Ships From The Nile Were First
Post Special Report
by Rex Gilroy
Australasian Post, December 24, 1981
Ships from the Nile were First
Back around 2300 BC an Egyptian explorer told stories of a vast southern continent where he saw strange animals that kept their young in pouches. New evidence now suggests Australia was colonised by ancient visitors long before Captain Cook's discovery.
Egyptian-Type hieroglyphs on rocks of the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney suggest a vessel from the Middle East visited there thousands of years before the Europeans. They show the Egyptian god Horus in bird form, near an Aboriginal carving of a ship resembling a Phoenician trireme, in which Egyptians and Phoenicians are known to have sailed on expeditions to south east Asia.
I believe the crew of such a ship, having reached the Hawkesbury, could have ventured southward along the adjoining Nepean River as far as the Lapstone Gorge on the southern escarpment of the Blue Mountains. In Lapstone Gorge, workmen digging a pipeline trench in 1969 unearthed a bronze axe blade two metres down, that was later identified as a tool used in the Middle East around 2500 to 3000 years ago.
In this area workmen constructing the first railway line across the Blue Mountains during the 1850s unearthed a number of idols up to 30 cm in height which were made of a black stone alien to the region. Were these relics of Middle east origin also? Indeed, the number of mysterious Middle east-type finds made throughout the Blue Mountains suggest the district may have been colonised by these ancient visitors for a considerable period.
In 1978 a workman unearthed from about 2.5 metres below ancient rock strata near Katoomba, a small black stone bearing Phoenician letters, believed to spell a name "Thuffi". Other strange scripts were found engraved upon a cliffside hereabouts, including two human figures reminiscent of solar deities worshipped in Egypt around 3000 years ago. Despite these finds, many Australian historians prefer to go on believing that our history of discovery does not pre-date European landfalls of the 16th century.
But famed French Egyptologist Professor Jean Louis Bernard says;
"The fact that eucalyptus resin was used by the Egyptians in their mummification rites is THE conclusive argument proving that the ancient Egyptians discovered Australia".
Methods of mummification once practised by the Torres Strait islanders were identical to the methods employed in Egypt, around 1000 BC-a time when eucalyptus resin was being used and could only have come from Australia. So it seems reasonable to assume that Egyptian mariners reached our shores, often remained here for considerable lengths of time, and also established colonies for their often joint mining operations.
At certain Western Australian coastal sites remains of ancient Palestinian and other Middle east pottery have been unearthed in the vicinity of what appear to be ancient open-cut mining operations. Numerous Middle East symbols have also been found among Aboriginal cave art of the north-west Kimberleys, Arnhem Land and Cape York. Among these are the Phoenician symbol for copper, the Egyptian symbol for gold, and the Aten, the symbol of the sun-god worshipped in Egypt around 1000 BC.
In remote areas of Papua New Guinea ancient megalithic stone ruins have come to light, often in areas where ancient Middle East pottery remains have been found. In one area miles of subterranean stone aqueducts have been found, built to carry water into arid areas, presumably for farming. In the eastern Sepik district five stepped pyramid structures have been found, built of crude stonework. They are identical to another, found on a Great Barrier Reef island in far north Queensland some years ago.
During my many years of research I have examined a number of important finds made throughout Australia which lend considerable weight to my theory of pre-European discovery. One of these was a crude stone idol in 1966 on a farm at Gympie, in southern Queensland. I inspected it in 1975 I saw that the relic, carved from local ironstone in the form of a squatting ape, was certainly not the work of early Aboriginals.
Photographs were examined by overseas archaeologists who confirmed my theory that the idol represented the Egyptian god Thoth-the god of wisdom and inventor of the art of writing-in ape form. This was the appearance that Thoth took until around 3000 years ago, when he was changed to an ibis-headed human bodied deity.
A carved symbol between thee idol's legs was identical to the hieroglyph for the papyrus flower. Thoth's insignia as the god of writing.
A farmer, Mr Andrew Henderson was sinking fence post holes through dense rainforest country on the Atherton Tableland near Kuranda {N.Q.} in 1911 when he dug up a strange bronze coin. Not knowing what it was, he kept it until 1962 when he gave it to an ex-serviceman who had served in the Middle-east during World War 2. Recognising the relic as an Egyptian coin he had it identified by numismatic experts in Brisbane.
The coin, which weighs 30 grams, is 3 and a half cm wide and 5 mm thick, and was minted in Barce, Cyrenaica during the reign of Pharaoh Ptolomy the 4 th, who ruled from 221 to 204 B.C. One one side is the head of the god Jupiter, on the other an eagle riding a lightning bolt,a Ptolemaic insignia. On the Atherton Tableland in 1978 a bushwalker showed me ancient cave paintings in the same district, which, among other Aboriginal designs, featured human figures resembling Egyptian deities bearing surmounting sun-discs.
The ancient Chinese book The Classics of Shan Hai, written before 338 BC, mentions a great southern land on which dwelt fierce black people who used a strange weapon which we now know to have been the boomerang. In Peking there exists a map about 2000 years old, and which shows the crude but recognisable northern coastline of Australia.
And around 2300 BC Khemhotep, the Egyptian explorer, claimed to have visited a vast southern continent where he had mined large quantities of copper. He also spoke of having seen strange animals that kept their young in pouches attached to their bodies.
