ANCIENT VOYAGES
and THE TOWER OF BABEL
Did Egyptian Pharoahs Know About America?
(Investigator 220, 2025 January)
Anonymous
Introduction
The discovery of cocaine and nicotine in Egyptian mummies in the 1990s
suggested that Egyptians had contact by sea with America 3500 years
before Christopher Columbus in 1492 CE. This implied revisions to the
ancient history presented in history textbooks.
If such ancient cross-ocean voyages took place it could also answer an
objection to the Bible's "Tower of Babel" story where we read: "from
there the LORD scattered them abroad over all the earth." (Genesis
11:9) How did the "scattered" peoples cross the oceans?
Mummies on Drugs
The Advertiser in 2000 reported:
Mummies turn pages of history
La Paz, Bolivia: Researchers say they have discovered traces of cocaine
in 4000-year-old Egyptian mummies, and claim it is evidence of contact
with American cultures centuries before Christopher Columbus.
The decade-long study languished "under pressure from people with
obscure interests who don't accept changes in the interpretation of
history," researcher Svetlana Balabanova said from Frankfurt in Germany
in a teleconference at the First Seminar on Pre-Columbian Trans-oceanic
Contacts.
Cocaine is synthesized from the leaves of the coca plant grown in Columbia, Peru and Bolivia. (November 23, p. 36)
What came of this? Did Egypt have contact with America and Egyptologists who never mention it therefore wrong?
Wikipedia discusses the mummified remains of Egyptian priestess Henut Taui who lived about 1000 BCE during the 21st Dynasty:
In 1992, German toxicologist Svetlana Balabanova discovered traces of
cocaine, hashish and nicotine on Henut Taui's hair as well as on the
hair of several other mummies of the museum, which is significant in
that the only source for cocaine and nicotine had at that time been ...
the coca and tobacco plants native to the Americas...
This result was interpreted by theorists and supporters of contacts
between pre-Columbian people and ancient Egyptians, as a proof for
their claims...
After these experiments, even assuming that cocaine was actually found
on mummies, it is possible that this could be contamination which
occurred after the discovery of the mummies. The same argument can be
applied to nicotine but, in addition, various plants other than tobacco
are a source of nicotine... Of these, two – Withania somnifera and
Apium graveolens – were known to the Egyptians … and the latter,
celery, was the more likely to be used as a food.
Ocean Exploration
Wikipedia under the heading Ocean Exploration lists major known steps in ocean exploration:
• 4000 BCE Egyptians developed sailing vessels used in the eastern Mediterranean
• 4000 BCE - 1000 CE Polynesian colonization of South Pacific Islands.
• 1500 BC Middle Eastern peoples explored the Indian Ocean.
• 600 BCE Phoenicians developed sea routes around the
entire Mediterranean and into the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and
reached England by
sailing along the western European coast.
• 325 BCE Pytheas, a Greek astronomer and geographer,
sailed north out of the Mediterranean, reaching England and possibly
Iceland and
Norway. He also developed the use of sightings on the North
Star to determine latitude.
• c.240 BCE Eratosthenes of Cyrene measured the circumference of Earth.
• 150 CE Ptolemy produces a map of the Roman world,
including lines of latitude and longitude, the continents of Asia,
Europe, and Africa and the
surrounding oceans.
Safe trans-ocean voyages do not require giant ships like the 120-metre-long ships built by China in the 15th century CE.
The five Egyptian ships in the expedition to Punt (Somalia) in 1471 BCE
were each 21 meters long. The Santa Maria which Christopher Columbus
sailed to the Caribbean in 1492 CE was 36 meters, and his other two
ships 20 meters each.
3000 Years Before Columbus Again?
Henk van Oosten (2024) asks "Could Odysseus have sailed the Atlantic
Ocean to America and back guided by stars, 3000 years before Columbus?"
and "Did ancient seafarers navigate Oceanus, the Atlantic, long before
Odysseus?"
Writers who have proposed this idea didn't explain how the ancient
sailors crossed the Atlantic without navigation instruments. The
journeys, however, could have been somewhat circular by sailing with
the flow of the Gulf Stream — south from Spain along the coast of
Africa, west to the Caribbean, north to Florida and the American coast,
then east to the Azores and back to Spain. Modern-day sailors have
crossed the Atlantic in replicas of ancient ships but would have had
helpful modern knowledge.
Van Oosten examines how the stars and constellations mentioned in
Homer's epic poem Odyssey (8th century BC), about the adventures of
Odysseus sailing home from Troy, could have assisted ancient sailors
crossing the Atlantic. He accepts, however, that merely demonstrating a
method is not proof that it was actually done.
Furthermore, no Egyptian hieroglyphics seem to mention a continent far
to the west of the Mediterranean Sea and voyages to or from that
continent.
Prehistoric Migrations
People far more ancient than the ancient Egyptians migrated to
Australia from Africa via Asia, and to America from Siberia. That was
mainly done via land connections when sea levels were much lower.
However, to reach various Indonesian Islands and Australia around
50,000 years ago, still required crossings of 50 or 60 miles of ocean
despite sea levels being lower.
Tower of Babel and Dispersion
In my 1992 article "Linguistics and the Tower of Babel" I took the
phrase "the whole earth had one language" (Genesis 11:1) in the
universal sense — as meaning all of planet Earth. However, I also
cited DeWitt who gave the break-up of languages and human dispersion of
Genesis 11 a Sumerian context in Mesopotamia about 2000 BCE.
"Earth" in the Bible refers to land. Therefore phrases such as "the
whole earth" and "most distant parts of the earth" usually refer to the
most distant countries that the Bible writers and readers at the time
had heard of. In the time of Solomon "the whole earth" might have meant
roughly the area from Europe to India, and Southern Russia to Sudan and
Arabia.
I noted in "Linguistics and the Tower of Babel":
Since 1786 the Indo-European language family has become the
most-studied language group. It’s now generally accepted that this
group arose from an ancestral language called Proto-Indo-European about
7,000 years ago.
This is my current working hypothesis that the "one language" of
Genesis 11 could be Proto-Indo-European and the dispersion of its
speakers was approximately between India and Europe and started about
7000 years ago. If so then the question of how they crossed large
oceans is answered. They didn't need to.
REFERENCES:
DeWitt, D. S. The Historical Background of Genesis 11:1-9: Babel or
Ur?; Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 22/1, March
1979, pp. 15-26
https://etsjets.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/files_JETS-PDFs_22_22-1-pp015-026_JETS.pdf
Henk van Oosten 2022 Could Odysseus have sailed the
Atlantic Ocean to America and back guided by stars, 3000 years before
Columbus? Academia Letters, https://doi.org/10.20935/AL5316
Investigator 24, May 1992, Linguistics And The Tower Of Babel
https://antrocom.net/archives/2023/volume-19-number-2/mummies-and-impossible-drugs-a-new-look-to-the-svetlana-balabanovas-ethnobotanical-
revisionism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_maritime_history#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henut_Taui
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_exploration
https://faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/ethnic/mummy
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/500-years-ago-china-destroyed-its-worlddominating-navy-because-its-political-elite-was-afraid-
of-free-trade-a7612276.html#