Word: phoenician
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Courage, like morality, is redefined by each generation. "The monsters of this sea are everywhere," reported a Phoenician explorer several centuries before Christ, "and keep swimming around the slow-moving ships." The monsters were whales, the sea the Bay of Biscay. In succeeding generations men would skim over that water as if it were a pool, and the heroism of the early sailors on their scary voyage would resemble that of fearful children in the dark. What the explorer does by courage, the settler does by habit. What the father does by taking a deep breath, the son will...
Chiseled into a crude stone tablet in the language of the ancient Phoenicians, the mysterious inscription has tantalized scholars for nearly a century. "We are the Sons of Canaan from Sidon, the city of the king," runs the translation. "Commerce has cast us on this distant shore, a land of mountains." The tablet tells of ten Phoenician trading vessels that embarked from the ancient port of Ezion-geber (near the modern Israeli town of Elath) on the Gulf of Aqaba, possibly in the 7th century B.C. Presumably, they sailed through the Red Sea, rounded the tip of Africa, and were...
Garble. The Phoenician text has a pedigree almost as strange as the tale it tells. In 1872, a slave belonging to a landowner named Joaquim Alves de Costa supposedly found the inscription on a broken stone tablet on his sprawling estate in the tropical rain forests of Brazil's Paraíba state. Costa's son, a draftsman, made a copy of the baffling markings and sent it to the Brazilian
...Massachusetts, paid a few cents for a tattered and yellowed scrapbook that once belonged to Wilberforce Eames, a turn-of-the-century American bibliographer. Piccus discovered that the old scrapbook contained a letter written by Netto in 1874. The Rio museum director included not only his translation of the Phoenician text but also a tracing of the original copy he had received from the plantation owner...
...Gordon, a language detective famous for his identification of an ancient Cretan script known as Linear A. Long a proponent of the theory that ancient civilizations of South America were somehow influenced by Middle Eastern culture, Gordon carefully compared the Paraíba inscription with the latest work on Phoenician writing. He found that it contained nuances and quirks of Phoenician style that could not have been known to a 19th century forger. "The alternatives are either that the inscription is genuine," said Gordon, "or that the guy was a great prophet...