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Friday, March 4, 2011

Tehuelche rock inscriptions. Comparison to "Phoenician" stones

 
The authentic Tehuelche rock inscriptions look very different to those of a supposed "Phoenician" origin.
 
See Index on all my posts on Phoenicians in America.
 
Cover of Diseños nativos de la Argentina (Clásicos y Actuales), by Juan José Rossi. From: [1]

Above is the cover of a very nice book which reproduces traditional designs of the different native Americans who peopled Argentina. Its name: "Diseños nativos de la Argentina (Clásicos y Actuales)", by Juan José Rossi (Ed. Galerna, 2000). The idea of the book is to introduce the motifs used by our natives to modern designers so that they can use authentic designs in modern artifacts (clothes, handicrafts, art, etc.).

It is part of my library, so I decided to check if it had any references to the Tehuelche and their inscribed stones. Well, it does. Below (click to enlarge) is a photograph that I took of two (out of three) pages with images depicting their inscriptions: [1]

Inscribed stones. Tehuelche
Inscribed Stones by Tehuelche natives. From: [1]

You can clearly see that the style of these genuine Tehuelche inscriptions is completely different from the one used in the "engraved stones" of alleged "Phoenician" inspiration or origin:

Tehuelche : Small size. Thin and with a rectangular shaped.
Phoenician: Large size. Thick. Any shape.

Tehuelche : Scratched or etched on a "soft" surface such as slate.
Phoenician: Carved or sculpted in bas-relief on a hard granite or basaltic or porphyric rock.

Tehuelche : Simple lineal or geometric patterns. Only one out of eighteen stones depicted has a representative image: a crude drawing of the sun.
Phoenician: Complex drawings that combine geometric figures (generally as a border or fringe around a central area that is clearly representative and has well drawn images of: hearts, arrow heads, natives, animals -guanaco, cryptid, ñandu, snakes, sun and moon. Some even include symbols that appear to be letters.

The "Phoenician" stones were definitively not made by native Tehuelche or Mapuche people, they are very different. And we can therefore conclude that they are either:

  • Fake. A forgery, a hoax. That is: someone deliberately crafted these stones with "native" motifs, with the intention of making them appear as authentic native or Phoenician crafts (hence the use of Semitic letters), to sell them to gullible amateur archaeologists.
  • Genuine, made by some non-native people. By genuine I mean that the persons who made them, did so for some religious, cultural, social reason, and left them behind when they returned to their homeland or disappeared (famine, illness, war).

My analysis and opinion in the next post.

Sources.

[1] Juan José Rossi, (2000). Diseños nativos de la Argentina (Clásicos y Actuales). Ed. Galerna, 2000,


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