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Seems bizzar that the concentration of celts is in western Europe. Yet some theorize that celts migrated there from the east? Maybe some did. Maybe there was a prior people already in west Europe then the celts come along and claim it for themselves. Or maybe the celts are the Atlanteans that migrated eastward mixing and mingling losing their identity becoming whomever they are told they are? Maybe Celts are a new name given to a previous people time dependant?
Celtic Languages
https://stairnaheireann.net/2021/02/02/celtic-languages/
‘Celtic’ is a linguistic term (pronounced with a hard ‘c’) which describes a group of languages nowadays represented by Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx, which belong to the ‘q’ Celtic group, and Welsh, Breton and Cornish, which make up the ‘p’ Celtic group.
The ‘q’ Celts could not pronounce ‘p’ and so either dropped it completely (pater in Latin, meaning ‘father’, is athair in modern Irish) or changed it to a ‘q’ type sound, thus purpura in Latin, meaning ‘purple’, is corcora in Irish.
Speakers of Irish can understand Scots Gaelic without much difficulty, but will not be able to understand Welsh or Breton at all, as the two groups of languages have been developing separately for over 2,000 years.
The Celtic insular languages are mostly those spoken on the islands, typically Britain, Ireland, Man and part of France. The Insular languages are divided into two branches, the Goidelic and the Brythonic. Manx is a form of Gaelic spoken on the Isle of Man. The last native speaker of Manx died in 1974, but many are learning the language today, and recordings exist of native speakers. There are many native speakers of both Irish and Scottish Gaelic today, not only in Ireland and Scotland, but also in Nova Scotia, in Canada. Language became central to the culture of the Irish, much more so than other Celtic races. It was, and is, a source of great pride and identity.
Modern Ireland has only four provinces, Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connacht. Meath was the fifth and cuige, the Irish word for province, retains the tradition – cuig means five.
The Celts are not the original Native Tribes of the British Isles. The Celts migrated there. Their origins are controversial.
Celts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts
The etymology of the term Keltoi is unclear. Possible roots include Indo-European *kʲel 'to hide' (present also in Old Irish ceilid), IE *kʲel 'to heat' or *kel 'to impel'. Several authors have supposed it to be Celtic in origin, while others view it as a name coined by Greeks. Linguist Patrizia De Bernardo Stempel falls in the latter group, and suggests the meaning "the tall ones". In the 1st century BC, Julius Caesar reported that the people known to the Romans as Gauls (Latin: Galli) called themselves Celts, which suggests that even if the name Keltoi was bestowed by the Greeks, it had been adopted to some extent as a collective name by the tribes of Gaul....
The exact geographic spread of the ancient Celts is also disputed ... In the first century BC Julius Caesar reported that the people known to the Romans as Gauls (Galli) called themselves Celts ... Latin Gallus (pl. Galli) might stem from a Celtic ethnic or tribal name originally ... Its root may be the Common Celtic *galno, meaning “power, strength”, hence Old Irish gal “boldness, ferocity” and Welsh gallu “to be able, power”. ...Classical writers did not apply the terms Κελτοί or "Celtae" to the inhabitants of Britain or Ireland, which has led to some scholars preferring not to use the term for the Iron Age inhabitants of those islands. ... The English form Gaul (first recorded in the 17th century) and Gaulish come from the French Gaule and Gaulois, a borrowing from Frankish *Walholant, "Land of foreigners or Romans" ...Volcae, a Celtic tribe who lived first in the South of Germany and emigrated then to Gaul.... Earlier theories held that these similarities suggest a common racial origin for the various Celtic peoples, but more recent theories hold that they reflect a common cultural and language heritage more than a genetic one....The Romans knew the Celts then living in what became present-day France as Gauls. ...the "arrival" of Celtic culture in Britain (via an invasion model) to the 6th century BC ...The native peoples under Roman rule became Romanised and keen to adopt Roman ways.... Slavery, as practised by the Celts, was very likely similar to the better documented practice in ancient Greece and Rome. Slaves were acquired from war, raids, and penal and debt servitude....
