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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. The invaders took
refuge in Libya, and it is suspected that the Old Norse runes went with them, and survived as
the Tifinag. During Fell’s work in
North Africa he met Berbers who had no tradition of the origin but who were
obviously Europoid, with fair hair, blue, gray, or hazel eyes, and typical
European features. And as for how European skippers
could have reached the Americas in the early Bronze Age, their own spokesman,
King Woden-lithi himself, may be left to handle that question. he does so in the words he had
inscribed on limestone in Canada
3,500 years ago, during the five months he spent in Ontario. And so for why Europe chose to forget
about America, that is a matter primarily for European historians to explain,
but it should be pointed out that the earth's climate became colder at the
end of the Bronze Age, when the north polar icecap came into being [see Climate]. Sailing
westward by the northern route became hazardous until the amelioration of
climate that took place just before the onset of the Viking period. Perhaps, when the study of rock
inscriptions in Scandinavia is pursued more widely, new evidence may be
discovered that could help to fill in some of the missing pieces of the
record of humans upon the high seas.
The increasing frigidity of the North Atlantic as the warm Bronze Age
came to an end would not have been the only factor that might have tended to
discourage transatlantic trading. There were also changes occurring in
the pattern of commerce in Europe, as the Bronze Age advanced, and these,
combined with gradual exhaustion of available upper-level deposits of
metallic copper in Canada, probably turned the attention of Scandinavian
skippers more to the south and less to the remote lands across the Atlantic. By 1200 BC, when the Scandinavian
Bronze Age was reaching its peak, traders from the Carthaginian
settlements in Spain and Tunisia were reaching the Baltic lands. They brought with them another alphabet, the
Iberian, itself a development of the Phoenician way of writing. .....Scandinavian inscriptions now assume
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 sue 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 Norsemen 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 syllabary,
and when Woden-lithi set sail for home, an Ojibwa scribe cut a short comment
into the rock at the site, using the ancient Basque script and a form of
Algonquian still comprehensible today, despite the lapse of time. Fell (1982) then continued with
evidence supporting such sweeping claims.
He suggested, "The primary physical evidence comprises a series
of inscriptions cut in the Tifinag and ogam consaine alphabets, using an
early form of the Norse tongue, scattered around the outer margins of the
petroglyph site at Peterborough [Ontario, Canada] (Fig. 18 & Fig 19). Except for the central sun god and
moon-goddess figures and certain astronomical axes cut across the site, the
numerous inscriptions are the work of later Algonquian artists, who used King
Woden-lithi's inscription as a model for their own, more conspicuous,
carvings. The site has been since
1972 under official government protection, and instructions for reaching it
are given by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources in various guide
booklets and pamphlets available to the general public. Readers of this book will find most
helpful the ministry's book Petroglyphs
Provincial Park, Master Plan; also valuable for its treatment of the Algonquian art at
the site is the work by Joan M. and Romas K. Vastokas entitled
Sacred Art of the Algonkians (Mansard Press, 1973). The latter work is meticulous in the
accurate portrayal of the inscriptions, in their present eroded state, though
the authors did not then recognize the inscribed alphabets or record them as
such. The important fact is that
professional anthropologists such as the Vastokas team found and recorded the
inscriptions and reported that they must date back to a period before the
historical occupation of the region by the Hurons and
later by Iroquois; in other words, the inscriptions
could not be modern features, and must date back to the era of Algonquian
occupation, which came to an en some five centuries ago. Joan and Romas Vastokas recognized
apparent Scandinavian and Bronze Age features in the art style. They pointed out that the ships depicted
in the inscription are shown in the European manner, with animal figure heads
and stern tailpieces, features totally unknown to Algonquian, or indeed in
any American Indian, art. They, and
other archaeologists, noticed the strange similarities of the central sun-god
figure. and associated motifs to corresponding solar deities of Europe,
especially the Bronze Age petroglyphs of Scandinavia. Other characteristic Scandinavian features
that their photographs and drawings record are such elements of 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 Norsemen), and Gungnir, the spear of Woden....., both of which were imitated
many times over by the Algonquian artists who later occupied the site. Thus, the purely objective reports made by
the Vastokases who sought only to record what they discovered, without
attaching any interpretation other than that appropriate for Algonquian art,
have an added value and importance for us now, for they observed the material
as it was uncovered from the soil and placed it on permanent record in their
photographs, charts, and descriptions.
As a result of the initial discoveries, the whole site was set aside
as a public part and protected by an enclosure. Thus, the primary evidence still
exists and is open for public inspection under circumstances that prevent the
possible vandalization of the site.
