Walam Olum

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He created the sun, the moon, the stars. Ideogram from the Walam Olum

With Walam Olum one is ideographic hieroglyphics referred to the tribal chronicle of the five panels of birch bark Lenni Lenape , a Native American tribe from the north east of the USA should be shown, but this turned out to be fake.

overview

According to this chronicle of their tribe, which begins with the creation of the world, the Lenni Lenape once moved from Siberia , across North America , to their traditional residential area on the Atlantic coast. However, the majority of scientists today are of the opinion that it is a fake. The original is said to have consisted of wooden plaques with ideographic representations that tell the story and migration of Lenni Lenape. The descriptive texts in the Lenape language came from a second source.

Rafinesque's book

In 1836 a book by Constantine Rafinesque (1783-1840) was published under the title The American Nations , in which he deciphered the red pictorial writing of Lenni Lenape and provided an English translation of the Lenape text. The American scholar was born in Galata (Turkey) to a German mother and a French father and distinguished himself as a genius and eccentric . He had made special contributions to research into Mayan script . Rafinesque claimed the wooden plaques were made by a Dr. Ward of Indiana , which Lenape allegedly received in 1820 in return for medical treatment. The description of the ideograms in the Lenape language emerged from a second source two years later. Rafinesque's translation of the 183 verses was less than 3000 words. In the original manuscript, now in the University of Pennsylvania , the ideograms and original explanatory texts appear in the Lenape language alongside the English translation.

history

The Walam Olum contains the creation story , the Flood, and a series of migrations that, according to Rafinesque, begin in Asia . Next to it appears a long list of the chiefs who are supposedly responsible for the content and who lived before 1600. Traditional Lenape stories suggest that their homeland has been the area where the present-day states of New York , Pennsylvania and New Jersey meet, that is, northern New Jersey, southeastern New York, and eastern Pennsylvania. Other Lenape, however, who know the Walam Olum, believe in the content of this story.

Despite the dubious origin and the disappeared original tablets, the Walam Olum was described as real by historians, anthropologists and archaeologists for many years. The respected American archaeologist Ephraim George Squier was the first to republish the text in 1849. He was followed by a large number of leading scholars who studied the Walam Olum. The well-known ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton published a new translation of the text in 1885. In 1954, a team of scientists from various disciplines even published a modified translation with comments, followed by translations and comments in other languages.

critic

Only a minority of experts were suspicious and had long doubted the authenticity of the Walam Olum. As early as 1849 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft wrote to Ephraim G. Squier that he considered the document to be possibly forged. In 1952, the archaeologist James Bennett Griffin publicly renewed his doubts about its authenticity: he did not trust the Walam Olum . 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 was unable to convince his colleagues that the text was forged. As a result, Witthoft announced a Walam Olum project in the Journal of American Linguistics in 1955 , but this project has apparently never been realized.

Constantine Samuel Rafinesque

However, his research eventually led to evidence of discrepancies. For example, Witthoft found out that Rafinesque had compiled the descriptive verses from Lenape texts that had already been printed. In the 1990s, some scholars concluded that the Walam Olum was a well-made forgery . Steven Williams summarized the evidence against the authenticity of the document in a 1991 publication and placed it on a par with many other archaeological forgeries.

Herbert C. Kraft, a Lenape expert, had also long suspected the document to be a forgery. Kraft found inconsistencies with archaeological studies and cited a 1985 field experiment among the Lenape in which ethnologists David M. Oestreicher and James Rementer found that the traditional Lenape had never heard of the document.

Despite Witthoft's revelations and the doubts of other scientists, the evidence was still insufficient to prove a forgery. In 1994, David M. Oestreicher published a book called Unmasking the Walam Olum: A 19th Century Hoax ( Unmasking the Walam Olum: A 19th Century Fake). In it he tried to prove that Rafinesque had skilfully adopted texts from the Lenape language that had previously been published by the American Philosophical Society . In addition, the ideograms are representations from publications about the Egyptian, Chinese and Maya cultures. Oestreicher also suspected that the texts were a conglomerate of diverse sources and different cultures. Rafinesque's motive for this forgery was both the win of the International Prix Volney ( International Volney Prize ) in Paris, as well as the proof of his theory of the American Indian population. A summary of Oestreicher's revelations is Herbert C. Kraft's last work, The Lenape Indian Heritage: 10000 BC to AD 2000 (The tradition of the Lenape Indians: 10,000 BC to 2,000 AD).

