For many years it was believed that Christopher Columbus, who went ashore from the Santa Maria caravel on October 12, 1492, became the first inhabitant of the Old World to set foot on the land of the Americas. This date is officially celebrated in the United States as America's Discovery Day.
Columbus sailed to the wrong place
But why is not the entire mainland discovered by him called Colombia, but only a small country in its central part? The fact is that the brave navigator until the end of his life believed that he had found a new sea route to India. His mistake is immortalized in the collective name of the indigenous inhabitants of the American continent - the Indians.
Seven years later, the first of several of his expeditions to the lands reached by Columbus was made by another no less famous navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, originally from Florence, who was in the naval service in Spain and Portugal. He expressed the conviction that this was not India at all, but a previously unknown continent, and suggested calling it the New World.
And in 1507, the Lorraine cartographer Waldzmuller gave the mainland its current name - America, in honor of Vespucci. So after 15 years, the newly discovered land received its final name. Well and locals after that they did not begin to be called "Americans", but remained - Indians. It would seem that everything fell into place. But…
"Lave Was Here"
Since the early 1960s in different parts east coast of the North American continent, archaeologists find irrefutable evidence the fact that in 800-1000 years, that is, more than 500 years before Columbus, these lands were not only visited, but also settled and lived for a long time by brave sailors from the north of Europe - the Vikings, or Normans. archaeological finds- the remains of buildings and fortifications, utensils, fragments of weapons and clothing, runic inscriptions carved on the rocks - convincingly indicate that for a number of years in different places coast there were settled colonies of pale-faced newcomers from across the ocean.
This is recognized by the modern inhabitants of the continent. In 1964, on the recommendation of the US Congress, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill on the annual celebration of October 9, Leif Eiriksson Day - in honor of the leader of the Norman expedition, which, according to Old Norse legends and chronicle sources, was the first to reach the legendary Vinland - the area on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland. Moreover, already in the 19th century, evidence of the presence of Scandinavians on the shores of Florida and Mexico was discovered, and in our time, many researchers consider it proven that the Vikings lived at the foot of the Andes, in the legendary Tiahuanaco - one of ancient cities peace in present-day Bolivia.
In 1975, a French scientist, Professor Jacques de Maillet, director of the Anthropological Institute in Buenos Aires, made a sensational report that the Vikings even visited the Amazon basin and climbed up it and its tributaries - Beni and Madeira - far deep into the South American continent. The anthropologist came to this conclusion after more than 20 years of research. mysterious tribe so-called "White Indians". During one of his expeditions to the Brazilian state of Piauí, he came across the remains of a 10-meter wall, the ruins of two small forts and the Temple of the Sun. who were there stone statues seemed to be copies of the Scandinavian Viking Age, and the walls were covered with runic inscriptions characteristic of the ancient Danish-Norwegian language. On one of the fragments of the wall, de Maillet found carvings of a Norman ship with dragon heads at the bow and stern, as well as symbolic images of the hammer of Thor, the Nordic god of lightning and thunder. The professor is convinced that the fair-skinned "white Indians" are the descendants of the fearless Scandinavian sailors.
Jews? Arabs? Chinese?
However, it is possible that the Vikings were not the first overseas aliens on American shores. In the states of Tennessee and Georgia, inscriptions were found carved on the rocks, giving reason to believe that about 3,000 years ago representatives lived there. Jewish people. The Yuchi Indian tribe of Georgia has customs and speech turns, in which researchers of American folklore see possible impact ancient Jewish culture.
There is a version about the discovery of America by the Arabs. In medieval Arabic legends, lands with animals and plants unknown to the world of that time are described, which, according to some scientists, belong to the fauna and flora of both Americas. The Arabs set sail as if from the territory of present-day Morocco, from where the port city of Casablanca is now located.
For more than one hundred years in Europe, they say that in ancient times the Chinese reached America. And in 1962, there was a message from a certain Beijing professor about a landing on the coast of Mexico in 459 BC. e. six Chinese navigators led by a Buddhist monk. Chinese scientists are trying to substantiate this hypothesis, relying on ancient legends, mythology, numismatics, as well as on Chinese motifs allegedly discovered by them in the Aztec culture.
Celts?
In 1975, several scientists from the American Epigraphic Society announced that more than 2,500 years ago, on the northeast coast of the American continent, in present-day New England, the Celts landed - representatives of the Indo-European people who then inhabited a vast part of northern and central Europe, including British Isles and Ireland. This landing is evidenced, in their opinion, by inscriptions in the language of this people, found on rocks in the states of New Hampshire and Vermont. These inscriptions were studied by Harvard University professor Barry Fell, an expert in marine biology and epigraphy, a science that searches for and studies ancient inscriptions. He confirmed that the time of their appearance is the period between the 7th and 3rd centuries BC. e., and suggested that they were left, most likely, by fishermen who swam to North America from Europe about 2000 years before Columbus.
Hypotheses, hypotheses...
In 1940, about 400 inscribed stones were found near the mouth of the Susquehanna River, about 160 kilometers from Philadelphia. At first they thought that this was the work of the Vikings, but Barry Fell saw signs of Phoenician writing in them. He believes that he was able to translate some of the inscriptions, and since they mentioned women and children, Fell came to the conclusion that in this place between 800 and 600 BC. e. there was a settlement founded by the Basques - highlanders from the Pyrenees.
The next hypothesis of the indefatigable Fell concerns the ancient Egyptians. According to him, in 231 BC. e. they, swam Pacific Ocean(!), landed on the coast of Chile, 200 kilometers southwest of present-day Santiago. The basis for this sensational hypothesis was an equally amazing discovery by scientists at the University of Texas. On the walls of the Casa Pintada cave in the Cordillera, they found inscriptions dated to the 16th year of the reign of the Egyptian king Ptolemy III (and he began to rule in 246 BC: “... the southern border of the coast that Mavi reached ... The fleet managed to swim to this southern border. The seafarers occupy these lands for the king of Egypt, the queen, and their son."
Next comes detailed description the mentioned lands. Scholars have noted a surprising similarity between the texts and those found by Fell in Libya, as well as... written monuments Polynesians. It has been suggested that the inhabitants ancient egypt, and hence Libya, reached the coast of South America across the Pacific Ocean, stopping along the way on the islands of Polynesia.
Great Hanno
Another discovery of Fell is associated with the name of the Carthaginian prince Hanno-vel-Hannon, a subject of Hiram III, king of the Phoenician city-state of Tyre, founded in the 4th millennium BC. e. At the head of an expedition of sailors from Carthage and Gadir (present-day Cadiz is a port in southern Spain), Hanno in 480 BC. e. went in search of overseas lands and, reaching the American continent, landed in several places on the east coast between Quebec and Yucatan. In the state of Massachusetts, as well as in Canada and Mexico, inscriptions carved on the rocks were found, made, according to Fell, in the Ibero-Punian language, which was used in southern Spain and North Africa in the vicinity of Carthage about 2500 years ago.
One of the inscriptions reads: "Hanno, who arrived from Tamu, reached this place." Another says: “Proclamation of property. Do not destroy. Hanno claims this place as his domain.
True, some archaeologists and linguists doubt that Fell correctly identified the origin of these inscriptions and understood their content. But he also has many supporters. Among them is the famous Swiss linguist Linus Brunner, who praised Fell's discovery as brilliant. Regardless of Fell, three such inscriptions discovered in the early twentieth century in the province of Quebec were read by Thomas Lee, a professor at the University of Laval in Canada. From them, in his opinion, it follows that 2000 years before Columbus, the Phoenician expedition from Carthage reached the coast of North America and climbed up one of the tributaries of the St. Lawrence River.
Which of the inhabitants of the Old World and when was the first to set foot on the American continent, we probably will never know. One can only assume that its very first inhabitants were people who moved there from Eurasia by land that existed in very ancient times on the site of the Bering Strait, and are now known to us as American Indians. This event happened tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of years ago. And the results recent research American geneticists testify that the distant ancestors of the current Indians lived in the area of Lake Baikal.
A little over ten years ago, on October 12, 1992, one of the significant dates in the history of mankind - the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America. There are many hypotheses about when in the Western Hemisphere, in the Northern and South America, man appeared on numerous islands and when people came to the American continent. For the fifth century (since the 16th century), pundits have been arguing on this issue. In numerous studies on this topic, among the first inhabitants of America, people with canary islands, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, ancient Greeks and Romans, Jews, Spaniards, Egyptians and Babylonians, Chinese and even Tatars and Scythians.
