Atlantic BC: An Epic Recreation of a Phoenician Voyage 2000 Years Before Columbus

This illustrated lecture will challenge everything you thought you knew about Columbus and the discovery of the New World. It covers what the ancient scholars knew of the Atlantic, what Columbus borrowed from the ancients and how such voyages were almost certainly undertaken, as illustrated by the Phoenicians before Columbus expedition.

In 2019 Philip Beale set out to prove that the ancient Phoenicians could have crossed the Atlantic 2,000 years before Christopher Columbus. As captain and leader of the Phoenicians before Columbus expedition, Beale tells the exciting story of arguably the most ambitious voyage in experimental archaeology since Kon-Tiki.

Beale’s lecture is divided into three parts, the first part will cover how the replica Phoenician ship, the Phoenicia, was built in the ancient Phoenician stronghold of Arwad in modern day Syria, carefully following the procedures of ancient boat builders as discovered by archaeologists. The second part covers what the ancient Greek, Phoenician and Roman scholars such as Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, Marinus of Tyre, Hipparchus and Strabo knew about the Atlantic and the Lands to the West and how this knowledge was lost. The final part of the lecture tells the story of how the Phoenicia and crew made the 6,000-mile voyage from Carthage in modern day Tunisia to the Americas over the six months from September 2019 to February 2020. Beale will also comment on the legacy of Columbus and the current controversy as to his real country of origin.