the roman's go to America

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Erm. Surely that refers to actual Indians, rather than Native Americans?

Unlikely for several reasons.

1) The commonly accepted reading of Pomponius Mela puts this event on Europe's North Atlantic coast. It is technically *possible* fior an indian ship tobe blown off course around Africa and drift out of sight of land until it reaches the North Sea or Scandinavia. Tthey made landfall among a nation close to Roman Gaul whose name was unforetunately garbled in transmission, but which is commonly read as Sueves - that would put them in Germanic territory. It is much more likely, however, that anyone blown off course and ending up here comes from the Americas.

2) Actual Indians would have been able to expülain where they were from in geographixc terms the romans - especially Pomponius Mela - could understand. it is possible that the writtentradition was simply not good enough when it reached him, but it is again more likely that their information siomply made no sense to the Romans.

3) Indian traders headed for the Red Sea, just like Parthian traders, would have spoken the lingua franca of thattrade network, which was Greek. At least one of these guys should have had enough of it to make it clear he wanted an interpreter.

4) You can cross the North Atlantic in kayaks and umiaks. It's been done, though not usually voluntarily.
 

MrP

Banned
Erm. Surely that refers to actual Indians, rather than Native Americans?

Dear me - I was reading what I assumed he'd said rather than what he had said. Thankee for setting me straight! I don't recall having heard of native Americans reaching Europe, it's true.
 
OK... But given that the Romans weren't Columbus, why would they refer to these people as 'Indians'? The Romans knew the Indians were from the East, why would they call someone from the west 'Indians'.

Very odd bit of info, that.


There is certainly modern evidence that individual Inuit made it to Europe by accident in modern times
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_kayak said:
Indeed at the end of the 17th century there were at least three separate kayaks preserved in Scotland. One kayak, with associated equipment, is preserved in Aberdeen's Marischal Museum. It was found, with dying occupant, on a nearby shore. Some suggest the occupants were escaped Inuit from European ships, Inuit storm-driven from Greenland, or from a European source.
 
There's a lot of older semi discredited ideas in there, that Europeans were oh so more advanced than Indians being the most obvious and noxious. In terms of many things like medicine, they really weren't. Romans, like most Europeans, were pretty damned unsanitary for example. Same with little things like, oh, basic ideas about democracy and human rights and women's rights.

And the basic premise of a lot of diffusionist ideas, that anything advanced among Indians tribes must've come from somewhere else, is pretty discredited. For one thing, we know of many cases where Europeans came and intermarried wholesale among Indians, the "lost colony" or Roanoke likely the largest example. People like the Lumbee and Melungeons as well. They adopted Indian ways, not the other way around.

This. Many of the technological advancement that the Romans had that the American natives didn't wouldn't actually be all that useful there. Especially wheels. They had wheels. They used them on toys. They weren't really useful for much else in that land. Even if horses and such were transported over, I doubt people like the Maya would want to bother too much, as horses have little to no use in most areas of Central America. They could only ever be used on the roads, and although the roads were well built and plentiful, they would still be too much effort. Ever taken care of horses? There's a reason the people in the area never really used horses all that much even after the Spanish came and took over.

This is a Hypothetical website so let’s stick with Mister Abbadon’s original idea of the Romans getting across the Atlantic.
It’s not as far fetched as all that, the Vikings managed to get there using the same level of technology.
Let’s have the Romans use the same northern route that the Vikings used later, taking advantage of the Ice free North Atlantic prior to the Cooling that took place at the end of the Medieval Warm Period.
What is their Motivation? We don’t know, but I’m sure there are a few good options.
Perhaps we are dealing with refugees from one of the civil wars.
So a Roman fleet reaches the coast of North America and head south looking for good arable land. They reach what in OTL is New Hampshire and Maine and settle. Establishing their first towns they trade with the indigenous population, exchanging farm products, tools, fashions and most importantly Technology.
The locals start adopting Roman ideas and products, not because they are forced to but because they can see the benefits of doing so.
The Iron Age arrives in North America before 400AD!
Wheat begins to replace Maize, doubling the yield per acre of land.
The Romans bring with them horses and cattle, revolutionising transportation of people and products, as do the wheel and that most Roman of all Civil Engineering projects: roads.
The concept of Money revolutionizes the power structures of Pre-Columbian America.
Let’s then assume that contact is lost between the two continents, either at the same time as it was in OTL (14th century) or earlier.
Time passes…
Christopher Columbus encounters ships based on the bireme when he arrives in the Caribbean.
Or Hernan Cortez arrives on the coast of Mexico and is confronted by a large army carrying Iron swords, wearing chain mail armour and with it’s own cavalry and catapult artillery. This would not be the Aztecs; the entire evolution of Civilisation in the Americas would have been drastically altered.
Dutch and English traders arriving on the coast of North America would find large cities and people who not only know the value of coins but who drive a very hard bargain.
Would they wear Togas? Almost certainly not, fashions change and besides, most of the people they are descended from would have been Native Americans.
The Romans in North America would have taken time to get established. Roman ideas taking root and spreading out, accelerating growth on the Continent. But in the mean time Europe was suffering the Dark Ages.
Who would in fact be discovering who the second time around?
There are quite a few problems here.

