If there is such a place as heaven for me it would be everlasting life in a place like the Cincinnati Museum Center reading a book next to their multiple exhibits.  It is well-known that I have a particular love of culture and obsess over how to implement successful societies based on mythology, recorded history, psychological necessity and how all that gets wrapped into a workable philosophy to achieve objectives.  I spend more time thinking about those kinds of things than anything else—and if I had no other responsibilities in the world I would be most happy putting on a pair of camouflage pants and a t-shirt and going to a different spot of that museum each day and reading from my books—all day–forever.  To be near history and the way those exhibits have been creatively assembled at the Museum Center is a marriage of all my favorite things.  I have a few favorite spots, one is near the T-Rex skull in the Museum of Natural History and Science, the other is the area near the Cincinnati Tablet in the Cincinnati History Museum.

I have a particular obsession with the Cincinnati Tablet.  It is located in the wing of the History Museum just beyond the WWII area and just ahead of the Native American, Colonial wings on the right side of the hall.  There are complaints from history buffs that the Tablet is tucked away into a remote corner, but it’s quite out in the open and well-lit. The problem with the Tablet is that some believe that it belongs in the section of the Natural History Museum that deals with pre-Columbian society as the Tablet was found in a burial mound at the inception of Cincinnati at the exact spot where Fountain Square resides.  Few realize that when they visit the Fountain they are on the spot of an ancient burial ground that was there long before there was ever a single building erected in the Queen City.  Yet the Cincinnati Tablet is a bit of a mystery. Archaeologists would like to attribute it to the Adena or Hopewell Cultures dated around 500 B. C. to 100 A.D.  Yet it is more reflective of the kind of art found in the Mississippian Culture of 700 A.D. to 1600, just ahead of the arrival of the first European colonists.  But that doesn’t quite tell the whole story.

The Cincinnati Tablet is nearly identical to a tablet found in Clinton County called the Wilmington Tablet.  Many have looked at these tablets and read into the numerical significance of the design.  They appear to have similar markings as that of Mayan and Aztec Cultures and point to a much more sophisticated pre history of Native American tribes than are normally associated with history.  Human beings like to believe that all life springs forward in a progressive manner meaning that each revolution around the sun that the earth makes, we get smarter and better.  So we often get caught looking back at history as if we were looking at a measuring stick of some kind—we’re here now, so back then we must have been—there.  That type of rationalization.  However, this is not the case.  Just as we are doing today in the modern age with all the tools of thought at our disposal, human kind is regressing.  To sit on the trolley car at the Cincinnati History Museum and listen to the recording of the conductor dropping passengers off at various points from pre 1951 it is increasingly obvious that the human intellect has fallen a long way in just those 50 years.  If such a declination of character continues to slide downward, it is easy to ascertain that human beings in another 200 years will easily be back to the types of hunters and gathering types associated with the Adena Indian.

There are some extremely complex mathematics associated with the Mound Builders that defy what we know about the Adena and Hopewell people.  In the times of Christopher Columbus there were still some in Europe who believed that the earth was flat and that if one strayed too far to sea that they would fall over the edge.  But it was the Greeks who came up with the concept of a spherical earth dating back to the 6^th century.  By the 3^rd century B.C. Pythagoras had postulated that the earth was indeed round which was supported by Aristotle.  For proof as to what I said about human society regressing along a Vico Cycle (CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW) look at the modern Greek people and their current collapsing economy.  They are only presently a 100 years from becoming simpletons equivalent to the Adena Indians—hunters and gathers struggling each day to feed themselves instead of an advanced culture contemplating whether or not the earth is round through mathematics.  The modern Greek people have nothing in common with their ancient ancestors of just 3000 years ago.  They have declined as a society, not advanced.  Yet, the Mound Builders from the same time period as Pythagoras understood that the earth was round otherwise they could not have predicted equinoxes and solstices or dates on a calendar.  How did they learn that the earth was round if they did not read Greek literature?  Or perhaps the Greeks were only verifying what mythology instructed them—based on ancient stories given to them during their days.

