Ancient American Discovery

Could the Phoenicians or another ancient civilisation (greece, egypt, rome, carthage, etc) have discovered America and if they could have, how would that effect the Native American populations (in North, Central and South America) and also the America of today?

This POD comes up a lot. They didn't really have the ship building or navigational knowledge for open ocean sailing. It's theoretically possible that you could have a convoy blown off course and wind up sailing into the Gulf of St. Lawrence or what's now New York harbor, but it would be a one way trip.

"Discovery" of America, as in "Columbus discovered America" actually means "sustained transoceanic contact" which is what basically started with Columbus (more or less).
This may have happened earlier or in different directions with right POD (which would have to be fairly extensive ones in most cases) but is very difficult to do in Antiquity because, basically, even handwaving the necessary navigational tech (which is in itself tall order, but not impossible) Mediterranean Antiquity will likely have very very little interest in keeping a sustained contact with the Americas.

There's also the fact that Columbus, and the Spaniards, had a reason to want to sail west in the first place, as the Portuguese controlled the trade rounds around the tip of Africa and the Turks had closed the Silk Road. If we're back tracking to, say, the 1st Century, what motivation do the Romans have for simply sailing off into the blue?

Personally I'd be surprised if at least one ship in the ancient world didn't make it to the Americas and make it back again. But other than an interesting story for the crew when they got home it wouldn't have been a very successful trip and certainly wouldn't have inspired follow up trips. Europe and Africa have plenty of empty land and resources to exploit. In the ancient world there was still plenty of gold left to mine in Europe and trade to India was still open.

What would ancient sailors found in the Americas? Lots of forest and farmers in small villages without any metal tools. Just about the only things the Native Americans have to trade are furs and lumber, which are more readily available in Europe. Even if the Americas were common knowledge there'd be no reason to go. To get sustained contact with the Americas in the ancient world you need to have it make economic sense for them to do so.

The best POD that I can think of is a Basquewank. The Basque were known for their seafaring abilities and as master whalers. The Basque had been fishing and whaling in the waters of the New World for almost a hundred years when Champlain sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the early 17th Century. Maybe there's POD that would allow the Basque to go to the New World in Late Antiquity, or the Early Middle Ages, say in the 6th or 7th Century?

Maybe keep a Norse colony by sending there refugees from Greenland or make the Vinland/Anses aux Meadows survive; alternatively, send there Irish monks.

Johannes Parisiensis said:

Maybe keep a Norse colony by sending there refugees from Greenland or make the Vinland/Anses aux Meadows survive; alternatively, send there Irish monks.

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A surviving Norse colony is another scenario that get discussed a lot around here, but it needs to be farther south. L'anse aux Meadows was the wrong place for the Vikings. Halifax or New York would be better locations.

even if there was a one way trip to the Americas but there happened to be someone on board with the flu or something similar, would this infect the native americans and give them more resistance to later diseases once the europeans rediscovered the continent and possibly give the Amerindians a larger population than OTL and maybe more resistance to the europeans? or nah?

finnz said:

even if there was a one way trip to the Americas but there happened to be someone on board with the flu or something similar, would this infect the native americans and give them more resistance to later diseases once the europeans rediscovered the continent and possibly give the Amerindians a larger population than OTL and maybe more resistance to the europeans? or nah?

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You would need more sustained contact, and a wider array of diseases.

The big challenge in "Ancient American contact" is always finding a motivation.

The Punic Wars end with a stalemate: both Carthage and Rome survive and the frontiers of both empires remain stable, that became Roman. Carthage would keep on expanding on Africa, and I can see them establishing cities and trade post in South America in a few centuries.

Escape Zeppelin said:

Personally I'd be surprised if at least one ship in the ancient world didn't make it to the Americas and make it back again. But other than an interesting story for the crew when they got home it wouldn't have been a very successful trip and certainly wouldn't have inspired follow up trips. Europe and Africa have plenty of empty land and resources to exploit. In the ancient world there was still plenty of gold left to mine in Europe and trade to India was still open.

What would ancient sailors found in the Americas? Lots of forest and farmers in small villages without any metal tools. Just about the only things the Native Americans have to trade are furs and lumber, which are more readily available in Europe. Even if the Americas were common knowledge there'd be no reason to go. To get sustained contact with the Americas in the ancient world you need to have it make economic sense for them to do so.

