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Did an American Expatriate Find an Advanced Lost Megalithic Civilization in Southern China?

4/21/2016

22 Comments

 
I went to school in Ithaca, New York, and in the years I spent there I learned that the city tended to attract people with unusual ideas. In the Victorian era, the founder of Theosophy, Helena Blavatsky, not only lived in the city but wrote her first bestseller, Isis Unveiled, in a house I walked by regularly. In the years I was there, ancient astronaut theorist Giorgio Tsoukalos had a house down the hill from campus. Just after I graduated school, Dr. Sheldon Gosline, a researcher into “ancient globalization,” took an apartment in the Commons downtown just two doors down from the apartment some of my friends occupied and opened a shop selling imported gift items and his self-published books.
At the time, in the early 2000s, Gosline was the self-proclaimed director of the Hieratic Font Project, which attempted to use Chinese writing techniques to analyze Egyptian hieratic writing in terms of its brush strokes. Gosline published his work through Shangri-La Publishing, the small press arm of his Shangri-La gift shop in the Ithaca Commons. He later moved to England and then to China.
 
Gosline studied anthropology with a focus on South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1990s but did not complete his doctoral program there. In 2011, he attended University College in London and earned a Ph.D. in the history of medicine. He now teaches a course on American and British connections between medicine and business at Peking University in Beijing. He also serves as a lecturer for Celebrity Cruises, and previously was a “visiting lecturer” at the same Chinese university where ancient astronaut theorist Robert Temple claims the title of “professor.” He published several articles on Egyptology, his master’s subject, in Discussions in Egyptology, the semi-professional journal home to Robert Bauval’s articles on the subject.
 
In 2005, Gosline proposed that Chinese writing emerged not from an indigenous development but through imitation of the Indus Valley civilization’s un-deciphered writing system, based on visual similarity and presumed trade connections along what would become, long after, the Silk Road. Even though the Indus Valley script died out centuries before the first oracle bone Chinese inscriptions, Gosline believes that the former directly influenced the latter.
 
To that end, he has spent years in China studying ways of bridging the gap between the end of the Indus Valley civilization (1800 BCE) and the first Chinese cultures known to use written language (1200 BCE). (The Yangshao culture of 4000 BCE might have had proto-writing.)
 
Beginning in 2014 Gosline claimed to have found a lost civilization that might bridge that gap, and not everyone agrees with his claims. Since he first presented his claims at the Explorer’s Club in New York in 2014, Gosline has adopted many of the patterns of the fringe archaeologist in defense of his belief, going so far as to claim that Chinese academics are either too befuddled to understand his findings or conspiring to suppress them. Oh, and he also believes that this lost civilization aligned giant rocks to target astrological events.
 
The full story is told in a fascinating article in Atlas Obscura this week, and I encourage you all to read it. The short form is this: China is dominated by the Han ethnic group, and for political reasons the country’s government emphasizes the role of northern China in creating the civilization known as Chinese. Gosline is interested in the connections between southern China and the rise of Chinese civilization, and he traveled to Guangxi province on the Vietnamese border to investigate a series of inscriptions on stone that farmers brought to him, claiming that they were ancient. Gosline recognized some of the characters as rotated Persian characters and believed that the alterations to the figures proved their authenticity:
 
“Why would a forger go through that elaborate disguise, of hiding that it’s old Persian?” he told Atlas Obscura. “The simple solution is that it’s genuine and, somehow, in antiquity, there was some sort of trading or culture connection with the Persian empire.”
 
The logic escapes me. Gosline believes that forgers would slavishly copy genuine inscriptions, but this is hardly the case. (Recall that the Kensington Rune Stone, almost certainly a hoax, contains unusual and erroneous characters.) If someone were trying to make something that looked genuine but unknown, rotating and altering random characters from genuine ancient scripts would help to create the patina of authenticity. I’m not sure proposing a connection to the Persian Empire is the most parsimonious explanation. However, this connection would have occurred after 550 BCE, so it’s neither impossible nor, from the perspective of the origin of writing, particularly interesting.
 
Instead, Gosline’s later claims are where the really unusual material came into play. After traveling to Guangxi, he claimed to have found an entire lost megalithic city, replete with inscriptions and a giant stone “chair” for viewing the winter solstice. He assembled an international team of experts to come and view his find. He says that an unnamed British archaeoastronomer confirmed that the site was a megalithic temple to the stars and the sun, and an unnamed scholar from India concurred. However, Chinese experts from the Chinese Academy of Science and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Archaeology disagreed. The Chinese scholars, including Xu Fengxian and He Nu, carefully explained that the so-called megalithic city was simply a natural formation, and the “inscriptions” Gosline claimed to have found on the rocks there were nothing more than erosion lines. The solstice alignment was simply a coincidence, and impossible for humans to view from the chair-shaped stone itself. Gosline disputes the reports filed by the Chinese scholars and claims that privately some members of the team had different views, implying that the Chinese government has an interest in downplaying southern civilization. He also claimed that the Chinese scholars used bad assumptions and incorrect methodology to determine whether inscriptions were natural or artificial.
 
