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Introduction
As of July 2004 there have been no
implements found in the Americas that date from the Bronze Age (Please see Discussion). Nevertheless, there is considerable
evidence of a voyage or voyages of a Bronze Age Scandinavian
king, Woden-lithi, to North America around 1700 BC
from texts found inscribed in the rocks at Peterborough,
Ontario, Canada (Figs. 18 & 19 & MAP), and other North American sites. (Figs. 18 & 19 & MAP), and other sites. These
texts, written in Teutonic and Celtic tongues, used alphabets that have
survived to the present in remote parts of the world. However, in Europe Roman script became the
predominant alphabet around the time of Christ as part of the general
occupation. They support the belief
that Europeans during the Bronze Age were literate, educated people. Harvard Professor Barry
Fell (1982) has made an attempt to translate the inscriptions to about
October 2000. Expected widespread
criticism of such new ideas flooded the archeological world (see Comments). Yet by the year 2000 there has emerged a
revolution in American prehistory that may finally remove antiquated biases
and enable concerted efforts at learning and dispelling myths about
colonization in America. The evidence
points to the certainty that European colonists and traders have been
visiting or settling in the Americas for thousands of years, have introduced
their scripts and artifacts and skills, and have exported abroad American
products such as copper and furs. The
voyages occurred just as the Iron Age was beginning, so that the explorers
might have brought with them implements of iron instead of bronze (see Picture), and most could
have eventually rusted away. Woden-lithi's
main purpose for visiting America was apparently to barter textiles with the Algonquian Indians in return for metallic copper ingots (Fell 1982). He left a detailed record of his visit at Peterborough where he
established a permanent-trading colony.
To critics who argued that there was no writing among the
Scandinavians until about the time of Christ, Fell (1982) pointed to two
alphabets as shown in Fig. 1. One alphabet,
"ogam consaine" was employed by the ancient
peoples of Ireland and Scotland (often erroneously referred to as Celts—see Celts) and and recorded and
explained in detail by Irish monks during the Middle Ages. A detailed description of this writing was
given in Barry Fell's books America BC
and Saga America. The other alphabet, called
"Tifinag", is the special way of writing of the Tuaregs,
a race of Berbers living in the Atlas Mountains of North
Africa. Both ogam consain and Tifinag
use only consonants in nearly all words, leaving the vowels to be inferred,
as do writers of Hebrew, Arabic and other ancient scripts. Sometimes, where doubt may exist as to the
word intended, a vowel sign is added, or a pictograph, to help recognize the
word (Fell 1982). [ Ogam Script
details] It is
apparent from evidence provided in the following text that Bronze Age Irish and Norse colonists in America showed strong feelings
about their pagan gods and the power that they had over
daily events. Therefore, the numerous
inscriptions found in America on rocks, implements and bone regularly
connected these gods with whatever the people were trying to show, whether it
be gathering wool from wild sheep or recounting their travels. With his wide knowledge about Bronze Age
mythology and religions in Europe, Professor Fell noted close similarities in
the American inscriptions. He
interpreted these as cultural extensions from Europe, following colonization
by explorers crossing the Atlantic in ancient times. (Pleases refer to Figs. 20, 21, 22, 23 & 24 for more illustrations to this section). The
following text reconsiders the detailed account by Professor Barry Fell in
Bronze Age America, 1982,.with new knowledge accumulated since its
publication. Particularly, his
erroneous references to Celts have been changed to coincide with knowledge
acquired by 2004. Although Fell’s
reference to Celts often includes peoples of both Ireland and Scotland, I
have generally used the word Ancient Irish for both (Please see Celts). The Bronze Age Alphabets
These
alphabets enable an examination of the famous Bronze Age sites where rock-cut
inscriptions are preserved. One
famous site occurs at Hjulatorp, Sweden, the name
meaning "Wheel Village." There exist numerous Neolithic or early Bronze Age rock carvings that resemble chariot
wheels and others that look like disks or globes (Figs. 3). Fell (1982) discussed the significance of
this site as follows: Examine the
fernlike inscription on the lower part of the rock face, beneath some circular
carvings. There is little difficulty
in recognizing this as ogam consain, and that the letters are as shown on Fig 3. They spell K-UI-G-L, which, as all Nordic-
and German-speaking readers will immediately recognize, is just an archaic
way of spelling the general Teutonic root that means a ball or globe. Glance now to the upper right, where,
beside the same circular images, we now find a series of engraved dots that
match letters in the Tifinag alphabet.
The letters are, as shown in Fig.
4, K-G-L--, again,
just an archaic rendering of the same word, this time in a different
alphabet. There are more of the
Tifinag letters. Look at the chariot
wheels..." in Fig. 5. "Beneath
them are letters that spell W-H-L-A, obviously an archaic spelling of the Old
Norse word for wheel. Farther to the
right we find a Tifinag word spelling K-L.
Now the writer of that last word may have been an ancient Swede,
already casting out from his pronunciation of kugl that internal g,
for whereas Danes and Germans retain the internal consonant, the Swedes now
spell and pronounce kugl as kula. But, it may
appear, there is not supposed to be any writing at all on these Bronze Age
monuments! Well, that was not Fell’s
opinion, and he suspected that it
would begin to occur to the reader that perhaps our earlier ideas may have
erred on these matters. Now let us
take a look at another Bronze Age carving, first recorded by Dr. G. Halldin
in the 1949 volume of the yearbook published by the Swedish
Sjöfartsmuseum. It shows a ship of
the characteristic Bronze Age form, with the keel projecting fore and aft
below the upward-turned bow and stern pieces. Along the upper and lower borders of the ....ship (Fig. 6a) we see two lines of Tifinag letters, and a third line
curves around the lower edge of the rock slab. In the Bronze Age (and also among the Berbers in modern times),
when two or more lines of text occur, they are read as if they were a
continuous "tape:": that is, with each line alternating in
direction, so that no break occurs in the line of symbols. Here we read the top line from left to
right, the next line from right to left.
The letters prove to be K-GH H-W-L.
Now take a glance at an American rock inscription, also depicting
ships of the Bronze Age type (Fig. 6b). This particular carving, at Peterborough,
Ontario, can be visited easily by Canadians living in that area, As can be
seen, the letters K-GH occur at the beginning of the first line, too, which
also is to be read from the left to right, just as in the Swedish
example. Reference to any Old Norse
or Old Icelandic dictionary will disclose that kuggr, often anglicized in Viking times as cog, is an Old Norse word meaning a seagoing trading ship. On the Swedish example the next word,
H-WL, can readily be recognized, since it still occurs in all Nordic tongues,
as meaning whale, or, in the older sense, any sea monster or leviathan. Thus the Swedish example is telling us
that the monument is dedicated to "The seagoing ship Leviathan." As for the Canadian examples, merely note
that kuggr is only one of several
Old Norse words for ships that we find represented by Tifinag letters beside
carvings of Bronze Age ships. Returning to
Sweden, we now visit at Backa, Brastad, another site,
considered by Swedish archaeologists, to be Neolithic (around 2000 BC). The word baca does not occur in modern speech, but in Old Norse it meant,
according to the Oxford Dictionary of
Old Icelandic, "a kind of blunt-headed arrow." The rock inscription that occurs at Baca
depicts just such a blunt-headed arrow, together with an image of the sun god
and human figure, apparently dead, plus some letters of the Tifinag alphabet
(Fig.
7 ). These, if read
from right to left, yield the words S-L B-K-S, solbakkas, translating as "of the sun's blunt
arrow." The precise reference
may be obscure, but it seems clear enough that the letters are indeed
Tifinag, and that the subject under discussion is indeed the blunt arrow that
is depicted below the letters and that gave its name to the place where the
inscription occurs. The examples
cited so far come from the eastern parts of Sweden and comprise very simple
texts, using only a few letters of the Tifinag alphabet. If we transfer our attention to the rock
inscriptions found on the southwest coast of Sweden, immediately adjacent to Oslo Fjord and along the strip of coast to the north of Göteborg, we find much more extensive and varied
inscriptions at localities in the Bohuslän region. Here the texts are longer and more interesting and, in many
cases, they show the same obvious relationship to the accompanying carvings
of men, animals, and ships. What have
hitherto been incomprehensible "lines of dots" now assume quite
clearly and unmistakably the character of commentaries in a very ancient kind
of Norse language that was evidently spoken during the Bronze Age. Since there was at that time no
differentiation of the ancestors of the future Angles and Saxons from the general stock of Teutonic speakers that later
gave rise to the tribes that spread from Denmark to England, herein shall be
used the terms Nordic
and Ancient
Nordic for the language
that is represented in these Bronze Age inscriptions. it was Fell’s impression that English,
German, and other Teutonic languages, including the Norse or Scandinavian
tongues, may all be traced back to the Bronze Age dialect that is the subject
of this account. The
inscriptions in western Sweden seem to fall
broadly into three main categories.
These are (1) short didactic statements that appear to be school
lessons for young scribes, very much resembling the Irish (noted as Celtic)
school inscriptions reported from British Columbia in Fell’s book Saga America, (2) prayers for the
safety of ships at sea and for victory in impending attacks upon foes, and
(3) narrative material depicting and identifying important events, such as
the pagan festivals with their associated rituals and entertainments. In deciphering these Tifinag texts, from
which the vowels, of course, are usually lacking, Fell used as his reference the known vocabulary of Old
Norse and Old Icelandic. However, in
many cases dialects such as Old English or Old High German could equally well
be used as the reference guide, with the same translation resulting, and with
little more than the substituted vowels to distinguish the various dialects. Since the vowels are lacking we are left
without any certain indication as to which of the Old Teutonic tongues is the
closest to the speech of these ancient Nordic people, and it is possible that
all are equally related, as was suggested above. But to provide a uniform nominal vocabulary Fell selected Old
Norse or Old Icelandic as the base. Any literate
community has to provide a means of instructing the young in the arts of reading
and writing; otherwise the skills would die out. it appears that in Bronze Age times the schoolmasters used much
the same kind of didactic material for their lessons as did teachers in later
ages. The subject matter ranges from
simple identifications of depictions of objects of daily life to more
sophisticated proverbs and adages, each illustrated by appropriate pictorial
carvings. Fig
8 illustrates two inscribed petroglyphs from
the Bohuslän district that suggest that they were
intended for younger readers. The
first imparts a moral lesson on cooperation; the second is of the familiar
grade-school type, in which people are related to their daily environment, in
this case two fishermen who are "on the water." Fig.
9 shows more of
the same type of illustrated statement, in which a warrior holds his buckler
in such a manner as to show how the word is
spelled; a bull and a cow are introduced, each illustrating how its name is
spelled; and the sun god carries the image of the sun, thus showing how the
letter s (for sol, sun)
originated. Fig. 10 could also be used in teaching youngsters, though the
context from which these ship details are taken suggests that it is a record
of a naval episode. The ships' names
are given, sometimes (as in the upper example) with a helpful hieroglyph
added-- the vessel is called the Serpent, and a serpent is shown between the letters that
spell the word. Fig. 11 shows part of an
inscription at Vanlös, Bohuslän, in which a
winding strand of Tifinag letters weaves through a series of carvings of
Bronze Age ships. The decipherment,
as given in the caption, shows that the work was intended as some kind of
charm to enable seagoing cogs to remain together, with a fair wind, and to
arrive at their destination all at the same time. Fig. 12 shows two charms
or prayer inscriptions intended to cause fish to take the hook. The upper illustration has the Tifinag
letters laid out in a vertical column; it is a rebus simulating a fishing
line with a hook at the lower end.
Analogous inscriptions in Irish (noted as Celtic) dialects commonly
form rebus arrangements of ogam letters, so we must conclude that texts of
this type were part of the whole Nordic culture during the Bronze Age and
were by no means confined to Scandinavia. Figs. 13, 14, 15 & 16 illustrate a portion of
a series of petroglyphs that occur on one rock face at Fossum, Bohuslän, all
depicting various aspects of the events that occurred during the celebration
of the Thorri festival, held during January and February. Fig. 13 shows the symbol of the festival, a sign made up of
reduplicated letters of the name Thorri, resembling a thunderbolt
symbol. There follows a scene in
which the trumpeters, the lur-blowers, hold these curved instruments to their
mouths, and an appropriate text tells us that this began the day's
ceremonies. Below, in Fig. 13 we see a scene
from what appears to be a hockey game appropriately labeled "ball
game." Dueling with maces is the
subject of Fig.
14, the competitors each wearing a sword, all as usual in this
period displaying their phalluses. Fig. 15 shows
petroglyphs of sorcerers performing feats of juggling, the balls that they
throw into the air being the letters of the inscription itself. Fig. 16 depicts hunting
with the bow and arrow and an archery contest held in connection with the
Thorri festival. Notable in these
texts is the use of ship symbols to provide punning words that suggest the
actual word intended by the consonants or even that replace spelled-out
words. The captions to these figures
explain the points of interest. With these
introductory examples, it is now appropriate to leave the Swedish scene,
where our readers have perhaps some questions to pose to the archaeologists
of Stockholm. As for us here in the
Americas, we too have matters to settle with our own archaeologists. But the
epigraphers, who study ancient inscriptions, have some explaining to do. How is it that a Berber alphabet can occur
in Scandinavian Bronze Age contexts?
Why does an Irish (noted as Celtic) script also occur there? Why do both scripts (and may others) occur
as rock-cut inscriptions in the Americas?
These are matters that have been the topic of Fell’s earlier books and
research papers. A few brief answers
may be inserted here, for readers new to the subject. In regard to
ogam, it is easy to demonstrate the untruth of the claim mentioned above that
it is a local London invention dating only from the fourth century AD. If those who make this claim (British
archaeologists) should take the time to visit the numismatic department of
the British Museum they would see examples of the silver coinage of the
Aquitanian Gauls, struck in the second century BC and lettered in ogam consaine. They would also see Iberian and Basque
imitations of these, lettered in ogam.
If they should look at the artifacts excavated from the Windmill Hill
site occupied around 2000 BC by the builders of Stonehenge, they would see
ogam consaine engraved on these, too. As regards
the Tifinag alphabet of the Berbers, ..... Fell’s thesis was that Tifinag is
in fact an ancient Nordic script, and that it was taken to North Africa,
probably in the twelfth century BC, when the pharaoh Ramesses III repelled an
attack by sea peoples who appear (in his bas-reliefs) to be Norsemen. The invaders took refuge in Libya, and it
is suspected that the Old Norse runes went with them, and survived as the
Tifinag. During Fell’s work in North
Africa he met Berbers who had no tradition of the origin but who were
obviously Europoid, with fair hair, blue, gray, or hazel eyes, and typical
European features. And as for
how European skippers could have reached the Americas in the early Bronze
Age, their own spokesman, King Woden-lithi himself, may be left to handle
that question. he does so in the
words he had inscribed on limestone
in Canada 3,500 years ago, during the five months he spent in Ontario. And so for why Europe chose to forget
about America, that is a matter primarily for European historians to explain,
but it should be pointed out that the earth's climate became colder at the
end of the Bronze Age, when the north polar icecap came into being [See Climate]. Sailing westward by the northern route
became hazardous until the amelioration of climate that took place just
before the onset of the Viking period. Perhaps,
when the study of rock inscriptions in Scandinavia is pursued more widely,
new evidence may be discovered that could help to fill in some of the missing
pieces of the record of man upon the high seas. The increasing frigidity of the North Atlantic as the warm
Bronze Age came to an end would not have been the only factor that might have
tended to discourage transatlantic trading. There were
also changes occurring in the pattern of commerce in Europe, as the Bronze
Age advanced, and these, combined with gradual exhaustion of available
upper-level deposits of metallic copper in Canada, probably turned the
attention of Scandinavian skippers more to the south and less to the remote
lands across the Atlantic. By 1200 BC,
when the Scandinavian Bronze Age was reaching its peak, traders from the Carthaginian settlements in Spain and Tunisia were
reaching the Baltic lands. They
brought with them another alphabet, the Iberian, itself a development of the
Phoenician way of writing.
Scandinavian inscriptions now assumed the character of commercial
documents, engraved on small pieces of bone, written in the Iberian script,
and recording business transactions.
It was probably at this epoch that Scandinavian leaders decided that
the time had come to discard the old Tifinag letters of King Woden-lithi's
day and to modernize their business records by adopting the new Iberian
script. So only the religious
inscriptions preserved the Tifinag in the northern lands. On the southern shores of the
Mediterranean, roving Norse raiders also preserved their Tifinag, which
ultimately became the inheritance of the Berber peoples. The alphabet
may not have been the only bequest these Norsemen made to their successors
who settled in the Atlas Mountains.
When Fell was working in Libya he noticed among Berbers some words
still in use that had familiar Nordic sound, made even more recognizable now
that we can see how King Woden-lithi would have written these same
words." (see Table I for examples). On the basis
of evidence gained from translations of ogam script in North America, Fell
(1982) proposed the following hypothesis:
"Some seventeen centuries before the time of Christ a Nordic king
named Woden-lithi sailed across the Atlantic and entered the St. Lawrence River.
He reached the neighborhood of where Toronto now stands, and
established a trading colony with a religious and commercial center at the
place that is now known as Petroglyphs Park, at
Peterborough. His homeland was
Norway, his capital at Ringerike, west of the head of Oslo Fjord. He remained in Canada for five months,
from April to September, trading his cargo of woven material for copper
ingots obtained from the local Algonquians (whom he called Wal, a word cognate with Wales and Welsh and meaning "foreigners."). He left behind an inscription that records
his visits, his religious beliefs, a standard of measures for cloth and
cordage, and an astronomical observatory for determining the Nordic calendar
year, which began in march, and for determining the dates of the Yule and
pagan Easter festivals. having
provided his colonists with these essentials, he sailed back to Scandinavia
and thereafter disappears into the limbo of unwritten Bronze Age history. The king's inscription gives his
Scandinavian title only and makes no claim to the discovery of the Americas
nor to conquest of territory. Clearly
he was not the first visitor to the Americas from Europe, for he found that
the Ojibwa Algonquians were already acquainted with the
ancient Basque syllabary, and when Woden-lithi set sail for home, an Ojibwa
scribe cut a short comment into the rock at the site, using the ancient
Basque script and a form of Algonquian still comprehensible today, despite
the lapse of time. Fell (1982)
then continued with evidence supporting such sweeping claims. He suggested, "The primary physical
evidence comprises a series of inscriptions cut in the Tifinag and ogam
consaine alphabets, using an early form of the Norse tongue, scattered around
the outer margins of the petroglyph site at Peterborough [Ontario, Canada] (Fig. 18 & Fig 19). Except for the central sun god and
moon-goddess figures and certain astronomical axes cut across the site, the
numerous inscriptions are the work of later Algonquian artists, who used King
Woden-lithi's inscription as a model for their own, more conspicuous,
carvings. The site has been since
1972 under official government protection, and instructions for reaching it
are given by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources in various guide
booklets and pamphlets available to the general public. Readers of this book will find most
helpful the ministry's book Petroglyphs
Provincial Park, Master Plan; also valuable for its treatment of the Algonquian
art at the site is the work by Joan M. and Romas K. Vastokas
entitled Sacred Art of the
Algonkians (Mansard Press, 1973).
The latter work is meticulous in the accurate portrayal of the
inscriptions, in their present eroded state, though the authors did not then
recognize the inscribed alphabets or record them as such. The important fact is that professional
anthropologists such as the Vastokas team found and recorded the inscriptions
and reported that they must date back to a period before the historical
occupation of the region by the Hurons and later by Iroquois; in other words, the inscriptions could not be
modern features, and must date back to the era of Algonquian occupation,
which came to an en some five centuries ago. Joan and
Romas Vastokas recognized apparent Scandinavian and Bronze Age features in
the art style. They pointed out that
the ships depicted in the inscription are shown in the European manner, with
animal figure heads and stern tailpieces, features totally unknown to Algonquian,
or indeed in any American Indian, art.
They, and other archaeologists, noticed the strange similarities of
the central sun-god figure. and associated motifs to corresponding solar
deities of Europe, especially the Bronze Age petroglyphs of Scandinavia. Other characteristic Scandinavian features
that their photographs and drawings record are such elements of Norse
mythology as the maiming of the god of war by the Fenrir wolf....., the
conspicuous short-handled hammer, Mjolnir, of Thunor (Thor of the Norse), and
Gungnir, the spear of Woden....., both of which were imitated many times over
by the Algonquian artists who later occupied the site. Thus, the purely objective reports made by
the Vastokases who sought only to record what they discovered, without
attaching any interpretation other than that appropriate for Algonquian art,
have an added value and importance for us now, for they observed the material
as it was uncovered from the soil and placed it on permanent record in their
photographs, charts, and descriptions.
As a result of the initial discoveries, the whole site was set aside
as a public part and protected by an enclosure. Thus, the
primary evidence still exists and is open for public inspection under circumstances
that prevent the possible vandalization of the site. The only disturbing feature is that, since
the inscriptions were exposed to the air, after removal of the covering soil
that had protected them, the action of frost and acid rain has
caused a gradual deterioration of the surface of
the limestone. Unless steps are taken
to impregnate the bedrock with a stabilizer, such as silicone, the precious
record may soon melt away into unreadable markings, as part indeed already
had before the site had been found. The actual
discovery should be noted here. It
occurred on May 12, 1954, and was made by three geologists, Ernest Craig, Charles Phipps,
and Everitt Davis, in the course of fieldwork on
mining claims. The following day,
"Nick" Nickels, a photographer-journalist of the Peterborough Examiner, visited the
site, and so began the first modern records of it. Paul Sweetman of the University of
Toronto undertook the first research at the site in July 1954, recording
nearly a hundred petroglyphs.
Sweetman's report indicated a possible age as great as 3,500 years or
as young as 400 years. His upper
limit, 3,500 years, is in agreement with the epigraphic evidence as given in
this book. Tens of thousands of
visitors now come to the site each year, using the access road and other
facilities that have been erected for their benefit. it has become a major center of
archaeological interest for the whole of North America, and all Americans are
grateful to the Canadian authorities for having seen to it that the ancient
petroglyphs are protected yet open to all visitors. The
Vastokases, like most archaeologists in North America, felt obliged to
explain all American petroglyphs as being the work of native Amerindian
artists. Despite their, and others'
perception of the similarities to Scandinavian petro9glyphs of the Bronze
Age, the idea that any connection might have existed between North America
and Scandinavia in the Bronze Age, some 3,500 years ago, seemed preposterous. So they were faced with remarkable
parallels, yet they elected to explain them as no more than chance
similarities brought about by a shamanistic view of the sky as a kind of sea
on which the sun and the moon sailed their ships to cross the heavens each
day. In treating
the inscriptions in this way, they were following the example of other
distinguished anthropologists and archaeologists who had investigated North
American petroglyphs. The leading
researcher during the last several decades had been Professor Robert Heizer of the University of California. hew was vehement in his rejection of all
theories that America had been visited in pre-Columbian times by voyagers
from Europe, Africa, or elsewhere, and he chose to view all American
petroglyphs as the products of Amerindians.
