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The treasures of ancient high
art lately unearthed at Luxor have excited the admiring interest of a
breathless world, and have awakened more vividly than before a sense of the
vast antiquity of the so-called " Modern Civilization," as it existed over
three thousand years ago in far-off Ancient Egypt and Syria-Phoenicia.
Keener and more personal interest, therefore, should naturally be felt by us
in the long-lost history and civilization of our own ancestors in Ancient
Britain of about that period, as they are now disclosed to have been a
branch of the same great ruling race to which belonged, as we shall see, the
Sun-worshipping Akhenaten (the predecessor and father-in-law of
Tut-ankh-amen) and the authors of the naturalistic "New" Egyptian art—the
Syrio-Phoenicians.
That long-lost origin and early history of our ancestors, the Britons, Scots
and Anglo-Saxons, in the " Prehistoric " and Pre-Roman periods, back to
about 3000 B.C., are now recovered to a great extent in the present work, by
means of newly discovered historical evidence. And so far from these
ancestral Britons having been mere " painted savages roaming wild in the
woods," as we are imaginatively told in most of the modern history books,
they are now on the contrary disclosed by the newly found historical facts
to have been from the very first grounding of their galley keels upon Old
Albion's shores, over a millennium and a half of years before the Christian
era, a highly civilized and literate race, pioneers of Civilization, and a
branch of the famous Phoenicians.
In the course of my researches into the fascinating problem of the Lost
Origin of the Aryans, the fair, long-headed North European race, the
traditional ancestors of our forbears of the Brito-Scandinavian race who
gave to Europe in prehistoric time its Higher Civilization and civilized
Languages researches to which I have devoted the greater part of my life,
and my entire time for the past sixteen years I ascertained that the
Phoenicians were Aryans in race. That is to say, they were of the fair and
long-headed civilizing " Northern " race, the reality of whose existence was
conclusively confirmed and established by Huxley, who proved that
"There was and is an Aryan Race, that is to say, the characteristic modes of
speech, termed Aryan, were developed among the Blond Long-heads alone,
however much some of them may have been modified by the importation of
Non-Aryan elements." ("The Aryan Question " in Nineteenth Century, 1890.
766.)
Thus the daring Phoenician pioneer mariners who, with splendid courage, in
their small winged galleys, first explored the wide seas and confines of the
Unknown Ancient World, and of whose great contributions to the civilization
of Greece and Rome classic writers speak in glowing terms, were, I found by
indisputable inscriptional and other evidence, not Semites as hitherto
supposed, but were Aryans in Race, Speech and Script. They were, besides,
disclosed to be the lineal blood-ancestors of the Britons and Scots
—properly so-called, that is, as opposed to the aboriginal dark Non-Aryan
people of Albion, Caledonia and Hibernia, the dusky small-statured Picts and
kindred " Iberian " tribes.
This discovery, of far-reaching effect upon the history of European
Civilization, and of Britain in particular, was announced in a summary of
some of the results of my researches on Aryan Origins in the " Asiatic
Review " for 1917 (pp. 197!). And it is now strikingly confirmed and
established by the discovery of hitherto undeciphered Phoenician and
Sumerian inscriptions in Britain (the first to be recorded in Britain), and
by a mass of associated historical evidence from a great variety of original
sources, including hitherto uninterpreted pre-Roman-Briton coins and
contemporary inscriptions, most of which is now published for the first
time.
In one of these inscriptions, a bi-lingual Phoenician inscription in
Scotland of about 400 B.C., now deciphered and translated for the first
time, its author, in dedicating a votive monument to the Sun-god Bel, calls
himself by all three titles " Phoenician," " Briton " and " Scot " ; and
records his personal name and native town in Cilicia, which is a well-known
ancient city-port and famous seat of " Sun-worship " in Asia Minor.
This British-Phoenician prince from Cilicia is, moreover, disclosed in his
own inscription in Scotland to be the actual historical original of the
traditional " Part-olon, king of the Scots," who, according to the Ancient
British Chronicles of Geoffrey and Nennius and the legends of the Irish
Scots, came with a fleet of colonists from the Mediterranean and arrived in
Erin, after having cruised round the Orkneys (not far distant from the site
where this Phoenician monument stands) and colonized and civilized Ireland,
about four centuries before the Roman occupation of Britain. And he is
actually called in this inscription " Part-olon " by a fuller early form of
that name.
This uniquely important British-Phoenician inscription, whilst incidentally
extending back the existence of the Scots in Scotland for over eight
centuries beyond the period hitherto known for them to our modern
historians, and disclosing their Phoenician origin, at the same time
rehabilitates the genuineness of the traditional indigenous British
Chronicles as preserved by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nennius. These
chronicles, although formerly accorded universal credence in Britain and on
the Continent up till about a century ago, have been arbitrarily jettisoned
aside by modern writers on early British history, obsessed with exaggerated
notions of the Roman influence on Britain, as mere fables. But the
genuineness of these traditional chronicles, thus conclusively established
for the period about 400 B.C., is also now confirmed in a great variety of
details for other of these traditional events in the pre-Roman period of
Britain.
This ascertained agreement of the traditional British Chronicles with
leading ascertained facts of pre-Roman British History wherever it can be
tested, presumes a similarly genuine character also for the leading events
in the earlier tradition. This begins with the arrival of " King
Brutus-the-Trojan " and his "Briton" colonists with their wives and families
in a great fleet from the Mediterranean about 1103 b.c, and his occupation,
colonization and civilization of Albion, which he then is recorded to have
called after himself and his Trojan Briton followers " Brit-ain " or " Land
of the Brits," after dispossessing a still earlier colony of kindred Britons
in Albion. All the more so is this pre-Roman-British tradition with its
complete king-lists and chronicles probably genuine, as the Ancient Britons,
properly so-called, are now found to have been accustomed to the use of
writing from the earliest period of their first arrival in Albion or
Britain. And the cherished old British tradition that Brutus-the-Troj an and
his " Britons" hailed from the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor is in
agreement with the fact that King Part-olon " the Briton " actually records
his native land as being also on the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor. And
this tradition is now confirmed by the discovery that many of the
prehistoric gravings and inscriptions on the rocks and monoliths in Britain
are of the Trojan type.
Fully to appreciate the historical significance of these long-undeciphered
Phoenician and Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, and their associated
evidence, it is necessary to have some general acquaintance with the results
of my researches into the racial origin and previously unknown early history
and world activities of the Phoenicians for a period of over two thousand
years beyond that hitherto known to our historians. I, therefore, give in
the introductory chapter a brief summary of the manner in which I was led to
discover that the Phoenicians were Aryan in Race, Speech and Script, and
were of vast antiquity, dating back from the testimony of their own still
existing inscribed monuments to about 3100 B.C.
My new historial keys to the origin and " prehistoric " activities of the
Phoenicians in early Europe disclose these virile ancestral pioneers of the
Higher Civilization as no mere dead figures in a buried past, but instinct
with life and human interests, adventurously exploring and exploiting the
commercial possibilities of the various regions along the unknown seas of
the Old World; and indicating to us at the present day the paths which led
to the propagation and progress of the Higher Civilization over the World.
Starting from the solid new ground of the positive, concrete, historical
inscriptions, we are led by the clues thus gained to fresh clues which open
up for us, as we proceed, new and unsuspected avenues of evidence,
disclosing rich mines of untapped historical material, written and
unwritten. These clues lead us from Britain back to the Phoenician and
Hittite homeland of the Aryan Phoenician Britons in Syria, Phoenicia and
Asia Minor of St. George of Cappadocia (and England), and there offer us the
solutions to most of the long outstanding problems in regard to the origin
of the Ancient Britons and the source and meaning of our ancestral British
folklore, national emblems and patron saints.
In this way we gain not only a fairly intimate knowledge of the
personalities of the Early Aryan Phoenicians who, as the ancestral Britons
and Scots, colonized and civilized Britain, and the historical reasons for
their various waves of migration hither with wholesale transplantation of
their cults, institutions and names on British soil. We gain at the same
time a considerable new insight into the remoter origin and racial character
of the pre-Briton, non-Aryan aborigines of the British Isles in the Stone
Age and their relation to the Picts and Celts which unravels to a great
extent the hopeless tangle in which the question of the aboriginal races in
Britain has hitherto become involved.
In thus enlarging, not inconsiderably, the boundaries of Clio's domain in
Britain, we are led into several provinces not hitherto suspected of
connection with Britain, though the relationship now becomes obvious. This
wider outlook on the parent land, as well as its colony in Britain and their
intercommunications, reflects fresh light on both the Ancient Britons and on
their parent Phoenicians. Amongst the great variety of historical effects
thus elicited by this new light may be mentioned the following:
Archeologically are disclosed
the racial character, original homeland and approximate dates of our
ancestral erectors of the prehistoric Stone Circles in the British Isles
with the motive of these monuments, also the erectors of the prehistoric
stone cists and long barrow graves of the " Late Stone Age." The discovery
of the key to the script of the prehistoric " Cup-marks" engraved upon the
rocks and monoliths unlocks the hitherto sealed messages of these
prehistoric literary records of our ancestors, and gives us a vivid picture
of the exalted ideals which already ruled their lives in those far-distant
days. Relatively fixed data are obtained for the much-conjectured beginning
of the Bronze Age in Britain, and of the race who introduced it and
manufactured the Early Bronze weapons, implements and trinkets which are
unearthed from time to time, and hitherto supposed to be " Celtic." The
racial character and original homeland of the pre-Aryan aborigines of the
British Isles in the Stone Age also become evident. And we discover that the
hitherto inexplicable Unity in the essentials of all the Ancient
Civilizations is owing to the original Unity of the Higher Civilization, and
its diffusion throughout the world by its originators, the ruling race of
Aryans, and especially by their sea-going branch, the Phoenicians.
Historically, besides recovering the approximate dates of the chief waves of
Aryan-Briton invasions, and the political causes apparently leading to these
invasions, we recover and establish the historicity, names, achievements and
dates of a great number of the chief kings and heroes of the Ancient Britons
in what has hitherto been considered " the prehistoric period." Amongst
other results is the interpretation of the unexplained legends and the
wholly unknown origin and meaning of the symbols stamped upon the very
numerous coins of the Ancient Britons in the pre-Roman period, and now
disclosed for the first time.
In British National Patron Saints and emblems of Phoenician origin are now
found to be St. George of Cappadocia and England and his Dragon legend and
his Red Cross ; also the Crosses of St. Andrew and St. Patrick, now forming
with St. George's the Union Jack and the kindred Scandinavian ensigns, all
of which crosses are found to have been carried by the Phoenicians as their
sacred standards of victory and imported and transplanted by them in the
remote past on to British soil. " Britannia " also is discovered to have
been evolved by the ancient sea-going Phoenicians as their patronymic
tutelary goddess, and under the same name and with substantially the same
form of representation as the British " Britannia.'' And the Phoenician
origin and hitherto unknown meaning of the Unicorn and Lion emblems in
British heraldry are now disclosed for the first time.
Linguistically, we now find that the English, Scottish, Irish, Gaelic,
Cymric, Gothic and Anglo-Saxon languages and their script, and the whole
family of the so-called " Aryan " languages with their written letters, are
derived from the Aryan Phoenician language and script through their parent,
the " Hittite " or Sumerian ; and that about fifty per cent of the commonest
words in use in the'' English'' Language to-day are discovered to be
Sumerian, " Cymrian " or Hittite in origin, with the same word-form, sound
and meaning. This fact is freely illustrated in these pages, as critical
words occur incidentally as we proceed. And it is found that the English and
" Doric " Scottish dialects preserve the original Aryan or "Sumerian" form
of words more faithfully than either the Sanskrit or Greek. The Phoenician
origin of the ancient sacred " Ogam " script of the pre-Christian monuments
in the British Isles is also disclosed.
