In this recording of a fascinating live talk held on September 8th 2022 Philip Beale examines the remarkable proposition that ancient Phoenicians might have travelled to the Americas more than a thousand years before Christopher Columbus. The Phoenician civilisation thrived in the Levant region of the Eastern Mediterranean (primarily in the area of modern day Lebanon) from around 3,000BC until the first century BC. Philip Beale is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, sailor, adventurer, author and historian. He has spent 15 years investigating the intriguing questions of whether the Phoenicians could have reached the Americas before Columbus’s famous voyage across “the ocean blue” in 1492.

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