He did take account of age-determination techniques, such as those
dependent on carbon-dating of materials found in caves where petroglyphs
occur and the evidence provided by the oxidation of rocks, especially in dry
climates such as eastern California, Nevada, and Arizona. These methods enabled Heizer to set dates
of up to five thousand years ago for some petroglyphs. As for me, at the time when the Ontario
petroglyphs were discovered, Fell had just completed a comprehensive
Scandinavian journey and had visited many of the famous inscriptions of
Sweden and Denmark, though he was still a long way from recognizing the
Tifinag alphabet at any Bronze Age petroglyph site beyond the shores of North
Africa. Fell’s
subsequent work on Tifinag led to the gradual decipherment of the ancient
language of Libya and, after various Libyan scholars visited me at Harvard,
Fell was invited to lecture on the Tifinag inscriptions at the universities
of Tripoli and Benghazi. Just before
leaving for North Africa in 1977, Fell had received from Otto
Devitt the first of what were to be a continuing series of photographs he
made for me of the petroglyphs at Peterborough. Although he could see that the site included Tifinag letters,
the words they formed seemed to have no discernible connection with the
language of ancient Libya, and he was forced to put the slides aside while
undertaking other assignments. In the
interim Fell read some of Heizer's reports on the petroglyphs of eastern
California and Nevada, and recognized that they included Tifinag and Kufi
(early Arabic). A particularly
striking case is the petroglyph in Owens Valley,
California, that depicts the entire zodiac, in the form it had before the
third century BC, together with a Kufi inscription explaining that the New
Year is determined at the time of the vernal equinox, when the sun enters the
constellation of the Ram. One of Dr.
Fell’s former Harvard students, Dr.
Jon Polansky, was now doing research at Berkeley, and he made the acquaintance
of Professor Heizer and showed him the decipherment Fell had done on his
Owens Valley petroglyphs. As a
consequence Professor Heizer invited me to visit him; this came about in May
1979. We became friends and, putting
aside his former opposition to the notion of pre-Columbian visitors, Bob
Heizer now carefully checked each element of the decipherment and confirmed
that Fell had rendered his original published diagrams correctly tin the
version in which In inserted the sound values of the Kufi signs. We planned a joint publication, but
illness prevented him from accompanying me into the desert that year. Instead, he arranged for one of his former
Berkeley students, Dr. Christopher Corson, to
take me to some of the inscription areas.
Dr. Corson, an archaeologist in the Bureau of Land Management, ahs the
best knowledge of petroglyph sites in northern California and northwest
Nevada. He led a party that included
John Williams, Jon Polansky, and me, together with Wayne and Betty Struble
and their son Peter. Bob Heizer
planned to take part in Fell’s next field trip, but to his great regret he
passed away, struck down by the illness that had already prevented his
participation in the 1979 fieldwork.
Fell was obliged to publish the Owens Valley zodiac without the
benefit of his contribution, though the illustrations of the paper had been
checked by him for accuracy and had his approval. Dr. Heizer's
contribution to American petroglyph studies had been immense, and Fell’s
colleagues and he knew that a significant point had been reached when Heizer
recognized the true nature of the Owens Valley zodiac and opened his mind to
a new view of American prehistory in which pre-Columbian visitors and
colonists would now play a role.
Heizer, an archeologist and anthropologist, filled an intermediate
position between those archeologists who devote their research to excavation
of ancient sites and epigraphers, those linguists who give their energies to
the decipherment of ancient inscriptions. By 1979, the
same season in which Heizer and Fell had begun to influence each other, the
epigraphers of Europe had already begun to analyze by work on ancient
inscriptions in America, and soon authoritative publications began to appear,
giving strong support and conformation.
Professor Pennar Davies, a leading Welsh scholar, and in America,
Professor Sanford Etheridge, editor of Gaeltacht
(an Irish-language publication), had both written in support of Fell’s
finding ogam inscriptions in America.
In Spain, the leading Basque scholar, Dr. Imanol Agiŕe,
advised me that he too confirmed Fell’s reports on Basque inscriptions in
Pennsylvania, dating from about the ninth century before Christ. In 1980 the volume he contributed to the Gran Enciclopedia Vasca (Great Basque
Encyclopedia) contained letter-by-letter analyses of Fell’s papers, and in a
technical paper published in 1982 Agíre acknowledged that his decipherment of
the ancient Basque syllabary was correct.
These and other published papers, such as those of the Swiss linguist
Professor Linus Brunner, provided competent
scholarly approval of our American studies on the alphabets and syllabaries
that are represented at the site in Peterborough. Their opinions, therefore, together with the detailed analyses
that they have published, must be taken into account when some
archaeologists, both in America and Britain, attempt to discredit the
research on American inscriptions.
The claims of the latter that epigraphers in America are deluded by
forgeries, or even forge the alleged inscriptions themselves, have to be
dismissed as ignorant remarks made without personal knowledge of the scripts
or the language involved, and generally without any knowledge of the sites at
which the inscriptions occur. From the
information given herein it is obvious that the petroglyphs at Peterborough
cannot be forgeries, and that they are ancient. From the information given previously and those that follow, it
is easy for any person who so desires to check the statements and conclusions,
and as in previous books that Fell has written. Only by such methods can we eventually persuade Americans to
realize that American history extends far into the past, and that America and
Europe interacted through trade and cultural contact for over three thousand
years before Columbus made his first voyage. Since Fell’s
first book on ancient voyages to America, some important advances have been
made to archaeological research bearing out that topic. In New England James
P. Whittall and members of the Early Sites Research Society have
discovered and excavated a site (a disk barrow) that was first occupied seven
thousand years ago. Some of the
skeletons show the characteristics of Europeans, yet their age by carbon
dating is at least 1,600 years. One
of the skulls matches closely the skulls of the ancient Irish. These facts have been determined by an
anthropologist, Professor Albert Casey, whose
research has been devoted to skull and bone characteristics of Old World
peoples. His computer is programmed
to recognize Old World characteristics in New World skulls not being
discovered. The tumuli of
northeastern America show great similarities to those of Europe. The radiocarbon dates indicate similar
ranges to time. The artifacts
excavated from American burial sites, sometimes in actual contact with the
skeletons of their presumed former owners, have been discovered in some cases
to have inscriptions carved upon them, in ogam and Basque script; to Dr. William P. Grigsby we owe this observation, based on
his own extensive collections of artifacts from the southeastern states. We are
faced, therefore, with what amounts to conclusive evidence that the artifacts
(including written inscriptions) of European peoples of the Bronze Age are
found at American archaeological sites, and with these artifacts skeletons
are occasionally found that conform to Europoid criteria. The recognition and confirmation of the
inscriptions are due to epigraphers who have published their findings and
who, in most cases, teach courses in linguistics or epigraphy at reputable
universities. Thus, whether or not we
can comprehend the sailing techniques of Bronze Age peoples, the fact seems
inescapable that Bronze Age Europeans reached North America. Fell’s personal view was that the mild
climate of the Bronze Age permitted navigation to take advantage of the
westward-flowing currents and westward-blowing winds of the polar regions,
and thus made the natural northern route to North America much easier to use
than is the case today, when polar ice intrudes and savage weather occurs
[See Climate]. Fell had sailed that route and appreciated
its discomforts. They would have been
much less severe in the Bronze Age, while the attraction of North America for
Scandinavian skippers would have been much enhanced by the availability of
copper in metallic form, at a time when Europe was demanding copper for bronze alloys on a larger scale than ever before or
since...... Salient
aspects of the Bronze Age are now described by Fell. "In northern Europe bronze weapons
and implements first began to replace the stone artifacts of the Neolithic
inhabitants when trade routes to the Mediterranean lands permitted imports
from the south. The change from stone
and malleable copper to the more durable and more valuable bronze equipment
is dated to about 2000 BC." At this
time, which marks the opening of the Bronze Age, the most numerous and
conspicuous man-made features of the landscape were the massive drystone
monuments that had been erected during the last phases of the Neolithic, from
about 2200 BC onward. These great
monuments, called megaliths (from
Greek roots meaning huge stones)
have remained an impressive feature of the European landscape ever since, and
today tens of thousands of tourists visit the megalithic sites every year, to
gaze with wonder at these mysterious works of our ancestors. When the English Pilgrims began to settle northeastern North
America in the early 1600s they found that the forests and open hillsides
carried similar ancient stone monuments.
Governor John Winthrop (the Younger) of
Connecticut had become during his student years one of the first Fellows of
the infant Royal Society, and after his arrival in America was regarded by
the colonists as a fount of information on all matters to do with natural
history and antiquities. hew wrote
papers for the early volumes of the Philosophical
Transactions (published by the Royal Society in London) and thus drew
attention to the salient features of scientific interest in his new world
across the Atlantic. Among his papers
is found evidence of inquiries from settlers as to what could be the meaning
of the strange stone "forts" they were encountering. it was noted that the Algonquian Indians
did not use stone in their constructions (save for some rare instances), and
the Indians themselves shunned the stone chambers and could throw no light on
their origins. Toward the
close of the nineteenth century the opinions of a few influential
archaeologists in North America were that no European had set foot in America
until the time of Columbus. Since
such opinions precluded any possibility that the stone monuments of new
England might be related to the megalithic monuments of Europe, the entire
subject fell out of favor. Americans
were sent to Europe to study Stone Age and Bronze Age archaeology, and few,
if any, though to pay attention to the problems raised by the New England
megaliths. So deeply ingrained is
this view of the age long isolation of America that when in 1976 Fell
published his reasoned thoughts on the parallels between American and
European archaeological sites, his book America
BC was dismissed by most archaeologists as ignorant rubbish. In reality, much of Fell’s reasoning was
based on a careful comparison of engraved inscriptions found on the
associated stonework, both in European sites (especially Portugal and Spain)
and in American contests. Fell
recorded, for example, well-known Iberian scripts of the late Bronze Age,
found on hundreds of rocks in Pennsylvania, and his decipherments, utilizing
Professor David Diringer's tales in The
Alphabet (Hutchinson, 1968). Such
works as Resurrección María de Azukue's Diccionario
Vasco-Español-Frances (Bilbao, 1969) enabled me to recognize and report
Basque gravestones and boundary marker stones, apparently dating from about
the era of 900 BC. European
epigraphers and linguists, such as the foremost Basque scholars, carried out
detailed checks on Fell’s findings, confirmed most of them, and, as already
noted, in the latest volume of the Gran
Enciclopedia Vasca [a discussion is] now given over to matters raised by
these American Basque inscriptions, and the analysis by Imanol Agiŕe in
his Vinculos de la Lengua Vasca
gives a virtual total confirmation of his findings: the inscriptions, in Agíre's opinion, do date from about 900
BC, and they do carry Basque phrases in the appropriate Iberian alphabets of
that period. These findings have been
the object of much discussion by archaeologists. For a current summary of the subject, reference may be made to
the Occasional Publications of the
Epigraphic Society, Volume 9 (1981), where some fifty opinions, pro and con,
are set out. In general, it can be
said in summary that linguists and epigraphers agree that the American
inscriptions are genuine and ancient, and that many of them relate to the
Bronze Age. Since
linguists and eipgraphers concur that the American inscriptions do include
genuine products of Bronze Age scribes, and that the scripts and languages
used show that the scribes came from European and North African lands, there
is no longer any basis for doubting that the monuments of North America that
resemble megaliths are indeed just that--megaliths. By this it should be understood monuments produced by colonists
from Europe in Bronze Age times. Now, a
popular book is not the proper place to review the tedious details of various
scripts and various languages employed and inscribed by these visitors, who
came from so many different lands.
Besides, Fell already wrote about these matters in America BC and Saga America, as well as in around a hundred or so technical
papers. The most entertaining and
attractive entrance to the subject is through visiting some of the sites
where American megalithic monuments can be seen, and also through visiting
the corresponding sites in Europe where, of course, there is no dispute at
all as to the authorship or antiquity of megaliths.
Visual presentation rather than written descriptions form the best
introduction to the monuments, and in the atlas of photographs that are
presented here. European and American
examples of each of the major categories of megaliths are arranged in
comparable groups of similar structures. Radiocarbon
and amino-acid dating has only recently been applied to the determination of
dates of American megaliths [as of 1982 here], but analogous features
suggesting early European penetration into North America include the low
circular burial mounds that are called disk barrows. Already noted previously the investigation
of one of these, presently under way in New England by James Whittall. it has so far been learned that Whittall's
site was under continuous occupation, at least for ceremonial purposes, from
about 5000 BC (amino-acid date 7200 Before Present), until about 500 BC. Over that span of time a number of burials
occurred and, as noted.... these include a Europoid
skeleton. Associated stone
artifacts resemble tools of the era called Archaic in America (8000 to 500 BC), corresponding to the entire
span of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Europe. Sometime before, AD 900,m stonework structure was added around
the margins of the barrow. These findings
by Whittall point strongly to European arrivals in North America long before
Bronze Age times. Other
radiocarbon dates show that some of the megalithic chambers in New England
are of later date, one in Vermont, for example, yielding charcoal from the
foundation layer that gave a carbon date of about AD 200. As for those
megalithic monuments that contain no artifacts or charcoal, dates can only be
guessed at from indirect evidence. The
guesses made in that way suggest that most of them were probably built during
Bronze Age and Iron Age times, as indeed many of the European megaliths can
be shown to postdate the Neolithic period also. So massive and enduring are megaliths that, whenever they were
built, the affected the living space of later peoples, and certainly Bronze
Age Europeans utilized the Neolithic megaliths. ........" ”.....further
comments will be restricted to the actual megalithic monuments, merely noting
here that the disk barrow, with its contained female skeletons lying in
flexed positions, is regarded in Europe as a feature of the early Bronze Age
and that therefore it is relevant to note here that similar features occur in
New England in districts where megalithic monuments occur. Fell’s own opinion, of course, remained
unaltered; it is that the megalithic monuments of northeastern North America
were used during the Bronze Age and therefore may have been constructed
either shortly before or during the Bronze Age. The term dolmen is a Breton word meaning a stone table. it aptly describes many of the smaller
examples of the megalithic monuments that go under this name. Such smaller examples, a meter or less in
height are shown in Figs. 25, 26, 27, 28., 29. & 30. As can be seen,
they comprise an upper, horizontal slab of stone, the capstone, which is supported on several vertical slabs, like a
table, with an internal cavity.
European archaeologists believe that the central cavity originally
contained a burial and that the entire structure was originally buried in
earth that has subsequently disappeared through erosion. it is known that some examples had partial
earth cover still intact a century or so ago. Such bared burial chambers are often distinguished from other
dolmens under the name cromlech. Of the examples
shown, Figs. 25 & 26 are European, Fig. 25 from Carrazeda,
Portugal, and Fig. 26 from the Orkney Islands. The remaining four examples are all
American. Fig. 27 shows an example at Gay Head, on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; a faintly visible
ogam inscription occurs on one of the stones at the entrance to the small
chamber within.... The others, Fig 28., Fig 29. & Fig. 30, are all located
at Westport, Massachusetts. Similar ones occur in the Boston area. Nothing is known of any former burial
relics in these small cromlechs."
[Please see review of structures in <Megaliths>] Very much
large examples, with massive capstones and relatively shorter vertical
supports, form conspicuous dolmens.
These seem unlikely to have been covered by earth at any stage. A collapsed dolmen was found in
Vermont. The finder, John Williams,
also found a remarkable sculpted ax and halberd that are cut into one end of
the squared capstone (detail in Fig.
31).
"A similar occurrence has been reported from an early Bronze Age
burial cairn at Nether Largie North, in Scotland, ax heads being engraved on
one end of the capstone and a halberd with streamers on another upright stone
of the same burial cist. it is
difficult to conceive of any Amerindian carving such devices and, as stated,
the Algonquians of the New England region have no knowledge of the authors of
these stone monuments. The example
from Scotland cited above postdates the Neolithic period, to which megaliths
are customarily assigned, and suggests that dolmens are not restricted to a
single period. Still more striking
evidence is seen in examples from France..... The elaborately carved Tuscan columns that serve as the
supports for the massive capstone indicate that this dolmen cannot antedate
the Roman era. Also, dated Roman
coins have been found under dolmens in France, and other evidence proves that
they served as sites for some kind of ceremony even as late as the Middle
Ages, when the church authorities regarded such assemblies s the practice of
witchcraft. By analogy, then, there
are no grounds for insisting that dolmens are restricted to the archaeology
of the Neolithic period, as do some British authorities. The largest
of the dolmens utilize natural boulders, sometimes weighing up to 90 tons,
supported precariously, so it would seem, on the underlying peg stones, yet
their duration through 4,000 years shows their builders to have had a fine
sense of stable construction. An
example is depicted in Fig.
33, from Ireland, and another in Trelleborg, Sweden, is shown in Fig. 34. Corresponding examples from North America
are illustrated in Fig. 32, Fig. 35, Fig. 36 & Fig. 38. , Fig. 35 shows the dolmen
at Lynn, Massachusetts, locally known as the Cannon Stone. Fig. 32 is an example
from near Lake Lujenda, northern Minnesota,
discovered recently by David Harvey, and the first to
be reported from that state. The
other examples are from Bartlett, New Hampshire (Fig. 36), and North Salem,
New York (Fig.
38). It difficult
to distinguish the North American examples from the European ones and believe
that both sets were produced by ancient builders who shared a common
culture. When the evidence of
inscriptions is taken into account, ..... the relationship of the American
examples to those of northern Europe becomes undeniable.
A second category of megaliths is supplied by the underground stone
chambers, and on some of these, too, the American ones included, inscriptions
are found that use European scripts appropriate to the Bronze Age, as well as
later graffiti, which have no bearing on the date of construction. They fall in several categories, according
to the mode of construction. Some are
in the form of rectangular chambers, up to twenty feet in length by ten feet
in width, often with the long axis pointed toward the sunrise direction for
either the equinoxes or for one of the solstices. One at Danbury, Connecticut, carries
engraved on a fallen lintel stone the ancient symbol of the equinox, a circle
divided into equal halves, one half deeply engraved to represent night, the
other left clearly visible; this chamber, as John Williams and his colleagues
proved, faces the sunrise on the equinox days: that is, it is oriented due
east and points to a notch on the horizon within which the sun appears on the
days of the vernal and autumnal equinox.
The mode of
construction follows patterns appropriate to the type of stone naturally available. Where large slabs can be obtained, these
are used as capstones to form the roofing, as in the Danish chambers called Jaettestuer ("giants,
salons") Fig. 39 shows an example
at Aarhus, Denmark. North American examples include a large chamber at South Woodstock, Vermont (Fig. 40). The entrances
commonly have a massive lintel stone supported on either two vertical slabs
(called orthostats), as [one found at Mystery Hill,
North Salem, New Hampshire] or on a drystone vertical column of slabs on
either side (Fig. 41, Mystery Hill).
Alternatively, the construction may utilize natural features of the
environment, as at Concord, Massachusetts (Fig. 42), and at Gungywamp, near Groton, Connecticut (Fig. 43). The chamber may
be wholly subterranean, as in one of the White River examples in Vermont (Fig. 44), or may stand
free, as at Mystery Hill..... [See Fell 1982]. In the latter case the details of the wall construction are
visible externally (Fig. 45, Vermont) as
drystone and internally (Fig. 46, Mystery Hill),
the latter example showing some degree of trimming of the blocks. The internal chamber is usually
rectangular (Fig. 47, South
Woodstock, Vermont), but exceptionally, as in Fig. 46, the chamber may have lateral passages. Some chambers are covered by mounds, as in
the example shown in Fig. 48,, South
Woodstock. Where large capstones are
not available locally, corbelling is utilized to produce a roofing, as in the
chamber at Upton, Massachusetts (Fig. 49). Chambers of the latter type seem to be
related to the similar constructions called fougou in Cornwall, England,
believed to date from the Iron Age and to have been used in and after Roman
times. The function of a fougou is
unknown, but food storage or places of refuge are considered
possibilities. The New England
tradition is that these chambers were built by the colonists as "root
cellars," for storing vegetables.
But inquiries disclose that they were already present on some sites at
the time of the arrival of the colonists, who, in any case, found that root
vegetables survive the winter frost well when buried in straw in the soil,
but tend to decay from mold if placed in the so called root cellars. The enormous labor of construction, as
opposed to the simplicity of building a log cabin, denies another legend,
that the colonists built the chambers to live in while they were constructing
their first farmhouses. Chambers are
also found on mountainsides where no farm has ever existed but where a good
astronomical viewpoint is obtained. Like the
dolmens, megalithic buildings continued to be utilized, and also to be
constructed, until Roman times. Fig. 50 and 2-30 depict Pictish broch construction at Baile Chladaich, northwestern
Scotland. The brochs are believed to
be defensive structures made around 100 BC. Some other
distinctive megaliths occur in both Europe and North America. These include phallic monuments of
standing stones, called also dall
or menhir. ...... [They ] are associated with male
fertility. So also the megaliths
called men-a-tol (Cornish
"Hole in the stone") or just "holey-stones," are [associated]
with the fertility goddesses. The
well-known stone rings and monuments such as Stonehenge are
also a feature of the megalithic industry. .... [These are noted] in connection with astronomical
observatories and calendar regulation.
For, although the English archaeologist Glyn Daniel
denies any connection of these structures with astronomy, competent
astronomers, notably the Thoms, father and son, of the Department of
Astronomy, Edinburgh University, and Gerald Hawkins,
Fred Hoyle, and John Carlson in
America have all concluded that an intimate connection exists between these
ring structures and the development of astronomical science." (Please
also see Figs. 37 & 51 ), [Please see review of these structures in
<Megaliths>] What the Excavations Reveal
Fell (1982)
continues that his professional work as an oceanographer had taken me to
various remote oceanic islands, and while there he had learned of the
existence of unexplained inscriptions cut in caves or painted in rock
shelters. These raised questions as
to who had made the inscriptions and when they had been made. Fell’s first paper on Polynesian rock art
has appeared under the aegis of the Royal Anthropological Institute in
1941. His colleagues began to look
out for inscriptions, too, when they know of his interest, and he gradually
assembled a considerable collection of photographs and casts as the years
went by. He soon became convinced
that Stone Age man was by no means an ignorant, land-tied savage. On the contrary, he appeared to him to
have been a resourceful and accomplished mariner, who could cross ocean gaps
between Pacific islands greater than the total span of the Atlantic Ocean. As
oceanography advanced, methods were developed of sending various ingenious
devices down to the ocean floor to take samples by boring into the muds on
the bottom. Since mud accumulates
extremely slowly far away from the effluence of rivers, even just an inch
deep in the ocean floor takes us back to a time of deposition of the mud that
amounts to thousands of years. Also,
since bones and shells of marine animals fall to the bottom, they are preserved
there in the mud and become fossils.
