America & the Jade Road.. No Puritans Need Apply

[SoCalDem]

http://www.thejaderoad.com/america.html

Imagine a USA "settled" & "discovered" by Chinese explorers of the 1300s, instead of the religious "searchers" of the 1600s.

Some academics think we WERE visited by Asian people, long before the "white man" arrived.

Why did the Asians leave? Would they have repelled the Mayflower folks & the Columbus crowd?

Flights of fantasy may carry one anywhere they please, but scholarly research requires evidence, and where is the evidence to make a link between the Shang and the Americans to be found? Look no further than ancient Jade and Stone Olmec and Shang Chinese artifacts that reveal a most compelling relationship between these two ancient civilizations.





On pottery made by Native Americans in northwestern North America, one often sees motifs similar to the ferocious taotie animal-face patterns (top) found on bronze artifacts from China's Shang and Zhou dynasties. The two sides of the animal are depicted opposite each other, giving it two heads, two bodies and two tails. This can be seen as an early attempt to express a sense of 3-dimensionality. The lower picture shows a pattern from an Amerindian casket.


It is a generally accepted view is that 3000 years ago the Olmec civilization flourished in what is today Central America. Because of the distant age of this civilization and the Spanish invasion and mass destruction of the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas very few facts are know about the Olmec. Only now are new discoveries being made that support the fact the the Olmec indeed had a writing system of sophisticated ideographic symbols. Archeological researchers have yet to decipher the Olmec "Bird" script writing that has been discovered from excavated pottery and jade artifacts.

These "Bird Script" incised markings Olmec relics closely resemble the writing of ancient China in remarkable ways. When scholars here in Taiwan, on this side of the Pacific, overcame their initial surprise, they were as interested as the mainland scholars. After looking at over 100 characters hand-drawn by Mike Xu, they really did recognize many which were similar to the characters of oracle bones and bronzes. "Some are similar to particular pre-Qin characters, but it would take further research to determine their phonetic and semantic values," says Chung Po-sheng, head of the Chinese writing systems section at the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology.