File <bronze9.htm> <Migrations
Index> <Bronze Age
Index> <Archeology
Index> <Home>
Educational Material:
Quote Cited References
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 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 Norse, 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. [ Continue with <bronze10.htm> ] |