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Consider the new crops. With horses and European livestock to trade, the Native Americans might be very interested. Two-way contact does not mean colonization at the levels of the Spanish Inquisition. If the Romans knew there something out there, they would likely build bigger ships. The trade would do much to bolster the craftsmanship and technology of both the Romans and Americans. In many ways, the Americans might have more to gain. If you get up the Great Lakes, you have iron ore. Consider the possibilities.

But the Romans or Phoenicians really have nothing to gain. There's no natural or human resource that fundamentally can't be obtained at home, or through Europe, Africa or Asia.

New crops? Who cares. They already have satisfactory crops that they know how to farm. Why import new ones. The seafarers aren't going to be interested in that sort of thing.

There's tobacco and chocolate. But... without a pre-existing market, it's unlikely to go anywhere.

Look at spices. Spices were already coming through the silk road network from the East Indies for centuries. But they were incredibly expensive. So it was worthwhile to go out in ships and forge new sea routes for the commodity.

That's not the case here - the market doesn't exist, and you'd have to incur incredible expense to develop the market.

Lack of a market means no significant trade, especially since ancient vessels would not have had the capabilities of Renaissance models. There is also a desire for discovery for its own sake. Rome had a wealthy ruling class and if they had reports of a land across the sea inhabited by Asian-looking people and animals they never saw before, there would be some interest. Eratosthenes (276-194 BC) said the earth is a sphere and the funding would likely be there to investigate. The real bounty of the New World is not tobacco, coffee and cocoa; but corn, squash and potatoes. Of course, explorers would need to reach Mexico and South America for some of these staple crops. It’s the same spirit that sent Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River and 1804.

There are some missing factors for actually trying to find, let alone exploiting/colonizing, a New World, in the times of Carthage and Rome (and for a good while after that).

1. No more space. In the age of exploration, Europe is full of people and polities. There is literally nowhere else to go but to Africa and across the Atlantic to find new territory that you can expect not to fight a powerful neighbour for and risk invasions into your own homeland, either retaliatory or opportunistic. By contrast in ancient times Europe and even the Northern Coast of Africa were ripe for colonization. Only today's Greece/Macedonia, Anatolia, Egypt, Italy and Tunisia were densely populated (and ofc Mesopotamia).

2. Ships. Obviously, the Exploration Age navigators have over 1,000 years' worth of technological progress over their proposed ancient competitors.

3. Artificial need. The Exploration Age had a lot to do with the Caliphates (incl. the Ottomans) and Mongols blocking Europe off from its trade routes to the Far East. They didn't expect to find new land and exploit its resources; they were after trade routes that the ancients already had on land.

Contrast and compare to the current situation with the colonization of space. By the analogy above we seem to be in a repeat of antiquity vis a vis the age of Exploration/Rennaissance.

While we may send out scientific missions and examine space through telescopes and such, there is currently no serious project to expand humanity beyond Planet Earth:

1. Space and resources on Earth are problematic, but not problematic enough.

2. Our technology is woefully inadequate especially for getting to the good stuff (rocky worlds rich in water, hydrocarbons, organic compounds, nytrates or sillica).

3. There aren't resources which we know of and need, that are so tightly restricted by trade strangulations it would be cheaper to go to space after them.

While the New World is relatively deficient in spices which could intrigue Europe, it's not completely lacking in spices.

It has a big one: chilli pepper. The hottest spice of all.

During Columbus's time, chillis were grown enough on the Caribbean islands that he brought some back with him, convinced it was pepper and that it was part of the proof that he had reached the real spice islands. In some ways chilli peppers were actually too hot - it took people time to get used to them - but there was interest in the end.

Trade with the Americas for chilli peppers alone is a long shot, but it's at least possible to conceive circumstances where it might happen. The New World also has at least one other spice which could end up commanding extremely high prices - vanilla - although that would require reaching Mesoamerica, not just the Caribbean.

Of course, none of this solves the many logistical and navigational problems of getting there in the first place, or of working out how to get home. But there is something which might serve as a potential market.

Yes, Columbus and his contemporaries had incentives to sail the Atlantic with that did not exist in ancient times.

My premise is that a Roman vessel makes it to northern North America, most likely by accident, meets up with natives and the crew can outfit the ship for a return trip. What happens when the account of this new land reaches the Roman capital? They may not need territory to settle. It may be too far to send legions to conquer. But this IS Rome. They would send at least one more exploration party, if for no other reason that they might find some helpful new technology.

