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Very good hardcover octavo in fine original tan dust jacket, inscribed in ink to FFE "To Matthew and Marion Stirling with all good wishes / Henriette Mertz / Peoria 18 January 1954." Matthew Stirling (1896-1975) was an American ethnologist and archaeologist and later an administrator of several related scientific institutions. He's best known for his discoveries relating to the Olmec civilization in southern Mexico in the 1940s, which according to the National Geographic "essentially rewrote Mesoamerican history." His wife Marion Illig Stirling (1911-2001, later Marion Stirling Pugh, having married John Ramsey Pugh following her first husband's death in 1975), was also an American archaeologist. Her discovery of a date in the Long Count calendar, corresponding to 32 B.C., on a stella at Tres Zapotes, helped establish the antiquity of the Olmec civilization. The Stirlings' archives were donated by their grandchildren to the Smithsonian Institution in 2006. Mertz explains "Pale Ink" is "The story of two Chinese expeditions to America -- one in the fifth century A.D., and the other in the twenty-third century B.C. The fifth century story, which will be treated first, is that of Hwui Shan, Buddhist priest, who told the Court of China of going to a far country, to the east, called 'Fu-sang.' The second story, the 'Classic of Mountains and Seas,' is the record of a series of journeys, compiled by the great Yu, at the request of the Emperor Shun, supposedly in 2250 B.C., describing mountains and rivers across the 'Great Eastern Sea.' Fu-sang, this alleged-to-be 'geographical myth of Mexico-figment of Buddhist imagination,' is today assumed to be nothing more than legendary fantasy. (But) . . . within the past ten or fifteen years, archeologists have uncovered amazing pre-historic sites that would have been inconceivable to the scores of French and German scientists who examined the Buddhist monk's story" (and dismissed it as fantasy, 1761-1885.) Recent finds in Arizona and New Mexico confirm some of the most minute details contained within Hwui Shan's gripping account of Fu-sang. Had this present-day knowledge been available to those European scholars, history, within the past century, would have recorded the facts in a far different manner. . . ." 158 pp., reduced from $420.
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