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The non-Algonquin question of west-coast Egyptian

EGYPTIAN TRACES in Hawaii; the hieroglyphic summer-solstice inscription at Lone Pine site in Alabama Hills of Inyo County, Calif. which Roberta Smith deciphered [1987, 1992], and the irregularly-placed knobs on a cyclopean wall of Inca Roca at Cuzco that she pointed out occur elsewhere only on cyclopean walls of the Osiris temple that guards the cemetery of Abydos, Middle Egypt [Post. Feb. 1996], and Egyptian-type reed boats on Lake Titicaca stand out among instances that give an impression of 3rd-mil-lennium Egyptian imperialism, flight, or exploration trans-Pacific.

Antique as original models may have been, antiqueness does not date distant recurrences, as 1st-Dynasty-type step-pyramids on Tenerife and in Teotihuacan repeat a sacred model in a later millennium. If bearers of Egyptian religion were Libyans, Cambodians, Micronesians, & Polynesians who reached the Hawaiian Islands, California, & Peru from Java, Borneo, New Guinea, & the Tonkin Gulf in the Middle Ages they would have preserved very-old forms which sacredness kept as unchanging as possible--and would have given that ambiguity Roberta found in the solstice inscription, which looks Chinese at the same time that it translates Egyptian. It will be difficult to prove 3rd-millennium-B.C. transmission of a unique architectural feature to the mid-14th-century-A.D. 6th Inca in the 3rd millennium. It is as unlikely an independent coincidence as it is a pre-1st-millennium-A.D. transmission, although Inca ancestors could have settled Cuzco as early as 2,000 B.C.

The powerful southern and northern currents did sweep craft, doubtless in stages, to the American Pacific coast in the 3rd millennium, but not Egyptian before the anomalous Ptolemaic voyage of the 3rd century B.C. This leaves 3rd-millennium Egyptian figurines found in Neolithic Ecuador unexplained. It is likelier they were 2nd-millennium specimens faithful to 3rd millennium tradition--a conservatism prevailing throughout Egyptian cultural history--and transported by Indonesian adherents of Egyptian religion. We can also wonder about misdating of the Ecuadorian provenance, although Jomon pottery in Ecuador dates even earlier. Could the figurines belong to Jomon tradition? Something is amiss in the whole question.

A nonindigenous gourd dug from Huaca Prieta (Black Pyramid), a 15-yard-high heap consisting of habitations and trash at the Chicama mouth (north of Chan Chan) on the North Peru coast, carbondated 4298 B.C. (300-year sigma), which should probably have been computed 4423.71 with higher sigma. Junius Bird, American Museum of Natural History curator, estimated the "Pyramid" without benefit of carbon dates as accumulated during one millennium, c.2800-1800 B,C. Burials occurred in the early levels and later in abandoned adobe houses. Cane-&-mud houses, Bird did not doubt, preceded abobe. From a deep pre-pottery level which he dated c.2300 B.C. he excavated three swatches of cotton cloth, each a rectangle less than a foot per side. By microscope he remarkably recovered their color-drained designs, following twined yarn movements. One design showed a doubleheaded snake suspending a rock crab--a recurring mythic motif in Peruvian art, and another a lined sequence of birds in same block style--a motif recurring in the Pyramid pottery period some seven centuries later.

Yet more spectacularly, Bird reconstructed two disintegrated carved gourds with carved lids near his 2000-B.C. level. Each quarter presented a stylized mask built of rectangles as on Shang bronze vessels, opposite quarters identical on each gourd but slightly differing between gourds. The style is already full-blown Chavin Geometric. Bird displayed all these specimens Sept. 1961.

It has grown unnecessary to belabor transpacific stylistic identity. You will see this ancient Geometric anew in nearly any East Asian restaurant of recent immigrants to the U.S. Bird's discoveries--devoid of Egyptian parallels--suggest that the Akkadian-inscribed grain-measuring bowl found on the Bolivian bank of Lake Titicaca; "Mycenaean" stirrup-vases with goateed effigy heads Ruth Verrill took for Sargon I; and 3rd millennium holdovers of Shumerian she found in Quechua diffused with Egyptian elements via Indonesian, Chinese, or Central Asian migrants in the 1st millennium A.D.

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