Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

Yigal:

>From the perspective of today where most of our surviving ancient records 
>come from non-seagoing peoples, isn‘t it a bit presumptuous for us to assume 
>ancient ignorance of distant lands? How do we know that America was not 
>known in the second millinnium BC?

For example, in China, there was the record of the eastern mountains. Already 
two millennia ago, Chinese scholars questioned if the then ancient records 
were fiction, because no such mountain ranges are found in East Asia. But 
those mountain ranges can be recognized in western North America, east from 
China.

It is known (though not widely) that when Columbus went westward, he knew 
that there was land to the west, from a (now lost) book telling about it, and 
that book was written by someone who in the 1300s followed the Vikings, and 
Erik the Red followed the Irish, and who before them? Within America, both 
North and South, there are numerous artifacts that don‘t make sense unless 
they are evidences of regular contact as ”inhabited lands over the sea“. For 
example, the richest copper mines in the world in terms of the size of pure 
copper nuggets and percentage of copper, are found around the Great Lakes, 
though today‘s technology is largely stymied by the ruggedness of the area. 
Those mines were extensively worked in ancient times. By whom? Where did the 
copper go? The number of copper artifacts found are a tiny fraction of what 
is expected to be found had it been for local consumption. Did that copper 
fuel at least part of the bronze age Europe and elsewhere? The same questions 
wi
 th Bolivian tin, richer than Cornwall mines.

How much did Isaiah and other Biblical authors know? Can we rule out beyond 
the eastern Mediterrenean in view of the fact that the ships of that time 
were capable of trans-Atlantic travel?

With the lack of surviving written records, we can only speculate: but to 
insist that those lands were known, or that they were not known, is 
presumptuous.

Karl W. Randolph.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>

<snip>
> 
> I had always assumed that the far-away Iyyim are the Greek islands in
> general, though in some cases the reference may be to a coastline. The Greek
> islands were certainly on the periphery of first millennium ANE geography,
> and were very important to the Persians.
> 
> Yigal
-- 
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