This fact led to Fell’s becoming involved in paleontology, the study
of fossils, and before long Fell was serving as consultant to various
geological institutions. One of the
skills that Fell had to acquire was knowledge of anatomy, so that fragmented
bones could be reassembled and identified.
Some of the restored bones that he
produced in this way became the object of research by specialists, and
various museums sought his aid in these matters. Consequently
when Fell learned by chance of the existence of hundreds of fragmented human
bones taken from archaeological digs that had yielded artifacts on which he
could see delicate inscriptions written in the Iberian alphabets of about
1000 BC, he naturally became very interested and inquired whether the bones
might be made available to me for study.
They would be the first human remains we had yet encountered that were
directly linked with gravesites from which readable inscriptions in an
ancient European language were also recovered. Through the good offices of Dr. William P. Grigsby of the Tennessee Archaeological Society, he
eventually found himself sorting, washing, and restoring the skulls of the
former owners of the inscribed artifacts. The first Americans, by which is meant people born and
bred in the New World, certainly descended from migrants who entered North
America by the only land route that links the Americas to the Old World, the
now nonexistent land bridge of the Bering Strait. Whether the first humans,
pithecanthropoids of the species Homo
erectus, ever reached the New World is unknown [Dr. R.
D. Simpson, Callico Dig, CA. expressed a belief to
Dr. Fred Legner in 1998 that Homo erectus might certainly have reached Southern California]. Their fossils span areas in Africa and
Eurasia that are or were tropical and subtropical (as during interglacial
phases in Europe). Since it is
doubtful whether a suitably warm climate could have occurred in the latitude
of the Bering Strait, especially at times when the sea level was low enough
to enable a land bridge to develop, it is possible that the reason why no
pithecanthropoids have been found in the Americas is because none ever
reached here [see Climate] . By the time man had evolved to the stage
represented by the Neanderthals of Europe, and the Old World generally,
periods of low sea level were still occurring, and it seems evident that the
bridge to America was crossed by humans on one (or many) of those
occasions. Fossil man
at the Neanderthal stage is now known from Brazil, and George Carter's latest
(1980) estimate suggests that a conservative date for the entry of man into
America might be about 100,000 years ago.
How long people like Neanderthals may have survived in the New World
is not known, but their cousins in the Old World were contemporaries of
modern types of man, at least until about 40,000 BC. As to what
kinds of man came nest to America, opinions of the various anthropologists
who have commented in recent years seem all to be much the same: that is
likely that pygmies were early entrants, since they once formed an important
part of the southern Mongolian population,
still linger on in isolated parts of Malaysia and neighboring territories,
and are known by carbon-dating to range back in time to at least 40,000
BC. Before these latter facts were
known, writers such as Harold Gladwin, E. A. Hooton and Carelton Coon suggested
that there are traces of former pygmy populations in
America, mainly in the shape of isolated communities of undersized people on
the offshore islands. "Others,
such as the zoologist W. D. Funkhouser, and the
physicist W. S. Webb, of the University of Kentucky, drew
attention to the extraordinary diversity of skull form in the prehistoric
burials of Kentucky, and proposed that several distinct races are
represented. Bennett
H. Young (1910) had encountered a living tradition among Kentucky folk
that pygmies had once lived in some of the valleys of tributaries of the
Mississippi in that state. But when
he tried to track the stories to their source he concluded that they must
have been based on a misinterpretation of the cist burials. The latter, are small stone-slab burial
containers, some three feet in length, into which the disarticulated bones of
the dead were placed. The examples he
saw did not disclose pygmy skeletons.
Fell’s interest in this problem was aroused in 1980. Fell was engaged on reconstructing the
thousands of fragments of crania from sites in east Tennessee, sent to me by
Dr. William P. Grigsby and his colleagues.
Among the best of the materials they sent me from 600 burials were
several fragmented but almost complete crania, with jaws, in which the brain
capacity was that of a seven-year-old child (950 cubic cm), yet the teeth
showed from their complete development and severe wear that the skulls were
from middle-aged individuals. Later
Fell received from Dr. Grigsby some complete skulls among which was one
unbroken pygmy skull, with the jaws still attached to the facial bones. As is often
the case in Europe, prehistoric burial grounds from which these and other
skeletons were recovered by members of the Tennessee Archaeological Society
showed from their associated artifacts that a broad time span is implied, and
that whereas some of the burials had occurred during the Woodland period
(ranging back to about 1000 BC), others had taken place later. From the similar states of preservation of
the bones of both the pygmy types and those of the other races present in the
burials, it appeared that the pygmies were contemporary with the other
races. Fell obtained permission to
sacrifice some of the long bones of the limbs for radiocarbon dating. The result of a carbon-14 determination,
with C-13 correction, made by Geochron Laboratories, Cambridge, on carbon
dioxide recovered from the bone collagen yielded an age of 2,160 years plus
or minus 135 years: that is, they
dated from about the third century BC. (Please see Figs. 52 & 53). The majority
of the other skeletons conformed to the most common type of Amerindian
anatomy, in which the head is of the rounded (brachycephalic) type, and the
jaws project slightly (mesognathous), the lips therefore being full, as in
many Western tribes today. [Please
see Fig. 56] This a typical Mongolian condition, and there could be
little doubt that the population was derived from ancient forebears who had
entered the Americas from Asia. Some
of the skulls, however, were of a Europoid type, and reference by Dr. Grigsby
to his very large collections (some 32,000) of stone and bone and pottery
artifacts from the sites had already disclosed to him that inscriptions in
old European scripts were engraved on some of the objects. It looked,
therefore, as if a mixed population of several races had lived in the east
Tennessee area, and in all probability they would have interbred. No pygmies are known to have survived to
modern times in North America, at least not in the United States or Canada,
but it does seem likely that pygmies may have been among the native peoples
encountered by the first European explorers to come to eastern North America." [The devastating effects of diseases such
as measles and smallpox on Amerindians after 1492 AD and repeated European
invasions, are known to have reduced population numbers by over 85% in many
parts of America]. Before Fell
received the skeletal material he had already become interested in the
problem of whether or not pygmies might have inhabited North America. The ancient European word for pygmy or
dwarf is a root based on the form nan. Thus in ancient Greek it is nanos, in Basque it is nanu or nano (according to dialect), in Irish Gaelic it is nan, and modern French has nain, Spanish enano. This strange
unanimity among the various languages of Europe, not all of them closely
related, seemed to suggest that there might once have been a race of pygmies
known to ancient Europeans. The lack
of pygmy bones in European archaeological sites seemed to imply that the
inferred pygmies, if they existed at all, may not have been European pygmies. Yet it seemed inconceivable that ancient
Europeans could have known about the pygmies of central Africa, of those of
the remote highlands of Malaysia and the Philippines. What
intrigued me still more, and prompted me to draw attention to the matter in
two papers Fell wrote on the language of the Takhelne tribe
of British Columbia, was that these American Indians also had a tradition of
pygmies (or dwarves), whom they called the Et-nane. Later Fell
learned from a colleague that the Shoshone vocabulary also includes a similar
word, whose root is nana- and is
defined by the compiler of the Shoshone
Dictionary as "elf-like people.” Now, when
Fell began to analyze the anatomical characteristics of the pygmy skulls from
Tennessee, he soon discovered that they matched those of the pygmies of the
Philippines, who are also brachycephalic.
[Please see Figs. 58 & 59] Further, he learned from the accounts of explorers in
Malaysia who had penetrated to areas where no racial intermixture had
occurred that the pure or true-bred pygmy there has very prognathous jaws, as
is the case with the American skulls.
These Malaysian and Philippine pygmies are regarded by archaeologists
as remnants of a formerly extensive Mongoloid pygmy race that once occupied
much of southern East Asia. Carter
believes that their characters area still to be recognized in dilute trace
form in the occasional frizzy hair, dark skin, and squat stature observed
among southern Chinese.
Significantly, perhaps, the best-known native name of the Oriental
pygmies is the Aëta. Perhaps this root is the origin of the
prefix Et- used by the
Takhelne. Whether that be so or not,
it is clear that the pygmies of Tennessee were of Oriental--that is to say,
East Asian--origin; and since pygmies are not maritime people, they can have
reached the Americas only by the land route. They must
once have been more widely dispersed than our present finds imply. However, since they reached as far east as
east Tennessee, and their bones have been found in association with Europoids
and inscribed artifacts of Europoid type, such as loom weights and pottery
stamps, lettered in ancient Irish (noted as Celtic) and Basque [see Figs. 183, 185, 186, 187 & 189], Fell concluded that
there were in fact meetings of the two races, and that therefore the European
visitors could well have taken back to Europe some account of these
mysterious undersized people. An inscription that Professors Heizer and
Martin Baumhoff had recorded from 1California (Fig.
63), when
deciphered as Ancient Irish ogam, seemed also to suggest that early explorers
had encountered some pygmy race that they considered dangerous. In addition
to skeletal remains, a number of sculptures, evidently of ancient origin,
have been discovered at varying depths in the soil, some of them depicting
people of obvious Europoid origin, yet all the evidence indicates that these
sculptures were created in America, at an era long before the colonists
arrived in modern times. Some
representative illustrations (Fig. 60, Fig. 61, Fig. 62) may serve to
show their nature and their similarity to ancient European sculpture that has
been attributed to the Gauls. Most
striking is the head of a man, carved in Ancient Irish style, with the
curving nostrils and staring eyes that one encounters in Irish art and
wearing as a chaplet a twig of bog oak leaves and acorns. it seems difficult to regard this as
representing anything other than an Irish priest, or druid. It was found in Searsmont, Maine, a part
of a larger work of which the torso still remains on the site, the head being
now in the museum at Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Fell
believed that these heads and others like them are truly ancient American
artifacts, and that the hands that carved them are also responsible for the
engraved inscriptions in ogam and other ancient European alphabets, found on
artifacts at burial sites and also cut in rock. The Tifinag Alphabet at Peterborough, Ontario
The alphabet
used by scribes at Peterborough, Ontario was detailed by Fell (1982) as
follows: "Using Table I, the comparisons
of the Tifinag alphabet with the short inscriptions found in Sweden and
Denmark, and supplementing these by the much more extensive material now
recognized in America, it is not difficult to reconstitute King Woden-lithi's own alphabet [at Peterborough]. It is given in Table 2." It is now
possible for anyone who cares to do so to visit the site at Peterborough,
Ontario, with [the present information]... in hand, and perhaps a copy of
Geir T. Zoega's Dictionary of Old
Icelandic (Oxford University Press, 1910) as an independent check, and to
see and read the inscriptions the king had cut, and thus for the first time
ever hear the words of a Bronze Age language that stands in the direct line
of descent of English and the other Nordic tongues. Although nearly 4,000 years stand between us and King
Woden-lithi, we can still recognize much of his language as a kind of ancient
English. It is an eerie feeling to
realize that we are reading, and hence hearing, the voice of the ancient
explorers of Canada whose thoughts now come to us across the space of forty
centuries, yet still with familiar words and expressions that remain a part
of the Teutonic heritage. This is not
the place to instruct readers in the grammar of Old Norse, let alone the
still more obscure grammar of Bronze Age Norse, but it is quite within the
realm of practical life for visitors, including teachers and their students,
to examine for themselves at least the more conspicuous and best preserved of
Woden-lithi's recorded comments. The
diagrams.... will make this task relatively easy. And for those who wish to make independent checks, or to
translate parts of the text that are not included [here] , there can be no
better guides than Zoega's Dictionary,
a grammar of Old Norse such as E. V. Gordon's (Oxford University Press,
1927), and a camera to record the inscriptions for more detailed study at
home. For many of the words and
Anglo-Saxon dictionary will also aid recognition. The easiest
parts of Woden-lithi's text are, of course, those where the letters are
engraved on the largest scale, and that therefore have suffered least from
the erosion of time and the elements.
One of the clearest sections is located about 30 feet to the west of
the central sun figure. The
individual letters are from 20 to 40 cm high, and they form a horizontal band
about 5 feet (1.5 m) long. The
inscription lies directly beneath the Fig. of the god of war, Tziw,
and it is in fact a dedication to this god.
The god can be recognized from .... Fig. 111 and Fig 112, and by the fact
that he stands beside the Fenrir wolf, which has just bitten off his left
hand.... [see later section]. For the
present we will restrict ourselves to the line of dedication, shown in.... Fig 112. With the exception of the ornamental
capital TZ [or TS] that begins the
name of the god, all the letters are easily recognizable from the table of
Woden-lithi's alphabet.... [Table 2]. Remember that vowels are nearly always
omitted in all Bronze Age inscriptions except when they occur at the
beginning of a word, or where possible confusion of meaning might
result. The line of text of the
dedication reads: w-k h-l-gn tz-w
w-d-n-l-t-ya The last two letters are written in ogam and form a rebus
of a ship, on the right, all the others are in Bronze Age Tifinag. The meaning of the text is "Image dedicated
sacred to Tziw by Woden-lithi."
The individual words are as follows. W-K,
matching Old English (Anglo-Saxon) wig,
a heathen idol, in this case a bas-relief ground into limestone, depicting
the god. Probably we have to supply
the same vowel, i, to make the
letters w and k pronounceable, g and k are related consonants, both formed
in the throat; the only difference is that g requires the vocal cords to reverberate (as can be felt by
placing the fingers on the throat when uttering the sound of g), while in pronouncing k the vocal cords remain inactive, so
no vibration is felt on the throat.
Jakob Grimm, the great German philologist, first showed how pairs of
consonants, such as g and k d and t, b and p, change (mutate) from voiced to
unvoiced if they occur in certain positions in words. Woden-lithi apparently spoke with an
incipient "German" accent, and preferred to use a k at the end of words where we in
English are usually content to retain the ancient g sound. The next
word, rendered by Woden-lithi's scribe as H-L-GN means hallowed or, as we would prefer to say in Modern English, dedicated. It is a root that is common to all the Teutonic languages. Germans, for example, retain it to this
very day as heilig, meaning holy, which in turn is another Modern
English word derived from H-L-GN. In
the Scandinavian languages the word survives unchanged, as helgen, meaning holy or to make holy,
and the Anglo-Saxon form of the word is represented by such old terms as halig (holy), halgan (a saint), halgung
(a consecration or dedication), with hallow,
hallowing, Halloween (All-Saints' Eve) as surviving English
derivatives. Halloween is the night
before the first day of the ancient Nordic winter (November 1), when ghosts
are reputed to roam at large. These
spirits could be bought off, by bribes, from any evil intention during the
following year, hence our modern surviving custom of given token gifts to
children dressed as demons and ghosts.
The children of Woden-lithi's Ontario settlers no doubt carried on the
same custom. The next
word is the name of the god himself, here rendered as TZ-W. This implies a pronunciation similar to
the ancient German name of the god of war, Tziwaz. Our Anglo-Saxon forebears called him Tiw, and in the Middle Ages the surviving form of the name, in
the word Tuesday, became what we
still say today, for the god of war is still commemorated by having the
second day after the sun god's day named for him. The last
word is the name of King Woden-lithi himself, and it is written beside a
pictograph of a man wearing a robe and crown, to show the reader that the
word is the personal name of a king.
Elsewhere in the various texts on the site we find the word king spelled
out in Tifinag, and it then has the form konungn,
matching Anglo-Saxon cyning, Old
Norse konungr and other similar
forms in all the Teutonic languages. Lithi, here rendered as litya, means "servant," thus
the king's name is "Servant of Woden." Woden was the king of the Aesir or sky gods. "The
dedication to Tziw illustrates the way in which we can use dictionaries of
Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse, as well as modern English dictionaries that give
the old roots (such as the OED or the American
Heritage), not only as a guide to understanding what Woden-lithi is
saying, but also as a means of guessing approximately what his language-- our
ancestors' language-- actually must have sounded like. It is not
needful here to continue treating in detail the rest of the numerous texts
that lie about the site at Peterborough and at other places such as the sites
along the Milk River, Alberta, or in Coral Gardens, Wyoming. Readers can devise their own philological
checks, if these interest them, or ignore the subject if they are more
interested in other aspects.
......" [This discussion is merely to show how to approach the
ancient inscriptions]. [Please refer
now to Figs. 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 & 70]. Now that we
have seen that the alphabet really does give us the means of reading the
various texts that King Woden-lithi had engraved at the Peterborough site,
when he selected it for the sacred center of his colony, following are some
comments on the origin of this alphabet. It is
essentially the same alphabet as that used by the Tuareg Berbers. A possible reason for this surprising
circumstance is suggested [later]."
However, none of the scholars who have worked on Tifinag inscriptions
in North Africa could ever understand the relationship between the Tifinag
alphabet and the Berber language. it
has now become clear that there is no relationship. Tifinag is now a
Berber invention-- instead it is Nordic--
and that changes the whole problem. The
decipherment of any ancient and unknown inscription requires first that the
alphabet in which it is written must be solved. Various methods can be used to achieve this first
essential. In the case of
Woden-lithi's inscription Fell found the solution relatively easy, for he had
previously traveled widely in the Scandinavian countries, where shorter but
similar inscriptions occur on Bronze Age monuments, and he had also carried
out research on the ancient scripts of North Africa, including the Tifinag of
the Tuaregs. The Tuaregs had
preserved their unique system of writing since time immemorial, and its origin
was unknown, though all epigraphers, including me, supposed it to have been
their own invention. Four
thousand years ago the ancestors of the present-day peoples who speak
Teutonic languages were all grouped together in Scandinavia, in parts of
Germany, and along the Baltic coasts.
They had not yet differentiated into Germans, English, Norse, so we
can refer to them only as Nordic.
Their descendants today not only live in northern Europe but have
spread across the world, and most people in North America now speak a tongue
directly descended from the ancient Nordic of the Bronze Age. Although
short inscriptions in the ancient Nordic alphabet have recently been
recognized in Scandinavia, that discovery stemmed from the more significant
one of ancient Nordic engraved on North American rock. Thus North America has now become
custodian of the oldest and most precious of the ancient records of the
Nordic peoples, and to Canada is assigned the responsibility of preserving
them intact, and the thanks of millions of people must go to the geologists,
surveyors, and archaeologists who uncovered the main site and placed it under
the protection of the local government. Our
ancestors of the Nordic Bronze Age inherited some of the signs of their
alphabet from their Neolithic predecessors, who also spoke a Nordic tongue
and used a number of signs. Thus the
following signs were already known in northern Europe before the Bronze Age,
and we now know that they give us the sounds shown in Table 2. As is quite
obvious, these are hieroglyphs in which the signs depict recognizable
objects, and the sound they stand for is that of the first letter in the name
of the object. Thus, the crescent
that is m is obviously the first
letter of mán, the older form of
our modern English moon. Similarly the circular sign r, or hr, is the first letter of the word hringr, meaning our modern word ring. So also the circle
with a dot in the center, s, is the
first letter of sol and of sunu, the two ancient Nordic names of
the sun. The b symbol is clearly the old Nordic buklr, the circular shield with a leather arm-strap, which is
still called a buckler in modern
English. These four signs, with the
indicated sound values, were needed by the Neolithic wizards to indicate
certain words that mean magic (bur-
in Proto-Nordic), sailing ship (also bur-,
though a different root), and the combinations of these two words with signs
for the sun and moon, both of which were viewed as celestial gods that sailed
their sun ship and moon ship by magic across the heavens. Simple statements of this kind can now be
read, by sound as well as by pictograph, in the Neolithic engravings on rock
in Scandinavia and also in North America, as far west as California. The German philologist Jakob
Grimm traveled among the village communities of Germany and the Baltic
lands 150 years ago, and discovered old words such as those have been
mentioned. He used his findings to
develop a forecast of modern theories on how language evolves through
time. He also recorded the old names
of the constellations. This is
fortunate for us, for when we look at the deciphered Nordic alphabet of the
Bronze Age we can now recognize more of the origins of the alphabet. For just as the letter s and m reflect the form of the sun and the crescent moon, so also we
now perceive that the dots that make up other letters, in a kind of Braille
system, are really the constellations. Thus, just
as the ancient Irish (noted as Celts) gazed at their fingers and invented a
writing system called ogam based on
the varying combinations of five strokes above, below, and across a central
writing axis, so also the ancient Nordic people gazed instead at the sky and
saw their letters writ large upon the face of heaven. No doubt they said their script was
divine, sent from the sky by the sky god Woden (Odin), lord of magic and of
runes, the secret writing of the magicians.
As this word runes has
already been applied to later types of writing developed by the Norsemen
after the Iron Age, we cannot use it without some qualification for our
Bronze Age alphabet, to which it undoubtedly was originally applied. So we have to compromise and call the
oldest writing of the Nordic peoples Bronze Age runes. There remain a number of other letters that
seem to be formed from more commonplace objects of everyday life in ancient
times. Table 2, with Fell’s
suggestions as to these origins, explains itself. In Fell’s
popular books on North American inscriptions he was faced with the difficulty
of trying to explain to an English-speaking public the meaning and language
of texts engraved in tongues so remotely different from English that it made
the tasks both of writing the books and of reading them (as many
correspondents have told me) decidedly difficult. Now, thanks
to King Woden-lithi, these problems all vanish. he spoke and wrote a language that resounds down the centuries
with the age-old familiar tones of all the Nordic tongues. We speakers of English, as well as our
cousins in Europe who speak related languages, can all recognize many of the
words that Woden-lithi and his Ontario colonists spoke and wrote here
seventeen centuries before Julius Caesar first encountered the Nordic
tribesmen of the Rhineland. Although
Woden-lithi's site at Peterborough is the first recognizable Nordic Bronze
Age site to be discovered in America, it now appears that there were other visitors
from the Nordic world of that era.
For some years a puzzling inscription has been known from little Crow
Island, near Deer Isle, Maine, but it could not be deciphered, nor was the
script recognized. It is shown in Fig. 72 and in Fig.