Science developed, and as new discoveries accumulated knowledge, there was a selection of hypotheses. Today there is no doubt that the part of the world marked as America on the world map was inhabited by people from other continents. However, with what exactly - it has not been finally decided. Nevertheless, scientists managed to identify many common features inherent in all Indians, bringing them closer to the Mongoloid peoples of Asia. Appearance of the original inhabitants of America at the time of their first meetings with Europeans was as follows: a stocky figure, short legs, medium-sized feet, rather long, but with small hands, high and usually wide forehead, poorly developed superciliary arches. The face of the Indian had a large, strongly protruding nose (often, especially in the north, the so-called aquiline), a rather large mouth. The eyes are usually dark brown. The hair is black, straight, thick.
Many early European documentary and literary sources indicated that the Indians were redskins. In fact, this is not true. The skin of representatives of various Indian tribes is rather yellow-brown. According to modern researchers, the name "Redskins" was given to them by the first linen settlers. It did not arise by chance. It was once common among North American Indians to rub their face and body with red ocher on solemn occasions. Therefore, the Europeans called them the Redskins.
At present, anthropologists distinguish three main groups of Indians - North American, South American and Central American, whose representatives differ in height, skin color and other characteristics.
Most researchers believe that the settlement of the American continent came from Asia through the Bering Strait. Scientists believe that four great glaciations helped ancient people overcome the water space. According to this hypothesis, during the glaciation of the Bering Strait, it froze and turned into a kind of huge bridge. Asian tribes, who led a nomadic lifestyle, freely moved along it to the neighboring mainland. Based on this, the time of the appearance of man on the American continent is also determined - this happened 10-30 thousand years ago.
By the time the Spanish caravels under the command of Christopher Columbus appeared off the east coast of the New World (October 1492), North and South America, including the West Indies, were inhabited by many tribes and nationalities. FROM light hand the famous navigator, who assumed that he had discovered new lands of India, they began to be called Indians. These tribes were different levels development. According to most researchers, before the European conquest, the most advanced civilizations of the Western Hemisphere developed in Mesoamerica and the Andes. The term "Mesoamerica" was introduced in the 40s of the XX century by the German scientist Paul Kirchoff. Since then, in archeology, this has been used to designate a geographical region that includes Mexico and most Central America (to the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica). It was this territory that, at the time of its discovery by Europeans, was inhabited by many Indian tribes and was a colorful picture of the cultures that they represented. According to the correct definition of the Czech Americanist Miloslav Stingl, “these cultures were at various stages of development of tribal society, and general patterns the evolutions characteristic of the primitive communal formation manifested themselves here in a variety of local variants and forms. The most striking and developed civilizations of Ancient America (pre-Columbian period), scientists include cultures such as Olmec, Teotihuacan, Mayan, Toltec and Aztec.
The study of the art of ancient America, its history is relatively young. It is a little over a hundred years old. American researchers do not currently have at their disposal such rich material and achievements that are available today in the field of the study of ancient art. They also experience great difficulties due to the fact that, in order to reinforce their conclusions obtained as a result of archaeological excavations and discoveries, they do not have such a number of written monuments that are, for example, at the disposal of researchers of the Ancient East. Among the ancient Americans, writing appeared much later and never reached high development. The written monuments of the peoples of Mesoamerica that have come down to us have not yet been sufficiently studied. Therefore, most of the information about political history, social system, mythology, conquests, titles and names of rulers, are based only on Indian traditions. Many of them were recorded after the Spanish conquest and date back to the first half of the 16th century. It is also important to remember that up to this time, ancient American civilizations developed without any influence from European or Asian centers. Until the 16th century, their development proceeded completely independently.
The art of Ancient America, like any other art, has a number of features and characteristics, only inherent in it. In order to comprehend this originality, a dialectical approach is necessary, taking into account the historical conditions under which art and culture developed. ancient civilizations Mesoamerica.
The highest flourishing of the culture of the Mayan Indian tribe, scientists attribute to the 7th-8th centuries. The Aztec Empire reached its apogee by the beginning XVI century. Very often in the works of archaeologists and researchers of ancient cultural civilizations, the Mayan Indian peoples (as older in age) are called by analogy "Greeks", and the Aztecs (as those who existed later) are called "Romans" of the New World.
The cultural traditions of the Mayan Indians had a huge impact on the Yucatan Peninsula, in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as in several states of modern Mexico. The geographical boundaries of the distribution of this civilization were 325,000 km 2 and covered the habitat of several tens, and possibly hundreds of tribes. In general, the tribes inherited common culture. However, in many respects, of course, it also had regional features.