Although Oestreicher proved convincingly that the Walam Olum is not an authentic historical tradition and was created by someone who had only limited knowledge of the Lenape language, he could not personally prove the forgery to Rafinesque. It is entirely possible that Rafinesque himself was a victim of this forgery. During his time in Kentucky , Rafinesque was often the target of rough jokes. An example of this are the mythical birds and fish invented for him by John James Audubon for him to publish as scientific discoveries. It is also unlikely that Rafinesque would have sacrificed ten years of his life to decipher the Walam Olum if he had forged it. And surely he would have referred to it in his Prix ​​Volney Essay in 1835 if he had known the content at the time, because the subject of the competition was the Algonquin languages , which also includes the Lenape.

literature

  • Charles Boewe: Profiles of Rafinesque. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville TN 2003.
  • Daniel G. Brinton: The Lenâpé and their Legends: With the Complete Text and Symbols of the Walam Olum. 1883
  • Herbert C. Kraft: The Lenape: Archeology, History, and Ethnology. In: American Indian Quarterly. Volume 14, 1990, pp. 421-422.
  • Herbert C. Kraft and David M. Oestreicher: The Red Record: The Walam Olum, translated and annotated by David McCutchen, 1995. Book Review, In: North American Archaeologist. Volume 16, No. 3, pp. 281-285.
  • David M. Oestreicher: The Anatomy of the Walam Olum: A 19th Century Anthropological Hoax . Dissertation, Rutgers University. New Brunswick, New Jersey. Reprint Edition, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor MI 1995.
  • David M. Oestreicher: The Arguments that Created and Sustained the Walam Olum . In: Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey. Volume 50, 1995, pp. 31-52.
  • David M. Oestreicher: Unraveling the Walam Olum . In: Natural History. Volume 105, No. 10, 1996, pp. 14-21. Reprinted in: Charles Boewe (Ed.): Portraits of Rafinesque. The University of Tennessee Press, 2003.
  • David M. Oestreicher: Reply to Harry Monesson Regarding the Walam Olum . In: Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey. Volume 52, 1997, pp. 98-99.
  • David M. Oestreicher: In Search of the Lenape: The Delaware Indians Past and Present, 2000. Catalog of the exhibition at the Scarsdale Historical Society. Scarsdale Historical Society, Scarsdale New York. First published by Scarsdale Historical Society, 1995.
  • David M. Oestreicher: The European Roots of the Walam Olum: Constantine Samuel Rafinesque and the Intellectual Heritage of the early 19th Century. In: Stephen Williams and David Browman (Eds.): New Perspectives on the Origins of American Archeology. The University of Alabama Press, 2002.
  • David M. Oestreicher: The Algonquian of New York . The Rosen Publishing Group's Power Kid's Press, New York NY 2002.
  • David M. Oestreicher: Walam Olum. In The Encyclopedia of New Jersey . Rutgers University Press, 2004.
  • David M. Oestreicher: Tale of a Hoax, in The Algonquian Spirit . Edited by Brian Swann. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
  • CS Rafinesque: The American Nations or Outlines of a National History; of the Ancient and Modern Nations of North and South America . Philadelphia 1836.
  • Carl F. Voegelin with contributions by Eli Lilly, Erminie Voegelin, Joe E. Pierce, Paul Weer, Glenn A. Black, and Georg K. Neumann: Walam Olum, or: Red Score, the Migration Legend of the Lenni Lenape, or Delaware Indians . A New Translation, Interpreted by Linguistic, Historical, Archaeological, Ethnological, and Physical Anthropological Studies. Indiana Historical Society. Indianapolis IN 1995.
  • Steven Williams: Fantastic Archeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1991.
  • John Witthoft: The Walam Olum Project . In: International Journal of American Linguistics. Volume 21, 1995, p. 194.

Web links

annotation

  1. ↑ This article is, apart from a few additions, a translation of the article Walam Olum in the English language Wikipedia
  2. ^ David M. Oestreicher: Unmasking the Walam Olum: A 19th Century Hoax . In: Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey. Volume 49, 1994, pp. 1-44.
  3. ^ Herbert C. Kraft: The Lenape / Delaware Heritage: 10,000 BC-2000 AD 2002. Lenape Books.