Physical Trait: According to Diodorus Siculus: The Gauls are tall of body with rippling muscles and white of skin and their hair is blond, and not only naturally so for they also make it their practice by artificial means to increase the distinguishing colour which nature has given it. For they are always washing their hair in limewater and they pull it back from the forehead to the nape of the neck, with the result that their appearance is like that of Satyrs and Pans since the treatment of their hair makes it so heavy and coarse that it differs in no respect from the mane of horses. Some of them shave the beard but others let it grow a little; and the nobles shave their cheeks but they let the moustache grow until it covers the mouth. ...
The Celts fought naked, ...Celts had a reputation as head hunters. ... Diodorus Siculus, in his 1st-century History had this to say about Celtic head-hunting: They cut off the heads of enemies slain in battle and attach them to the necks of their horses. The blood-stained spoils they hand over to their attendants and striking up a paean and singing a song of victory; and they nail up these first fruits upon their houses, just as do those who lay low wild animals in certain kinds of hunting. They embalm in cedar oil the heads of the most distinguished enemies, and preserve them carefully in a chest, and display them with pride to strangers
Celts
In antiquity writers did not describe tribes in ancient Britain and Ireland as Celts, although they have acquired that label in modern times and some Celtic languages or their derivatives are still spoken there, as a form of Celtic still is in the Brittany region of northern France. The religion of the Celts, led by a priesthood known as the Druids, ...The migration of various Celtic tribes in order to flee wars – they were attacked in Gaul by Julius Caesar in the 1st century BCE and by the Germanic tribes ...
The ancient Celts were various population groups living in several parts of Europe north of the Mediterranean region from the Late Bronze Age onwards. Given the name Celt by ancient writers, these tribes often migrated and so eventually occupied territories from Portugal to Turkey. Although diverse tribes the ancient Celts spoke the same language and maintained the same artistic tradition which is characterised by the use of idiosyncratic flowing lines and forms. Celtic languages are still spoken today in parts of the British Isles and northern France. Ancient writers gave the name Celts to various population groups living across central Europe inland from the Mediterranean coastal areas. Most scholars agree that the Celtic culture first appeared in the Late Bronze Age in the area of the upper Danube sometime around the 13th century BCE. ...
The migration of various Celtic tribes in order to flee wars meant that eventually they occupied Territory from the Iberian peninsula to Turkey.... In antiquity writers did not describe tribes in ancient Britain and Ireland as Celts, although they have acquired that label in modern times and some Celtic languages or their derivatives are still spoken there,...
Celtic armies first came to the attention of historians when the Gauls, led by their king Bran (Brennus), sacked Rome in 390 BCE, and again in 279 BCE when they looted Delphi as they passed through Greece on their way to Asia. The Celts attacked the Romans again in 225 BCE and were frequent mercenary allies of Carthage during the Punic Wars.... Celtic warriors were known for their long hair and imposing physique.... The Celtic language is a branch of the Indo-European language family. Scholars have divided Celtic languages into two groups: Insular Celtic and Continental Celtic.... The Insular Celtic group of languages are two: British or Brittonic (Breton, Cornish, and Welsh) and Goidelic (Irish and its medieval derivatives, Scots Gaelic and Manx). Brittonic was spoken in all of Britain in the Roman period.... The earliest evidence of Goidelic-Irish dates to the 5th century CE, and it later evolved into Middle Irish (c. 950 – 1200 CE) and, thereafter, morphed again into Modern Irish, which is still spoken today.
This theory claims the migration of the Celts into the British Isles is reversed to traditional teaching.
New ideas on the origins of the Celts
Barry Cunliffe, author of Britain Begins (OUP, 2012), explains why recent linguistic discoveries are overturning long-held beliefs about where the Celtic people came from.
DANU The Great Goddess of the Tuatha De Danann
http://thegoddesstree.com/GoddessGallery/Danu.html
She is also an earth goddess. She is connected to the Fairy Hills and has associations with Dolmens also known as a portal tomb, or portal graves. She is the Mother of The Tuatha De Danann, the Irish Gods, which literally means the Children of Danu. All the Danann can trace their Lineage back to her.Danu is mention as the Goddess of the seas according to Michelle Skye’s book “Goddess Alive!”
