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From ancient Inscriptions, newly deciphered, comes startling evidence that Europeans had settled in America as early as 800 BC
A large, genial man in his late fifties, Fell first became interested in ancient languages when he was a student at the University of Edinburgh. He learned Gaelic, and began investigating Celtic tombs and ruins in Scotland. Then, in a study of the marine biology of Polynesia, he found hundreds of unreadable inscriptions engraved on rocks and painted on cavern walls.
Intrigued, Fell went to Harvard in 1964 and spent eight years there ransacking the Widener Library's unique collection of texts on obscure languages and writing systems. He acquired a working knowledge of half a dozen ancient alphabets, including Egyptian hieroglyphics; Punic; Carthaginian script (used by several ancient peoples); and Ogam, an almost forgotten script used by pre-Christian Celts.
Fell finally found that the Polynesian inscriptions were written in the native language, Maori. But its vocabulary was derived from a mixture of Greek and Egyptian spoken in Libya after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. The alphabet came from Carthage.
The most remarkable of these Libyan texts was found in a huge cave in New Guinea. There, a navigator named Maui left drawings of ancient but sophisticated astronomical and navigational instruments, as well as a depiction of a solar eclipse which enabled Fell, with the help of Harvard astronomers, to identify the year of the drawings as 232 BC.
If there were Libyans visiting Polynesia at that time, Fell reasoned, perhaps they sailed on to South America. He accumulated evidence for such landfalls, and began lecturing on the subject at Harvard.
His talks attracted the attention of a group of dogged investigators led by James Whittall, an archaeologist who had noted the similarity between many crude stone buildings in New England, which farmers often called root cellars, and similar ruins in Spain and Portugal. The European buildings had been identified as creations of Celts who ruled that part of Europe during the Bronze Age, the period of prehistory which dates roughly from 3500 BC.
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Whittall asked Fell to take a look at the Bourne stone, which had been discovered near Bourne, Massachusetts, around 1680. No one had ever been able to make any sense of the writing on it. Now, Barry Fell was able to read it. The letters were a variation of the Punic alphabet found in ancient Spain, for which Fell has coined the word "Iberic." It recorded the annexation of a large chunk of present-day Massachusetts by Hanno, a prince of Carthage.
Fell joined in a search for additional inscriptions at one of Whittall's favourite sites, Mystery Hill in North Salem, New Hampshire - a series of slabstone buildings variously attributed to Norsemen and wandering Irish monks. Fell began studying the inscribed triangular stones which had previously been found at the site by Bob Stone, the owner of Mystery Hill, and found a dedication to the Phoenician god Baal, written in Iberic Then suddenly, people began seeing hitherto unnoticed inscriptions.
"A shout from Bob Stone told us that he had found another tablet in an adjacent drystone wall," Fell recalls. "As he brushed away the adhering dirt, there came into clear view a line of Ogam script that read 'Dedicated to Bel. '"
Students of ancient mythology had long suspected that the Celtic sun god Bel and the Carthaginian-Phoenician god Baal were identical. Here, for the first time, was evidence not only of this fact, but of a Celtic-Carthaginian partnership in exploration and settlement on a scale never even imagined with dozens of Ogam inscriptions on another more remote site in central Vermont. Fell says,
"It became clear that ancient Celts had built these stone chambers as religious shrines, and the Carthaginian mariners were visitors who were permitted to worship at them and make dedications in their own language to their own gods."
Next, Whittall showed Fell a 1940 photograph of an inscription engraved on a cliff above Mount Hope Bay, in Bristol, Rhode Island. Discovered and recorded in 1780, it had been severely vandalized, making it necessary to work from the photograph. Fell soon read a single line, which was written in Tartessian Punic: "Voyagers from Tarshish this stone proclaims. "
Tarshish was a biblical city on the southern coast of Spain, and its men were among the boldest sailors of antiquity. About 533 BC, Tarshish was destroyed by the Carthaginians and its trade was taken over by them. Here was evidence of how the partnership between the Iberian Celts and the Carthaginians began.
On Monhegan Island, ten miles off the coast of Maine, another inscription was brought to Fell's attention. Written in Celtic Ogam, it read: "Cargo platforms for ships from Phoenicia." From these and other inscriptions, as well as an intensive study of historical data on the seafaring ability of the men of Tarshish and Carthage, Fell concluded there was a highly developed trade route between America and the Mediterranean for at least 400 years before the birth of Christ. The chief products from North America were probably copper, furs and hides.
"American data," as Fell calls it, now began to multiply. Most important was his decipherment of the Davenport stele, which some people compare to the translation of the Rosetta stone the nineteenth century breakthrough which enabled men to read hieroglyphics and grasp the awesome sweep of Egyptian history. On this inscription, which was found in a burial mound near Davenport, Iowa, in 1874, Fell was able to read three kinds of writing. At the top were Egyptian hieroglyphics. Below them was the Iberic form of Punic writing found in Spain. The third line was in Libyan script.
http://www.ensignmessage.com/stonesecrets.htmlDavenport stele found in Iowa:
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