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EUROPEAN BRONZE AGE
VISITORS IN AMERICA1/ Summary of
Discoveries of Dr. Barry & René Fell [Contacts]
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Credits Citations Dedication Summary
of Contents Introduction
As of
January 2020 there have been few 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 B.C. 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 Norse 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 attempted 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 2005 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 (please refer to Nyland’s
accounts). 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,
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. Edo Nyland has examined
the Peterborough petroglyphs and
especially what Barry Fell considered Ogam, but he failed to see Ogam writing
in it. Nyland considered that Fell took some isolated characters that look
like Ogam, then assigned English letters to it, but none are connected into a
sentence. If one looks at the Ogam inscriptions that Nyland works with, you
see that they form a series of connected characters, a lineup of them, but
that's not what Fell found.. Furthermore, Nyland thought that Fell was using
Gaelic to translate but Gaelic did not exist until about 700 AD. The early
Gnostics used Basque exclusively. Nyland wishes that he could be more
positive about Fell's work. As far as he can see his true strength is in
transliteration, not translation.
Indeed, Fell may have believed he was viewing an early form of Ogam
when indeed it was an early form of Norse. Regardless of the terminology, Fell’s translations appear to be
accurate, as indeed Nyland accepted. According to
Fell, 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 referred to as Celts—see Celts). They were 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 Norsemen 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). As of
2005, we have come to recognize the ancient language as Saharan
from which all other Indo-European languages were derived. The
following text reconsiders the detailed account by Professor Barry Fell in
Bronze Age America, 1982,.with new knowledge accumulated since its
publication. 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 Norse- 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 <= Saharan?> 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 <= Saharan?> 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 Norse 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 <= Saharan?>
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 Norse and Ancient Norse 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norse 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 (See Nyland’s
account). The invaders took
refuge in Libya, and it is suspected that the Old Norse <= Saharan?> 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 humans upon the high seas. The increasing frigidity of the North Atlantic as the warm
Bronze Age ended 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 Norsemen 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 Norse 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 Norseman 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 Norsemen 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
syllabify. 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 (See Nyland’s
account) 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 end some
five centuries before 2017. 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 Norsemen mythology as the maiming of the god of war by the Fenrir
wolf....., the conspicuous short-handled hammer, Mjolnir, of Thunor (Thor of
the ), 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. He 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.
Consequently 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 humans were 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 humans 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 humans 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 humans 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 humans, at least
until about 40,000 BC. As to what
kinds of humans came next 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 Norse 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 <= Saharan?>,
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 Norsemen 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 not a Berber invention-- instead it is Norse-- 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 or Scandinavian,
so we can refer to them collectively as Norsemen. Their descendants today
not only live in northern Europe but also have spread across the world. Most people in North America now speak a
tongue directly descended from the ancient Norsemen of the Bronze Age. Although
short inscriptions in the Ancient Norse alphabet have recently been recognized in
Scandinavia, that discovery stemmed from the more significant one of Ancient Norse engraved on
North American rock. Thus North
America has now become custodian of the oldest and most precious of the
ancient records of the Norsemen 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 Bronze Age inherited some of the signs of their alphabet from their
Neolithic predecessors, who also spoke a Norse 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 Norse names of the sun. The b symbol is clearly
the Old Norse 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-Norse), 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 Norse 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norse 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 Norsemen tribes of the Rhineland. Although
Woden-lithi's site at Peterborough is the first recognizable Norsemen Bronze Age site to be discovered in
America, it now appears that there were other visitors from the Norsemen 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 Norse 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 is that when the Norsemen 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. Such would have occurred 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 Norse language <= Saharan?> 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 <= Saharan?>,
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 Norsemen 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 <= Saharan?> 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen) 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 Norsemen 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 Norse 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 Norsemen 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). Religion 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 Norse 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen settlements in Canada may have been
the Algonquians. For, as an
inscription cut on Woden-lithi's site shows, the actions of the Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen recognized a sky god who was named for thunder: Taranis in ancient
Irish, Thunor or Thor in Norse. 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 Norsemen 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 die. 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 dwarf’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 Norsemen visitors or settlers. Tsiw Mighty-in-Battle
In
Anglo-Saxon and Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen origin, and consequently he was
baffled by what appeared to be Norsemen 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 inscribed in Norse. The inscription shows
that axes of this type were awarded as marks of honor by Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 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 Norse, allied to Old Norse <= Saharan?>.
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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen, 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 Norsemen 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. Twilight of The Gods -- Giants and Monsters
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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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. Commerce
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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen 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 Norsemen, 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 <= Saharan?> 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. Archaeologists have
identified this disk 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 Norseman 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 Norse 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?
(See Edo
Nyland’s account). Before going further with the account of Norsemen 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. Other writers
have already made the suggestion that the Sea Peoples may have included Norsemen 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 Norse dialect of the Indo-European family, that the so-called "Libyan" alphabet is in fact an alphabet of Norsemen, 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 Norsemen 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 Norse, and that Norsemen ships and crews carried it to Libya,
where it survived." Recent
articles in National Geographic Magazine, confirm the possibility that Norsemen 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 (*).
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 Norsemen, and Baltic 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 Norsemen 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 now impresses 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, 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 ka luahine. 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.
Times 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 Press |