73 , a provisional
reading is given, which suggests that some voyager from Scandinavia,
seemingly named Hako or Haakon, visited Maine at a time when the Bronze Age
runes were still in use. [= Ey vik hvi nokkvi leya a vika =
"A sheltered island, where ships may lie in a harbor. Haakon brought his cog here."] This
inscription greatly resembles the script called bead ogam, but the resultant text, if it were read as bead ogam,
is gibberish, whereas if we treat it as Tifinag script, a Nordic text,
although rather obscure, emerges. The
lack of associated pictographs or hieroglyphs increases the difficulty of
reading the signs. Servant of Woden's Observatory
To the
discerning eye the solar observatory that King Woden-lithi established at his
trading center near Peterborough is one of the wonders of American
archaeology. So surprising do his
knowledge of the constellations and his understanding of the motions of the
sun through the signs of the zodiac appear that at first it seems impossible
that the site could be ancient. it is
more like what one might expect to have been constructed during the early
Middle Ages. However, consideration
of what has been discovered about the growth of astronomy shows that it is
not at all impossible for Woden-lithi to have known what he did know and yet
have lived in an epoch 3,5000 years before our own. Until about
a century ago, all that we knew about ancient astronomy was what the Greeks
and Romans had written. It was
supposed that the Greeks had named the constellations, and that therefore
man's knowledge of the stars as mapped in the constellations could not be
older than about 2,700 or 2,800 years; for some of the constellations, and
their roles in setting the time of year for plowing, sowing and reaping, are
mentioned by name in the works of Hesiod, the first Greek writer to refer to
them, who lived about 800 BC. Then an
unexpected discovery was made.
Archaeologists in the Middle East began to uncover tablets of stone in
which clear reference was made to constellations, some of them recognizably
the same as those we know today, yet the age of the records extended many
centuries earlier, into a time antecedent to the Greek civilization. An English
astronomer, Richard Proctor, devised an ingenious
method of finding out when the constellations first received their
names. He plotted on a chart all the
constellations known to the ancients.
He then examined the area in the sky, over the Southern Hemisphere, in
which no constellations had been recorded until modern astronomers named
them, because the ancient astronomers had not explored the Southern
Hemisphere. He found that this
southern blank area has its center, not at the southern celestial pole, as
one might expect, but in quire a different place: a point in the southern sky some 25 degrees to one side of the
South Pole. When he realized that
this center must once have been the pole, at the time when the constellations
were named, he then attacked the related question, the known motions of the
poles as the earth's axis has slowly wobbled like that of a spinning
top. He found that the ancient
position of the poles he had discovered, for the time when constellations
were named, corresponded to a direction of the earth's axis that was correct
4,000 years ago. Thus, the
constellations must have been named some 2,000 years before the time of
Christ. it was then discovered that
the description of some features of the sun's motion in the sky, given by a
Greek astronomer names Eudoxus, could not possibly have been true at the time
when Eudoxus wrote, but would have been correct had he been quoting from
sources dating back to 2000 BC. The
position of the sun at the time of the vernal equinox (in March) was recorded
by these early writers as lying in the zodiacal constellation of the
Bull. But in classical times, when
Eudoxus wrote, the vernal equinox occurred when the sun is in the
constellation of the Ram, some 30 degrees away. What this
means for us is that when the Nordic farmers first learned the arts of sowing
seed by the calendar, and could thereby be sure of seeing the seed sprout
instead of rotting in the ground, as would happen if it were not sown at the
correct time, this phase of social history in the northern lands matched the
rise of astronomy, about 2000 BC.
Evidently the astronomical skills passed along the same trade routs as
did the trade goods themselves: from
the Danube and the Rhine there spread outward and northward into Germany, and
then Scandinavia, a knowledge of the constellations and the motion of the sun
through them. Observatories would be
established to watch for the equinoctial rising of the sun and for other
significant astronomical events that could be used to keep the calendar
correct and functional. Hence it was
one of the concerns of Woden-lithi in America to ensure that his colonists
were provided with a practical means of observing the sky and the heavenly
bodies, so that they could have always a reliable farmers' calendar. Certain religious festivals were also
regulated by the calendar, such as the spring (New Year) festival in March,
and the midwinter or Yule festival held in December. To establish
his observatory, Woden-lithi had first to determine the position of the
north-south meridian of his site. He
probably used the following method.
First, he selected a central observing point, and engraved two
concentric circles into the rock (thus forming the head and central
"eye" of what later became the main sun-god image). An assistant then held a vertical rod,
centered in the marker circles, on a clear day as the sun approached its noon
altitude. The shadow cast by the
vertical rod would grow shorter as the sun rose higher, and then would begin
to lengthen again as the sun passed the highest elevation at noon, and
commenced to decline. The direction
of the shadow at its shortest length was marked on the rock. Checks on subsequent days would establish
this shadow line more precisely. The
marked lines except for minor errors due to variations in the velocity of the
earth's motion (for which no correction could be made in those early days),
would be the meridian, running north and south. Woden-lithi could
now lay out the cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west, by making
a right-angle intersection with the meridian line, to give the east-west axis
(see Fig. 74). Instead of cutting lines for these
cardinal axes, however, he made sighting points at their extremities by
cutting a sunburst figure, as shown. The sighting
sunburst for due east he then identified by an inscription lettered in ogam
consaine, shown on the right side of Fig. 74. In his Old Nordic language it reads
M-D O-S-D-N (Old Norse mot osten, facing east). The illustration gives a plan view to the
scale shown, so the visitor can readily identify these features at the site. At this
stage in his work Woden-lithi had now provided his colonists with the
fundamental tool for regulating their calendar, for, every year at the vernal
equinox in March, when the ancient year began for all civilized peoples, an
observer standing on the site would see the sun rise at a point on the
horizon lying on the line of sight from the "eye" of the central
sun-god figure. to the eastern sunburst figure. On that occasion each year the Nordic peoples held a festival,
named for the goddess of the dawn, Eostre.
The name survives in our modern language as Easter, now of course linked with
a Christian festival to which the old pagan name has been attached. Ancient
peoples also celebrated another festival on the shortest day of the year,
called by the Nordic nations Yule;
this pagan festival is nowadays lined with the Christian festival of
Christmas, still called Yule (spelled Jul)
in Scandinavian countries.
Woden-lithi therefore wished to provide his colonists with a means of
determining the day on which the Yule feast should be held, for to the
ancient peoples it was a great day of celebration, marking the end of the
sun's winter decline and the promise of a new and warmer season ahead.
Woden-lithi's inscriptions tell us that he remained in Canada only for
five months and that he returned to his home in Scandinavia in October. hence he could not observe the direction
in which the sunrise would be observed on the actual day of midwinter, for he
was no longer in Canada. So
apparently he estimated the direction, drawing on his experience in
Scandinavia. In southern Norway the
precise direction of sunrise on Midwinter Day varies quite considerably, for
at the latitudes spanned by the interval between the southern end of the Skagerrak
(at about 56 deg. N) and the head of Oslo Fjord (at 60 deg. N), the
astronomical equation that determines the sunrise direction gives solutions
that range over a span of some seven degrees between the extreme values. Consequently, since Woden-lithi probably
did not have any clear conception of latitude, and would have to judge the
situation in terms of his notions of the variations seen in Norway itself and
neighboring Sweden, he would probably conclude that the Peterborough site
seemed to be comparable with southernmost Scandinavia. For example, he would have noticed that
the midday sun stood higher in the sky at midsummer at Peterborough (when he
was present to observe) than it did in his homeland, and he would also know
that the noonday sun stands higher in the southern Sweden than it does near
Oslo on any given day. From such
knowledge he perhaps estimated the likely sunrise direction for Midwinter
Day, and cut his estimated axis into the rock at the site. This he marked by another sun-god figure
(which is labeled Solstice on Fig. 74). Woden-lithi himself had a label carved
into the rock beside this figure. As
can be seen from the illustration, it spells W-L H-K. Hoki was the ancient Norse name of the
midwinter festival: the word still survives today in the Scotch word Hogmanay, the
traditional name of the Scottish midwinter holiday, now applied to the New
Year holiday. The letters W-L
evidently represent the hvil of Old
Norse, meaning a time of rest, a holiday from work. The importance of this Hoki
holiday can be judged from the large scale in which the letters have been
engraved at the site. It was, no
doubt, the time of the major national festival for all Nordic peoples, and
Woden-lithi undoubtedly intended that the old traditions be kept alive in his
trading colony in the New World. As we
examine the site today, where these ancient instructions for regulating the
calendar year and its festivals still survive, it is clear that whereas the
critical date for starting the year and determining the correct time of
planting seed, the equinox, is accurately set out, the same is not true of
the Hoki axis. it overestimates the southern declination
of the sun by several degrees.
Woden-lithi's colonists would find that the midwinter sunrise did not,
in fact, ever range quite so far south as the king had predicted, and that
the sunrise point would begin to return toward the eastern horizon before
ever reaching the southeastern azimuth to which Woden-lithi's Hoki axis now points. Nonetheless the general tenor of the
matter would be clear enough, and since most years the midwinter sunrise
tends to occur in banks of low-lying cloud, the error was probably known to
only a few of the more meticulous observers. Those of us
who have made the somewhat hazardous journey to observe the midwinter sunrise
at sites in the Green Mountains [Vermont?] that are oriented for this
purpose, have discovered the whole area under the deepest snowdrifts. The same circumstance, no doubt, is true
of Woden-lithi's site: the whole inscription area, with all the astronomical
axes, would usually lie buried under deep snow, hence invisible and useless
for making astronomical determinations of the festival dates. An
explanation for these conflicts of data is to be sought in our developing
knowledge of climatic change. In
Woden-lithi's time the whole earth had a much milder climate than it did one
thousand years later [see Climate] . The site at Peterborough may well have been
prairie rather than dense needle-forest, as it is a present. Open views of the distant horizon could be
had, the actual sunrise could be observed, and because of the milder climate,
the snow, if present at all, could be cleared away from the site. Also, as the climate deteriorated with
the progress of time, the people here at the end of the Bronze Age, around
800 BC, began to find the snow an increasing impediment to their calendar
regulation [see Climate] . They were
forced to construct a new type of observatory, one that could retain its
major astronomical axes in a visible and usable state despite the snow
accumulations. These new
observatories are probably where the observers could be housed comfortably
below ground, with a large living space that could be heated by fire, and
with the axis of the entire chamber directed toward the midwinter-sunrise
azimuth on the distant horizon, so that the calendar observation could be
made simply by sighting from the inner end of the chamber, through the
entrance doorway, which was built so as to face the midwinter sunrise
point. Once this practice had been
adopted to overcome the ferocity of the winters, reaching its extremes of
discomfort as the Iron Age began, the advantages of astronomically oriented
chambers would be realized, and soon all observatories, whether based on
summer, equinoctial, or winter sunrise directions, would eventually be
constructed as comfortable chambers.
The old open-air sites, like that of Woden-lithi, would be abandoned
forever, became buried under drifting soil and leaves and then turf (as
happened at Peterborough), or would be eroded away by the elements till
nothing readable remained, and thus disappear altogether. To return to
Woden-lithi's site, it is of interest to note that he adopted the ancient Semitic method of naming the south
direction. The Semitic peoples
regarded east as the main map direction.
Facing east they would name the cardinal points on either side, so
that north became "left-hand" and south became
"right-hand." On
Woden-lithi's site w find that he has engraved in very large Tifinag letters
the word H-GH-R at the southern extremity of the platform, where he as cut
yet another sunburst figure. The word
intended is Old Norse hogr, meaning
"right-hand." The word is
still sued today in Sweden where, if you are given street directions in
Stockholm or Lund, you are sure to be told to take such and such a turn till högra, "to the
right." The Danes say hFjre, but we who speak English seem to have lost the word, and
replaced it by another root. The Old
Norse words for south (sudhra) and
north (nord) are nowhere to be
found on Woden-lithi's site, so perhaps they had not yet come into use. Now, since
we find Woden-lithi using the Semitic (Mesopotamian) methods of naming
directions by reference to the right and left when facing east, and since
east is the only direction that he actually calls by its special name, east (osten in his dialect), it is not
surprising that we should find Woden-lithi in possession of so much
information on the Babylonian maps of the heavens, as designated in the form
of the named constellations. Constellations
Known to
Woden-lithi. The first
hint we encounter on the observatory site that the stars were already grouped
into constellations in Woden-lithi's day is given by the northern end of his
meridian (see Fig. 74). Here we find an
inscription in Tifinag that reads W-K-N
H-L A-GH, and it is evidently
to read as Old Norse Vagn hjul aka,
"The wagon-wheel drives."
Our Nordic ancestors knew the constellation near the present north
celestial pole that we in America call the Big Dipper today, and which
Europeans often call the Plow or Wain, as the Wagon. it was supposed to be an ox wagon (that
is, the ancient chariot, before horses had been tamed) and was said to be
driven by the god Odin, the Woden of our colonists. In Woden-lithi's day the north celestial pole was marked by the
star Thuban, in the constellation Draco; nowadays it lies some 25 degrees
away from the pole. The Wagon was
conceived as wheeling around and around the Pole Star. The wheeling motion, of course, is caused
by the rotation of the earth, but in Woden-lithi's day it was conceived as a
rotation of the sky itself. We have
other hints.... about star groups known by name to the peoples of the north
in Woden-lithi's time: the four stars
that form the square of Pegasus (Called Hestemerki,
"horse-sign," by the ancient Norse) seem to be the basis of the
four dots that make the Tifinag letter h;
and the w-shaped group of stars that form Cassiopeia, called Yorsla by the ancient Scandinavians,
seem to be the origin of the w-shaped letter that gives the sound of Y. To the
southwest of Woden-lithi's observatory lies an area of limestone where the
constellations of the Nordic zodiac have been engraved. These are shown in Fig. 75 and Fig. 76. We note that some of the Babylonian
constellations bear replacement names in the Woden-lithi version. The ram (Aries) is obviously a bear, and
some broken letters beside the image of the animal seem to spell in Tifinag
the word B-R-N, a root that appears in all Nordic tongues in one form or
another, as bjorn in Scandinavian,
and bruin in English. The next sign, the Bull (Taurus) of
classical astronomy, is drawn as a moose; it is labeled in Tifinag L-GN, Old
Norse elgen, the elk. The Lion (Leo), though labeled L-N (Old
Norse leon), seems to have been
carved by an artist who had in mind a lynx.
The Crab (Cancer) looks like a lobster, and it is drawn as if it lies
at the feet of the Twins (Gemini), here identified as M-T TH-W-L-N-GN (Old Norse matig-tvillingr, "the mighty
twins"). The
significance to Woden-lithi's people of the zodiac was that it provided a
means of describing the annual path of the sun through the heavens. The sun spends about one month in each of
twelve constellations, which together form the so-called zodiac (a word
meaning, "girdle of animals").
The vernal equinox, the start of the ancient Nordic year, occurs at
the time when the sun is located in the zodiacal sign for that equinox. Two thousand years before Christ, when, as
we have seen, the constellations received their names, the sun occupied the
Bull (the elk in Woden-lithi's zodiac).
Around 1700 BC the slow wobble of the earth's axis (called the
procession of the equinoxes) caused the vernal equinox position to move out of
the Bull into the neighboring sign, Aries (in Woden-lithi's terminology, the
bear). In Woden-lithi's zodiac map he
shows the situation in just that way.
The word W-GN (Old Norse vaegn,
a balance) signifies the "balance of night and day," and is set opposite
the space between Taurus and Aries.
In addition, as can be seen on the right-hand side of Fig. 75, the sun is shown
entering the W-R-M zone of the zodiac at that point. The word intended is simply our word warm, Old Norse, varm, meaning summer. On
the part of the zodiac corresponding to the sun's positions during the cold
months the engraver has written the letters W-N-T, our word winter, Old Norse vintr. All the
indications are, then, that Woden-lithi used a chart of the sky that was
appropriate in 1700 BC. Since his
writing system and the style of his inscriptions match so well the
inscriptions that Scandinavian archaeologists declare to belong to the early
Bronze Age, we may assume that Woden-lithi did in fact live around that
time. Hence, until evidence is found
to the contrary, Fell believed that we have to date his visit to America as
having occurred around 1700 BC. There are
other indications that this is a reasonable estimate. Some archaeologists who have investigated
the site have suggested a possible age of 3,500 years, based on the
similarity of the art style to that of Europe 3,500 years ago. At a neighboring site in Ontario where a
thousand or so copper artifacts were excavated, radiocarbon dating indicated
occupation a thousand years before the time proposed for Woden-lithi;, that
is, around 3000 BC. And some of the
radiocarbon dates from the Lake Superior copper mines indicate that the mines
were worked between about 3000 and 2000 BC.
All these data suggest that the copper-mining industry was already an
old established activity in Canada long before Woden-lithi came to trade for
copper. Circles of Stone
Yet another form
of calendar site has come under investigation in recent years: the circles of
standing stones that occur in large numbers in Europe [e,g., Fig. 80] and also span
the entire continent of North America from New England to California. A variant form in America, especially in
western Canada and the adjacent United States territories, such as Wyoming,
is the stone circles with radial lines of boulder forming spokes to the outer
rim, hence the name Medicine Wheel. In some cases it is believed that the
spokes are oriented toward points on the horizon that were formerly the
positions of the rising or setting of conspicuous stars, which could be used
to mark the seasons. These star-rise and
star-set positions can be calculated for particular epochs in the past,
making use of the known equations that describe the motions of the earth's
axis. One of the
best-known sites is Mystery Hill at North Salem, New Hampshire..... Apart from the numerous stone chambers on
the site there is also a stone circle.
The native forest has encroached upon the circle, like many others now
becoming known,, but radial avenues have been cleared to permit visitors to
sight the major standing stones from the central observation platform. As the diagram (Fig. 79) showed, there are
five principal standing stones, four of which are still standing erect. The fifth has fallen over. One stone marks the meridian and lies due
north of the central observation point.
The other four mark the sunrise and sunset points on the horizon for
the midsummer and midwinter solstices.
On account of persistent distant cloudbanks on the horizon the actual
moment of contact of the rim of the sun is often invisible for, as the moment
when the ball of the sun is about to reach the marker stone, it vanishes into
mist. However, about once every eight
or ten years a totally clear sunset or sunrise can be expected, and on such
an occasion the event is truly impressive.
On the diagram (Fig.
79), in which
Osborn Stone assisted by reading the exact azimuths from his transit
telescope, the observed angles are those shown; their deviation from the
theoretical calculated values is only of the order of minutes of arc. It is obvious that the site is an ancient
astronomical observatory for the regulation of the calendar, whatever else it
may have been. To judge by the modern
solstice ceremonies of Amerindian tribes, one may assume that much religious
import was also attributed to the celestial phenomena by the ancient peoples
who would assemble at the site to participate. At Mystery Hill the major significance seems to have been the
summer and winter solstices, and regulation of the calendar by the vernal and
autumnal equinoxes does not seem to have been an important part of the
purpose of the ritual. There are
also many sites, as yet little known or wholly unrecorded, where a dozen or
so natural boulders form ring-shaped structures. They vary from small circles, such as one that occurs at
Gungywamp near Groton, Connecticut, to rings of more massive boulders, up to
15 meters in diameter that would have involved considerable labor in
assembling the giant stones in this manner.
One photographed by Jerry McMillan in the Santa Cruz Mountains, California, is shown in the
photograph in Fig. 79b & Fig
79c. An approximate plan of the thirteen stones forming it is
seen in Fig.
78. These rings seem
to have been places of assembly for religious purposes; whether they also
served as astronomical observatories (as seems very probable) remains yet to
be proven. Jerry McMillan and Christopher Caswell discovered and photographed
old engraved markings on two of the stones; these have not yet been
deciphered but they seem to record angles of sight. Some of the
smaller rings of stones that are found in the Sierras and in Montana do not
seem to me to be calendar sites. They
remind me of the old shielings
of the Scottish Highlands. A
shieling was a place on the open mountainside where the young women of a clan
would gather in spring, when the herds ere in flow, to make cheeses and other
milk products. They slept in the
open, in shelters provided by such rings of stones, which remain today as
witness to a way of life that has vanished from Scotland. It was still practiced a century ago, and
when Fell was a student in Scotland in the 1930s he met aged women who had
participated in the shieling and who had a stock of folklore to relate on the
subject (The Devil himself being one of the personages liable to frequent the
shielings, on the watch for any careless maiden who might not have said the necessary
protetective charms). Religon During the Bronze Age
Based on a
translation of inscriptions in America, Fell (1982) attempts to provide an
overview of American Bronze Age peoples' religion: As no
Nordic inscriptions older than the Iron Age [had been deciphered before
publication of... [Fell's 1982 book], King Woden-lithi's commentary on his
gods is not only the first information we have had on the matter, but it is
unique. The era in which he lived,
calculated from the position of the vernal equinox on his zodiac as about
1700 BC, is regarded as early Bronze Age in Britain, but in Scandinavia,
where metals were imported, the Neolithic continued longer, and Woden-lithi
would be regarded as living in the transitional time between the end of the
Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age, a period, often called Chalcolithic, when copper was employed.
Archaeologists and mythologists have concluded from a study of the
carvings left by northern European peoples that sun worship was the religion
practiced at this transitional phase and that it continued well into the
Bronze Age. Their inferences are
totally confirmed by Woden-lithi's inscription. "It is
obvious that sun worship was the vogue, as the sun figure is placed at the
center of Woden-lithi's sacred site, is drawn on a larger scale than the
other figures, save only that of the moon goddess, and the lettering beside
each of these deities is much larger than the other parts of the text (Please
see Figs. 81, 82 & 83). The great
festivals of the Nordic year in Woden-lithi's day were, as noted previously,
those of Yule and of Eostre. At these
times, as the inscription tells us, there was feasting and drinking, and men
dressed up as comic figures called Yule-men. Their
costume suggested the diagonals that mark the solstice and equinox lines on
an azimuth plate recording the greatest and least excursions of the sun northward
in the course of a year. Some of the
actors wore horns, other had outsize rabbit or hare ears. Some were dressed as other animals, and
some performed acrobatics. Thus, the
mad March hare and the Easter Bunny of some Christian
secular celebrations may be survivals from Woden-lithi's time, over 3,000
years ago. If there was
a lunar festival, whatever Woden-lithi may have said about that has not yet
been recognized or deciphered. "Other
gods are mentioned, but they seem to have been relatively minor nature
spirits. These latter are divided
into two groups, the more important Aesir (also sky gods, but having roles to play on earth and
in the thinking of the people), the less important Wanir or earth gods, and the
enemies of the gods, the giants and monsters of the underworld (including the
bed of the ocean). These lesser
divinities match their more important later derivatives, the gods of the late
Bronze Age and subsequent periods. A list of
the various divinities whose names have so far been deciphered (by Barry
Fell) on Woden-lithi's inscribed rock platform is shown in Fig. 84. The custom
of having clowns, and in particular those buffoons that the inscriptions at the Peterborough site
call Yule-men (see Fig. 85) may have
originated in Spain, for several sites are known in that country where images
occur of humans dressed in this manner.