Danu also gave her name to the Danube River which runs through Europe. She can also be traced to the Walsh Goddess Don. Danu is recorded as showing Herself in the guise of The Morrighan according to the book called, "The Guises of the Morrighan"
The Book of Invasions – Part 1: Cesaire
http://bardmythologies.com/the-book-of-invasions-part-1-cesaire/
The Book of Invasions – Part 2: Partholon
http://bardmythologies.com/the-book-of-invasions-part-2-partholon/
The Book of Invasions – Part 3: Nemed and the Fir Bolg
http://bardmythologies.com/the-book-of-invasions-part-3-nemed-and-the-fir-bolg/
Tuatha Dé Danaan
http://bardmythologies.com/tuatha-de-danaan/
Danu
http://bardmythologies.com/danu/
The Book of Invasions – Part 4: The First Battle of Moy Tura
http://bardmythologies.com/the-book-of-invasions-part-4-the-first-battle-of-moy-tura/
The Book of Invasions – Part 5: The Second Battle of Moy Tura
http://bardmythologies.com/the-book-of-invasions-part-5-the-second-battle-of-moy-tura/
Lugh
http://bardmythologies.com/lugh/
The Book of Invasions – Part 6: The Sons of Mil
http://bardmythologies.com/the-book-of-invasions-part-6-the-sons-of-mil/
DNA shows Irish people have more complex origins than previously thought
The earliest settlers came to Ireland around 10,000 years ago, in Stone Age times. ...The latest research into Irish DNA has confirmed that the early inhabitants of Ireland were not directly descended from the Keltoi of central Europe. In fact the closest genetic relatives of the Irish in Europe are to be found in the north of Spain in the region known as the Basque Country. These same ancestors are shared to an extent with the people of Britain - especially the Scottish. ...Men with Gaelic surnames, showed the highest incidences of Haplogroup 1 (or Rb1) gene. This means that those Irish whose ancestors pre-date English conquest of the island are direct descendants of early stone age settlers ... Parts of Ireland (most notably the western seaboard) have been almost untouched by outside genetic influence since hunter-gatherer times. Men there with traditional Irish surnames have the highest incidence of the Haplogroup 1 gene - over 99%. ...
Distribution of Celtic paternal lineages in Europe
Eupedia Map Italo-Celtic Y-DNA
(Scroll down to near end of the article but before comments.)
http://www.eupedia.com/europe/maps_Y-DNA_haplogroups.shtml
This map represents the paternal lineages associated with the spread of Proto-Italo-Celtic people from Central to Western Europe in the Bronze Age, starting circa 4,500 years ago. Their lineages are R1b-S116, in other words most of the European R1b minus the Greco-Etruscan R1b-L23, the Germanic R1b-U106 and R1b-L238, and the Proto-Celto-Germanic L11, L51 and L150. S116 includes subclades associated with non-IE languages such as Basque, and the ancient Gascon and Iberian languages. Since it is unclear exactly when and where Celtic languages developed and whether some Proto-Celtic speakers might have adopted indigenous languages in the land they settled (especially in Gascony and Mediterranean Iberia), all lineages were included for the purpose of this map, giving priority to Y-DNA over languages.
List of Celtic tribes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Celtic_tribes
This is a list of Celtic tribes, listed in order of the Roman province (after Roman conquest) or the general area in which they lived.
Celtic Britons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Britons
The Britons or Brythons were the ancient Celtic people who lived in Great Britain. The term is usually used for people in the Iron Age (from approximately 600 BC), and through the Roman, Sub-Roman period, and Early Middle Ages...
Ancient Warriors - Episode 02: The Celts (History Documentary)
https://youtu.be/yUtASoLqxQc?list=PL6oforB7ir5KG2v6703gKUkAtp6UBRsAz
Documentary - The Celts : Blood Iron and Sacrifice 1of3
Documentary - The Celts : Blood Iron and Sacrifice 2of3
Documentary - The Celts : Blood Iron and Sacrifice 3of3
The Celts - BBC Series Ep 1 - " In the Beginning"
Celtic Symbols / Druid Symbols
http://symboldictionary.net/?page_id=3
Index of Celtic and pseudo-Celtic symbols, including Druid symbols, Irish and Scottish cultural images, Celtic knots, and more.