Firstly, you mentioned them creating a successful colony in New Hampshire/Maine right from the start. How? The English didn't too very well at all there at first. Why? They died. Ever been up in that area during winter? Of those who did not die from sickness or the cold, a great many were assimilated into native tribes. You assume they'd become Romans essentially, which quite bizarre. Then, as someone else mentioned, you ain't gonna find much iron here. Building roads for your horses and cattle would be tough when you are busy trying to find food to save your dying colonists. The horses and cattle would be gone too quick to use them for anything, eaten probably. Roads are not likely to be built for some time. The most likely fate of the first Roman colony would be most of the colonists dying and the few survivors becoming Abenaki or whatever the local tribes are. There is no way they could be as successful as the first colonists, having less technology themselves.

Then you ignored everything the locals achieved apparently. If you count the Mesoamericans as native-Americans, they had money, roads, and civil engineering to match Rome. The height of Mayan civilization was actually quite a bit earlier than most people believe, being around the end of the Preclassic Period (roughly 0-100AD IIRC, though Wikipedia says the biggest city reached it's height a couple hundred years earlier). If the Romans get down there, they ain't introducing anything revolutionary. Mainly because they would have precious little iron and no beasts of burden prbly. And in the far north where you placed them the natives would not care for those "achievements" either. The biggest mistake of yours was viewing everything objectively, meaning you see the Romans as being objectively superior to native-Americans.
 
OK... But given that the Romans weren't Columbus, why would they refer to these people as 'Indians'? The Romans knew the Indians were from the East, why would they call someone from the west 'Indians'.

Very odd bit of info, that.

Well, he's arguing the woprld can be circumnavigated, so it makes sense from his POV. Columbus didn't just come up with the idea out of the blue.
 
Will Pomponius Mela be good enough?

III, 38

http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/pomponius3.html

'Indians' reaching the coast of Germania after being blown off course in a storm.

I always thought it quite odd to apply this to Native Americans. We call Native Americans "Indians" because Colombus thought he'd landed in India when he got to the Caribbean, and so called the natives he encountered "Indians".

It would be extremely odd for Romans many centuries earlier to also call Native Americans "Indians". I would think the passage refers to people of unknown origin to the area. Presumably from far away"
 
I always thought it quite odd to apply this to Native Americans. We call Native Americans "Indians" because Colombus thought he'd landed in India when he got to the Caribbean, and so called the natives he encountered "Indians".

It would be extremely odd for Romans many centuries earlier to also call Native Americans "Indians". I would think the passage refers to people of unknown origin to the area. Presumably from far away"

I'm fairly convinced that that is the case, but of course it begs the question where this 'far away' was. It has been suggested that they were Finns, Sami or Balts, but I rather suspoect the Germanic tribes would have known about these people. The only other 'far away' that suggests itself (unless we want to assume they were Britons, Picts or Scandinavians who lied about their origin) would be the Americas, or possibly the Canary islands.
 
Firstly, you mentioned them creating a successful colony in New Hampshire/Maine right from the start. How? The English didn't too very well at all there at first. Why? They died. Ever been up in that area during winter? Of those who did not die from sickness or the cold, a great many were assimilated into native tribes. You assume they'd become Romans essentially, which quite bizarre. Then, as someone else mentioned, you ain't gonna find much iron here. Building roads for your horses and cattle would be tough when you are busy trying to find food to save your dying colonists. The horses and cattle would be gone too quick to use them for anything, eaten probably. Roads are not likely to be built for some time. The most likely fate of the first Roman colony would be most of the colonists dying and the few survivors becoming Abenaki or whatever the local tribes are. There is no way they could be as successful as the first colonists, having less technology themselves.

Early European colonists and explorers -- such as Champlain's disastrous winter on St. Croix Island in 1604, near present-day Calais, Maine, and the short-lived Popham colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1607 -- failed because they arrived just as the Little Ice Age was getting established. Champlain chose a terrible location for his winter headquarters, and the Popham settlers were simply ill-led and ill-supplied. I've read that winters in Maine at that time were comparable to winters in Newfoundland today. Roman colonists would likely have much better weather.