The lowermost figure on the right [of Fig. 85] depicts a women
dressed as a Yule clown, a feature not found at Woden-lithi's site; the
Spanish Yule-lady shown here is from the Cueva de
los Letteras. The upper left
figure is lettered in Tifinag, and announces himself as a Y-L M-N, one of the Yule-men; it can be found
about 5 feet northwest of the main sun-god figure. The other two Yule-men shown on the right side of the
illustration are respectively from 14 feet and 16 feet northwest of the main
sun-god figure. The two figures on
the lower left lie about 50 feet southwest of the sun god. One is evidently a tumbler, the other a
jackrabbit, or, in terms of his European origins, a hare. In Scandinavia to this day the equivalent
of Santa Claus is called the Yule-man (though nowadays
he wears Icelandic costume, as does our own American Santa). The Scandinavian Yule-man also has a troop
of Jule-nisser (Yule Dwarves) who accompany him. The hare seems to have vanished from the midwinter festival of
modern times, and remains with us in the guise of the Easter Rabbit who now
brings the Easter eggs, another survival of old Nordic pagan customs. There are
other links with ancient Spain, though not at Woden-lithi's site, which is
predominantly Scandinavian. Fig. 86 ....[and other
examples: Fell, 1982] show sculptures
of animals that have been found in parts of New England where the stone
chambers occurs. The bison (Fig. 86) is from Lawrence,
in the valley of the Merrimack River in
Massachusetts. It recalls the
numerous Iberian sculptures, often crude as in this case, of
bulls." [A boar and a recumbent
beast, apparently a bull (Fell 1982)] were both discovered in central Vermont
by John Williams and me while we were investigating the chambers at South
Woodstock. They too recall the
ancient Spanish sculptures. The carvings
in stone in northern Portugal also include numerous examples of animals, so
much so that Professor Santos Junior, President of the Anthropological Society
of Portugal (Sociedade de Antropologia e Etnologia de Portugal), has inferred
that a special zoolatry (religious worship of animals) too place there. One of the examples he found was attached
to a stone tablet carrying an inscription, which he sent to me. Like others from the region, where Basque
place names occur, the inscription proved to be written in the ancient Basque
tongue, using the ancient Basque syllabary (Fig. 87). The inscription disclosed that it was a
dedication to the Laminak, subterranean monsters that are
still the object of superstitious dread among the Basque country people of
today. It is
relevant to state here that when Basque and other Spanish scholars sent these
undeciphered inscriptions to me, nothing was known in Spain or Portugal as to
the language of the writing. The
solution (Fig 89 & Fig 90) proved to be
one that depended wholly on the fact that the Cree, the Ojibway, and some
other Amerindian tribes have preserved this same syllabary today, and still
use it in their letters, their newspapers, and other contexts. It is mistakenly attributed to the
missionary James Evans, a Welshman who is supposed to have
"invented" the script in 1841.
What Evans really did, as Fell had noted in Saga America, was to preserve and adopt the writing system that
he found already in use among his
flock. For this he deserves great
credit, but it is wrong to say he invented the syllabary. The system of writing goes back far beyond
the earliest Roman inscriptions in Spain and Portugal. It continued in use among Basques until
some time in the early Middle Ages.
The last known example of its use is on a tablet now held in the San
Telmo Museum (Fig 89 & Fig 90). Using the Cree syllabary
as a guide (Fig. 88), Fell transliterated the signs into the phonetic
equivalents in Latin script, and then recognized the language as Basque. Its translation appeared to be that shown
in the illustrations, and Fell submitted his decipherment of the tablets to
Dr. Imanol Agiŕe, the Basque etymologist and epigrapher. he confirmed the decipherment and provided
a modern Basque rendering of the same text.
(This, of course, is in marked contrast to the views of those
archaeologists who state that the Basque inscriptions found in America are
marks made by roots or by plowshares.
For the views of linguistic scholars
on the one hand, and archaeologists on the other, reference may be
made to volume 9 of the Epigraphic Society's Occasional Publications,
entitled Epigraphy Confrontation in
America [1981]). A possible means of Iberian influence
on the Nordic settlements in Canada may have been the Algonquians. For, as an inscription cut on
Woden-lithi's site shows, the actions of the Nordic colonists were of
interest to the Algonquians, and an inscription in a language similar to
Ojibwa, using the Basque (and therefore the Cree-Ojibwa) syllabary (see Table 3), makes
reference to Woden-lithi's departure by ship. As already noted, Woden-lithi's relations with the Algonquians
appear to have been cordial, and he refers as a "foreign-friend" (Fig. 20 )to one whom he
has carved. The beliefs
and practices referred to in this [section], worship of the sun and moon and
worship of animals, appear all to derive from the Stone Ages and were
doubtless a direct carryover from the late Neolithic. But the
Indo-European farmers who occupied Scandinavia toward the close of the Stone
Age, and who are believed by Scandinavian archaeologists to be the direct
ancestors of Bronze Age peoples in Scandinavia, were practical country people
who perceived the sun as a supreme deity on whom the fertility of their crops
depended, since only by planting seed at times determined by the position of
the sun in the constellations could they be assured of success in reaping a
harvest." [It is of interest
that Fell (1982) does not indicate farming practices among the Norse
colonists in America. The evolution
of observatories in their culture in Scandinavia might have been related to farming,
but such observatories also fulfilled other functions, such as when good
sailing seasons are available, etc.]. For their
more personal needs they apparently evolved a whole pantheon of lesser
deities. As the Bronze Age
progressed, these lesser gods gradually assumed the role of major gods, and
eventually the sun and the moon and the rest of nature were assigned by the
priests to the lesser roles of servants of the new gods. For the Nordic peoples the leading members
of the new pantheon were all sky gods.
The new religion had already developed clearly defined roles for these
gods, and in that capacity they accompanied Woden-lithi to America, as his
presiding patrons. The Gods Go West-- Woden and Lug
Based on a
translation of inscriptions in America, Fell (1982) proposes a hypothetical
scenario of further migrations by Bronze Age peoples on the American
continent: Although
both the ancient peoples of Ireland and the Nordic Teutons venerated the sun
god above all others during the Bronze Age, the former calling him by the
name Bel or Grian, the latter Sol or Sunu, each of these peoples recognized a
host of lesser gods. These deities
seem to have originated as spirits of nature, each in charge of particular
natural manifestations, and later some of them were elevated to become major
gods. Thus Lug to the ancient Irish was a god of light, who repelled the
forces of darkness with his mighty spear.
The Nordic people apparently assigned much the same characteristics to
Woden or Odin, who also owned a mighty spear and dealt destruction to the
enemies of gods and men. Both ancient
Irish and Norse recognized a sky god who was named for thunder: Taranis in ancient
Irish, Thunor or Thor in Nordic. Both had divinities in charge of war, of music, of writing
skills and magic, and, especially, fertility, both male and female. In America
something happened that did not and could not happen in Europe. Relatively isolated and defenseless settlements
of Irish and Nordic Teutons came into accidental and basically friendly
contact. Inevitably there were
intermarriages, and each side imparted its ideas to the other. Thus arose a peculiarly American blending
of European concepts, which later permeated Amerindian thinking, as
intermarriages became more extensive. When the
people from Ireland and Scandinavia crossed the Atlantic to settle in America
they brought their gods with them. In
the northeastern settlements, where native rock abounded, they built
religious centers in the megalithic style.
Some of the chambers still carry ogam inscriptions indicating the name
of the god or goddess of the dedication (.....see Fig. 168). In most cases the original inscriptions
are now unreadable or totally effaced by time and weather. As centuries went by, and the Ancient
Irish people or their Creole descendants dispersed across the continent,
their concepts changed with the changing environment. In the Northeast the mother goddess was
conceived as a female figure resembling the Punic Tanith, also as a nude
image. On the prairies the mother
goddess is represented as an Amerindian woman who’s fringed clothes spell out
in ogam her name and titles. Where
there were no rocks, no stone chambers could be built, and they and the other
megalithic structures all but vanish as we pass beyond the Great Lakes. Chief of the
Ancient Irish gods was Lug, god of the sky and of light, and creator of the
universe. His emblems are his spear
and his slingshot. With the latter he
once destroyed a one-eyed monster named Balar, who, with
his sorcerer attendants the Fir-bolg, had gained the mastery of Ireland. Balar is depicted in an unlettered
inscription on the Milk River, near Writing-on-Stone, Alberta. He is shown as having one leg and one arm, held aloft over his
gigantic eye, which could kill hundreds merely by its glance. In this pictograph, Fig. 93, Lug has just
loosed the thong of his slingshot and the monster is about to bite the
dust. Another and evidently much
later depiction of Lug is that in Fig. 92, where his name is given in Norse runes, one of many examples
we now have of Norse influence on the western Irish in North America. Presumably the Norsemen came down from
Hudson Bay to enter the prairie lands.
In this petroglyph Lug is shown holding his magic spear, by means of
which he defeats the forces of darkness each year, to usher in the returning
spring. The last-mentioned petroglyph
occurs on cliffs at Castle Gardens in Wyoming, and at the same site another
Ancient Irish god is identified by his name written in Norse runes. This is Mabona (or Mabo), the Irish Apollo, god of music and of sports and the
presiding divinity in charge of male fertility. In this context his symbol is the phallus, shown in the
petroglyph on the rock above him. The Punic traders of Iberia brought to America the coinage
of Carthage and other Semitic cities, and these coins often depict a horse
(the emblem of Carthage), or just its head and neck, or a Pegasus with wings
but without the rest of the animal's body.
Since there were no horses in the Americas at that epoch, the Ancient
Irish had vague and strange ideas as to what kind of animal it might be,
apparently able to fly like a bird, yet resembling a deer in other
respects. They sometimes carved
representation of their gods or heroes riding on this magic animal of the
skies," and often birds' feet replace the hoofs. "The body may resemble a boat, while
the mane and tail provide the fringe ogam required to give a title to the
composition. In this respect the
American Irish copied exactly the conventions of the minters of Spain,
forming the word C-B-L or G-B-L (for capull,
horse), and in the case of a Pegasus, adding the suffix -n (ean, meaning
"flying"). Some of these
flying heroes mounted on Pegasus-back may be intended for Norse Valkyries,
other have the name Mabona or Mabo-Mabona incorporated in the ogam of the
tail. The god of
knowledge, especially astronomy, astrology, and occult sciences, and of
writing skills, was Ogmios. He is always represented as having a face like the sun, and
sometimes he carries rods that spell G-M, the consonants of the word ogam. In later
centuries, long after the time of Woden-lithi and his colonists, the
descendants of the Nordic settlers began to migrate westward, to reach the
Great Plains and, ultimately the West Coast from British Columbia southward
to an undetermined distance. They
also encountered other Amerindian tribes, especially the many Dakota tribes,
usually now referred to as Sioux.
With the passage of time these communities all blended, and so a part
of the Nordic heritage was introduced into the Amerindian tradition. While these
events were occurring, a similar westward migration took place among the
Irishiberian (noted as Celtiberian) colonists who had originally occupied
much of New England and also part of the southeastern states. These ancient people from Ireland likewise
reached the Plains, and they too blended with the Sioux tribes and the
Shoshone. They also had a predominant
influence in forming the Takhelne people of British Columbia. These people from Ireland spread southward
along the Pacific coast, through Oregon and much of California, where their
ogam inscriptions are often to be found in excellent states of preservation. Inevitably
the two religious traditions, Norse on the one hand, Ancient Irish on the
other, both of them expressions of the original Indo-European pantheon,
blended to produce a composite mythology.
Thus we find Norse heroes depicted in what appear to be Ancient Irish
roles and vice versa. These blended
traditions persisted into modern times, and there were still artists painting
ogam texts beneath Norse mythological subjects as late as the first decades
of the nineteenth century. All the
foregoing inferences are attested to by the inscriptions. In localities such as the Milk River in
Alberta, where inscriptions in ogam abound, the bedrock is so soft that the
inscriptions cannot be many centuries old.
Some declare their [recent origin] by incorporating depictions of
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or colonists with rifles-- scattered
incongruously among petroglyphs that depict the old Nordic gods and heroes. It is clear
that a tradition of sculpting replicas of still older petroglyphs must have
persisted for thousands of years, and it is very probable that many of the
artists whose work we now admire and whose ogam texts we can still recognize
may not themselves have really understood what it was that they had been
trained to sculpt. Perhaps, like the
Egyptian carvers of Roman times, they merely knew that they were repeating
old and hallowed texts from their remote ancestors, the meaning no longer
known to them. Whether this
was so or not, the Amerindians have disclosed little of what lies behind
their traditional art, or have cloaked it behind a disguise of later-invented
myths. And as for the inscriptions,
many of those that are still readable as ancient ogam cannot possibly have
been cut in ancient times. They
represent a fossil art, preserved intact from another age. We can be grateful to those artists who
thus preserved the remote past for us in this way. King
Woden-lithi gives a concise summary of his pantheon of gods, which (like
Snorri's Edda) he separates into
the Aesir or sky gods and the Wanir or earth gods. "Chief of Nordic sky gods is Woden of the great spear Gungnir and, as
stated above, he has much the same characteristics as Lug of the Gaelic Irish
(noted as Celts) and Lew of the Brythonic
Irish. He presides over magic and
owns a magic ring that Loki, his son, had made for him. His magic
spear is carved many times at Peterborough, some of the larger versions being
perhaps the work of Algonquians copying from smaller originals. In one example (Fig. 96 & Fig. 97), located about 18
feet west of the main sun figure, the letters GN-GN N-R are written: Gnugnir, the Ontario version of Gungnir, by which name Odin's spear
was known to the Vikings of a later age.
These and other inscriptions show that the mythology of Odin in Viking
times is fundamentally just a more elaborate development of the mythology of
the Nordic peoples generally in the much earlier era of King Woden-lithi. Woden
himself is depicted as a male figure just to the right of Gungnir (Fig. 96 & Fig. 97). His name is written W-D-N, Woden, in the
English and Germanic form of his name. About 14
feet south of the main sun figure another of Woden's possessions is depicted
(Fig. 103). This is a peculiar forked tree, identified
as W-GH D-R-S-I-L, Ughdrasil,
matching the world-tree of the Vikings, called Yggdrasil. The name is supposed to mean "Ugly
Horse" and its link with the tree is obscure. Woden was
also regarded as the god who presided over the dead, with feasting and other
pleasures of the flesh for warriors who died in battle. His assistants in bringing in the bodies
of the slain for restoration to life, were the Valkyries. There has not yet been observed any
reference to this mythology on the Peterborough site, but Fig. 94 & Fig.
95 suggest that the myth of the Valkyries was
imparted to the American migrants from Ireland. The inscriptions depicting these strange riders of flying
steeds were cut in nearly modern times by western plainsmen, probably Sioux,
who had inherited the Celtic-Norse tradition." Please also refer to
Figs. 98, 99, 100 & 102. Loki The Crafty
One of Woden's
sons was the crafty Loki of Viking tradition. He may well have been venerated more highly in Woden-lithi's
time, not as a crafty ill-natured character, but as a skillful craftsman, for
in the early Bronze Age technical skills would be rare and highly
valued. About 10 feet north of the
main sun figure at Peterborough there is an illustration of a galloping
animal, and beneath it an ithyphallic Fig. (Fig.
104 ), with the following text engraved: M-GN
L-M-S L-K L-A
W-N W-V-GH W-D-N (magna lumis Loki
lae wan Vighhya Slehefnir Wodena) "By sorcery, cunning and venom
Loki won the steed Sleipnir for Woden."
The word Slehefnir is
assumed to be the damaged section that lies beneath, to the right. Loki was credited
by the Vikings with having powers of persuasion that the skillful dwarves of
the Mid-Earth could not resist.
Whenever Odin needed something from the dwarves's factories, Loki was
always sent to wheedle it out of them.
Similarly, when Thunor, the thunder god, required a weapon to defend
the Aesir, it was Loki who was sent for, and who found means of providing
it. King Woden-lithi's text states
that a dwarf manufactured the magic hammer named Mjolnir for Loki to give to
Thunor. This inscription is given
as [Fig.
119]. Loki,
despite his malevolence, was a skillful craftsman himself, and seems in this
aspect to represent the blacksmith god of the Greeks (Hephaistos) and the
Romans (Vulcan). The Ancient Irish
(noted as Celtic) equivalent of the latter two deities was Goibhnui
and he, like the Graeco-Roman craftsman god, was lame. If, therefore, we equate Loki with
Goibhnui (Fig. 105), despite their
apparent differences in temperament, we should perhaps include here the
activities preside over by Goibhnui in his new roles in America. For, as the Ancient Irish settlers moved westward, they encountered
the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, and began
to harvest its wool by means of annual roundups. Goibhnui now became the presiding genius over the craft of
forming. Once the wool was shorn, it
passed under the aegis of the mother goddess. At suitable locations
in the mountainous areas of the Far West the ancient migrants from Ireland
hunted the bighorn and the antelope.
In Nevada, however, and also in British Columbia, there was an annual
round up by shepherds, on foot. The
pictographs show them carrying shepherds' crooks (Fig. 106a). it is probable that the long drystone
walls noted by Professors Robert F. Heizer and martin A. Baumhoff (1962) were
to facilitate driving the wild sheep into a confined area, where they were
shorn of wool. The various
pictographs (Figs.106a, 106b, 107, 108, 109 & 110), some of them
rebus ogam, depict sheep, and also other animals. The spinning of yarn and various parts of the vertical loom and
its associated tools (shed battens, loom-comb [replacing a reed], and frame)
are shown in pictographs given in ...[Figs. 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165 & 166]. The methods appear to be the same as those
used by the present-day Navaho. In
Nevada Professor Fell was told of persistent legends that the region was
formerly in the possession of now-vanished people called
"sheep-eaters." The
technical farmer's words appearing on some of the inscriptions are in some
cases of Norse origin. This fact, taken
with the mixed Irish--Norse features of some of the mythological inscriptions
and the occasional use of Norse runes, can only mean that a contact occurred
between the Ancient Irish migrants of the Milk River (and also of Wyoming)
and Norse visitors or settlers. Tsiw Mighty-in-Battle
In
Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology, Tiw is the son of Woden (Odin) and therefore a member of the superior sky gods, though
subservient to Woden. Two striking
differences are evident in the mythology of King Woden-lithi, which antedates
the historical era from which Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology derives. First, the
name of Tiw is rendered in the ancient Germany manner, with an initial ts-sound (z of Old High German), and so, like Thunor, Tsiw reminds us of
the southern Teutons rather than the Norsemen. Second, his image
is by far the largest of the gods' after the sun god and the moon
goddess. He is also shown as the
tutelary deity of ships. The ship
depicted beside his main image is not a warship, however, but a trading
vessel, with a deep capacious hull for cargo and without the banks of oars of
a naval ship. it may well be
Woden-lithi's own ship. By tradition
Tiw was the god of battle, and he presumably had that department of human
aggression under his charge in Woden-lithi's day also. His major image lies some 30 feet west of
the main sun figure at the Peterborough site (Fig. 111). He is shown as a stoutly built man,
standing on the initial letter TS of his own name, his right hand held aloft,
his left arm with the hand severed, the stump dripping blood. To his upper left stand the letters of his
title L-M-Y-TH, "maimed" (Old Norse lamidhr). Beside him to
his right lies the giant wolf Wenri (Fenrir of
Norse mythology). According to
Snorri, who wrote in the twelfth century, Fenrir was one of the evil progeny
of Loki. He became a menace to the
gods, and Odin ordered him to be haltered.
Only Tiw was willing to attempt the task, and to achieve it he had to
pacify the wolf by placing his hand in its mouth, as an earnest [gesture]
that the halter would not in reality restrict him. When the truth appeared otherwise, Fenrir bit off Tiw's
arm. Obviously this myth was already
established in the early Bronze Age, since it is so clearly depicted here. According to
philologists, Tiw is the same god as the Greek Zeus. The Old High German name Tsiwaz, like the
name by which Woden-lithi knew him, resembles Zeus. His tasks included that of holding up the sky. This he is shown doing in an unlabeled
premaiming situation in a petroglyph (Fig. 113) located 6 feet
west of the main sun figure [at Peterborough, Ontario]. In his role
as a war god Tsiw has as one of his symbols a battle-ax. In Fell’s book Saga America he recorded two iron battle-axes that had been
discovered in America, though they seem to be of Viking origin. One was found at Cold
Harbour, Nova Scotia, and the other (Fig. 114) at Rocky Neck,
on the Massachusetts coast. They were
formerly owned by William Goodwin, who first protected Mystery Hill, and they
are now in the Goodwin Collection in the
Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. At the time
when Fell prepared the text for Saga
America (1980) he had not realized that the Tifinag alphabet is of Nordic
origin, and consequently he was baffled by what appeared to be Norse axes
engraved, as these two are, with Tifinag letters. Not expecting the alphabet to render Norse language, he could
find no Libyan match for the words the letters seemed to spell, and was
forced to record them in the book with the comment.... "The markings are
letters of the Tifinag alphabet of Libya, although the axes appear to be
Viking." Now that we
can expect Norse language written in the Tifinag alphabet, the decipherment
is clear, and we can be sure that the ax is indeed Norse. The inscription shows that axes of this
type were awarded as marks of honor by Norse kings, and that even though they
are products of the Iron Age, they retain the ancient Tifinag as a persistent
tradition from ancient times, as do many royal gifts given in modern
times. The inscription may be
transcribed as L-A-N S-M E-K-M
M-M S-M E-L, to be understood as Lae sami ekjurn emum, sami eli,
"Royal award for the honor of battle widows, and for the honor of old
age." That two such awards have
been discovered in North America and none apparently in the Scandinavian
countries themselves seems surprising. Woden-lithi
associates Tsiw with ships, as his dedicatory inscription shows, and this
must indicate that at the epoch when Woden-lithi lived, the god was regarded
as a tutelary deity for sailors.
Since the king was himself a sailor, it is natural for him to have
given such prominence to his patron, greater than that which he accorded to
Woden or any of the other gods, save only the sun god. No other references have been found to
Tsiw on American rocks, not indeed to find which god was regarded as in
charge of fishing. For want of
information on the subject, included here are some of the inscriptions that
relate to ships and to fisheries (Figs. 115, 116 & 117). Most of these are demonstrably Ancient
Irish in origin, some are unidentified, and merely depict ships of the Bronze
Age type. The
illustrations have detailed captions.
