Eldorado
The Eldorado (of Spanish el dorado : gilded) is a mythical region supposed to abound in Or and located in South America according to the Conquistador be Spanish 16th century. The belief in its existence is based on the account of the voyage of a conquistador, Francisco de Orellana by Gaspar de Carvajal.
The account was believed until the 18th century by the Conquistador are and the Indians, who more precisely located this region between the river Orénoque and the river the Amazon, on the current territory of the Brésil, the Guyana, the Venezuela, the Suriname and the Guyana.
Eldorado like legend
Condamine, after its voyage from 1743-1744 during which it descends the Amazon, fact justice of this legend: there is no lake Parimé (the immense lake describes by Carbajal) nor of fantastic city of Manoa.
Sir Walter Raleigh also launched out him in a forwarding in order to find Eldorado .
In its philosophical tale Ingenuous, Voltaire uses this region like decoration in chapters XVII and XVIII. This passage, through this utopian universe, enables him to expose the ideals of the philosophers of the Lumières.
Adversaries of the veracity of the account of Orellana
They are based in particular on impossibility supposed to establish an agriculture powerful and installed durably on a soil in Amazonia:
- because of the tropical and equatorial climates;
- because of the yellow ground which becomes sterile in a few years.
They give of it for proof the failure of the culture on denshering
Recent discoveries
Several discoveries of researchers operating in various disciplines during the fifteen last years pushed with a second reading of the account of the voyage of Orellana. There no would have been country where gold ran with floods, but well a prosperous agricultural civilization, decimated by the diseases brought by Europeans.
The American anthropologist Michael Heckenberger, of the university of Florida raised by air Photographie, in the area of the higher course of the Rio Xingu, in the State of the Mato Grosso, several traces of a relatively dense human occupation. Nineteen monticules, named islas , foresters, being distinguished in the naked plain, distant on average of 3 km, would be old villages. An abundant ceramics remains there, with ground flower. These monticules are connected by elevated structures (causeways, the area being flooded under one to two meters of water at the rain season), and rectilinear channels. Heckenberger names these people Xinguano. Their hypothetical descendants would be the Kouikourou S.
Elsewhere, in the middle of the Amazonia, the existence of the Terra lent, this fertile ground which could be constituted only by the intervention of the man, adds to the credibility of its theories.
One also raises, in the tribe of hunters-gatherers of Sironos, of the words to indicate plants of which they do not make any use: cotton, the corn, of the tinctorial plants, which would have been bequeathed to them by their ancestors farmers.
See too
- Cadillac Eldorado, model of the Car manufacturer Cadillac;
- Quivira and Cíbola, two of mythical the seven gold cities.
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