In Religion, it is now found that the exalted religion of the Aryan
Phoenicians, the so-called " Sun-worship," with its lofty ethics and belief
in a future life with resurrection from the dead, was widely prevalent in
early Britain down to the Christian era. In this " Sun-worship," as it is
usually styled by modern writers, we shall see that, although the earliest
Aryans worshipped that luminary itself, they were the first people to
imagine the idea of God in heaven, and at an early period evolved the idea
of the One Universal God, as " The Father God," some millenniums before the
birth of Abraham, and they symbolized him by the Sun. They further
emblemized the Sun as " The Light of the World " by the True Cross, in the
manner now discovered, and they carved the Cross, as the symbol of Universal
Divine Victory, upon their sacred seals and standards, and sculptured it
upon their monuments from the fourth millennium b.c. downwards; and invented
the Swastika with the meaning now disclosed. This now explains for the first
time the very umerous Crosses and Swastikas carved upon the prehistoric
stone monuments and pre-Christian Stone Crosses with their other solar and
non-Christian symbols throughout the British Isles. It also now explains the
solar " wheeled " Cross, the so-called " Celtic " Cross, and the Red Cross
of St. George, the Fiery Cross of the Scottish clans, the Bel Fire rites
still surviving in the remoter parts of these islands at the summer
solstice, and the numerous True Crosses with solar symbols stamped upon the
ancient Briton coins of the "Catti" and "Cassi" kings of the pre-Roman and
pre-Christian periods in Britain.
Geographically, the topography of the " prehistoric" distribution of the
early Aryan Phoenician settlements throughout Ancient Britain is recovered
by the incidence of their patronymic and ethnic names in the oldest Aryan
place, river and ethnic names in relation to the prehistoric Stone Circles
and monuments, before the thick upcrop of later and modern town and village
names had submerged or obscured the early Aryan names on the map. The
transplantation by the Phoenician colonists of old cherished homeland names
from Asia Minor and Phoenician colonies on the Mediterranean is also seen.
The Phoenician source and meaning of many of the ancient place, river and
mountain names in Britain, hitherto unknown, or the subject of more or less
fantastic conjecture by imaginative etymologists, is disclosed. And a
somewhat clearer view is, perhaps, gained of the line of Phoenician
seaports, trading stations and ports of call along the Mediterranean and out
beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the prehistoric period.
In Economics and Science, the
Hitto-Phoenician Aryan origin of our ordered agricultural and industrial
life becomes evident. And the old British tradition is confirmed that London
was built as the commercial capital several centuries before the foundation
of Rome.
In Art, a like origin is disclosed for many of the motives in our modern
decorative art. The religious solar meaning of the " key-patterns " and
spiral designs is elicited for the first time. And the art displayed by the
Ancient Britons in the pre-Roman period is found to be based upon Hitto-Phoenician
models, and to be of a much higher standard than in the Anglo-Saxon and "
mediaeval" period in Britain.
Politically, the newly discovered racial link, uniting the Western Barats or
" Brit-ons" with the Eastern Barats (or " Britons ") of India—still called "
The Land of the Barats "—through the blood-kinship with the ruling chiefs of
India now revealed and established, should favourably determine the latter,
in these days of Indian unrest, to remain within the fellowship of the
British Commonwealth, which is now shown to have retained the real " Swaraj
" elements of the old progressive ancestral Barat Civilization in a much
purer form than the Indian branch. And the intimate kinship of the Britons
and British, properly so-called, with the Norse—the joint preservers of the
ancestral Gothic epics, the Eddas—is now disclosed to be much closer and
much more ancient than has hitherto been suspected; and long before the
Viking Age.
