veled to the Americas (Ra Poscript). As far as the overland journey from a landing point in theCaribbean to Peru, theSpanish explorer Francisco Pizzaro provided proof that it wasn't aninsurmountabledistance. Indeed, he sailed from the Mediterranean to South America, andmarchedoverland, with his crew, to the Inca empire in Peru, and then returned toSpain almost asfast as Hernan Cortes hacked through Mexico to the Aztec empire (Ra267-268). Despite all this evidence, though, it has not beenunequivocally proved thatEgyptians sailed to South America. There is an entire ocean, and twocontinentsseparating the cultures. It would have been a remarkable feat to havetraveled thatdistance. But one must keep in mind that the Egyptians were the buildersof the Pyramids,and crossing the vast distances may have been a similarly worthyundertaking to thismighty people. As pointed out by Thor Heyerdahl, there is a much strongercase for Incacolonization of the Pacific Islands. The single most obvious indicators ofsuch contact arethe sweet potato and bottle gourd. The common sweet potato, Ipomoeabatatas is nativeto South America. It was brought into North America by natives, and wasn'tknown inEurope until the sixteenth century. Yet it is prolific throughout all ofthe Polynesianislands. Its distribution among these scattered islands could only havebeen accomplishedby human intervention. On Easter Island, huge sweet potato plantationshave flourishedfor hundreds of years. Like the sweet potato, the bottle gourd, nativeonly to SouthAmerica, is found throughout the Pacific. Even more striking is thelinguistic similaritiesbetween the names given to these vegetables by the different cultures.The sweet potato iscalled kumara, and the bottle gourd is known as kimi inalmost all Polynesian dialects, andby the traditional languages in Peru (Kon-Tiki 102-103). There are also legends, on both sides of the...