However, it should be explained that Ancient Irish custom, still to be
found in Ireland within living memory, required that the local chief of any
community be granted a tax comprising one tenth part of all catches of
fish. The tithe was used by the chief
for the support, not only of his own family, but also of indigent females or
widows and fatherless children. (The
American gypsies, at least in the Northeast, still maintain a similar custom,
or did so up to [1972]... when Fell was collecting linguistic material from
the Boston gypsies.) The
inscriptions that illustrate these fishing practices come from the Tule Lake region, on the border of Oregon and
California. Although no fishing is
now carried out there, the local Indians and museum authorities confirm that
very great runs of fish used to occur in former times, and that they were
indeed caught in nets, as the inscriptions state. it is also of great interest that the unit of measurement of
fish by tally is called the M-S, to be read as Old Irish maois, the meaning of which is given in Patrick S. Dinneen's
Irish-English, English-Irish dictionary (2nd ed., Dublin, 1927, p. 709) as
"a hamper of 500 fishes."
The lettering on the texts gives the remaining details. These texts are traced from photographs
made at Tule Lake by Wayne and Betty Struble, who detected the ogam and
brought the site to Fell’s attention. Thunor The Thunderer
Third of the
sons of Woden, and fourth of the Aesir gods, we may note Thunor (Thor of the
Norsemen). The form of his name
suggests a north German rather than Scandinavian affinity for Woden-lithi's
tongue. Thunor was the
name by which he was known to the Anglo-Saxons, before the Vikings came to
England. He is accorded much space on
Woden-lithi's rock platform [Peterborough, Ontario, Canada], and seems to
have been one of the major objects of veneration. About 24 feet south-southwest of the main sun figure. He is depicted (Fig. 119) with his sword and hammer, but no text. He wears a high-peaked conical
helmet. Some 20 feet west of the main
sun figure his famous hammer is depicted, together with his personal name,
M-O-L-N-R (Mjolnir). In the Bronze Age all famous weapons had
personal names, on the model of Siegfried's sword, Volsung. Images of the short-handled hammer,
usually not labeled, are seen all over the site. About 11 feet southeast of the main sun figure Thunor himself
is depicted (Fig. 120), helmetless, arms akimbo, his hammer beside him to the
right, and its name, M-L-N-R, inscribed to the left. In a corrupt spelling M-N-R the hammer
appears about 45 feet to the south-southeast of the main sun figure, beside a
pair of serpents, and to the right Thunor stands, demonstrating his mighty
glove, one of the sources of his power.
As conqueror of the sea giant Ymir (Himir of the Norsemen), he may have
been accorded special veneration by Woden-lithi's
mariners. He is shown
with his high conical helmet and his hammer also in a petroglyph composition
(Fig. 123) centered at
about 15 feet northeast of the main sun figure. This shows Thunor at the outset of the final battle of the gods
against the forces of the underworld.
The giant serpent-dragon of Middle Earth lies to the right, coiling
its body, with a text composed of the dot-letters of the alphabet along its
length. The text that accompanies
this composition appears to be a continuation of the text given in Fig. 119, where a dwarf
is recorded to have made Molnir for Thunor.
This section reads: N-M
TH-W-N-R M-L-N-R H-K
R-M L-K-K L-W-K
L H-W which may be interpreted as Nema Thunor molni haka Orma likkja luk la hawa, "Thunor
takes up Molni to strike at the Serpent, its body lying coiled in the
sea." (In Fig. 123 only the god and
his hammer, and the first three words of the text are shown.) The dragon defeated Thunor in the end,
leading to the ascent to Walhol, as recorded later in this section. As we have
already seen, the ogam alphabet that for so long has been supposed to be an
exclusively Ancient Irish script was in fact well known in Nordic countries
as early as the Bronze Age. This fact
accounts for the otherwise untranslatable ogam inscriptions that occur in the
Western Plains and as far west at the valley of the Milk River in Alberta,
Canada. Here occur
many petroglyphs cut in soft bedrock; they are obviously not more than a few
centuries old at most. One such is
shown in Fig. 124, where a
supernatural figure is depicted holding aloft what appears to be a rake. Indeed, the archaeologists who have
recorded these and similar inscriptions say just that. Now it so happens that the Ogam Tract written by the mediaeval
Irish monks describes a special kind of ogam called by them ogam reic: literally "rake
ogam." It is not known in
Ireland as occurring in petroglyphs, nor indeed anywhere save in the
manuscripts written by the monks.
Thus the American petroglyphs are the first examples to be recognized
as archaeological artifacts. When Fell
was first confronted with these examples he naturally expected the language
contained in the ogam script to be people of ancient Ireland and related to
Irish Gaelic. But the decipherment
proved baffling, as no Ancient Irish words known to him matched the
concatenation of consonants present in the rakes and in the associated finger
ogam (also mentioned in the Irish texts). After the
presence of Norse or Nordic inscriptions was made clear by the Peterborough [Ontario,
Canada] texts, the solution of the mysterious rake ogam of the Milk River
petroglyphs became evident. The
letters are indeed ogam, but the language is Nordic, allied to Old Norse. As can be seen from Fig. 124, the
"rake" represents the hammer Mjolnir and the god depicted is
Thunor, here rendered as ogam T-N-R. As god of
war the deity may be presumed to rule-over the art of using weapons, whether
for battle or for hunting. Fig.
125 is an example of many similar petroglyphs, in this case
written in Ancient Irish language, where hunting scenes are portrayed. it is from Site 77 near Canal Flats in
British Columbia, discovered by John Corner.
This is modern work, for the medium in which it is executed is paint,
exposed to the atmosphere; another piece of evidence pointing to the long
memory of the Amerindians. The artist
was a member of the Takhelne tribe, with a spoken tongue of partly Ancient
Irish derivation." Please also
see Figs. 121
& 122. Mabona and Freyr-- The Phallic Gods
King
Woden-lithi seems to have devoted less space on his platform to the Wanir, gods
of the earth, than to the other deities.
Under the inscribed word W-R-Y-aR (Freyar) he has depicted a phallic god ... [eleven] feet west
of the main sun figure. Beside Freyr
is an up-ended ship, one of his symbols by Norse tradition, though the connection
with male fertility is not immediately obvious. The hull of a ship is perhaps here regarded as a phallic
symbol. The
interesting interconnection between Ancient Irish and Nordic gods, already
noted in Fig. 92, under Lug, is again evident in a petroglyph at Coral Gardens, near Moneta, Wyoming, photographed by
Ted Sowers of the Wyoming Archaeological Survey. The Ancient Irish god Mabona is shown below his symbol, a giant
phallus and beneath is written his name, in younger runes. Again we have evidence of a later contact
between the ancient American migrants from Ireland and Norsemen of the period
of Leif Eriksson. Much more
obvious attention is given to the worship of the power of the phallus as a
fertilizer not only of women but of Mother Earth herself, in the shape of the
great stone phallic monuments that the Ancient Irish and Nordic peoples
erected in Europe and that their American cousins placed at corresponding
suitable sites in the New World. That
these are, in some cases at least, Bronze Age monuments is evidenced by the
presence of ogam and consain script, making reference to ancient pagan
divinities and rituals. Figs. 129 , 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, & 137 illustrate typical examples in both Europe
and America...." The inferred
fertility rituals are discussed in America
BC. [Please also see Figs. 126 & 127]. That Mabo
was preferred by the youth of America to his Norse equivalent Freyar is made
clear by the much larger number of inscriptions dedicated to the former, and
usually written in Ancient Irish ogam of the type called fringe ogam (...Fig. 1). A telling piece of evidence is seen at
Woden-lithi's site (Fig. 128), where the male fertility god is named in ogam as
Mabo. And the reason for the
preference of young for the Ancient Irish god of youth is his three spheres of
activity-- sex, sports, and music-- all of primary interest to the youth of
every country. In this
first aspect, that of god of male sexuality, the numerous stone phalluses and menhirs,
erect or fallen, in both Europe and North America, bear silent witness. Figs. 129, 130 & 131, show three European examples in France and Spain, and
North American examples appear in Figs. 132, 133, 134 & 135. Most of the American phalluses have fallen
into a recumbent posture. Those on
Phallus Hill, South Woodstock, Vermont, have since been transferred to the
museum of Castleton State College in Vermont. In New
England, groups of phallic stones were erected on the summits of hills (Fig. 137). Whether these were used as calendar
determination sites is not yet established. In British
Columbia and in the Nevada and Californian deserts, there occur inscriptions
in ogam, in a Ancient Irish language, relating to matings and the marriage
bond (Figs. 138 & 139). In addition
to the worship of Mabo as a fertility god, interest in the various games and
athletic sports under the protection of Mabo, and brought by ancient
colonists from Europe is manifest in various petroglyphs (Figs.140, 141, 142 & 143). What may be the Ancient Irish ball game of camanachd seems
to be depicted in some cases. Running
and hurling the caber are other athletic subjects, and we know from historic
contacts in the nineteenth century that the Takhelne tribe of British
Columbia practiced a sport much resembling the Scottish caber-tossing. An inscription at Cane Springs, in Clark
County, Nevada, recorded by Professors Robert Heizer and Martin Baumhof,
carries fringe ogam (Fig. 143) that implies
that the game depicted can scarcely be separated from baseball, the latter an
invention attributed to New York State in modern times." [Please also
see Figs. 141 & 142]. The third
aspect that Mabo assumes, as the Apollo of the Ancient
Irish, is that of the god of music. This is succinctly referred to in a
Takhelne pictograph (Fig. 144) discovered by John Corner near Robson, in British
Columbia as his Site 65, where the god has the head of a lyre, while his
outstretched arms make the letter m,
and his erected phallus an ogam b,
thus spelling his name. The lyre-faced god appears in various inscriptions in
Nevada (Figs. 145, 146 & 147), with remarkable fringe ogam inscriptions incorporated
into the petroglyphs as rebus forms.
The captions to the figures give details. Designs evidently influenced by these compositions enter into
the art of the Navajo and Apache tribes,
who entered the western territories as late in wanderers from eastern Siberia
(their language still retains many recognizable Turkmenian roots). It seems likely that these late invaders
dispossessed the Pueblo peoples and acquired many of their art forms, so that
the Navajo and Apache today are regarded as the foremost exponents of
Amerindian culture in North America.
In the process they seem to have acquired the Mabo rebus and converted
it into a new but similar style, expressing a wholly different tribal
mythology from that of the Ancient Irish from whom these figures originated. Dancing to
music, the dancers holding stag's antlers, is an ancient Irish cultural
feature, also reflected in the North American petroglyphs (Fig. 148). Amerindian musicians possessed many different though simple types of musical
instruments. But the petroglyphs
depict a wider range than was found in recent times and, in addition to the
lyre, we see various representations of the Ancient Irish
harp, both the large and the smaller kinds. The associated ogam lettering, in a Gaelic language, is
illustrated in Figs. 149 & 150, and the
captions explain this. Competitive
performances on these instruments may have been judged by priests (druids),
ensconced in seats like the curious stone ones that occur in New England (see
Fig. 151). The
conclusion we reach, then, is that Norse and Irish colonists in ancient time,
even as early as Woden-lithi's epoch, came to North America and influence
done another and the Amerindian neighbors they encountered, producing a rich
culture with varied strands. The
inability of the Norse people to establish bronze industrial sites in America
led to the disappearance of the great trumpets, the lurs,
but the various instruments manufactured from turtle shell and wood, such as
the lyre and the harp, were capable of manufacture here, and so survived
almost to modern times. The Mother Goddess
The mother
goddess is depicted by the Ancient Irish & Norsemen in America and their
Amerindian descendants as a divine being with a celestial grace, whether she
be shown as a young woman, or as an elderly grandmother figure. The Norse, on the other hand, depict the
terrifying aspects of worship of the goddess, in which a priestess and
elaborate ritual becomes her voice and announces mysterious
instructions. The concept of a divine
mother seems to be the most ancient religious belief, for the Paleolithic
peoples left behind them images and paintings of pregnant females, apparently
expressing the wonder and the importance of fertility to the maintenance of
the band or tribe. Later, when the
essential preliminary role of the male in fertilizing the female was
understood, the religion seems to have changed toward a father-god
orientation, and the divine couple bred numerous divine progeny, each of whom
became responsible for one or another of the fundamental human activities and
interests. Fig. 152 shows one of the Milk River inscriptions at
Writing-on-Stone, near Coutts, in Southern Alberta, where fringe ogam
identifies the female figure as "Byanu, Mother of the Gods, Queen of the World," the
language being Ancient Irish. Fig. 153, by way of
contrast, from the same region, shows a Norse version of the goddess, seen in
the guise of her priestess, as graceless and repulsive as the Irish version
is attractive. The
megalithic symbols of the mother goddess in America are the same as she has
in Europe-- the Men-a-tol or female
stone, literally "stone-with-a-hole." Fig. 154 shows a
men-a-tol at Land's End in Cornwall, England, and Fig. 155 a New England
equivalent found and photographed by Hulley M. Swan at Jefferson,
New Hampshire. The precise
significance of these "holey-stones" in Europe has been
debated. In modern times engaged or
newly married couples exchange kisses through the aperture, and babies are
passed through the hole to bring good luck.
These may be ancient practices. The sun, and
his celestial manifestation as a sun god, was always appealed to for warmth,
and rain to promote growth of crops.
But so also was Byanu, the Ancient Irish mother goddess, as an
inscription at Tule Lake, California, shows (Fig. 156). Wayne and Betty Struble photographed
it. Other gods were also
invoked. An inscribed stone placed in
an ancient plantation in New York and found by John H. Bradner, invokes both
Byanu and her divine son, Mabo. The
Dakotas and Mandans invoked Thunor, in his later transformation into a rain god. Plowing was virtually impossible in North
America, for lack of suitable draft animals.
Thus we are perhaps to interpret Woden-lithi's inscriptions [at
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada] of what appear to be plowmen (Fig. 157) as no more than
a didactic reference to Scandinavian practices. A Danish version of an early Bronze Age plowman is shown in
that same figure. When the
Ancient Irish & Norsemen traveled west and discovered the Rocky Mountain
bighorn sheep, they established a sheep-farming industry based on stock
running wild, but rounded up (on foot) once a year for shearing.... The product of this farming industry was,
of course, raw wool. This, in turn,
became the basis of a spinning and weaving industry,
and the inscriptions in Nevada indicate that the mother goddess-- or a mother goddess-- was considered the
tutelary deity of such activities. In
the guise of a female that looks like the Irish Sulis, we find inscriptions
in Nevada dedicated to some female divinity (Figs. 158 & 159). The rocks of
the Nevada plateau are rich in their petrographic
commentary on the activities of these early farmers and wool-workers. At one site w find depictions of needles and
thread, each labeled in fringe ogam with the names of the tools in old
Gaelic. We find pictures of
embroidery stitches. One ingenious
petroglyph at Lost City, Clark County, Nevada, is in
effect an advertisement for the wool industry, showing the production of
cloth from the sheep's back by means of a looped wool thread, with pendant
threads that spell ogam letters (Fig. 160). The various stages in converting the raw
wool into yarn, then into a ball of yarn, including the carding, are all
depicted (Figs. 161, 163, 164 , 165 & 166). Setting up the warp on a frame is shown on
Fig.
161, and a vertical loom of the type
afterward used by the Navajo appears in petroglyphs at Valley of Fire, Nevada
(Fig. 163). The various tools of
the weaver, the battens, rods for weaving to cause the shed to alternate
between throws of the shuttle, pegs, and loom combs (which replace the modern
reed) all appear (Figs. 162, 164 & 165). And the final
product, in this case a dress length, embroidered at the warp-ends (Fig.
166), is shown. Other and
equally important information comes from the burial goods deposited with the
bodies of the dead at ancient burial places, such as those of the early
Woodland Period investigated by members of the Archaeological Society of
Tennessee at Snapps Bridge, Near Kingsport. Here we find actual pieces of equipment,
such as loom weights, inscribed with appropriate words in ogam or Iberic, in
the Iberian (noted as Celtimberian) or Basque languages, indicating the
functions of the objects, which were evidently buried with their
owners.... These latter finds came to
notice through the observations of Dr. William P. Grigsby, who first noticed
what he correctly inferred to be writing on some of the artifacts in his
large collection. Similar
artifacts are found in Britain, as for example at the Windmill Hill site,
occupied by the late Neolithic builders of Stonehenge. These have been recorded and well
illustrated, and it is plain to see that inscriptions similar to those in
North America occur, even the identical words. And similar inscriptions to those found on amulets in graves
are also found inscribed on the stone chambers of New England. Thus, an invocation to the goddess Byanu,
the mother-goddess....., occurs on a Windmill Hill amulet, and a similar text
was reported in 1976 in America B.C.
from a stone chamber dedicated to Byanu at South Woodstock, Vermont (also ee Mystery). On the
ceiling of the same chamber at South Woodstock occurs a depiction of Byanu in
her guise as Tanith, the mother goddess of the southern
Iberians and of their Carthaginian neighbors (Fig. 168). Near the
same site John Williams and Barry Fell found in 1975 the torso of a fallen
image of a female divinity, evidently Byanu, whose name appears in various
local contexts (Fig. 167). These
examples illustrate the continuing and widespread influence of the concept of
a mother goddess in North America just as in Europe. Giants and Monsters-- Twilight of The Gods
In
Scandinavian mythology the underworld, Jotunheim, is
inhabited by the evil progeny of Loki and by other giants and monsters. One of Loki's children was the giant worl
Fenrir, who became a menace to the gods, and had to be placed under restraint
in a magic halter. None dared to
capture the beast, however, until Tyr, the god of war, allowed the wolf to
take his arm in his jaws as a guarantee that the halter would not restrain
him. When Fenrir discovered that he
had been tricked, he bit off Tyr's arm, so the god is depicted as maimed. This ancient
myth, as noted previously, is depicted on Woden-lithi's inscription [at
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada] in at least two places, Fig. 111 & Fig 112. About 21 feet from the main sun figure,
slightly east of the north-south axis, occurs a wolf figure that is labeled
L-Z F-N-R. The beast appears to be caught in some kind of trap. The inscription seems to mean, "Fenri
locked," assuming that L-Z is the root laesa in Old Norse, "to lock." Another
depiction is seen some 30 feet southwest-by-west of the main sun figure (Fig. 169). it shows the wolf running free. it is lettered W-N-R M-L
M-N-D [= Wenri mel mond]. This evidently means "Wenri
Crunch-Hand," the form Wenri
being alternative to Fenri (Fenrir in Norse), mel being the verb to "crush" or "grind," and
mond meaning "hand." The figure of the wolf is placed just to
the left of the main image of the god Tsiw, whose left hand he has just
bitten off. The god, with blood still
dripping from the wound, stands defiantly, over the conspicuous dedication
made by Woden-lithi (Fig. 111). Two giants
with similar names occur in Norse mythology.
One of them, Ymir, is present at the creation of the earth, and his
body is carved up to constitute the world.
The other, Himir, is a sea monster that is defeated in battle with
Thunor. The version presented by Woden-lithi's
artists shows the sea giant, but he is named Y-M-R, hence Ymir. He is shown beside his ship (Fig. 170), which is
carried along the waves by a huge sea horse.
The inscription reads Y-M-R
N-GH-W (Ymira nokwi),
readily translated as "The ship of Ymir." The giant may have been feared by Woden-lithi's mariners, so
his defeat by Thunor would be cause for veneration of the Thunderer. According to
Snorri's Edda, the world will end
with Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when the
monsters of Jotunheim finally overcome the Aesir and Vanir. During the last battle Thor (Thunor of our
Ontario text) manages to hold at bay the giant serpent that encircles the
world and is called Midgardsormen (Worm of Middle Earth); at length his
hammer Mjolnir avails no more, and Thunor and the other gods succumb. Parts of this scenario are depicted in
various places on Woden-lithi's site. A little
west of a point 30 feet south of the main sun figure there can be found a
number of serpents, with inscriptions scattered among them. The inscriptions (Fig. 172) include M-O-L-N
(Mjolnir or Old Norse), the hammer
of Thunor; R-M (orm,
"serpent" in Old Norse); M-D-N-M, apparently to be understood as Midn[gardsorm] nama ("Worm of
Mid-Earth is its name"), nama
being a south Germanic form, replacing nefni
of Old Norse. Another serpent is
labeled S-W, presumably svika,
"twisting." The collection
is identified (Fig. 171) as R-G-N D-M (Regin
Domr, Doom of the Gods). Another
picture of the Worm of Mid-Earth appears in the engraving of Thunor given in
an earlier [section]. The word A-K-W,
Old Norse akava is written beside
yet another serpent: it means "fierce." The earth is now given over to flame, and
the Aesir gods under the leadership of Woden form in procession to ascent the
rainbow (in Norse lore called Bridge-of-the-Gods) to enter Valhalla, there to
await their own doom. This last scene
is the subject of a petroglyph engraved some five feet southwest of the main
sun-god {Fig 173} figure [at
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada]. The
petroglyph includes the Tifinag letters W-L-H-L, Walhol, which is also the Anglo-Saxon manner of pronouncing
Valhalla. Inconsequent as it seems,
perhaps because of the random manner in which the various pieces of Nordic
mythology have been ground into the rock platform, a Yule-man seems to be
taking part in the proceedings, wearing the disguise of the equinoctial hare,
while he wrestles another clown dressed as a bear. These
ancient Nordic myths were to some extent acquired or inherited by the
Algonquian and Sioux tribes who were the neighbors of the colonists. Pictographs and petroglyphs of dragons and
other monsters found along the banks of the St. Lawrence [River] present
features remarkably like the monsters of Norse tradition. Even more
surprising is the persistence of these stories into quite modern times among
the Takhelne of British Columbia, who speak a language derived in part from
Ancient Irish. In modern times, not
more than one or two centuries ago at most, painted inscriptions lettered in
ogam script, were created by artists who not only recalled the form of the
monsters, but also retained the ability to write the names of the
supernatural beings in legible ogam script.
An example of such work, depicting Loki and the dragon of Middle
Earth, is shown in Fig. 174. It serves as a
visible reminder of how long a folk memory can persist if the demands of
tribal tradition so require. Business Transactions in the Bronze Age
Most of us,
consciously or unconsciously, tend to interpret the past in terms of the
present. Since we ourselves use
trading tokens and coins, we assume that our remote ancestors may have done
the same. But when did this custom
begin? When was simple barter
replaced by more sophisticated business dealings, involving standards of
exchange comparable to coinage? In
the 1950's Fell became interested in this question, and published his
findings in two papers. The
conclusions he reached are relevant to this discussion. The inquiry was
prompted by events in Britain that resulted from World War II. At that time
the people of Britain faced a severe food shortage caused by the blockade of
ships bringing farm products from overseas.
To help overcome the crisis, every possible strip of land, no matter
how narrow, was plowed and planted.