Another mystery if trade with the Yucatan Peninsula is considered among the Mississippian Cultures of North America is the nearly simultaneous rise of cities like Cahokia outside of St. Louis and Chichen Itza in Mexico.  Their art and cultures appear to be extremely similar, yet nobody knows much about either because there is an assumption that nobody had the ability to travel such a distance to have legitimate trade ability.  We assume that these ancient people were still learning how to travel by canoe until Europeans came along and showed them how to build a boat.  But it is quite obvious if the facts are assembled, that there was great trade and interaction between groups of societies vastly separated, which is something that wasn’t supposed to be the case.  The evidence of all this interconnectivity was likely destroyed when the Spanish attacked the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan built in 1325 and destroyed in 1521.  Modern day Mexico City was built upon its ruins.  Tenochtitlan was built on a vast island with complicated canals intersecting the city.  In fact is was Bernal Diaz del Castillo who said, “When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments (…) I don’t know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.”  Sounds a lot to me like the lost city of Atlantis which Plato spoke about only the dates are separated by several thousand years.  The point of course is that what the Spanish encountered was an advanced culture, not a bunch of knuckle-draggers.  So the Spanish did what they always have done, they attacked the city, destroyed the people and imposed Catholic religion on the survivors calling the area New Spain.   By the time Santa Anna was fighting Sam Huston in the Republic of Texas just to the north, the New Spanish Empire was declining and the newly established “Mexican” was left conquered twice within a few centuries of each other by rival clans of European settlers.  The origin culture had been destroyed by the Spanish and all the archaeology erased to history in the name of religion.  As advanced as Tenochtitlan was it was around two hundred years newer than the ancient city of Teotihuacan located just 30 miles to the northwest.  That city has a pyramid on the scale of the Great Pyramid in Giza and by volume as large as the one outside St. Louis, the Monks Mound.  The dates on this epic city of sophistication and mathematics are 100 B.C. to 250 A.D., about the same time period as the Adena Indian over a thousand miles to the north across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi River, then up the Ohio.  The assumption was that these cultures didn’t communicate, but it looks as if they did—or at least knew of each other.

As I look at the Cincinnati Tablet I can’t help but wonder if it’s not the remnants of an older culture that left the Ohio Valley well before the Adena Indian during what is called the Archaic Period.  I have covered before the obvious signs of a lost race of people who were large in stature.  The evidence of their lives is obvious in the unexcavated mound at Miamisburg, the burial grounds at Augusta Kentucky and the ancient city that has been buried under modern-day Lexington, Kentucky. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  The Adena and Hopewell Indians were similar in culture and intellect to the modern version of the inner city dweller compared to the suburbanite.  The ancient suburbanite doing as humans always do run from their political disputes for destinations uncharted leaving behind the more parasitic aspects of their societies.  In modern times most people living in suburbia are those running from the corrupt politics and high taxes of the large cities, and it looks as if this is what was happening in America well before Columbus found a map in Portugal convincing him that there was a way to circumnavigate the world.  Of course that map was made by the Chinese who had been doing that circumnavigation for centuries—and had been trading with the same people who settled the Ohio Valley who were thus trading with ancient Mesopotamia.  Again, all that assumed history was destroyed by two known events, the destruction of Tenochtitlan and the Library in Alexandria, Egypt, both by the same religion.

I tend to think that the Cincinnati Tablet was specific to the person it was found under within the mound.  It may have been the tattoo pattern used to identify his people to his region, and when he died, they buried it with him.  The Wilmington Tablet is similar, and was probably specific to the ruler of that area, etc.  But the cultures associated with them are largely unknown, because the limits of science assume that mankind is always moving forward instead of following a Vico cycle of continuous birth and death—always starting over again as a civilization.  Just like inner city dwellers occupy the grand establishments of a creative past, the Adena likely occupied ceremonial sites associated with a culture that left south to form a world of their own without the restrictions of collective association.  I cannot help but wonder as I look at the Cincinnati Tablet if the origin of the Inca, the Maya and the Aztec were not in fact a combination people from Mesopotamia and China who merged in the Americas long before Christ was born and became ancient suburbanites moving constantly south until they ran out of room and were killed by a competing culture doing the same thing for the same reasons—leaving for opportunity elsewhere once civilization destroyed the luster of innovation and adventure in the individual.

I take such lessons into account when I have to build a culture, whether it’s raising a family or building a company.  People desire to be their own explorers and to find for themselves the roots of their desires.  They don’t like to share by nature when the itch of adventure is clawing at them.  But people are quite giving once they achieve their personal objectives.  And that is what the Cincinnati Tablet represents to me, a hint at a past long gone and a window into an issue that is still pressing the minds of mankind.  The Cincinnati Museum Center gave the tablet its own little spot in between two worlds, the known history of WWII and the roots of Cincinnati’s founding as a colonial hub after the Revolutionary War.  Because the Cincinnati Tablet is in and of itself not clearly defined by science, because much of the way to confirm them through logic has been purposely erased by future empire builders—and that is why I consider such places like the Museum Center heaven on earth.  There is truth there only hinted at, but it is more than what you can find anywhere else.  And all that history collides upon the Cincinnati Tablet.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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