Ogham- the Celtic Oracular Alphabet
http://symboldictionary.net/?page_id=3456
Gaels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaels
The Gaels are an ethnolinguistic group indigenous to northwestern Europe. They are associated with the Gaelic languages; a branch of the Celtic languages comprising Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic. Other ethnonyms historically associated with the Gaels include Irish and Scots, but the scope of those nationalities is today more complex.
Gaelic language and culture originated in Ireland, extending to Dál Riata in southwest Scotland.
At the turn of the 21st century, the principles of human genetics and genetic genealogy were applied to the study of populations of Gaelic origin. It was found that the overwhelming majority belonged to haplogroup R1b in their Y-chromosome DNA (as with much of Western Europe). The two other peoples who recorded higher than 85% for R1b in a 2009 study published in the scientific journal, PLOS Biology, were the Welsh and the Basques.
Old Texts
Celtic Folklore
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/index.htm
Some of these books and texts are translations of Celtic legends and sagas; others are retellings of the material, folklore, or literary works based on Celtic themes.
CELTIC GODS AND GODDESSES
http://www.angelfire.com/wizard/celticdeities/
Celtic Deities
https://wicca.com/celtic/wicca/celtic.htm
A Brief History of the Gaels
https://celticlife.com/a-brief-history-of-the-gaels/
The Celts were first evident in continental Europe around the 7th and 8th centuries BC...The Greeks called them Keltoi and the Romans called them Galli and both terms meant ‘barbarians.’...By the 2nd and 3rd century, the Celts had arrived in Ireland. They became known as the Gaels, because of their language and culture and inhabited the island of Eire as Ireland was originally known and named. The Gaels, Gauls, Britons, Irish and Gallacians were all Celtic people....
DNA analysis which clearly showed a genetic fingerprint to the inhabitants of coastal regions of Spain, specifically the northern Basque region of Spain and the northwest Galician region of Spain.
He discovered from approximately 4,000 to 5,000 BC that the Iberians migrated north to the British Isles and lived in all of the countries of the British Isles today. Therefore, the ancestors of the Irish Celts or Gaels were the Spanish and/or Portugal. These Iberians first inhabited Ireland and throughout the ensuing centuries evolved into what we know today as the Gaels of Ireland.
The Gaels in Ireland
http://www.libraryireland.com/irishnationality/gaels-ireland.php
The peoples of Britain, Celts and English, came to her from the opposite lowland coasts; the people of Ireland crossed a wider ocean-track, from northern France to the shores of the Bay of Biscay. The two islands had a different history; their trade-routes were not the same; they lived apart, and developed apart their civilisations....
One invasion followed another, and an old Irish tract gives the definite Gaelic monarchy as beginning in the fourth century B.C. They drove the earlier peoples, the Iberians, from the stupendous stone forts and earthen entrenchments that guarded cliffs and mountain passes. The name of Erin recalls the ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the new rulers, more in number than their conquerors. The Gaels gave their language and their organisation to the country, while many customs and traditions of the older race lingered on and penetrated the new people.
Over a thousand years of undisturbed life lay before the Gaels, from about 300 B.C. to 800 A.D.. The Roman Empire which overran Great Britain left Ireland outside it....Each of the provinces later known as Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connacht...
Gaels
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Gaels
The Greek and Roman classical authors also had several terms for the Gaelic people. The first of these was Iverni, from which derives Hibernian, best known from Ptolemy's Geography. This was used in Ireland itself as the Proto-Irish tribal name *Iwerni. By the 4th century, this had given way for the Latin name for the Gaels; Scoti or Scotti. It is not believed that Gaels used the term to describe themselves and there is some conjecture that the Latin meaning is "pirate", as during this time the Gaels were raiding for slaves on the West-Coast of Britain. Scots was used to describe the Gaels of Dál Riata who founded the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th century. Eventually by the 16th century, due to Anglian Lowlanders and their culture overtaking Gaelic Highlanders as the court language, the Anglo-Saxon language of the former, ironically, became "Scots", while Gaelic was refered to as Erse ("Irish"). ...