The only disturbing feature is that, since the inscriptions were
exposed to the air, after removal of the covering soil that had protected
them, the action of frost and acid rain has caused a
gradual deterioration of the surface of the
limestone. Unless steps are taken to
impregnate the bedrock with a stabilizer, such as silicone, the precious
record may soon melt away into unreadable markings, as part indeed already
had before the site had been found. The actual discovery should be noted
here. It occurred on May 12, 1954,
and was made by three geologists, Ernest Craig, Charles Phipps, and Everitt Davis,
in the course of fieldwork on mining claims.
The following day, "Nick" Nickels, a photographer-journalist
of the Peterborough Examiner, visited the site, and so began the first modern records
of it. Paul Sweetman
of the University of Toronto undertook the first research at the site in July
1954, recording nearly a hundred petroglyphs. Sweetman's report indicated a possible age as great as 3,500
years or as young as 400 years. His
upper limit, 3,500 years, is in agreement with the epigraphic evidence as
given in this book. Tens of thousands
of visitors now come to the site each year, using the access road and other
facilities that have been erected for their benefit. it has become a major center of
archaeological interest for the whole of North America, and all Americans are
grateful to the Canadian authorities for having seen to it that the ancient
petroglyphs are protected yet open to all visitors. The Vastokases, like most
archaeologists in North America, felt obliged to explain all American
petroglyphs as being the work of native Amerindian artists. Despite their, and others' perception of
the similarities to Scandinavian petro9glyphs of the Bronze Age, the idea that
any connection might have existed between North America and Scandinavia in
the Bronze Age, some 3,500 years ago, seemed preposterous. So they were faced with remarkable
parallels, yet they elected to explain them as no more than chance
similarities brought about by a shamanistic view of the sky as a kind of sea
on which the sun and the moon sailed their ships to cross the heavens each
day. In treating the inscriptions in this
way, they were following the example of other distinguished anthropologists
and archaeologists who had investigated North American petroglyphs. The leading researcher during the last
several decades had been Professor Robert Heizer of
the University of California. hew was
vehement in his rejection of all theories that America had been visited in
pre-Columbian times by voyagers from Europe, Africa, or elsewhere, and he
chose to view all American petroglyphs as the products of Amerindians. He did take account of age-determination
techniques, such as those dependent on carbon-dating of materials found in
caves where petroglyphs occur and the evidence provided by the oxidation of
rocks, especially in dry climates such as eastern California, Nevada, and
Arizona. These methods enabled Heizer
to set dates of up to five thousand years ago for some petroglyphs. As for me, at the time when the Ontario
petroglyphs were discovered, Fell had just completed a comprehensive
Scandinavian journey and had visited many of the famous inscriptions of Sweden
and Denmark, though he was still a long way from recognizing the Tifinag
alphabet at any Bronze Age petroglyph site beyond the shores of North Africa. Fell’s subsequent work on Tifinag led
to the gradual decipherment of the ancient language of Libya and, after
various Libyan scholars visited me at Harvard, Fell was invited to lecture on
the Tifinag inscriptions at the universities of Tripoli and Benghazi. Just before leaving for North Africa in
1977, Fell had received from Otto Devitt the first of
what were to be a continuing series of photographs he made for me of the
petroglyphs at Peterborough. Although
he could see that the site included Tifinag letters, the words they formed
seemed to have no discernible connection with the language of ancient Libya,
and he was forced to put the slides aside while undertaking other
assignments. In the interim Fell read some of
Heizer's reports on the petroglyphs of eastern California and Nevada, and
recognized that they included Tifinag and Kufi (early Arabic). A particularly striking case is the
petroglyph in Owens Valley, California, that depicts
the entire zodiac, in the form it had before the third century BC, together
with a Kufi inscription explaining that the New Year is determined at the
time of the vernal equinox, when the sun enters the constellation of the
Ram. One of Dr. Fell’s former Harvard students, Dr. Jon Polansky,
was now doing research at Berkeley, and he made the acquaintance of Professor
Heizer and showed him the decipherment Fell had done on his Owens Valley
petroglyphs. As a consequence
Professor Heizer invited me to visit him; this came about in May 1979. We became friends and, putting aside his
former opposition to the notion of pre-Columbian visitors, Bob Heizer now
carefully checked each element of the decipherment and confirmed that Fell
had rendered his original published diagrams correctly tin the version in
which In inserted the sound values of the Kufi signs. We planned a joint publication, but
illness prevented him from accompanying me into the desert that year. Instead, he arranged for one of his former
Berkeley students, Dr. Christopher Corson, to
take me to some of the inscription areas.
Dr. Corson, an archaeologist in the Bureau of Land Management, ahs the
best knowledge of petroglyph sites in northern California and northwest
Nevada. He led a party that included
John Williams, Jon Polansky, and me, together with Wayne and Betty Struble
and their son Peter. Bob Heizer
planned to take part in Fell’s next field trip, but to his great regret he
passed away, struck down by the illness that had already prevented his
participation in the 1979 fieldwork.
