Before Columbus or the Vikings

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 caught by a fierce ocean storm. Driven into the South Equatorial Current, one of the ships must have been swept across the Atlantic to the coast of Brazil. And there the hardy band of voyagers left their historic memoir.

Scholars have long considered the story a clever but farfetched hoax. How could those Middle Eastern mariners in their small ships actually have made a landfall on the shores of the New World hundreds of years before Columbus or the Vikings or the half-dozen other claimants of the discovery of the Americas? Now, a respected authority on Semitic languages, Professor Cyrus H. Gordon of Brandeis University, has discovered additional evidence that may moderate the scholarly skepticism.

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 Paraiba state. Costa's son, a draftsman, made a copy of the baffling markings and sent it to the Brazilian

Emperor's Council of State. Subsequently, Ladislau Netto, director of the national museum, worked out a crude translation. Though Netto was convinced of the inscription's authenticity, he never located the original stones, and his contemporaries generally scoffed at the story as a fairy tale. Translations of the inscription that circulated among scholars of the day were so garbled that they justified the scoffing.

For many years, few experts took the story seriously. Then, at a Providence, R.I., rummage sale two years ago, Dr. Jules Piccus, professor of Romance languages at the University of 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's son.

Convincing Nuances. Piccus called in his old friend 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 Paraiba 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."

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