It is rather interesting that the Chinese scholars’ views, which from the available photographs appear to be correct, align with their country’s political interests, while the archaeoastronomer found archaeoastronomy and the Indian scholar concurred with Gosline, who wants to make Chinese writing a derivative of that of ancient India. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
 
The result was renewed scrutiny on Gosline himself, and Atlas Obscura calling him out for what their writer perceived to be his Orientalism. Not only did Gosline name his business after a mythic Asian land, he also enjoyed playing dress-up in the clothes of other cultures and pretending to be them—as an adult. He had photos taken of himself dressed like a British official of the Raj going native, complete with turban and upturned waxed moustache, and used one on his C.V.! “The fact that Gosline seems to follow an Indiana Jones narrative is not exactly a compliment,” Atlas Obscura’s Sarah Laskow wrote. “The story of a white man who comes to a foreign land and thinks he finds something new, a civilization that hasn’t been recognized, is old and tired.”
22 Comments
habeas corpus
4/21/2016 10:27:16 am

>>Sheldon Lee Gosline

There are bound to be many other academics, specialising in different fields, who decide to hold their respective beliefs private.

Witness the example of John Strugnell within the context of The Dead Sea Scrolls and his religious beliefs.

Reply
Only Me
4/21/2016 10:35:11 am

Agree completely with Laskow. Oh look, another white guy that understands the native culture and its history better than the people themselves!

By the way, tenth paragraph, the fifth sentence appears incomplete:

"However, Chinese experts from the Chinese Academy of Science and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Archaeology."

Reply
Jason Colavito link
4/21/2016 11:18:25 am

It's missing the word "disagreed." I added it back in. Thanks!

Reply
CJ
4/21/2016 05:31:32 pm

You got two other typos too Jason...when discussing Ithaca, you say, "I graduate" vs. "I graduated". There's also an extra space between the "f" and the "or" here: "Han ethnic group, and f or political reasons"

Just trying to help - I'm crazy about this stuff.

Laura Cohen
4/22/2016 12:58:05 am

"Agree completely with Laskow. Oh look, another white guy that understands the native culture and its history better than the people themselves!"

Well, there have been occasions when Europeans have made discoveries that surpass what was known to the natives. For example, Europeans were the ones who learned how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century. And Europeans were also the ones who learned how to read Mayan.

Reply
V
4/23/2016 06:51:33 pm

Yes, but we're not talking about, "Hey, there's these inscriptions that everyone has known about for a long time but haven't been able to decipher, and this white guy figured them out and now it's been tested by other individuals and it works!" We're talking about "Yeah, and nobody around knew that this ENTIRE CITY was here until some white guy came along!" and the native scholars COMPLETELY disagreeing that this is even a city. They're two entirely different narratives. One is how science happens. The other smacks of self-aggrandizement and cultural appropriation.

laura cohen
4/28/2016 10:07:00 pm

V:"Yes, but we're not talking about, "Hey, there's these inscriptions that everyone has known about for a long time but haven't been able to decipher, and this white guy figured them out and now it's been tested by other individuals and it works!" We're talking about "Yeah, and nobody around knew that this ENTIRE CITY was here until some white guy came along!" and the native scholars COMPLETELY disagreeing that this is even a city. They're two entirely different narratives. One is how science happens. The other smacks of self-aggrandizement and cultural appropriation."

Well, Europeans have discovered entire civilizations and cultures that were pretty much unknown to the natives. Sumer, for example, was unknown until European archaeologists discovered what lies behind Babylon. And the Hittites were simply a vague, shadowy people in the Hebrew Bible until Europeans uncovered them in the 19th century.

Bob Jase
4/29/2016 09:25:33 am

So much for the human capability to orally transmit perfectly remembered history for thousands of years.

Clete
4/21/2016 11:15:27 am

It appears that Sheldon Gosline, unlike Scott Wolter, does have some actual academic background. However, like Scott Wolter, he seems to have problems understanding actual peer review of his finding. He again, like Scott Wolter, dismisses away those who disagree with him by stating that they do not understand the evidence or are members of a conspiracy to hide what has been revealed to him as the truth.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
4/21/2016 02:16:45 pm

“The simple solution is that it’s genuine and, somehow, in antiquity, there was some sort of trading or culture connection with the Persian empire.”