Fell was obliged to publish the Owens Valley zodiac without the
benefit of his contribution, though the illustrations of the paper had been
checked by him for accuracy and had his approval. Dr. Heizer's contribution to American
petroglyph studies had been immense, and Fell’s colleagues and he knew that a
significant point had been reached when Heizer recognized the true nature of
the Owens Valley zodiac and opened his mind to a new view of American
prehistory in which pre-Columbian visitors and colonists would now play a
role. Heizer, an archeologist and
anthropologist, filled an intermediate position between those archeologists
who devote their research to excavation of ancient sites and epigraphers,
those linguists who give their energies to the decipherment of ancient
inscriptions. By 1979, the same season in which
Heizer and Fell had begun to influence each other, the epigraphers of Europe
had already begun to analyze by work on ancient inscriptions in America, and
soon authoritative publications began to appear, giving strong support and
conformation. Professor Pennar Davies,
a leading Welsh scholar, and in America, Professor Sanford Etheridge, editor
of Gaeltacht (an Irish-language publication), had both written in
support of Fell’s finding ogam inscriptions in America. In Spain, the leading Basque scholar, Dr. Imanol Agiŕe, advised me that he too confirmed Fell’s
reports on Basque inscriptions in Pennsylvania, dating from about the ninth
century before Christ. In 1980 the
volume he contributed to the Gran Enciclopedia Vasca (Great Basque Encyclopedia) contained
letter-by-letter analyses of Fell’s papers, and in a technical paper
published in 1982 Agíre acknowledged that his decipherment of the ancient
Basque syllabary was correct. These
and other published papers, such as those of the Swiss linguist Professor Linus Brunner, provided competent scholarly approval of
our American studies on the alphabets and syllabaries that are represented at
the site in Peterborough. Their
opinions, therefore, together with the detailed analyses that they have
published, must be taken into account when some archaeologists, both in
America and Britain, attempt to discredit the research on American
inscriptions. The claims of the
latter that epigraphers in America are deluded by forgeries, or even forge
the alleged inscriptions themselves, have to be dismissed as ignorant remarks
made without personal knowledge of the scripts or the language involved, and
generally without any knowledge of the sites at which the inscriptions occur. From the information given herein it
is obvious that the petroglyphs at Peterborough cannot be forgeries, and that
they are ancient. From the
information given previously and those that follow, it is easy for any person
who so desires to check the statements and conclusions, and as in previous
books that Fell has written. Only by
such methods can we eventually persuade Americans to realize that American
history extends far into the past, and that America and Europe interacted
through trade and cultural contact for over three thousand years before
Columbus made his first voyage. Since Fell’s first book on ancient
voyages to America, some important advances have been made to archaeological
research bearing out that topic. In
New England James P. Whittall and members of the
Early Sites Research Society have discovered and excavated a site (a disk
barrow) that was first occupied seven thousand years ago. Some of the skeletons show the
characteristics of Europeans, yet their age by carbon dating is at least
1,600 years. One of the skulls
matches closely the skulls of the ancient Irish. These facts have been determined by an anthropologist,
Professor Albert Casey, whose research has been
devoted to skull and bone characteristics of Old World peoples. His computer is programmed to recognize
Old World characteristics in New World skulls not being discovered. The tumuli of northeastern America show
great similarities to those of Europe.
The radiocarbon dates indicate similar ranges to time. The artifacts excavated from American
burial sites, sometimes in actual contact with the skeletons of their
presumed former owners, have been discovered in some cases to have
inscriptions carved upon them, in ogam and Basque script; to Dr. William P. Grigsby we owe this observation, based on
his own extensive collections of artifacts from the southeastern states. We are faced, therefore, with what
amounts to conclusive evidence that the artifacts (including written
inscriptions) of European peoples of the Bronze Age are found at American
archaeological sites, and with these artifacts skeletons are occasionally
found that conform to Europoid criteria.
The recognition and confirmation of the inscriptions are due to
epigraphers who have published their findings and who, in most cases, teach
courses in linguistics or epigraphy at reputable universities. Thus, whether or not we can comprehend the
sailing techniques of Bronze Age peoples, the fact seems inescapable that
Bronze Age Europeans reached North America.
Fell’s personal view was that the mild climate of the Bronze Age
permitted navigation to take advantage of the westward-flowing currents and
westward-blowing winds of the polar regions, and thus made the natural
northern route to North America much easier to use than is the case today,
when polar ice intrudes and savage weather occurs [see Climate] . Fell had
sailed that route and appreciated its discomforts. They would have been much less severe in the Bronze Age, while
the attraction of North America for Scandinavian skippers would have been
much enhanced by the availability of copper in metallic form, at a time when
Europe was demanding copper for bronze alloys on a
larger scale than ever before or since...... [ Continue with <bronze4.htm> ] |