Along the ancient highways, many of them going back to Roman or even
Ancient Irish times, the bordering verges of grass were put to the plow and
then planted. But many an ancient
foot-traveler had once wandered along these routes, occasionally dropping
coins by mischance, or in other cases deliberately concealing pots of coins
if danger threatened. Many a burial
had remained intact when the owner had met with ill fate, or perhaps could no
longer return, or failed to locate his treasure. Tens of thousands of ancient coins, Roman, Saxon, and medieval,
were discovered by the plowmen. As a
result the market value of ancient coins dropped with a crash, and it became
possible for many people of quite modest means to assemble valuable and
instructive collections of these intriguing relics of our ancestors. Since the
Anglo-Saxon silver pennies are the oldest inscribed artifacts we possess from
the ill-documented period that followed the withdrawal of the Romans from
Britain in the fifth century after Christ, Fell began to research the Old
English manuscripts in an effort to discover what role these coins played in
our ancestors' daily lives; later, as stated above, he summarized his
findings in two papers published in 1954 and 1955. What at first puzzled me greatly was that nearly all the
references to monetary transactions that occur in the Saxon literature are to
shillings, pounds, and marks-- yet
the only coins that are found in the soil are pennies and pieces of lesser value, such as feorthungs (farthings, that is, quarters of a penny, cut with
shears for change) and some irregular coins called stykas, issued in the first years of the Saxon occupation. Now, a
typical Saxon entry relating to money is represented by this passage, which
Fell translated from the seventeenth-century laws of King Inc of Wessex: "If a man owns a hid of land, his wer [that is, property value] is to be
reckoned at 120 shillings, half a hide 80 shillings, and if he owns no land
60 shillings." Apparently taxes
were apportioned according to one's wer. Again, King Aethelberht, who died in the
year 616, decre3d that if a man had one ear smitten off in combat, the
aggressor must pay him six shillings amends.
There is a whole table of possible injuries and the appropriate
compensation payable in each case-- injury to the mouth, 12 shillings; loss
of an eye, 50 shillings; the four front teeth, 6 shillings each; an eyetooth,
4 shillings; the first premolar, 3 shillings; other teeth a shilling each--
and so on. But what
were these "shillings"? Certainly not the silver coins of that
name that were first struck in England in the Middle Ages. It turns out that in Saxon times all these
monetary terms were merely units of account.
A shilling in nearly every case actually means a sheep. The true equations
of account were as follows: 6 sheep equal 1 ox 8 oxen equal 1 man 30 silver pence equal 1 ox 48 shillings weigh
one pound 5 silver pence equal 1 sheep
1 sheep equal 1 shilling 240 silver pence equal 1 man
1 man equals 1
pound of silver Almost all
debts were extinguished, not by coin of the realm (which was scarce) but by
barter payments of sheep and oxen.
The system remained almost intact until inflation set in, caused by
labor scarcity during the Black Death (1349). hence, we may hazard the guess that the
Saxon system was an ancient one, and that it had been introduced from Denmark
and northern Germany, the homelands of the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons who
invaded England after Roman rule ended. According to
the ancient historians of Greece and Rome, the oldest city in Europe is Cadiz
(Gades of the ancients), founded by
Phoenician traders in the twelfth century BC. The Phoenician script rapidly spread through southern and
western Spain and Portugal, soon assuming a characteristic Iberian form in which certain letters
were written somewhat differently from their original form as developed in
Phoenicia (Lebanon), where the parent cites of the Phoenicians, Tyre and
Sidon, are located. Later, as the
Phoenician colony of Carthage, in Tunisia, became independent, other
varieties of Phoenician script arose and spread through the Iberian
Peninsula. In addition, mysterious
scripts of apparently native Iberian origin occur in Spain and Portugal in
archaeological contexts that certainly long antedate the Romans and may well
antedate those of the Phoenician traders of Cadiz. At the time
when Cadiz was founded the Nordic peoples were settled in lands that we now
call Germany and Scandinavia. Their
cousins the Pre-Irish occupied much of Gaul and parts of Britain, and were
beginning to penetrate into Spain.
Much of the Iberian peninsula was peopled by tribes who probably spoke
Basque, and the Basque philologist Imanol Agiŕe is of the opinion that
Basque-speaking tribes were also to be found in Britain and Ireland as well
as parts of Gaul.
Archaeological excavation discloses that these northern peoples were
still in the Stone Age as late as 1800 BC, and their emergence into the Bronze
Age during the century that followed was occasioned by trade contact with
Mediterranean peoples, from whom they obtained bronze swords and elaborate
knives and other sophisticated manufactures.
Apparently only the wealthiest members of Nordic society could afford
these imported luxuries, for we find carefully chipped flint imitations of
the bronze knives, apparently the property of commoners who could not afford
to purchase the bronze originals.
According toe the ancient historians the Phoenicians traded with these
northern peoples, taking such valuable wares as purple cloth for their
chiefs, and the bronze weapons mentioned earlier, and receiving in return
such materials as tin from Cornwall and amber from the Baltic lands. A so-called amber route has been traced,
leading from Denmark southward along the Danube to the Rumanian ports of the
Black Sea. But was this the only door
by which the Nordic peoples could face the trading world of the
Mediterranean? it seems unlikely, for
the Bronze Age rock carvings of Scandinavia depict fleets of ships similar to
those of the Mediterranean peoples (especially the Libyans of North Africa),
and such vessels could certainly cross the open sea. An actual
example of one of these vessels (though excavated from a site thought to date
to about the fifth century BC) is known, and Fell examined it in Copenhagen
in 1953. About 13 meters long, it is
constructed in a manner very similar to that of the Polynesian
oceangoing craft: that is to say,
of adzed wooden planks held together, not by nails or dowels, but sewn together by cordage. With similar vessels, called waka, the ancient Polynesians
could cross open spans of the Pacific of 3,000 miles, such as the gap between
Tahiti and New Zealand. We know from
carefully kept traditional Polynesian sources that the 3,000-mile journey was
covered at a rate of 100 miles a day, so that a voyage to new Zealand lasted
only a month; vegetable tubers were stored in the lower part of the hull,
fish were caught each day, and rain supplemented the drinking water carried
in gourds. Carbon dating has shown
that human settlement of New Zealand had been achieved at least by the tenth
century AD, as Maori tradition also affirms. The Polynesian voyages had spanned the Pacific in the
centuries before the occupation of the southernmost region, New Zealand, and
this historical fact is accepted without question by archaeologists. It has therefore always seemed strange
that European and American archaeologists seem to have so much difficulty in
conceiving that the people who built the Bronze Age ships of Europe could not
also have made similar transoceanic voyages.
However, leaving aside for the moment the question of transoceanic
sailing, it is surely not to be doubted that the Scandinavian skippers of the
Bronze Age must certainly have made voyages along the coasts of the Baltic
and the North Sea.
It is inconceivable that any people who inhabited a seagirt land would
build ships if it were not their avocation or profession to sail wheresoever
their fancy and sea skills sufficed to prompt adventure or trading voyage. Inevitably
the Scandinavians must have discovered that Phoenician ships and traders were
working the western approaches to Europe.
Inevitably their interest would turn upon the valuable trade goods of
Phoenicia, available to them either by peaceable trading of the Baltic amber that the Semitic visitors so much craved,
or by piratical attack if circumstances might make such a course seem
profitable. Homer and Hesiod, both of
whom wrote of the Greek mariners of the Bronze Age, tell us that farmers
turned pirate during the summer and returned to reap their crops in the fall,
bringing ill-gotten treasure and Phoenician slave women as booty from the
summer's expeditions. It may be taken
as given that the ancient Norsemen would do much the same. If, then,
the Bronze Age Norsemen encountered Phoenician or
Iberian traders, either as visitors to their own
lands, or as people to whose shores they themselves paid visits, would they
not acquire from them a knowledge of writing skills? It seems they did indeed, as the following
implies. One of the
best known of the Danish archaeological sites is that located at Mullerup Mose, in the western part of the island of
Zealand. The older name of the site
was Maglemose, and under the latter name there has been
designated a Stone Age culture whose remains are found there. The site, like many others of the Stone
Age, spans a long period of time, in this case thought to range from about
7000 BC down to 1500 BC. Its later
elements, if the dating is correct, would therefore overlap with the onset of
the Bronze Age, in the shape of the first trading visitors from Phoenician
Iberia, or the return of Norse ships from visits to Iberia. Among the
curious artifacts attributed to the Maglemose people are a series of engraved
bones (Fig. 175 14-1), the
purpose of which would be hard to determine were it not for the fact,
hitherto overlooked, that small inscriptions in the Iberic alphabet can be
found on some of them. Engravings
are found of oxen (cows or heifers) and, beside them, or drawn separately,
meshwork patterns that can be recognized as the common European symbol for cloth or weaving, often
found engraved on loom weights, for example. On one engraving of a cow we find the
Iberic letters that spell (reading from right to left in the Semitic manner)
W-'A-G. The middle letter, resembling
an A, is the letter 'alif, pronounced like the initial A in the German word Apfel:
that is, with a slight glottal click.
Iberian writers did not use vowels, and they regarded 'alif as a
consonant. So the word is to be
pronounced as wag, with a glottal
catch in the voice. In the modern
Scandinavian tongues there is no such word, nor does it occur in the related
Teutonic tongues, nor in the less closely related Ancient Irish tongues. But in the Latin family the root is the
base of all the common words for cow in Latin itself (vacca), Spanish (vaca),
Portuguese (vaca), French (vache), Italian (vaca) and Rumanian (vacă). The Swiss philologist Julius Pokorny,
after comparing the whole range of words for cow in ancient and modern
Indo-European languages, concluded that there were once several different
roots used by the various dialects of ancient Indo-Europeans, and that one of
the roots must have been uak or wak.
Evidently the people who spoke the language used at the Maglemose site
around 1500 BC used that particular root, and pronounced the terminal
guttural as a g rather than a k.
This does not necessarily mean that the Maglemose people were not
Nordic, or that they were displaced members of the Latin group. it probably merely means that the word wag was widely recognized by the
various trading peoples of Bronze Age Europe as being a term for cow. And why should a cow be depicted, and
labeled in writing, on a bone, beside a depiction of fabric? The answer
is not far to seek. Beside one of the
engravings of the symbol for cloth we find the Iberic letters that spell Q-D
(Fig. 176), which is the
Phoenician manner of writing KH-D, the vowel as usual left unexpressed. This word again matches an Indo-European
root identified by Pokorny: kwei-, with a terminal -d as the sign of the past
participle. It answers to the modern
English word quit and the Old Norse
kvitr, as well as many other modern
and ancient European forms of the root [e.g., German Quittung], all conveying the sense
of "quittance" or "paid." In fact, these bones are evidently
receipts issued by some trader to persons who have purchased from him cloth
to the value of 6 shillings: that is
to say, one cow. And to support this
inference we have in the Old Norse language special words, such as kugildi and kyrlag, both meaning "the value of a cow" and
corresponding to the Saxon unit of 6 sheep or 30 pence, equaling "...
one ox . (click
to see monetary terms). The equation may have varied a little; for
example, we know that in one English summer, sheep had become so plentiful
that the exchange rate (angilde)
fell drastically and became 3 pence to 1 sheep, so that a cow could then only
be rated at 18 pieces of silver. In
general, I think the standard rate was the one I have stated. There were no pennies minted in the days
of the Maglemose trader, but if they had been, I think his price for a bolt
of woven cloth would be reckoned at 30 pieces of silver, which in Saxon terms
is yet another way of saying "the wages of an able-bodied man for one
month's work," for a Saxon earned a penny a day and, by the laws of King
Alfred and King Guthrum, who ruled the English and Danes, "An Englishman
and a Dane are reckoned as of equal value" (Their wives were not so
regarded. The present-day advocates
of equal rights for women may trace their complaints back at least to the era
we are discussing, when a woman was reckoned as having a value of one
half-man, and was accordingly paid one half-penny for a day's labor in the
harvest. To buy her bolt of cloth,
then, she must work for 60 days or have a wealthy husband.) And why we receipts issued for the
purchase of goods? Receipts or
"quittances" were the invention of traders, who issued them to
their customers for the same reason that your modern supermarket or drugstore
staples a mechanically printed receipt to your purchase-- to prove that you
have not stolen the goods. Traders in
ancient Europe would indeed have had to keep a wary eye for shoplifters, as
dozens of eager farmers and their wives fingered and examined the wares. After a purchase was made, the customer
would be given a formal receipt, already engraved in advance at the
stipulated value. Complaints against
shoplifters could then more easily be handled by the local chieftain, who
would know that no more visits from traders could be expected unless he saw
to it that due restitution was made.
With such homely materials as these pieces of engraved bone, the life
of our remote ancestors acquires a new dimension, one much more familiar to
us than the notion that they were savage barbarians. What The Grave Goods Tell Us
An important
part in the recognition of the language and origins of ancient peoples consists
in studying their grave goods closely in search of inscriptions. Small but telltale comments or notations
often occur on objects that look unimportant but that formed some part of
household or artisan's equipment. For
example, loom weights may carry a notation indicating whether they belong to
the warp of a standing loom or to the pairs of threads that form part of a
so-called card loom. Archaeologists
are prone to overlook these, supposing them to be some decorative marking of
no significance. Thus, Basque token
coins of the second century BC, issued in imitation of Aquitanian silver
coins of the Ancient Irish and carrying an ogam statement in the Basque
language have been erroneously identified as "buttons"
or "necklace beads," and classified as Aurignacian
artifacts of 20,000 BC In America
stone loom weights, labeled in ogam with the Ancient Irish word meaning
"warp," have been identified as Amerindian "gorgets." Pottery impress stamps, labeled to that
effect in Iberic script, have been mistaken for decorated combs. Cases could be multiplied of similar
mistakes. The errors arise from the
fact that archaeologists often do not realize what important light
epigraphers can throw on their finds, and that what may be mistaken for mere
decoration is often an ancient form of script, which can identify the people
who once owned and used the artifacts. The
occurrence of burials with associated inscribed relics was first reported for
North America in 1838, when a tumulus at Grave Creek, Moundsville, West Virginia (Fig. 179), was excavated
and yielded an inscribed stone tablet, obviously written in some alphabet
related to the Phoenician or Carthaginian (Fig.
180).
When a Danish authority on scripts, Dr. Rafn at Copenhagen University,
was sent a copy of the writing on the stone he promptly identified it as
being in one of the Iberian scripts.
As Grave Creek is 300 miles from the sea, the implication seemed to be
that an Iberian settlement had once occurred in North America-- a notion that
later archaeologists rejected. hence
the Grave Creek grave goods and the included tablet were either forgotten or
attributed to the treacherous invention of forgers." [Please also see Fig.
181 for European example].
Edo Nyland has translated the Horse Creek Petroglyph of West Virginia,
finding the text written in the Basque Language (see Horse Creek Petroglyph). In more
recent times more artifacts have been found with inscriptions in Iberic (as
well as other ancient European scripts) and have been recorded and published,
but only as "decorated" artifacts.
Since archaeologists did not expect to find inscribed artifacts, they
were unaware of what might constitute an inscribed artifact." Dr. William P. Grigsby of east Tennessee,
who has assembled one of the largest collections of excavated artifacts of
eastern North America, began, after reading America B.C., to recognize on some of his specimens markings that
appeared to match both Iberian letters and ogam script; he wrote to draw
Fell’s attention to his specimens and then allowed me to research them. When the
attention of archaeologists was drawn to the presence of ogam inscriptions on
the artifacts as also on some of the megalithic chambers, their response was
often disbelief. Their skepticism is
based on the mistaken notion, long held, "that ogam was invented no
earlier than the fourth century A.D., for use in Ireland." The best answer to criticisms of the kind
cited lies in numismatics, for dates of coins can be established with
considerable accuracy. Illustrated
in Fig. 177 are two Ancient
Irish silver coins of the second century BC
They are imitations of the coinage of a Greek trading center in Spain
named Emporiom. The lower example,
which dates from before 133 BC, is lettered in Iberian script, and reads nomse, the Celiberian version of the
original Greek word for a coin, nomisma. the upper example is drawn from a
specimen, now in the British Museum, of a silver coin of the Gauls of
Aquitania. it has been dated (Allen, Celtic Coins, British Museum, 1978) to
the second century before Christ. The
ogam inscription is in ogam consaine and therefore omits the vowels. It reads N-M-S (nomse, coin), and below are the letters L-G, probably the
mint-mark of the city of Lugdunum in Aquitania. A clear photograph of the inscription may be seen on page 35 of
Allen's Celtic Coins. This disposes of the claim that
"ogam was invented in the fourth century AD at the earliest." We shall now deal with the remark that
ogam "is peculiar to the Celts and in particular to the Irish…: the use
of “Celts” here is vague. The bone disk
with an engraved design and ogam inscription, shown in Fig. 178, is one of a
number of similar examples found at the Paleolithic site at Laugerie-Basse,
in the Basque country of the Pyrenees adjacent to the old Pre-Irish (noted as
Celtic) kingdom of Aquitania, from which the previously mentioned coin
derives. This disk has been
identified by archaeologists as "a bead from a necklace, or less
probably, a button." and it has been described as an artifact made by
the cave-dwelling Paleolithic people of Langerie-Basse. These
statements cannot be correct. The
ogam consaine inscription reads in the Basque language S-H-T (šehe-te), which
means, "to serve as money."
More precisely, the standard Diccionario
of Azukue explains that the word refers to what numismatists call a billon
coin of very small value; "billon" means a debased alloy of
silver. Clearly the bone disk is a
Basque imitation of the coinage of Aquitania and can be dated to about the
same period as the piece it simulates: the second century BC. Like many other inscriptions of ancient
Europe-- and America-- it has nothing to do with Ireland, nor does it express
an Ancient Irish tongue. it is
improbable that the engravers of any of these coins were "familiar with
the Latin Language," nor should such a familiarity have any relevance to
the subject. Many other
Iberian (noted as Celtiberian) and Gaulish numismatic examples of ogam
consain can be cited. However, we now
refer to the inscriptions found in North America, written in Iberic script
(like that of the Grave Creek mound) and using Basque or other Iberian
language. In the case of the Iberian
script cut on stones in Pennsylvania, and reported by me as Basque in 1974,
the Basque Encyclopedia now includes
these inscriptions as the earliest recognized Basque writing,.." This is "in contract to American
archaeologists claim that they are marks made by roots of trees or by
plowshares. When Dr. Grigsby first
discovered the Iberian script on some of his artifacts, the signs he found
were precisely the same set of letters that make up the Iberic alphabet, and
which had earlier been found on the grave markers and boundary stones of
Pennsylvania. Asked if these markings
are caused by miniature plows, archaeologists have thus far maintained a
stony silence." [It is worth noting here that before the recent
decipherment of Mayan scripts in Mexico and Central America, American
archeologists steadfastly maintained that there was no "writing" of
any kind in America]. There are
also quite independent and unrelated reasons for thinking that ancient
European voyagers came to America.
They concern the mining of metals. For the past
twenty years leading mining engineers and university metallurgists have been
seeking from archaeologists and explanation of a most baffling mystery in the
history of mining technology. So far
no answer has been found. Around the
northern shore of Lake Superior, and on the adjacent
Isle Royale, there are approximately 5,000 ancient copper mine workings.
In 1953 and 1956 Professor Roy Drier led two
Michigan Mining and Technology expeditions to the sites. Charcoal found at the bases of the ancient
mining pits yielded radiocarbon dates indicating that the mines had been
operated between 2000 BC and 1000 BC.
These dates correspond nearly to the start and the end of the Bronze
Age in northern Europe. The most
conservative estimates by mining engineers show that at least 500 million
pounds of metallic copper were removed over that time span, and there is no
evidence as to what became of it.
Archaeologists have maintained that there was no Bronze Age in
Northern America and that no contacts with the outside world occurred. On the other hand, the mineralogists find themselves
obliged to take a different view: it is impossible, they argue, for so large
a quantity of metal to have vanished through wear and tear. An since no large numbers of copper
artifacts have been recovered from American archaeological sites, they conclude
that the missing metal may have been shipped overseas. Such an opinion, as is obvious, now
becomes entirely reasonable, for the inscriptions of Woden-lithi [at
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada] declare that copper ingots were his primary
targets in coming to Canada. Previous
shippers must have passed the information to the Norse king, since otherwise
he could not have known that copper was available and that a suitable trade
commodity in exchange would be woven fabrics and cordage. Thus the sum
total of evidence from burial sites, from the chance discovery of burial
marker stones and boundary stones, from the other sources mentioned
...[previously], all adds up to a consistent and simple explanation of all
the baffling facts; it is simply this-- European colonists and traders have
been visiting or settling in the Americas for thousands of years, have
introduced their scripts and artifacts and skills, and have exported abroad
American products such as copper. [Please also see Figs. 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 189 & 190]. How Stone Age Language Was Preserved in Bronze Age Petroglyphs
In the
1960's a Swiss Scholar, Dr. Rudolph Engler, drew
attention to the extraordinary similarity existing between the rock carvings
of ships engraved in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age and certain rock
carvings found in North America. Fell
(1982) continues, "Dr. Engler's name and his thought-provoking book Die Sonne als Symbol (The Sun as a
Symbol) are still little known in America, unfortunately. he expressed the opinion that an explanation
for the facts would one day be supplied by epigraphic research. Certain easily recognizable symbols are
found beside the Scandinavian ship engravings, and the identical symbols
occur beside the American ones. When
Engler wrote his book, however, none of the symbols had been deciphered, and
consequently the writing-- for such it appeared to be-- remained unread and
mysterious. We may speculate as to
whether the Scandinavian rock engravings of ships may conceal a message
unperceived by us because of the infantile aspect of the art itself. One way to
examine the matter is to let our mind's eye escape from the trammels of the
age in which we happen to be born, and to take flight in fancy through time and
space, to watch the artists at work (Figs. 191 & 192). Our first
stop is to be on the Baltic seashore at Namforsen, in
the Gulf of Bothnia, in northern Sweden.
As we touch down, a Bronze Age artist has just engraved a
representation of a ten-oared boat, with the crewmen represented as plain
sticklike marks. he now takes up his
gouge and hammers out a bent left arm on each of two facing crewmen. Next, to our surprise, he adds what seems
an utterly irrelevant detail, a stylistic head of a horse suspended in midair
(so it would seem) above the vessel's stern.
Next we take flight southward to the island of Sjaelland,
in Denmark, to watch another artist at work near Engelstrup. he has chosen to decorate a boulder. First he carves a stylized ship, a
twenty-oared vessel. Again the
crewmen are shown like vertical pegs.
he now adds two more men, one at the bow and one suspended above the
other rowers. Each of these two
figures is now given a bent arm. Next
(and this time we are prepared for it) he adds a horse in midair above the
stern. Now we take flight across the
Atlantic to visit one of King Woden-lithi's artists [near Peterborough,
Ontario, Canada]. He, too, has cut a
ship engraving, some 15 feet due east of the main sun figure. He has cut only 6 rowers. He now adds a larger stick figure at the
bow, taking care to bend the forearm.
