File: <fellogam.htm> Archeology Index <American Archeology> <Migrations Index> <Bronze Age Index> <Home>
Additional Websites and #2 ] <Main Categories of Fell 1982>
---- Please CLICK on numbered Figures to view:
|
[Contacts] The Bonze Age
alphabets enable an examination of the famous Bronze Age sites where rock-cut
inscriptions are preserved (Fell 1982).
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) who discussed the significance of this site is reviewed as
follows (some terminology updated): Now examine the
fernlike inscription on the lower part of the rock face, beneath some
circular carvings. You will have
little difficulty in recognizing this as ogam consain, and that the letters
are as shown on Fig 3. They spell K-UI-G-L, which, as all Nordic-
and German-speaking readers will immediately recognize, is just an archaic
way of spelling the general Teutonic root that means a ball or globe. Glance now to the upper right, where,
beside the same circular images, we now find a series of engraved dots that
match letters in the Tifinag alphabet.
The letters are, as shown in Fig. 4, K-G-L--,
again, just an archaic rendering of the same word, this time in a different
alphabet. There are more of the
Tifinag letters. Look at the chariot
wheels ... in Fig.
5. Beneath
them are letters that spell W-H-L-A, obviously an archaic spelling of the Old
Norse word for wheel. Farther to the
right we find a Tifinag word spelling K-L.
Now the writer of that last word may have been an ancient Swede,
already casting out from his pronunciation of kugl that internal g, for
whereas Danes and Germans retain the internal consonant, the Swedes now spell
and pronounce kugl as kula. But, you say, there is not supposed
to be any writing at all on these Bronze Age monuments! Well, that is not now my opinion, and I
suspect it is beginning to occur to you 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, whom I now invite to join us. As can be seen, the letters K-GH occur at
the beginning of the first line, too, which also is to be read from the left
to right, just as in the Swedish example.
Reference to any Old Norse or Old Icelandic dictionary will disclose
that kuggr, often anglicized in Viking times as cog, is an Old Norse word
meaning a seagoing trading ship. On
the Swedish example the next word, H-WL, can readily be recognized, since it
still occurs in all Nordic tongues, as meaning whale, or, in the older sense,
any sea monster or leviathan. Thus
the Swedish example is telling us that the monument is dedicated to The
seagoing ship Leviathan. As for the Canadian examples, merely note that kuggr is only
one of several Old Norse words for ships that we find represented by Tifinag
letters beside carvings of Bronze Age ships. Returning to
Sweden, we now visit at Backa, Brastad, another site,
considered by Swedish archaeologists, to be Neolithic (around 2000 BC). The word baca does not occur in modern
speech, but in Old Norse it meant, according to my 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, I shall use here
the terms Nordic and Ancient Nordic for the language that is
represented in these Bronze Age inscriptions. it is my 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 [section]. 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
–Norse—(reported as Celtic) school inscriptions from British Columbia in my
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 Tifnag texts, from
which the vowels, of course, are usually lacking, I hve used as my reference
the known vocabulary of Old Norse and Old Icelandic. However, in many cases dialects such as
Old English or Old High German, could equally well be used as the reference
guide, with the same translation resulting, and with little more than the
substituted vowels to distinguish the various dialects. Since the vowels are lacking we are left
without any certain indication as to which of the Old Teutonic tongues is the
closest to the speech of these ancient Nordic people, and it is possible that
all are equally related, as I suggest above.
But to provide a uniform nominal vocabulary I select Old Norse or Old
Icelandic as the base. The Language of The Bronze Age People The English
language is a member of the Teutonic family of
tongues, to which belong also German and the Scandinavian languages. Until now the oldest examples of Teutonic
language have been short runic texts from about the time of Christ. King Woden-lithi's
written version of his own tongue [at Peterborough, Ontario, Canada] has
given us the first decipherable information on how our ancestors spoke 4,000
years ago. With the aid of his
American inscription, the fragmentary related inscriptions in the same
alphabet, found in Scandinavia, can now also be deciphered, and they prove to
be the same language as Woden-lithi's, or nearly so. Also, aided by this new information, we
can now begin to solve the late Stone Age hieroglyphic rebus
inscriptions. Adding these Neolithic
forms to the alphabetic versions given us by Woden-lithi, one can now list
some of the basic vocabulary of the Bronze Age Teutonic peoples. The list made from the above sources was
provided by Fell (1982) in Table 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e. Words
inferred from a Neolithic rebus are prefixed with an asterisk (*). Pronunciation.--
King Woden-lithi's language was evidently pronounced with a strong pervading
aspiration. Initial r is probably hr. Two signs for r appear in his
alphabet. One of them is apparently
to be rendered as -ar, or -or. The
sign for d seems always to occur in words where Old Norse has, a letter that
also occurs in Old English; its sound is the th in words like this, then. The letter t appears in both unaspirated
and aspirated forms. The aspirated
form, here rendered as th, is to be pronounced as th in with. Utah,
USA = http://www.naturalfrequency.net/Ogham.htm West Virginia, USA = http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/bronze/westva.htm Cuba = http://www.rupestreweb.info/numeros.html Paraguay
= http://users.telenet.be/kenneshugo/Vikingos%20en%20America.htm http://users.telenet.be/kenneshugo/ITA%20LETRA%20WORKGROUP.htm http://www.templeparaguay.org/ILWF/Investigaciones/index.htm (5
windows) http://users.telenet.be/kenneshugo/Runes%20Polilla.htm |