The ethnogenesis of the Gaels is difficult to document with absolute certainty,...The most prominent self-description of their origins is in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, also known as The Book of the Taking of Ireland, where the Gaels are described as patrilineal descendants of the Milesians, sons of Míl Espáine from the Iberian Peninsula....
The traditional stories of the Milesian origin of the Gaels trace them back further to an eponymous ancestor called Goídel Glas (also said to be the father of the language), a prince of the Scythians who is said to have to have married Scota, a daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh. ...
BBC - Scotland's History - The Kingdom of the Gaels
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/articles/kingdom_of_the_gaels/
The Gaels gave Scotland its name from 'Scoti', a racially derogatory term used by the Romans to describe the Gaelic-speaking 'pirates' who raided Britannia in the 3rd and 4th centuries. They called themselves 'Goidi l', modernised today as Gaels, and later called Scotland 'Alba'....
The earliest historical source we have comes from around the 10th century and held that the Gaels came from Ireland in around 500 AD, under King Fergus Mor, and conquered Argyll from the Picts. Recently archaeologists have challenged this idea....suggesting the Gaels had lived in Argyll for many centuries before Fergus Mor and shared a common Gaelic culture with Ireland.
ALBA?
Albania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albania
The term Albania is the medieval Latin name of the country. It may be derived from the Illyrian tribe of Albani (Albanian: Albanët) recorded by Ptolemy, the geographer and astronomer from Alexandria, who drafted a map in 150 AD, which shows the city of Albanopolis located northeast of the city of Durrës....
The first traces of human presence in Albania, dating to the Middle Paleolithic and Upper Paleolithic eras, were found in the village of Xarrë close to Sarandë and Dajti near Tiranë....Aurignacian culture. ....Several Bronze Age artefacts from tumulus burials have been unearthed in central and southern Albania that show close connection with sites in south-western Macedonia and Lefkada, Greece. Archaeologists have come to the conclusion that these regions were inhabited from the middle of the third millennium BC by Indo-European people who spoke a Proto-Greek language. A part of this population later moved to Mycenae around 1600 BC and founded the Mycenaean civilisation there. Another population group, the Illirii, probably the southernmost Illyrian tribe of that time that lived on the border of Albania and Montenegro, possibly neighbored the Greek tribes....In ancient times, the territory of modern Albania was mainly inhabited by a number of Illyrian tribes. This territory was known as Illyria...
Origin of the Celts - Caucasian, not European
http://www.angelfire.com/home/thefaery5/
Celts and Chaldean. What if any are the relationships?:
"Celts and Druids, Who Were They?" by E. A. Holmes
http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/world/anceur/relwale5.htm
Kymry, our author claimed they also colonized India and the Middle East. The Greeks were either cousins or descendants of the Kymry, and Jove, Venus, Hercules, Jason, and Helen of Troy were all Welsh! We are also told it was a descendant of the defeated Trojans, Brutus, who came to Britain... The Rev. Morgan's book does, at least, point up the Indo-European origin of most European languages. There is a lot of Sanskrit in the Welsh vocabulary,... One argument in favor of the theory of Indian-Egyptian origins is the philological one. The most elementary acquaintance with the Welsh language reveals that its syntax, the arrangement of words in a sentence... similar links with the languages and customs of the Berbers of North Africa, and possibly with the Basques of Spain....
So the Welsh are a hybrid race of Aryan and non-Aryan descent, and this is shown in the complexity of types of ancient barrows and burial mounds. The Welsh gods and heroes of old also had customs differing from those of the Aryan Celts, such as in their matrilinear line of succession. They belonged to an older age, and we saw in the previous article on "Giants and Floods" that it was probably Atlantean.... the fourth great race is generally called the Atlantean, while our present or fifth race has become known as the Aryan race, because the Aryas are believed to have been the initial subrace of that great stock or root-race.
