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Parahyba inscription

"just three years after Mauch’s discovery of the kingdom of Sheba in South Africa, a Phoenician inscription turned up in Brazil, on the Parahyba River. The inscription, allegedly left behind by the survivors of a Phoenician shipwreck, does not mention Solomon directly, but it includes details that suggest these sailors were from one of the ships dispatched for Ophir, mentioning that they were servants of Hiram and noting that their journey had begun at Ezion-Geber, the Red Sea port built by Solomon, according to 1 Kings. Earlier Christian scholars had suggested Solomon’s gold came from South America—one popular theory connected it to Peru, citing as evidence a rare word used in 2 Chronicles 3:6 to describe the gold that Solomon used to build the Temple, parvayim, or parouim in its Greek translation, which to premodern etymologists seemed to resemble the word Peru. The discovery of the Parahyba inscription seemed to provide archaeological corroboration of this theorythe kind of evidence that was being used to illumine the Phoenician presence in the Mediterranean, and while it was soon recognized as a hoax, it was convincing enough to fool a highly respected twentieth century scholar of Semitics, Cyrus Gordon, who republished it in 1968 as an authentic inscription." - weitzman (2011) solomon: the lure of wisdom, p. 123