Walam Olum

With Walam Olum an ideographic picture writing is called, in the five panels of birch bark the tribal history of the Lenni Lenape, an Indian tribe, is shown from the northeastern United States.

Overview

After this their tribal history, which begins with the creation of the world, the Lenni Lenape are once pulled from Siberia, across North America, up in their traditional residential area on the Atlantic coast. The majority of scientists today, however, of the opinion that it is a fake. The original is said to have consisted of wooden boards with ideographic representations with which the history and migration of the Lenni Lenape is told. The descriptive texts in the Lenape language came from a second source.

Rafinesques book

In 1836 a book by Constantine Rafinesque ( 1783-1840 ) under the title The American Nations was published, in which he deciphered the red hieroglyphics of Delawares and an English translation of the Lenape supplied text. The American scholar was born in Galata (Turkey ), the son of a German mother and a French father and distinguished himself as a genius and eccentric. He had acquired with the study of Maya writing outstanding services. Rafinesque claimed the wooden panels came from a Dr. Ward of Indiana, who had allegedly received from Lenape in return for medical treatment in 1820 this. The description of the ideograms in the Lenape language had appeared two years later from a second source. Rafinesques translation of 183 verses consisted of less than 3000 words. In the original manuscript, now kept in the University of Pennsylvania, the ideograms and explanatory original texts appear in the Lenape language alongside the English translation.

History

The Walam Olum contains the story of creation, the flood and a series of migrations that begin according to Rafinesque in Asia. In addition, appears a long list of chiefs who are allegedly responsible for the content and have lived before 1600. From the traditional stories of the Lenape shows that their home since ancient times, the area in which the present-day states of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey meet, that is, in the northern New Jersey, in southeastern New York and eastern Pennsylvania. Other Lenape, however, know the Walam Olum, believe in the content of this story.

Despite the dubious origin and the vanished original plates the Walam Olum was called for many years by historians, anthropologists and archaeologists as genuine. The distinguished American archaeologist Ephraim George Squier was the first who published the text in 1849 again. He was followed by a large number of leading scientists who dealt with the Walam Olum. The well-known ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton published in 1885 a new translation of the text. Published in 1954 a team of scientists from different disciplines even a revised translation with commentary, followed by translations and commentaries in other languages ​​.

Critic

Only a minority of experts was suspicious and doubted the authenticity of the long Walam Olum. Already in 1849 wrote Henry Rowe Schoolcraft to Ephraim G. Squier that he sees the document for potentially falsified. 1952 renewed the archaeologist James Bennett Griffin publicly cast doubt on the authenticity: he had no confidence in the Walam Olum. The historian William A. Hunter also believed that the text was a forgery. In 1954, the archaeologist John G. Witthoft discovered linguistic and textual inconsistencies, but he could not convince them of the forgery of the text his colleagues. Then Witthoft announced in 1955 in the Journal of American Linguistics Walam Olum a project, but that project was apparently never implemented.

However, his research eventually led to the detection of inconsistencies. For example Witthoft found that Rafinesque had put together the descriptive verses Lenape texts which have been previously printed. In the 1990s, some scientists came to the conclusion that Walam Olum was a well-made forgery. Steven Williams summarized the evidence against the authenticity of the document in a paper published in 1991 and put it on a par with many other archaeological forgeries.

Herbert C. Kraft, a Lenape expert had, the document also been suspected as a forgery a long time. Power discrepancies are presented with archaeological investigations, citing a field experiment at the Lenape in 1985, in which the anthropologist David M. Oestreicher and James Rementer determined that the traditional Lenape had never heard of the document.

Notwithstanding the revelations Witthofts and the other scientists doubt the evidence was still insufficient to detect a fake. Published in 1994, David M. Oestreicher a book titled Unmasking the Walam Olum: A 19th Century Hoax ( unmasking of Walam Olum: A fake from the 19th century). In it, he tried to prove that Rafinesque had sent over texts from the Lenape language that were previously published by the American Philosophical Society. In addition, the ideograms are representations of publications about the Egyptian, Chinese and Mayan culture. Oestreicher also suspected that the texts were a conglomerate of diverse sources and different cultures. Rafinesques motive for this forgery is both the profit of the International Prix Volney (International Volney Prize ) in Paris, as well as the proof of his theory of the indigenous population of America was. A summary of Oestreichers revelations is Herbert C. Kraft's last work, The Lenape Indian Heritage: 10,000 BC to AD 2000 (The tradition of the Lenape Indians: 10,000 BC to 2000 AD).

Although Oestreicher convincingly proved that the Walam Olum is no authentic historical tradition and was created by someone who had only limited knowledge of the Lenape language, he could not prove the forgery Rafinesque personally. It is quite possible that Rafinesque himself had become a victim of this fraud. During his time in Kentucky was Rafinesque frequently the target of crude jokes. An example of this is the mythical birds and fish, which were invented by John James Audubon for him, so he published as scientific discoveries. It is also unlikely that Rafinesque has sacrificed ten years of his life to unravel the Walam Olum, if he had faked it. And certainly he had referred in his Prix Volney Essay in 1835 to when he knew the content at this time, because the theme of the competition were the Algonquian languages ​​, including the Lenape heard.