And despite the cold winters, far more colonists survived and thrived in New England than they did in the more southerly colonies, such as Jamestown, where disease was rampant and the mortality rate ran as high as 90 percent in the early years.

As for iron, Maine was a major source of iron for decades before the higher quality western deposits were discovered. Ore Mountain produced quantities of limonite gossan and iron sulfide ores for the Katahdin Iron Works furnaces east of Greenville.

The key would be developing good relations with the local Native Americans and using the Romans' advanced ship technology to harvest fish and other sea life as a steady source of food.
 
The key would be developing good relations with the local Native Americans and using the Romans' advanced ship technology to harvest fish and other sea life as a steady source of food.
By taking their land and building crap all over it? You forget the eastern seaboard was already inhabited. Not sure the Abenaki, Massachusetts, Wampanoags, Mississipians, etc, would enjoy Romans colonizing them. They didn't enjoy the English, French, Spanish, or Dutch doing so IRL. Can't see the Romans, what with their attitude on foreign peoples deemed "inferior", being much gentler.

There's also the point as to why they'd want to colonize America in the first place, assuming they could actually make regular voyages there. I mean, to them Germany was the frontier, not the Appalachians. Why expand by going on a dangerous and extremely long voyage to a hostile land with worse weather than the one they came from and millions of native people who don't want you there? What in America would draw them there? Nothing I can think of.
 
By taking their land and building crap all over it? You forget the eastern seaboard was already inhabited. Not sure the Abenaki, Massachusetts, Wampanoags, Mississipians, etc, would enjoy Romans colonizing them. They didn't enjoy the English, French, Spanish, or Dutch doing so IRL. Can't see the Romans, what with their attitude on foreign peoples deemed "inferior", being much gentler.

There's also the point as to why they'd want to colonize America in the first place, assuming they could actually make regular voyages there. I mean, to them Germany was the frontier, not the Appalachians. Why expand by going on a dangerous and extremely long voyage to a hostile land with worse weather than the one they came from and millions of native people who don't want you there? What in America would draw them there? Nothing I can think of.

I'm not forgetting anything. I'm responding to issues raised by other posters. As for the attitudes of the Native Americans to the early colonists, they were in general friendly. It was only after the colonists began expanding and occupying large tracts of land and after it became obvious that the new diseases were brought by the colonists that Amerindian hostility grew to the point of warfare. And the attitude of the Romans toward the natives wouldn't hold a candle to the attitudes of colonists like Captain John Smith and Governor John Winthrop.

As for why Romans would want to colonize the Americas, I haven't a clue. Offhand I can't think of anything readily observable on the Atlantic Seaboard that the Romans would want badly enough to cross the North Atlantic on a regular basis -- particularly with a ship technology based on the Med.
 
I'm fairly convinced that that is the case, but of course it begs the question where this 'far away' was. It has been suggested that they were Finns, Sami or Balts, but I rather suspoect the Germanic tribes would have known about these people. The only other 'far away' that suggests itself (unless we want to assume they were Britons, Picts or Scandinavians who lied about their origin) would be the Americas, or possibly the Canary islands.

I think Sami might have been quite exotic to the Germanic in both looks and language. Whatever language the Sami spoke at the time. Kvæns and Bjarms would be other possibilities. However, we should not forget the Baltics importance as a center of the Amber trade. It is not impossible that someone from further east had tried to hook onto the Amber Road.

I'm not forgetting anything. I'm responding to issues raised by other posters. As for the attitudes of the Native Americans to the early colonists, they were in general friendly. It was only after the colonists began expanding and occupying large tracts of land and after it became obvious that the new diseases were brought by the colonists that Amerindian hostility grew to the point of warfare. And the attitude of the Romans toward the natives wouldn't hold a candle to the attitudes of colonists like Captain John Smith and Governor John Winthrop.

As for why Romans would want to colonize the Americas, I haven't a clue. Offhand I can't think of anything readily observable on the Atlantic Seaboard that the Romans would want badly enough to cross the North Atlantic on a regular basis -- particularly with a ship technology based on the Med.

Roman Legions normally had quite a diverse supply of skills. What they did not have was a large number of women. A shipwrecked Legion, or the remains of one may hire out as mercenaries/allies to a local power group and then assimilate/hybridize the group. The problem would be finding a reason why the Romans would not attempt to cross back to the roman world ASAP. Maybe if they were losers from a rebellion or something?
 
Interesting. I expect it will turn out to be a hoax though.

Btw, I think you should have started a new thread to post this article.
 
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