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Did The Ancient Greeks Sail To Canada?
Των Phoebe Weston και Tim Collins
The ancient
Greeks could have reached Canada in 56 AD - almost a millennium before the
Vikings. This is according to a controversial study that claims during the
Hellenistic period Greeks had such detailed knowledge of astronomy that they
were able to pinpoint Atlantic currents that would propel them west.
This idea is
based on a study of the text De Facie by Greek biographer and essayist
Plutarch, who lived between 46 and 119 AD.
A character in
the texts recounts meeting a Greek stranger who had recently returned from a
'great continent' - and scientists say this may have been Canada.
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sails and oars, they may have regularly visited Newfoundland, mined gold and
set up colonies that thrived for centuries, the study claims. However, there is
no concrete evidence of these trips and many historians and maritime
archaeologists have dismissed the work as 'unfounded'.
'Our intention
is to prove, with modern science, that it was possible for this trip to be
made,' Ioannis Liritzis, an archaeologist from the University of the Aegean
told Hakai Magazine as part of an in-depth feature on his research.
These early
settlers may have travelled for the sake of finding new lands or riches, researchers
say. They believe some travellers would return home after a brief stay but for
others the trip was one way.
Researchers
acknowledge that they do not have evidence that these trips were made but
believe they were possible, as suggested by the writings of Plutarch.
Plutarch wrote
more than sixty in-depth biographies of famous Romans and Greeks, detailed in
his writings of Parallel Lives.
This theory is
based on evidence from Plutarch's work De Facie, also known as On the Face
Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon. In this work, which became familiar to
classicists during the Renaissance, characters discuss whether the moon is
another Earth, whether it has life, and other philosophical questions.
One character
recounts meeting a stranger who had recently returned from a 'great continent'.
Dr Liritzis
and his colleagues believe this content was in fact North America, specifically
Newfoundland.
This is not
the first time that this theory has been proposed.
Johannes
Kepler, a German mathematician and astronomer who was a key figure in the 17th-century
scientific revolution, also believed that this reference was in relation to
North America.
The stranger
recounts how travellers made the trip every 30 years when Saturn appeared in
the constellation Taurus.
The ancient
Greeks closely followed astronomical phenomena associated with Saturn, which
was called Kronos at the time. The suggestion is these trips could have
occurred every 30 years for centuries.
Unfortunately
the first few chapters of De Facie have been lost so no one knows on what date
these conversations happened so researchers had to date the story themselves.
They focused in on a reference one of the characters made about a solar eclipse
that happened at around midday.
Dr Liritzis
and his colleagues then looked through 5,000 years of eclipses and found one
that matched the description in Plutarch's writings. It took place in 75 AD.
Next they
looked at the decades surrounding the eclipse for evidence of Saturn appearing
in Taurus and found it happened on three occasions - 26 to 29 AD, 56 to 58 AD,
and 85 to 88 AD.
They decided
the trip was most likely to have occurred during 56 AD as this was the one when
Saturn was most recently in Taurus.
Travellers
would have stayed one year and then sailed out in 58 AD when Saturn was no
longer in Taurus, they claimed.
'By applying
modern scientific data, the present reappraisal of the astronomical and
geographical elements within this dialogue has produced a novel interpretation
of the date and place of the meeting and a journey to the northern Atlantic
Ocean', researchers wrote in their paper published in the Journal of Coastal Research
Online.
They looked at
the Gulf Stream current, as well as other known sea currents in the northern
Atlantic Ocean and estimated speed for the ship.
The 'great
continent' lined up with a bay on the same latitude as the Volhga River delta,
the northern entrance to the Caspian sea.
Using Google
Earth, they predicted that Greek settlers would have been able to make it to
St. Lawrence Gulf and Newfoundland island.
'Other unnamed
islands mentioned in this dialogue are identified with Norway's islands, Azores,
Iceland, Greenland, and Baffin islands', researchers found.
They claim the
Greeks had good knowledge of sea currents and astronomy meaning that this would
be a 'plausible event'.
However, other
experts have widely disputed the claims.
'While it is
clever and interesting I don't think the Greeks reached Canada', Dr Hector
Williams from the University of British Columbia told MailOnline.
'Indeed the
authors themselves admit there is no archaeological or other historical
evidence for the Greeks ever having crossed the Atlantic', he said.
'Such a
crossing might theoretically be possible--there are numerous examples of
Japanese fishing boats making it across the Pacific when caught in storms and
carried by currents that run west-east, for example--but the Greeks rarely even
made it out into the Atlantic (unlike the Romans who of course colonized
Britain).'
Brendan Foley,
an underwater archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden told Hakai Magazine
there is no way that first millennium BCE Mediterranean sailors would have any
concept of Atlantic Ocean currents.
'They
certainly did not possess the navigational technologies and knowledge (à la
Polynesian sailors) to position themselves in the open Atlantic Ocean to ride
them', Dr Foley said.
He also says
there are no ancient Greek artefacts that contain gold traced to North America.
Also, the
paper claims the boats travelled at 10 knots, but this would be fast for even
modern ships.
Editor's Note
Pytheas of
Massalia (fl. 4th century BC) was a Greek geographer and explorer from the
Greek colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseille) who made a voyage of
exploration to northwestern Europe in about 325 BC. In this voyage he
circumnavigated and visited a considerable part of Great Britain. Pytheas is
the first known scientific visitor and reporter of the Arctic, polar ice, and
the Germanic tribes. He introduced the idea of distant Thule to the geographic
imagination, and his account of the tides is the earliest known to suggest the
moon as their cause. It is believed Pytheas may have also reached Iceland.
ΠΗΓΕΣ:
Daily Mail, 3.2.2018.
Ioannis
Liritzis, Panagiota Preka-Papadema, Panagiotis Antonopoulos, Konstantinos
Kalachanis, και Chris G. Tzanis «Does Astronomical and Geographical Information of Plutarch's De Facie Describe a Trip Beyond the North Atlantic Ocean?».
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