Atlantis, according to tradition, straddled the Atlantic and extended at one time through Africa to the Middle and even to the Far East.... Tradition connects Stonehenge with initiated Egyptian priests who traveled overland to Albion when it was still a peninsula connected with the mainland.... Were these priests the original Druids, the primary Bards, whose lore was passed down to the wisest of the Celts at their "Chairs" or secret schools? H. P. Blavatsky was of this opinion: "Their priests were the descendants of the last Atlanteans, and what is known of them is sufficient to allow the inference that they were eastern priests akin to the Chaldeans and Indians, . . ." ...
The Celtic Druids By Godfrey Higgins
https://ia801309.us.archive.org/6/items/TheCelticDruids/The_Celtic_Druids.pdf
https://archive.org/stream/TheCelticDruids/The_Celtic_Druids_djvu.txt
P191: As usual amongst the Greeks, in matters relating to foreigners, we find the utmost
confusion respecting these people: different nations being called by this name. Bochart
proves, that they gave the name of Chaldaei or XoxSaSw to many nations. They may have
had a settlement somewhat similar to what the Druids had in Anglesey or Man, but I do
not think that they could ever be said to have formed a separate or distinct nation. They
were precisely like the Magi, out of whom some persons have been disposed to make a
nation.* The Tzabeans, the Chaldeans, and the Tuscans, were all orders of priests, the
latter of the Pelasgi or Etrusci. It was by these Chaldeans that the astronomical
observations were made, which were brought from Babylon in the time of Alexander.
They were very celebrated for their learning and knowledge, particularly respecting die
motions of the heavenly bodies, that is, astrology. f For astrology was always considered
a leading branch of knowledge in those times....
Of the Chaldeans, Dr. Aikin says, " The Chaldeans, or Celts, in fact flourished along
the Euphrates, and supplied a vast mass of population to Judea. One division of diem
settled on the Euxine coast, and bequeathed their name to Galatia. From among these
Galatians, probably in consequence of the inroads of Sesostris, that tribe of Gaels ap-
pears to have crossed the Euxine, which strolled along the middle zone of Europe,
occupied in early ages the north of Italy, laid Rome in ashes during the time of Camil-
lus, gave its name to Gaul, and was finally pushed, by the ensuing wave of Cimbri, from
the mouths of the Loire into Ireland. There the language of this oldest of the northern
European tribes is still in some degree preserved. It is said to resemble the Punic
seen in Plautus, and has been employed to decipher the soliloquy of Hanno. The
Fins of Lapland are thought to have branched from the same stock."
If Dr. Aikin be correct in the Chaldeans and Celts being the same people,
it is not difficult to account for a colony of them being found by the name of Culdees in Scotland....
P192: Mons. Baillie says,J u The Chaldeans (they say) were originally a college of priests,
instituted by Belus, on the model of those of Egypt. 1 * This he disbelieves, and shews§
that they did not come from Egypt ; but yet, that they were strangers at Babylon, and
that they were said to come there with Evechous, who was the first king of Babylon
that bore the name of Chaldean.
When the Assyrians first began to cultivate the earth, those who dwelt in the wilder-
ness were called Chaldeans. || In like manner when the borders of Europe began to be
settled and cultivated by the land-workers, we hear of the Celtae, from the utmost bounds
of the East to those of the West, variously pronounced Khaltee, Qualtee, Gualtee, Ga-
latee ; from Khaldt, Waldt, an original word, signifying wood. In like manner, those
woods, hills, or downs, which in the most western parts of Europe have been called
Dun-keldy in the eastern, in Greece especially, are called Calydonian ; nay, our wolds
in the southern, as well as in the northern parts of Britain, were by the Romans univer-
sally called Calydonia.
According to Mr. Whitaker also, the words Gathel, Gael, Gatal, Gait, Gaeld and Celt,
are all the same, and signify wood-lander. The word is known to mean wood-lander, or
resident in the wood, in opposition to the residents of cities....
