Lewis and Clark were often confronted with these types of situations, especially the more they moved west.

How they managed to negotiate with five, six, or more interpreters without it devolving into a ridiculous game of telephone is remarkable.

Did he really discover it if a) we were already here? And B) the first Europeans to arrive were Vikings.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume you're a native English speaker, because even today, there are an awful lot of multilingual people in the world, with probably over half knowing at least 2 languages. The dominance of the English language worldwide has led to a lot of anglophones not only not learning a second language, but resultantly not developing the skills for picking up languages. It's pretty well known that picking up new languages gets easier the more languages you already know, which actually means that ancient diplomats probably had it easier. You see, nowadays we generally have this idea that languages are independent and relatively rigid things, but before modern communications technology local dialects sprang up quite easily, and they could vary a huge amount even within the same language. This means that anyone who travelled around in the pre-modern world would essentially have to be able to integrate different languages into their knowledge base much more regularly than someone would have to today. The nature of dialects also means that languages in contact would often develop pidgins that could be used as a way to learn the other language by people who knew one. The standardization of languages really put an end to that.

“In this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero, end of subject”

The Australian Aborigines Indigenous Australians maintain very accurate oral traditions of sea level rise following the end of the last ice age:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/

More Greeks fought on the side of the Persians than they did on the side of the Greeks. These were cities that were vassals to Persia (Like in Asia Minor) or they were cities on the Greek mainland who simply thought that the Persians had a better chance and wanted to be on the winning side.

A few Greeks even famously changed sides midbattle (Thessalians).

Many Greek mercenaries from Athens and Sparta and other cities fought for the Persians both before and after the Peloponnesian wars. (see Xenophon)

All these Greek Vassals would have people speaking both languages by necessity.

There were even people in the Persian court who were Greek exiles.

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Related, in the U.S. there was a place called Sharps Island off the coast of Maryland that had a historic colonial era community. In 1848 it was said to measure 449 acres, by 1942 just 17 acres, and by the 1960’s it was gone. There were a number of islands in the Chesapeake Bay that suffered the same fate (https://www.chesapeakequarterly.net/sealevel/main8/ ). Apparently the culprit was land subsidence after the end of the last glacial maximum. That’s just my understanding though, so take it with a grain of salt.

It’s kind of sad to think that we lost the archeological record on these Welsh islands, but that’s how it goes I guess.

No, I get you are trying to be funny, but...

They didn't even know there was gold there until after Cortez was invited by the Aztecs.

And the best interraction was March_1504_lunar_eclipse ... Columbus and the Natives had great relations, until they overstayed their welcome ( 6 months ), where the natives wanted to get rid of them... Columbus used the incoming lunar eclipse ( which he knew would happen, because stronomists released books about future cosmic events which were 99% accurate at least ), thus he lied and said God was angry at how the natives had treated them. Naturally they knew the languages pretty well by that point.

Naturally the communication issue was resolved within weeks, long, long before the issue of gold even came up ( and with other natives ).

the persian´s had geek subjects, if need be some of those could be asked to translate

It's not exactly at the same period, but to give you a picture in the Viking Age at the beginning of the medieval period, the vikings were trading with Constantinople (and I mean a big trade route), and sometimes with Spain and Italy. They also had spies in about all the royal court of the major countries of Europe and again in Constantinople. So yeah, people managed to communicate.

Plus, you must not forget that people at the time had slaves. So one might capture someone and sell him to, let's say an intellectual, looking to learn the language.

Takes out whip, THIS IS GOLD? WHERE GOLD - proceeds to whip till gold

The actual funny question is how the first Europeans, i.e. Columbus or Cortez, communicated with the various American natives.

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Whether he was a “Gallego” or an “Italian” is irrelevant. His “discovery” of the Americas was a complete accident. He was trying to get to the “East Indies” and bumped into another whole continent by chance. Regardless, he did so with Spanish resources and Spanish crews, not Italian. He did so in the name of the Spanish crown. His “rediscovery” of the Americas (because the Vikings “discovered” it for Europeans first) was a Spanish accomplishment, not an Italian one.

I guess I must be discounting how easy it was to learn these things. I figure it's easier now because you have the internet to research the customs, languages, etc of the country and go from there.

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Ah didn't think about that. I never thought about them using bridge languages.

I find it fascinating that the more we actually take ancient writings, maps, drawings, etc. seriously, the more they tend to be remarkably accurate. I think the future of history/archaeology is going to be giving serious inquiry to discoveries that were traditionally written off.

I'd assume it's much more likely the Persians knew Greek than the Greeks knew Persian. There were Greek colonies/cities on the Anatolian coast within territory the Persians claimed. Persia exerting influence over the Ionian coast and mainland Greek city-states supporting the Ionians is what sparked the Persian invasion of Greece in the first place.

It's a fallacy to think of the ancient world as disconnected entities. There was a huge amount of trade and diplomacy between different cultures even well before the Persian/Greek wars. The leaders and scholars knew about each other's customs, traditions, culture, and language quite well.

I'm sure the Egyptians who built the great Pyramid of Giza are all laughing at us both in the afterlife, for only they know the real purpose it was built for.

I would argue that learning languages was easier for many people then, especially in centers of trade like a Greek city-state. As the other commenter mentioned, there were an abundance of multilingual people because of the large exposure to different languages.

There were ambassadors between countries whose main job was this very thing.

You're severely underestimating the amount of multilingual people that would have existed. Merchants, scholars, or diplomats would likely have known several languages and/or had access to people who could translate for them. In some cases a bridge language may have been used (ex: an American and German who both knew French, but not each other's language).

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