lantis, was more ancient than
the constrained voyage of that Tyrian ship of which Diodorus Siculus
gives an account; and it can be seen that the early Greeks had a better
knowledge even of Western Europe than those of later times. A dark age,
so far as relates to geographical knowledge, set in upon the countries
around the AEgean Sea and on the coast of Asia Minor after the
independence and enterprise of Tyre and the other Phoenician cities
were destroyed by the Assyrians, toward the close of the ninth century
before Christ, which was disturbed some four hundred and fifty or five
hundred years later by the conquests of Alexander the Great.

The known enterprise of the Phoenician race, and this ancient knowledge
of America, so variously expressed, strongly encourage the hypothesis
that the people called Phoenicians came to this continent, established
colonies in the region where ruined cities are found, and filled it with
civilized life. It is argued that they made voyages on the "great
exterior ocean," and that such navigators must have crossed the
Atlantic; and it is added that symbolic devices similar to those of the
Phoenicians are found in the American ruins, and that an old tradition
of the native Mexicans and Central Americans described the first
civilizers as "bearded white men," who "came from the East in ships."
Therefore, it is urged, the people described in the native books and
traditions as "Colhuas" must have been Phoenicians.

But if it were true that the civilization found in Mexico and Central
America came from people of the Phoenician race, it would be true also
that they built in America as they never built any where else, that they
established a language here radically unlike their own, and that they
used a style of writing totally different from that which they carried
into every other region occupied by their colonies. All the forms of
alphabetical writing used at present in Europe and Southwestern Asia
came directly or indirectly from that anciently invented by the race to
which the Phoenicians belonged, and they have traces of a common
relationship which can easily be detected. Now the writing of the
inscriptions at Palenque, Copan, and elsewhere in the ruins has no more
relatedness to the Phoenician than to the Chinese writing. It has not a
single characteristic that can be called Phoenician any more than the
language of the inscriptions or the style of architecture with which it
is associated;