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<< News >> Cuban Rock Art - evidence for Atlantis?

Submitted by Andy B on Thursday, 12 September 2002  Page Views: 12677

MysteriesAndrew Collins describes part of a recent lecture he has given: Cuba, more than any other island, fitted the description of Plato's Atlantean island, both in geography and topography. Moreover, Cuba has been identified by geographers as a mysterious island paradise known as Antillia, or the island of the Seven Cities

said to have laid in the outer ocean according to Moorish, and later Portuguese medieval tradition (and unquestionably borrowed from much earlier Phoenician and Carthaginian sources). More than this, the name Antillia can be shown to derive from the Semitic word root ATL, 'to elevate' , which was also the root behind the name Atlas, from which we derive the name Atlantis, 'daughter of Atlas', the term used for an Atlantic island

(Atlantides, 'daughters of Atlas', was the plural used to describe Atlantic islands in general). In other words, if Antillia was merely a medieval form of Atlantis, then it further confirms Cuba's association with Plato's Atlantic paradise.

The Seven Caves
For more evidence of the part Cuba played in the foundation of the Atlantis myth, we must turn our attentions to the creation myths of the Mesoamerican peoples, such as the Aztec, Toltec and Maya. They spoke variously of their earliest ancestors coming from an island paradise located in the east, known variously as Aztlan or Tulan, following a period of darkness when the sun would not appear. On this island the first humans emerged from somewhere called Chichomoztoc, the Seven Caves. From these individuals came seven tribes, or clans, and by their hands rose Seven Cities. I believe that some semblance of knowledge regarding the creation of the seven cities in Mesoamerican myth led to Antillia, or Cuba, becoming known as the Island of the Seven Cities. Furthermore, just ten years after Christopher Columbus's famous landfall in the Bahamas in 1492, the main islands of the Caribbean - Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Cuba - had been named 'the Isles of Antillia of the King of Aragon', showing how the early Spanish explorers likewise came to identity them with ancient Antillia and its accompanying islands.

The only site in the whole of the Caribbean which bears any resemblance to Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caves, is the Punta del Este cave complex at the extreme eastern end of a peninsular on the Isla de Juventud (Isle of Youth), divided from the southern coast of the Cuban mainland by the Bay of Batabano. Ceuva # Uno has been described as a veritable Sistine chapel of the prehistoric world, and is filled with beautiful petroglyphs of concentric circles, rectilinear shapes and other abstract forms many thousands of years old. I interpreted the symbolism of these designs as perhaps embodying the memory of some kind of comet impact suffered by the Caribbean in a distant epoch. Such thoughts came entirely from intuitive feelings experienced during a personal visit to the cave in September 1998 - feelings that led me to explore the possibility of a comet impact having devastated the region. More curiously, Paulina Zelitsky, the director of the ADC team working out of Cuba, visited the Punta del Este caves for the first time only shortly before the discovery of the Guanahacabibes site, off the west coast of Cuba in July 2002. She has since claimed that an unconfirmed carving of a cross detected on a large, roughly rectangular block videoed at the underwater site, bears some similarity to an abstract cross design found inside Punta del Este's Ceuva # Uno.

The 1951 ECOS Article
However, a dramatic new discovery regarding the Punta del Este cave complex was revealed to the ARE audience at the conference. For it now appears that Cuban archaeologists were working on the theory that Ceuva # Uno's petroglyphs reflected some kind of cosmic catastrophe which devastated the region in prehistoric times as early as 1951, a full decade before the country came under Communist control. A two-page article that appeared in the February 1952 edition of the magazine ECOS entitled 'Formó Cuba Parte de la Atlándida?' by Francisco Garcia-Juarez, the press secretary of the Instituto Cubano de Arqueologia (Institute of Cuban Archaeology, or ICA) posed the question: did Cuba once form part of Atlantis? He explained how members of the Institute were investigating the idea that traces of an Atlantean culture might be found in Cuba and Hispaniola, a view offered to them by Egerton Sykes, a world renowned authority on Atlantis. In 1949 he had written an introduction for a revised edition of ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD, the all-time classic on the subject written by former US congressman Ignatius Donnelly and published for the first time in 1882 (and still available as a re-print by Dover Publications). Sykes was also the editor of a journal propounding Hans Hoerbinger's Cosmic Ice theory entitled, simply, ATLANTIS, in which appeared a partial translation of the above-mentioned ECOS article.