Classic Legend and Myth is to some extent rehabilitated by finding that some
of the great heroes and demi-gods of Homer had a historical human origin in
the personalities and achievements of famous Early Aryan and Barat Kings,
whose actual dates are now recovered.
The Psychologist and Eugenist may probably find a somewhat clearer
standpoint for observing the effect of the mixing of racial elements in the
composite British Nation, and in regard to the question of the racial
element making for real progress in the complex conditions of our modem
National Life.
Amongst the many minor effects of the discovery of the Aryan racial
character of the Phoenicians and their merchant princes now disclosed, it
would appear that the beautiful painting by Lord Leighton which adorns the
walls of the Royal Exchange in London, portraying the opening of the Trade
era in Britain, now requires an exchange of complexions between the
aborigines of Albion and the Phoenician merchants, as well as some slight
nasal readjustment in the latter to the Aryan type.
In thus opening up for us lost vistas of history adown the ages, and lifting
considerably higher than before the dense veil that hung so long over the
origin and ancestry of the composite races now forming the British Nation,
the newfound historical evidence suggests that the modern Aryan-Britons or
British, more fully than the other descendants of the Phoenicians, have
inherited the sea-faring aptitudes and adventurous spirit of that foremost
race of the Ancient World; and that the maritime supremacy of Britain, under
her Phoenician tutelary Britannia, has been mainly kept alive by the lineal
blood-descendants of these Aryan Phoenician ancestors of the Britons and the
Scots and Anglo-Saxons.
In traversing such wide and varied fields of research in so many different
specialized departments of culture and civilization, wherein a great mass of
the new uncoordinated knowledge, laboriously unearthed by countless modern
archaeologists working in separate water-tight compartments, now receives a
new orientation, it is scarcely possible that one individual, however
careful, in such a pioneer exploration for the path of Truth along this
vastly complex problem, can escape falling into errors in some details. But
no pains have been spared to minimize such possibilities, and it is believed
that such errors of commission, if they do occur, are relatively few and
immaterial, and do not at all affect the main conclusions reached, which are
so clearly established by the mass of cumulative historical evidence.
The long delay in publishing these discoveries, which were mostly made many
years ago, has been owing to the vast scope of this exploration over so many
wide fields, with the re-orientation of much of the mass of knowledge
unearthed by countless archaeologists working in specialized but isolated
and uncoordinated departments. To this has been added the necessity for my
acquiring a working knowledge of the ancient scripts and languages in which
the original ancient inscriptions and records were written, in order to
revise at first hand the spelling of the proper names in the original
records in the Cuneiform and its parent the Sumerian hieroglyphic script,
also in the " Akkadian," Hittite, hieroglyph Egyptian, Cretan, Cyprian,
Iberian, Runic Gothic, Ogam, and the so-called Phoenician Semitic, and its
allied Aramaic and Hebrew scripts, in addition to the Indian Pali and
Sanskrit. This has entailed the spending of many additional years in
strenuous toil for the necessary equipment for this pioneer exploration from
the Aryan standpoint, as disclosed by my new historical keys found embedded
in the Indian Sanskrit Vedas and Epics. And it has been supplemented by
actual visitation of some of the chief sites in the ancient homeland of the
Phoenicians and Hitto-Sumerians in Mesopotamia and Syria-Phoenicia. It is
for the unbiassed reader now to judge whether these many years of intensive
study are justified by their results. Some of the outstanding historical
results of these discoveries are indicated in the concluding chapter.
And here I gratefully acknowledge the great obligations I owe to my friend
Dr. Islay Burns Muirhead, M. A., who from first to last has favoured me with
his helpful candid criticism on many of the details of the discoveries, with
not a few suggestive comments, some of which I have gladly incorporated in
these pages, and whose unflagging interest in the progress of the work has
been a constant source of encouragement. I am also indebted to the courtesy
of the several authorities mentioned in the text, for replying to my
enquiries and permitting the use of a few of the illustrations. A list of
the chief authorities and publications referred to is given at the end of
the work.
A. WADDELL.
January, 1924.
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