"Somehow"? Cuneiform was adopted in Persia in the mid 1st-millenium BC. There was trade between China and Persia from that time on. Where did Gosline get the idea this was controversial?

Reply
JJ
4/21/2016 02:53:07 pm

Please, since stated as fact- please note all runes this entails- for the record. thanks (Recall that the Kensington Rune Stone, almost certainly a hoax, contains unusual and erroneous characters)

Reply
David Bradbury
4/22/2016 08:33:42 am

That's really a blog entry on its own, analysing the debt of the KRS to sets of runes designed for writing modern Swedish (and the slight mis-rememberings which reversed some and combined others), and a number system designed to make finger-based arithmetic work like Arabic numerals.

Reply
Ken
4/21/2016 03:34:06 pm

Peer review, while the best system science has to date, is not without its serious shortcomings - especially concerning 'new' or 'controversial' findings. If you have ever reviewed studies for publication in prestigious journals, you know that doing a decent job is almost as much work as writing the original article. Even reading it carefully so as to understand the author's exact meaning is time consuming.

Knowing that, your first inclination is to go with "what you already know", and that is invariably the 'mainstream' storyline. So unless the new POV is accompanied by 'extraordinary evidence', even the most qualified reviewers will conclude that that the author is wrong. And if the evidence is there, the best you will get is "...it could be true...".

I have always experienced this in the 'hard sciences', where most data is obtained from experiments. I can imagine that in the 'softer' fields (like history, archaeology, religion, etc.) the tendency to stick with the status quo is much greater. And before you all crucify me for calling them 'soft' fields - let me clarify - I just mean that there is by necessity a lot of speculation based on very limited 'data' from both the side of the reviewed and the reviewer.

I'm not siding with Gosling - just sympathizing with what one must go through if he has a 'new' idea. Of course if he is a charlatan, just looking to make a fast buck or become a superstar in his field - F him.

Reply
David Bradbury
4/22/2016 08:37:10 am

Having one new idea is fine. Building a tower of new ideas, which must necessarily be ruined if any one of them turns out to be incorrect, is an invitation to harsh peer review.

Reply
bkd69
4/22/2016 07:25:06 am

Well, you're the one that finally got me to add Atlas Obscura to my news feed. Of additional interest there is another article about how a scientific discovery goes from suspected hoax to accepted fact, in this case, the platypus:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-19th-century-naturalists-didnt-believe-in-the-platypus

And like your discovery of Ithaca as a hotbed of early 20th century spiritualism, I, too, was surprised to learn that my in-laws' town of Onset, Ma was likewise a magnet for that sort of thing, but apparently they glommed more onto the Native American spirituality appropriation wagon than the Theosophy wagon.

Reply
DaveR
4/22/2016 08:40:24 am

Shocking, yet another fringe theorists claiming academics either do not understand him or are actively conspiring against him.

Reply
Kathleen
4/22/2016 09:48:06 am

In the Atlas Obscura article Gosline is constantly playing the academic card and yet those who support him are without names or credentials. He doesn't give any indication of how he arrived at the age of the inscribed rocks. He even refers to an "official archaeological dig" having discovered additional carvings yet doesn't say how, or if, those items were dated by those archaeologists. Could he have used the same techniques as Scott Wolter did with the KRS?

It also came to me that there's a simple way to explain why a hoaxer would come to writing cuneiform symbols turned at 90 degrees. In the photo example of how cuneiform tablet the lines of text are separated by solid lines. Turn it 90 degrees and it looks like the columnar writing of Chinese.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
4/22/2016 10:26:10 am

That's an excellent point about Chinese vertical writing, Kathleen! I hadn't thought of that, and I think you may have solved the mystery!

Reply
habeas corpus
4/22/2016 10:38:08 am

All you have to do is apply that same reasoning to everything.

Reply
Bob Jase
4/22/2016 02:45:50 pm

Of course Indus Valley script influenced Chinese writing - just look how completely different they are from each other.

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V
4/23/2016 07:02:42 pm

Hey. Jason. I as an adult also legitimately like dressing up in the costumes of cultures that are not necessarily the one I grew up in and taking pictures.

In fact I am currently working on building an 1850s Bloomer costume in order to go take a walk. I don't consider this something to be scoffed at and I'd appreciate if you'd tone that particular thing down a bit.

Focus on the particulars of the costume and how inappropriate it is, sure. When I do my costumes, I do a crapton of research and learn about the culture it came from, why it's made the way it is, and how it fit into a greater cultural context. And when wearing the costume, I either try to stay in the character of that culture, or teach others about the costume and the culture. It doesn't sound like that's what this guy is doing.

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