According to Syke's translation, the ICA concluded that the most likely location where traces of the Atlantean culture might be found was the Punta del Este cave complex. In one cave was found steps that led up to an alcove which might possibly have been used by priests to observe the movement of the stars. Moreover, petroglyphs inside the caves (presumably those in Cueva # Uno) displayed astronomical information which linked them with the origins of the Maya calendrical system, thus the possibility that Cuba had been a 'staging post' for the migrations of the Maya into Central America should not be overlooked. More than this, the translation stated:

On the South coast of Cuba, at Camaguey, there are many partially submerged mounds called "caneyes", which may have been places of refuge for primitive man. There are numerous artifacts here which have never been adequately investigated. Numerous skeleton remains found here give evidence of a sudden and violent death due to some catastrophe. The artifacts include stone balls, spherical stones, elongated stones, and rods with forked ends resembling snakes. The absence of large monuments may merely mean they have not yet been seriously looked for.

The existence of the article by Sykes regarding the earlier feature in Cuba' s ECOS magazine was brought to my attention by Dean Clarke of Atlantisite.com. He studied under Egerton Sykes and had been given permission by Syke's widow to quotes sections from some of the articles to be found in Sykes' ATLANTIS journal. Such was the situation when on arriving at Virginia Beach I was informed that, following Sykes death in Brighton, England, in 1983, the ARE inherited his library of books, files and correspondence, which are today housed in a special room attached to its own library. With the help of Greg and Lora Little, I was able to find the original Sykes' translation of the ECOS article, as well as the original 1952 Cuban article written in Spanish. Unfortunately, my Spanish is non-existent, yet after I came off stage I spoke to Humberto Martinez, MD, a pharmacist from Miami who is one of the trustees of the ARE. He was born in Cuba and speaks and writes Spanish fluently. I showed him the article and overnight he was able to make a rough translation.

Apparently, Sykes had told the ICA that if Cuba did form part of Atlantis then its archaeologists would find evidence on the island of artificial deformation of the cranium among its ancient inhabitants, as well as step monuments or ziggurats and methods of cutting and orientating large rocks. Why exactly is not made clear in the article, although I would suspect that these ideas were based on Donnelly's concept of a diffusion of shared ideas among cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, due to the proposed migration of peoples from Atlantis following its destruction. Whatever the reasons, the Cuban archaeologists confirmed that they had found all of these things on Cuba, but, as the article stated, there would have to be a revolution of the established ways of thinking before their presence would be seen as evidence for the existence of Atlantis.

Remember, all this was taking place just six years after the end of the Second World War, when Nazis are known to have been searching for evidence of Atlantis in nearby Venezuela, including the excavation and retrieval of skeletons bearing elongated skulls. Moreover, there are unconfirmed reports that Nazis were also searching for evidence of Atlantis in Haiti (on the island of Hispaniola), which they linked with the creation myths attached to the Afro-Caribbean religion of voodoo. Confirmation of this story would be very much appreciated!

What was infinitely more important, however, were the interpretations of the petroglyphs found in the Punta del Este caves (again, seemingly those in Cueva # Uno) by the Cuban archaeologists of the ICA. Captions to two example s shown as line illustrations, explained that the symbols showed a comet with a tail hitting an astral, or celestial, body, and breaking up. I was simply stunned when Humberto began translating the text there and then. He agreed to send me a more fuller translation in due course, and this I will post on the website, complete with the original article in Spanish. I was thus able to return to the stage at the conference on the Sunday morning and show the overheads of the two-page ECOS article as Humberto read aloud extracts of his translation, which confirmed my own theory that the petroglyphs of Cueva # Uno embodied a memory of a comet impact having occurred during some distant epoch.

More at: www.andrewcollins.net

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"Cuban Rock Art - evidence for Atlantis?" | Login/Create an Account | 2 News and Comments
  
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Re: Cuban Rock Art - evidence for Atlantis? by Partlow on Thursday, 10 February 2005
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What about the investigations of a possible city off the west coast of Cuba (by the Canadian company); and also the Miami Circle, the Tairona culture which was part of the Cir*****-Carib Culture found throughout the Caribean, Columbia and Gulf areas of the Southeastern U.S.?
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Re: Cuban Rock Art - evidence for Atlantis? by Anonymous on Thursday, 12 September 2002
In 1992 I published a book that argued that Thos. More had based his ideal republic Utopia on the Maya of Mexico. This was well received in some quarters but since then my own rersearch has made me question my findings.
I think we are too hung up on the Atlantis question. A careful reading of Plato will show that this was nort a new colony. Only one of many that covered the earth. What we are seeing in the writings is a template for establishing colonies. This is why we are getting confusing readings, there were a great number of "civilisations" established who followed this template. I agree that the early Antilles island mythology suggests that these were staging posts for future mainland colonies. The very earliest names for the deities and placenames resemble the island ones. Later scribes gave them a local slant.
I now could site locations in Northern Spain, Anatolia etc that would fit the criteria of the sevencaves, the seven ravines, homeland.
What we are seeing here, and in my view should be following worlwide is THE PATTERN OF CIVILISATION laid down by Plato, More and many other authors. When we estabish that a worldwide pattern exists we may be able to start tracing it and searching for a source.
Lorainne Stobbart.
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