Theory of Phoenician discovery of the Americas

The theory of Phoenician discovery of the Americas suggests that the earliest Old World contact with the Americas was not with Columbus or Norse settlers, but with the Phoenicians (or, alternatively, other Semitic peoples) in the first millennium BC.

This theory of a Phoenician discovery of the Americas was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the late 18th century, a number of people speculated on the origins of the petroglyphs on Dighton Rock. Ezra Stiles, then President of Yale College, believed them to be Hebrew.Antoine Court de Gébelin, who initiated the modern usage of the Tarot, argued in Le Monde primitif that they commemorated an ancient visit to the Massachusetts shore by a group of sailors from Carthage.

In the 19th century, belief in an Israelite visit to the Americas became a part of Mormonism. Ross T. Christensen has propounded the theory that the Mulekites in the Book of Mormon were "largely Phoenician in their ethnic origin."

In his 1871 book Ancient America, John Denison Baldwin said

The known enterprise of the Phoenician race, and this ancient knowledge of America, so variously expressed, strongly encourage the hypothesis that the people called Phoenicians came to this continent, established colonies in the region where ruined cities are found, and filled it with civilized life. It is argued that they made voyages on the “great exterior ocean,” and that such navigators must have crossed the Atlantic; and it is added that symbolic devices similar to those of the Phoenicians are found in the American ruins, and that an old tradition of the native Mexicans and Central Americans described the first civilizers as “bearded white men,” who “came from the East in ships.”

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