Last, as we expect him to do, he adds a somewhat misshapen horse,
suspended over the stern. As we watch,
[the Canadian engraver at Peterborough] then walks across the site to a point
that lies about 12 feet southwest of the central sun figure, where other
engravers have begin to lay out the figures of a zodiac. He cuts a four-oared ship. Beside it he engraves a man in the bow and
a very pregnant woman in the stern, and above them he engraves a large
ring-shaped motif. Meanwhile, our
Swedish and Danish artists have been busy.
When we return to Engelstrup we find that the Dane has added a second
ship to his boulder. Beside it, he
has placed two figures, a man and a woman, and between them he has engraved a
very conspicuous ring-shaped object.
As for the Swede, in his remote Bothnian fastness, when we arrive
there we find he too has added a second ship, has carved a man and a pregnant
woman beside it, and over their heads he has placed a ring-shaped design. Now, to an
epigrapher, a sequence such as just described-- and the actual engravings do
exist, at the places named-- can mean only one thing: the artists in each
case were following a formalistic, well-defined system of writing. The scribes of ancient Egypt had similar
procedures. Egyptian
writing depends on the use of the rebus-- a word that
is easy to depict as a picture is used to indicate another word that sounds
the same but that cannot be represented by a picture. Here is the principle, as the Egyptians
developed it. Suppose you want to
write the word man or male.
That is easy, for you can make a little pictograph, a matchstick
figure or a more elaborate one, depicting a man. The reader sees a man, and is expected to read "man,"
as indeed he will. But suppose you
wanted to write, not man, but brother. That is much more difficult, for no matter how accurately you
depict your own or someone else's brother, the average reader (who knows
neither of the persons) will just say "man." How can you make him understand that the
word intended is brother? The Egyptian discovery lies in the fact
that in the Egyptian language the word brother
is pronounced like sen. But in that language there is another,
readily depictable, thing that was also called sen-- namely, a ladle. So
the solution is to draw a pictograph of a man, and then beside it place a
pictograph of a ladle. All that then is needed is to ensure that
you teach your young people to read, and that in turn means teaching them to
recognize in each word a classifier
(or determinant) and a second
element called the phonoglyph
(sound-giver). In the word brother the man picture is the
classifier, telling the reader that the word has something to do with male
human beings, and the ladle picture is the phonoglyph, telling the reader
that the male human has a name that sounds like sen. When
Professor Fell lived in Copenhagen he became acquainted with Icelanders,
whose language has preserved most of the features of Old Norse. They delight in word play and also are
noted for the high proportion of poets in their population. One whom he knew used to invent risqué punning
games to tease some innocent party.
He would first dream up some complicated pun in Danish and then make
me say what appeared to be a harmless statement, the others present waiting
breathless to see what would result.
When Fell knew the words, he would then say, "Faster, say it more
quickly," whereupon the entire room would dissolve in laughter. To Fell’s innocent inquiry he would then
be told that, by saying the words faster, he had made them run together to
form a totally different and usually quite obscene statement: one of those
Old Norse customs for whiling away the long winter nights along the Arctic
Circle. In Polynesia Fell encountered
similar customs, there called riddles and taken very seriously by some
anthropologists whose knowledge of the language was too slight to enable them
to realize the traps they were led into.
Entire articles appear in the Journal of the Polynesian Society in
which the unwary authors have reproduced scores of the most scurrilous
material, thinly disguised as something different by dividing the words in
different places. These so-called
riddles were also a means of passing the long evenings. Also, tribal lore deemed to be too sacred
for ordinary ears can be concealed in complex puns that the uninitiated does
not fully comprehend. With these
experiences in mind, and knowing now as we do that the language spoken by the
Bronze Age engravers of Scandinavia and Ontario is a Nordic language, we can
test whether the inconsequential assemblages of horses in midair, men with
bent arms, and rings gazed upon by male and female matchstick figures may be
written puns, like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The test, of course, is to utter aloud the names of the
depicted objects in sequence. Since the
Danish example carries both of the statements on the same stone, one above
the other, we will use that one. "In
English we have: (reading each line from left to right): English: People, arms bent, and
a horse. A man and a woman at a ring
gaze. Norse: Menneskjor, olna
kviesand'ok hrossr. Ok mann ok kvinna't hring da. Homophone:
Menne kjol-nakvi Suna dagi hrossa, ok man-nokvi natt hrinda. English: Men to the keeled sun-ship
at dawn give praise, and to the moon-ship at her night launching. Thus, the
seemingly childish pictures are readily seen to be not pictures, but
hieroglyphs. They seemed to be
examples of Stone Age writing, poetic and religious, hallowed by centuries of
use before the Bronze Age and carefully preserved intact as historic and
religious expressions of piety from a former age. By treating
the messages of the Bronze Age as literal and childish, we have completely
failed to interpret the true sense they impart. The rock-cut petroglyphs deserve the close attention of
linguists, who may be expected to produce more perfect interpretations than
those that can be offered. Often
linguists are prone to spend so much time splitting hairs over
dictionary-authorized spellings and grammatical niceties that they often
forget that ancient peoples had no dictionaries, no written standards of
spelling, and that the grammar of each hamlet and village was likely to
deviate from that of its neighbors. Who Were The Sea Peoples?
Before going further with the account of Nordic
exploration in the far northern seas we should pause to take note of events
in the Mediterranean world at the onset of the twelfth century BC. These were turbulent times in the southern
lands, where violent attacks by a mysterious group of raiders referred to as
the Sea Peoples laid in ruins the Aegean civilization and even threatened the
very survival of the Egyptian monarchy.
Egypt at this time was ruled by one of the most powerful of the
Pharaohs, Ramesses III, who reigned from 1188 to
1165 BC. Only the
smoke-stained ruins now remain to speak mutely of the onslaught that suddenly
struck down the peaceful trading empire of the Aegean peoples who fell victims
to the raiders from the sea. In Egypt
a stout and effective resistance was made against the pirates, adequate
warning having no doubt reached the Nile Delta when the disasters occurred in the archipelago to the north of
Egypt. As to what happened next, we
are almost wholly dependent upon Egyptian records carved at Medinet Habu to
memorialize the defeat by Ramesses III of the Libyans and Sea Peoples in 1194
and 1191 BC., and a final attack in 1188 BC. by yet one more wave of Sea Peoples, this time not from Libya but from the
east. In the bas-reliefs that depict
the naval battles (Fig. 193), the defeated
Sea Peoples are represented as having a European cast of face. Some of them are shown wearing
hemispherical helmets that carry two recurved upward-directed horns. For other clothing they wear a kilt. Their weapons are swords and spears,
whereas the Egyptian marines are armed with bows and arrows, and are shown
able to attack the invaders with a fusillade before the Sea Peoples could
come near enough to board the Egyptian vessels. According to Ramesses III, the defeated remnants of these
invaders fled westward to Libya. Two centuries later the descendants of the invaders seized
power in Egypt, reigning as the XXII or Libyan dynasty for a span of 200
years. The
suggestion has already been made by other writers that the Sea peoples may
have included Nordic sailors, largely because the monument at Medinet Habu
depicts some of them as men that look like Vikings. Fell expressed a view that the inscriptions have forced upon
him: that it is very probable that
the Sea Peoples included substantial naval detachments from the Baltic region, that their language was a Nordic dialect
of the Indo-European family, that the so-called "Libyan"
alphabet is in fact an alphabet of Nordic, or at least northern European
origin, and that it was taken to Libya by the defeated Sea Peoples who
survived the Battle of the Nile. For some reason the alphabet they
introduced has continued in use throughout subsequent Libyan history, whereas
in its northern homeland it died out, to be replaced by runes. Fell hazarded the guess that the blond
Tuaregs who clung most tenaciously to the "Libyan" alphabet are
probably descended from Nordic immigrants around the time of the Sea Peoples'
invasions. All these proposals may
seem bold inferences, but there seemed
little in the way of plausible alternatives in the light of these new
finds of supposed Libyan inscriptions in Europe. It is, after all, a
question of relative motion. We
thought at first that Libyan voyagers had traveled to Scandinavia, to leave
their script there as a calling card.
It now seems that the script is Nordic, and that Nordic ships and
crews carried it to Libya, where it survived." Recent articles in National
Geographic Magazine, confirm the possibility that Nordic peoples brought
writing to Mediterranean lands in prehistoric times. Barry Fell’s suggestion that Egypt might
have had intense contact with North America is strongly supported by the huge
boats, which were discovered in 1950 adjacent to Khufu’s great pyramid. They were buried between 2589 and 2566
B.C.. One has been restored and it
shows considerable wear as if it had gone on long journeys. Its length is 43.63 meters, width 5.66
meters (see Egyptian
Boat).
This ship was perfectly capable of crossing the Atlantic. The other boats were left intact, awaiting
additional funding to rebuild them as well.
An excellent article about these boats may be found in the April/May
2004 issue of Ancient Egypt Magazine. The Language of Our Bronze Age
Ancestors
The English
language is a member of the Teutonic family of
tongues, to which belong also German and the Scandinavian languages. Until now the oldest examples of Teutonic
language have been short runic texts from about the time of Christ. King
Woden-lithi's written version of his own tongue [at Peterborough, Ontario,
Canada] has given us the first decipherable information on how our ancestors
spoke 4,000 years ago. With the aid
of his American inscription, the fragmentary related inscriptions in the same
alphabet, found in Scandinavia, can now also be deciphered, and they prove to
be the same language as Woden-lithi's, or nearly so. Also, aided by this new information, we
can now begin to solve the late Stone Age hieroglyphic rebus inscriptions. Adding these Neolithic forms to the
alphabetic versions given us by Woden-lithi, one can now list some of the
basic vocabulary of the Bronze Age Teutonic peoples." The list made from the above sources was
provided by Fell (1982) in Table 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e. "Words
inferred from a Neolithic rebus are prefixed with an asterisk (*). Pronunciation.-- King Woden-lithi's language was evidently pronounced with a
strong pervading aspiration. Initial r is probably hr. Two signs for r appear in his alphabet. One of them is apparently to be rendered
as -ar, or -or. The sign for d seems always to occur in words where
Old Norse has a letter that also occurs in Old English; its sound is the th in words like this, then. The letter t appears in both unaspirated and aspirated forms. The aspirated form, here rendered as th, is to be pronounced as th in with. Fell (1982)
noted that several outstanding facts become increasingly apparent from
various epigraphic expeditions. He
stated, "One is that we have greatly underrated the achievements of the
Bronze age peoples of northern Europe.
We have long known, from their conspicuous carvings that constitute
the rock art of the Bronze Age, that the North Sea and the Baltic were the
home waters of fleets of ships. What
we have failed to realize is that those same ships and characteristic Bronze
Age style, are also depicted on the rocks and cliffs of the maritime regions
of eastern North America. And now it
is also apparent that these same matching petroglyphs, on both sides of the
Atlantic, are also accompanied by readable texts cut in ancient scripts that
are likewise found on either side of the Atlantic. What this
means, of course, is that the ancient shipwrights made sound vessels, whose
skippers and crews sailed them across the ocean, thereby fulfilling their
builders' dreams. Flotillas of
ancient Norse, Baltic, and Celtic ships each
summer set their prows to the northwest, to cross the Atlantic, to return
later in the season with cargoes of raw materials furnished by the
Algonquians with whom they traded. To
make these crossings they depended in part upon the sea roads that had been
opened up by the amelioration of the climate at the peak of the Bronze Age
[see Climate] . As oceanographers
have inferred, the polar ice melted then, and the favorable westward-flowing
air and water currents generated by the permanent polar high now became
available to aid in the westward passage.
The return voyage, as always, could be made on the west wind drift, in
the latitude of around 40E-north latitude, as Columbus rediscovered. While these Nordic traders opened up the
northern parts of North America, other sailors from the Mediterranean lands
were doing similar things..., but their outward voyage lay along the path
that Columbus employed, utilizing the westward-blowing trade winds, found at
latitudes below 30E N. Both sets of
navigation, though employing different outward routs, were obliged to use the
same homeward track, that of the west wind drift in middle latitudes. Along this common sea road the sailors of
the two different regions would occasionally meet, thus prompting
intercultural exchanges between the Baltic lands and North Africa. At least
twice since the close of the Stone Age, conditions have favored such
events. The first occurred during the
warm period of the middle Bronze Age which was previously noted. Then the world's climates cooled again,
and the northern route to America became too ice-bound and too dangerous to
attract adventurers in those directions any longer. It remained thus until about AD 700, when once more the earth's
climate ameliorated[see Climate] . Once again the
northern icecap melted and the polar seas could support navigation that made
use of the polar high. Once more
mariners came to northeastern America, this time under a name by which they
are known in history--The Vikings.
Yet, as the inscriptions show, these Vikings were not just Norsemen,
they included as before men from the Baltic lands, Lithuanians and Latvians, as well
as Celts from Ireland and probably also Wales. After AD 1200
the earth grew colder again, the thousand vineyards of William the
Conqueror's England died out, and Normans turned their attention to the south
of Europe to bring in their Malmsey wines, no longer fermented in England,
where no vineyards now survived. The
old routs to America were deserted, and that western land lay ignored by Europe
until the voyage of Columbus once more awakened the cupidity of monarchs who,
by this time, now controlled large populations of Europe. This time the full force of European
exploitation fell upon the Amerindians, and the age of American isolation had
ended. Another
remarkable fact that is now impressing itself upon our minds is that the
ancient Europeans were not barbarians.
They not only spoke in the chief dialects of the Indo-European
tongues, but already by late Neolithic times the Europeans could write. The languages they wrote now prove to have been comprehensible
to us as representing the principal tongues of modern Europe: Teutonic, Baltic, Celtic, and also
Basque. Yet another surprising discovery
is due to Professor Linus Brunner, who announced in 1981 the occurrence of Semitic
vocabulary in the newly identified Rhaetic language of ancient Switzerland. The
heretofore mysterious people, to whom the archeologists have attached such
names as 'Beaker Folk,' 'Bell-beaker People,' and so on, now prove to be
Europeans of our own stocks, speaking-- and writing-- in early variant forms
of languages that we can see as related closely to the classical Teutonic,
Celtic, and other tongues of Europe at the time of the Romans. The inscriptions found on their artifacts
prove this. That it was not
understood before is simply because archeologists have mistaken the writing
for decorative engraving. When a loom
weight has inscribed upon it the word warp,
it is quite obvious that this is a purely practical identification label for
a weaver. Decorative it may be, but
let us not overlook the fact that such a label tells us immediately the
linguistic stock of the person who engraved it. And, of course, it also certifies that the engraver belonged to
a literate society. The same is
true of the engravers of the rock and cliff inscriptions of Scandinavia. When we discover that the 'meaningless'
decorations beside their ship carvings is none other than a readable comment
in Baltic speech, appropriate to the scene depicted, we know at once that the
designer was familiar with the language spoken by the ancestors of the people
who still live along the Baltic coasts today. They were, in short, Balts.
Let us recognize this simple fact, and call them by their proper
names. And when we find very similar,
and similarly lettered, engravings on North American rocks, it is our
obligation to our ancestors to recognize their European origins, and to call
them by their proper names too. Yet another
of the new facts now coming to our attention is the surprising discovery that
words appropriate to the contexts are painted or engraved beside the famous
cavern paintings of the great Aurignacian sites of Europe. These works of art have been attributed to
Paleolithic people of 20,000 years ago, yet we find now that they apparently
used the same words for the animals they painted as did German and French,
Spanish and Basque speakers within historic times. When a German of the Middle Ages called a wild bison a wisent, he was using the same word
that we find written in Baltic script beside one of
the most famous ancient paintings of a bison, that on the roof of the Altamira Cavern. Other paintings in
other caves are similarly accompanied by ogam or Baltic script, rendering the
names of the animals in tongues of the Celtic and Basque families. We do not find such inscriptions beside
paintings of animals that disappeared from Europe during the last
glaciation. Thus the mammoths are not
identified by name (though the Basque word that means "Bogeyman"
appears beside one such mammoth picture).
This seems to mean that the paintings were added in sequence over a
long period of time, and only the latest of the series carry identifications
in written language. Thus it is
probably wrong to date all the parietal art to about 20,000 BC. In proof of
the truth of this contention may be cited the case of the Basque bone disk
"coinage," [mentioned earlier.]
This is obviously a local Pyrenean copy, made by Basques from a silver
model provided by the Celtic coins of Aquitania in the second century before
Christ. We have to correct the dating
assigned by archaeologists, for it is not 20,000 years old, but only 2,000
years of age, and its purpose was not that of a bead or a button, but that of
token coinage. The word engraved on
it is still used in present-day Basque. Thus, the
forthcoming years will doubtless witness more drastic pruning of the
antiquity assigned to some European works of art. They may have been the work of Paleolithic hunters but, if so,
then the Paleolithic way of life as hunters and food-gatherers must have
persisted in some parts of Europe well into the era that is generally called
late Neolithic. In the world today
there are still Stone Age peoples. So
also in Europe in the Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago, there may well have been
pockets of isolated people, living in the Paleolithic manner but acquainted
with the writing systems used by their more civilized neighbors, and applying
it to the labeling of their art work. We have been
slow to recognize the presence of written words in the Celtic, Basque, and
Teutonic tongues beside or on these ancient cave paintings. But since we have begun to read the
inscriptions, the time has come to reconsider the role of linguists in
archaeology.
Have we, perhaps, devoted too much attention to the grammatical
niceties of ancient languages, and not enough to the daily vocabulary of the
simple country people who really constituted the bulk of the population in
classical times? Too many published
papers appear with titles like "On the Use of the Optiative Mood in
Aeolic Greek after the Time of Alcaeus." Many more papers ought to be written under headings such as
"The Vocabulary of Six Greek Graffiti from a Mycenaean Village. Grammar
without vocabulary is useless.
Vocabulary without grammar is decidedly useful. With a slight knowledge, and dreadful pronunciation,
of Berber, Fell was able in North Africa to elicit friendship and valuable
aid during his North Africa work.
Elegant Arabic, however literary and grammatical, would not have
availed so well as a few uttered words of Berber that Fell had recognized as
belonging to the Indo-European vocabulary of ancient Europe. The white Berbers have no recollection of
their ancestors' having come from Europe, yet their anatomy declares them to
be Europoids. Their vocabulary also
yields European roots, whereas their grammar tells us nothing about the
origin of their language. During
Norman times the English tongue was shorn of nearly all its characteristic
Teutonic grammar, and instead a simplified Anglo-French set of grammatical
rules took its place. On the other
hand, the vocabulary retained most of the old Saxon roots, and added much
French and Latin to them. To modern
students from Asia, English seems to be (as one of them described it to me)
"a kind of French." His
ideas were based on shared vocabulary and such grammatical features as the
use by modern English of the French plural in a terminal -s, almost all the old Teutonic plurals
in -n having disappeared, except in
rural dialects. A farmer still makes kine the plural of cow, but the city dweller does
not. So it is from the farmers and
other village folk that we can get best information on the older forms of
European languages. This is a
general rule. When Sir henry
Rawlinson set about the-- seemingly hopeless-- task of deciphering the
cliff-cut cuneiform inscriptions of Behistun [Iran], he made the basic
premise that the tongue of the local Iranian villagers might be the closest
he could find to the language of the ancient inscription cut by Darius. Jus as Champollion used Coptic to guide
him into ancient Egyptian, so also Rawlinson used the local idioms of
Behistun itself. These approaches,
which sound naive, are in fact well founded on reason, and they produced
results. It is
expected that a younger generation of linguists will arise from our hidebound
universities, and turn once more, as Jakob Grimm did a century ago, to the
village communities of Europe. Let
them collect the old vocabulary and discover whatever words they can, however
vulgar they may seem to the city ear.
it is from these ancient words that we shall garner the most useful
guides to the speech of our ancestors 5,000 years ago. Much that Julius Pokorny has done, by way
of extracting the "highest common factor" from each set of related
Indo-European words, has helped in reading the old inscriptions. He and his predecessors and his
successors, such as Linus Brunner and Imanol Agiŕe, are worthy explorers
of the tongues of our ancestors. The
inscribed artifacts of Stone Age people also bear information that has been
overlooked. It is not a
random harvest, but one already partly organized. The harvest is ripe for the gathering, and now is the time to
bring it in. Agiŕe, Imanol. Vinculos
de la Lengua Vasca Allen. Derek 1978.
An Introduction to Celtic Coins. British Museum Publ., London. 80 p. de Azukue's , Resurrección María. 1969.
Diccionario
Vasco-Español-Frances, Bilbao de Retana , José María Martín. 1966.
Gran Enciclopedia Vasca. ,
Bilbao [Editorial La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca] Engler, H. Rudolf. 1962. Die Sonne als Symbol; der Schlüssel zu
den Mysterien. Küsnacht, Helianthus-Verlag. 302 p. illus. 26 cm. Epigraphic Society's
Occasional Publications. 1981. Epigraphy Confrontation in America Fell, Barry. 1974.
Life, Space and Time: A course
in Environmental Biology. Harper
& Row, NY. 417 p. Fell, Barry. 1974.
An Introduction to Polynesian
Epigraphy with Special Report on the Moanalla Stele known as Pohaku
kaluahine.
Polynesian Epigraphic Soc. Fell, Barry. 1976.
America BC. Ancient Settlers in the New World. Pocket Books, NY. 312 p. Fell, Barry. 1982.
Bronze Age America. Little, Brown and Co., Boston,
Toronto. 304 p. Fell, Barry. 1983.
Saga America. A Startling New Theory on the Old World
Settlement of America before Columbus. Time Book, NY. 392 p. Fell, Barry. 1985.
Ancient Punctuation and the Los Lunas text. The Epigraphic Society.
p. 35-43. Fell, Barry. 1989.
America BC: Ancient Settlers in the New World. Pocket Books, NY. (revised ed.) Geir, T. Zoega. 1932.
English-Icelandic Dictionary. Bokaverslun Sigurdar Kristjanssnar,
Reykjavik. 712 p. Gran Enciclopedia
Vasca Heizer, R. F. & M. A. Baumhoff. 1962. Prehistoric
Rock Art of Nevada and Eastern California. Univ. of Calif. Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. 412 p. Oxford Dictionary of Old Icelandic Vastokas, Joan M.
& Romas. 1973. Sacred Art of the Algonkians: A study of
the Peterborough Petroglyphs. Mansard Press. 1694 p. Vastokas, Joan
M. 1984. Native and European Art
in Ontario 5000 BC to 867 AD.
Toronto, Canada, and Gallery of Ontario. 48 p. Zoega's, Geir
T. 1910. Dictionary of Old
Icelandic. Oxford University
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