. Menzies' earlier books as fiction masquerading as history.

As he did back then, Mr. Menzies remains unwavering from his beliefs. He claims his latest evidence for his book, which doesn't have a publishing date or a title yet, solves the mystery of which ancient civilization mined thousands of copper mines around Lake Superior on the Canadian-American border as early as 2,200 B.C., leaving behind thousands of knives, harpoons and other objects.

A Bronze Age wall painting of Minoan ships at Akrotiri on Thera, an island off the coast of Greece.

Vessels depicted in Minoan frescoes and the remains of one of them -- the Uluburun wreck found on the Mediterranean seabed in 1982 with a cargo of copper ingots and artifacts from seven different civilizations -- have convinced him that their ships were advanced enough for ocean travel. The frescoes and the wreck's surviving fragments, he claims, gave him enough detail to work out the number of rowers, the type and efficiency of sails and the sailing capacity.

"We can make accurate estimates of the length, width and draught of the ships and hence their seagoing capability," he explains in a phone interview from his home in central London, sounding resolute. "The ships could sail into the wind as well as before it, and lower sail very quickly in the event of an unexpected squall."

He also claims to have DNA proof that the Minoans carried a rare gene found today among Native Americans around Lake Superior and scientific tests matching the region's "uniquely pure" copper to the Uluburun ingots. Pointing to evidence of indigenous American plants being transported to other civilizations -- including nicotine traces found in ancient Egyptian mummies and maize-cobs carved on their temples -- he says that the Egyptians with their flimsy vessels weren't great seafarers and that only the Minoans, with whom they traded, could have undertaken trans-Atlantic travel.

One would expect that if the Minoans carried tobacco from the Americas to Egypt, evidence of American tobacco should exist around Crete. "There is such evidence in the form of a tobacco beetle found buried beneath the 1450 B.C. volcanic ash of a merchant's house in Akrotiri, the Minoan town...This tobacco beetle, Lasioderma Serricorne, was indigenous to the Americas. It should be remembered tobacco didn't grow in Europe in 1450 B.C.," Mr. Menzies says.

Despite his confidence, Mr. Menzies is bracing himself for ill-winds and a storm over his new theories. Although he has yet to finish his Minoan book, some academics are again skeptical ahead of having a chance to read the evidence.

Although Professor Carl Johannessen, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon and co-author of "World Trade and Biological Exchanges before 1492," is intrigued by Mr. Menzies's latest research and applauds his previous efforts as "a powerful search for ancient knowledge," he says, "I am convinced that the Minoans were not the first or the only sailors crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans."

Meanwhile, Susan Martin, an associate professor of archaeology at Michigan State University who specializes in Lake Superior's prehistoric archaeology, says, "There is no evidence of any exploration or exploitation of the mineral resources by anyone other than Native American users."

Professor John Bennet, a Minoan expert at the University of Sheffield, argues that, while it is theoretically possible that Minoans reached America, their ships were too small to carry sufficient supplies and cargo for regular long voyages. And Cemal Pulak, an associate professor at Texas A&M University who led the Uluburun excavation, says that such ambitious seafaring wouldn't have been feasible. Although the vessels were sturdy, they didn't have decks to endure storms and rough seas, he explains, adding that the Uluburun copper came from Cyprus.

Undeterred, Mr. Menzies counters that the Minoan ships were three times the size of Columbus's, that ancient artifacts found at Lake Superior match those from the Uluburun wreck, and that indigenous Americans had no knowledge of mining or smelting copper artifacts.

Rewriting history is easier said than done. Only dictators and Hollywood films do it with ease.

Certainly, Mr. Menzies isn't the first person to challenge America's earliest history. The Mormons have claimed that the Jaredite people from the Middle East discovered America 4,000 years ago, and others have argued that Leif Eriksson, the Norse explorer, got there first, half a millennium before Columbus.

Every year since 1934, America has set aside a public holiday to remember Columbus. The Minoans are likely to have to wait a while for their own remembrance day.