Let’s assume the emperor sends an exploration party and when it returns, concludes there are no resources in the New World worth the effort. Assume the journeys result in negligible cultural exchange. You will still have, more than 1000 years before Columbus, a documented quasi-Viking route path to the New World. No explorer in future centuries will be sailing blind; land is known and with natives.



While America does have crops for exploit, it would take sustained missions to reach them from the initial landing points near Nova Scotia.

Mark E. said:

Let’s assume the emperor sends an exploration party and when it returns, concludes there are no resources in the New World worth the effort. Assume the journeys result in negligible cultural exchange. You will still have, more than 1000 years before Columbus, a documented quasi-Viking route path to the New World. No explorer in future centuries will be sailing blind; land is known and with natives.

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Assuming that trip happens and records of that trip and a land that definitely isn't India or China survive the fall of Rome and the following millennia. One major problem is that the report of the trip would directly conflict with other ancient sources like Ptolemy about the geography of the world and is very likely to be discounted entirely or noted as a trip to India no matter what the actual text says. Another problem is that the thousand-odd years between the first trip and Columbus' era is a very long time. Wind, current, climate, peoples, all change. Heck, even the stars will have moved a bit. Any documented route will be nothing more than a rough guide and detailed information is likely to discredit the story since you'll have things like "the story says the wind blows east over this island but it definitely blows north. If this isn't right the rest is probably wrong too."

The Americas are very likely forgotten about by everyone except scholars, cartographers, and the occasional sailor telling stories until the at least the 1300s. That's the point at which sailing technology really starts to make traveling across the Atlantic in any regular sort of fashion feasible. Whichever country rediscovers America will have a ball claiming that they've recovered Rome's ancient lost provinces.

Honestly I can't see it dramatically changing the course of history without a lot of butterflies. There were dozens of legends of lands in the western Atlantic many of which were honestly believed for centuries and even showed up on official maps. One more story, no matter how true it turns out to be, isn't going to speed up technology or create the economic situation to exploit it.

Escape Zeppelin said:

The Americas are very likely forgotten about by everyone except scholars, cartographers, and the occasional sailor telling stories until the at least the 1300s. That's the point at which sailing technology really starts to make traveling across the Atlantic in any regular sort of fashion feasible. Whichever country rediscovers America will have a ball claiming that they've recovered Rome's ancient lost provinces.

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You have a discovery that is documented with the names and accomplishments of the Caesars, their battles, campaigns, etc. A single mission will not return the discovery of continents. It will bring back the latitude of a land populated by Asian-looking people. The latitude would be too far north for India and the speculation between island and continent would not be resolved because the resources to continue such long sailing missions were not there. Scholars will know that if you launch from Britain and sail west, you will reach land. If the launch point is Britain (or Normandy) the information might be preserved there, too.

Not until 1492 did the incentive arise to take the risk and sail west. In this ATL exercise, land is known. The ships do not have to be able to circumnavigate the world. After all, the Vikings did it. Given the challenges of the Middle Ages, might somebody else try?

Mark E. said:

There is also a desire for discovery for its own sake. Rome had a wealthy ruling class and if they had reports of a land across the sea inhabited by Asian-looking people and animals they never saw before, there would be some interest.

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Interest, but I don't know that there would be sufficient interest to invest substantially in investigation and exploration. Look at it this way, the Romans were vaguely aware of the existence of Civilizations beyond Persia, in India and China and even Africa. They didn't do a lot of exploring or mapping, and this was, at least, a lot more viable for them to do.

Eratosthenes (276-194 BC) said the earth is a sphere and the funding would likely be there to investigate.

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Because.... ?

The real bounty of the New World is not tobacco, coffee and cocoa; but corn, squash and potatoes. Of course, explorers would need to reach Mexico and South America for some of these staple crops.

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But the trouble is that these staple crops don't have the high value that would motivate or justify the cost of a transatlantic expedition. No one who is likely to be involved in financing, or authorizing, or participating in these expeditions is likely to really have a grasp of the potential of these crops. Seafarers just won't get it. Financial and political elites won't get it.

It’s the same spirit that sent Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River and 1804.

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No, it's not. Not really.