The Mayan civilization stood out primarily for its achievements in construction and architecture. Representatives of this nationality created exquisite and perfect works of painting and sculpture, had unique masters in stone processing and ceramics. The Maya had a deep knowledge of astronomy and mathematics. The greatest achievement is their introduction of such a mathematical concept as "zero". They began to apply it hundreds of years earlier than other highly developed civilizations.
The Aztecs appeared in Central Mexico in the second half of the 12th century. No historical data about them has been found so far. There are only a few legends and traditions, from which it is known that they called the island of Aztlan (Astlan) their homeland. One of the traditional descriptions of the alleged life of ancestors in Aztlan is known, allegedly compiled for the last of the pre-Hispanic rulers of the Aztec state, the famous Montezuma II the Younger, based on ancient manuscripts. According to this source, the ancestral home of Aztlán was located on an island (or was an island) where big mountain with caves that served as dwellings. From this word, which denoted the location of the island (Aztlan), the name of the tribe came from - the Aztecs (more precisely, the Aztecs). However, science has not yet established the exact geographical position this island.
At the most early stages The existence of the Aztecs was dominated by a nomadic lifestyle, they were mainly engaged in hunting. This left an imprint on their character. By nature they were very warlike. For almost two centuries, the Aztecs led conquest wars and at the beginning of the XIV century, having conquered many other tribes that lived in Central Mexico, created mighty empire. Around 1325, the city of Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City) they founded became its capital.
At present, interest in the study of ancient Indian civilizations has not faded. Architectural monuments, sculpture, jewelry, household items found in places , where peoples with original, unique culture lived several millennia ago, are still fraught with a lot of unsolved things. Learning the history of pre-Columbian America, leading archaeologists and scientists of our time are trying to find an explanation for many of the most important aspects of the life of ancient human communities.
Test tasks
1. Christopher Columbus was from
a) Italy
b) Spain
in Portugal
d) France
Answer a) Italy.
2. The purpose of the voyage of Columbus was
a) circumnavigation
b) reaching the shores of India or Japan
c) the discovery of a new continent
d) crossing the Indian Ocean
The answer is b) reaching the shores of India or Japan.
3. One of Columbus' ships was named
a) Nostromo
b) Salvador
c) pint
d) East
The answer is c) Pint.
4. How many voyages did Columbus make to the shores of the new mainland?
at four
Answer c) four.
5. When was the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America celebrated?
6. Fill in the gaps in the text.
In early August 1492, a flotilla of three ships left the port of Paloe: Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Columbus crossed Atlantic Ocean and discovered several islands, which, as he believed, were somewhere off the coast of India. Most likely, the name of the new continent came from the name Italian traveler Amerigo Vespucci.
Thematic Workshop
Read the text and answer the questions.
On October 12, an airplane landed at the airport in Madrid, arriving on the most ordinary flight from New York. Among the other passengers descending the gangplank, a tall Indian, dressed in a beaded robe of buffalo skin and a magnificent headdress of eagle feathers, stood out in particular. Descending to earth, he announced that he had arrived as an envoy of the North American Indians and that today, on the day of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, he announces his discovery.
1. What do you think the North American Indian discovered?
Answer. An Indian discovered the Old World. When Europeans discovered America New World) and began to create colonies, the Indians did not go by ship to Europe, but lived in their ancestral territories until they were expelled from there or completely exterminated. Therefore, they could only accidentally hear about the existence of Europe (the Old World) from the stories of Europeans.
2. Why did the Indian have the right to announce this discovery?
Answer. Because the first native inhabitant of America set foot on a territory previously unknown to his fellow tribesmen. Therefore, he had the right to announce his discovery.
3. In what year did this discovery take place?
Answer. In 1992.
Cartographic workshop
Use the atlas maps to find geographical names associated with the name of Christopher Columbus. They can be both in South America and in North. Do not forget also that cards are not only physical, but also political.
Answer. The following geographical names are associated with the name of Christopher Columbus:
North America - federal district Columbia (USA)
North America - province British Columbia(Canada)
North America - Columbia River (USA and Canada)
North America - several settlements Columbia or Columbia. Columbia City, South Carolina, Columbia City, Missouri, Columbia City, Maryland, Columbia City, Pennsylvania, Columbia City, Tennessee, Columbus City, Ohio.
South America - Colombia
South America - highest mountain Colombia Cristobal Colon (5775 m)
Central America - the town of Colon (Panama)
Central America - Colon Province (Panama)
Central America - Department of Colon (Honduras)
"Colon" is the name of Christopher Columbus in Spanish.