Full Text
https://sites.google.com/site/n8iveuropean/home/celt/CELTIC%20DRUIDS.RTF
HiLites
https://sites.google.com/site/n8iveuropean/home/celt/Celtic%20Druids%20Hilites.rtf
The Celtic Druids by Godfrey Higgins 1829 2nd ed.
https://archive.org/details/TheCelticDruids/page/n3/mode/2up
The Celtic Druids was "an attempt to show that the druids were the priests of oriental colonies who emigrated from India, were the introducers of the First or Cadmean System of Letters, and the builders of Stonehenge, Carnac, and other Cyclopeanworks in Asia and Europe."
TEXT: https://archive.org/stream/TheCelticDruids/The_Celtic_Druids_djvu.txt
There can be no doubt that the British isles were known to the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks, as Hero-dotus called them Cassiterides or the countries of tin ; and it was chiefly on account of the abundance of this, at that time scarce metal, that they were an object of attention. This word is the Celtic Casse-tair, pronounced Cassiter, to which the Greeks added their peculiar termination os, and formed Cassiteros. Casse-tair signifies the vulgar, or base sheet or bar, to distinguish it from silver, which is called Airgad—i. e. " the pre-cious sheet or bar.... Baratanac, in the Phoenician tongue, signifies a land of tin. The word stan or tan, as Pezron has observed, signifies in Celtic a region. Now I think that it was first called Baratanac or the country of tin, afterward translated into Cassiteros by the Greeks, and also Britannia or Bgirawixi).... The land generally, with its islands, was called Britannia. The word tan was a common termination for the names of countries...
The very learned Schedius,* speaking of the Druids, confirms all that I have said on this head. He writes, that they (the Druids) seek studiously for an oak tree, large and handsome, growing up with two principal arms, in form of a cross, beside the main stem upright. If the two horizontal arms are not sufficiently adapted to the figure, they fasten a cross-beam to it. This tree they consecrate in this manner. Upon the right branch they cut in the bark, in fair characters, the word hesus : upon the middle or upright stem the word taramis : upon the left branch belenus : over this, above the going off of the arms, they cut the name of God, thau : t under all the same repeated Thau.... This Tau was the symbol of the Druidical Jupiter....
ANCIENT FESTIVALS. CHAPTER V.
Conon says, that the Phoenicians once possessed the empire of Asia ; they made Egyptian Thebes their capital ; and that Cadmus, migrating thence i Europe, built Boeotian Thebes, and called it after the name of his native town."...
The following are the Gods as he gives them, with their Goddesses :
1. Aesar ....... Axire, Anu-Mathar, the first Ith.
Moloch, Molk, &c.
2. Ain. Fan..... Eo-Anu, the second Ith.
Taulac or Tauladh.
3. Cearas .... Ceara.
4. Lute, Lufe..... Aedh, Aodh.
Geamhar...... Cann.
5. Dins....... Ceachd.
Tath..... Brighit.
6. Neith..... Nath.
Baal, Alla, Aleim.
Samhan, Mediator.
The first, beginning at the bottom of the series, is Aesar.* He is called God ; or fire intelligent, Dia or Logh : Mr. Vallencey says, the word Logh means the spiritual flame... The word Aesar, in Irish, literally means to kindle a fire.... Aesar, then, would be the creator. Aesar was also connected with the power of magic, and he was called a magician....he has been taken to be the Aesar of the Etruscans, which Suetonius says* in the Etruscan language was the name of God. The Aeswar or Iswara, of the Indians...
The mother of the gods comes next in succession, and bore a great number of names. She was called Eire, Eirin, Eirean, Eirinn, Anu, Nanu, Anan, Nannan, Ith, lath, Anith, Eadna, Eoghna, Aonach, Tlachgo, Tlacht, Momo, Mumham, Ama, Ops, and Sibhol. The idea of the Greek mother of the gods applies to all these names, the passive feminine principle, the earth, water, darkness.... The goddess Anu seems to have been considered as the tutelar goddess of Ireland, is often called the Isle of Nannu, whence perhaps it may have got the name of sacred island. Several places are called after her, as Nany-water. One of the days of week was called after this goddess, Nang-dae, dies Veneris* and she was said to be mother of the Feini, that is of the Poeni, or Puni, or Phoenicians, who are said first to have colonised Ireland....
In Aesar and Eire, or Axire, may be found the duality of all the ancient systems the good and bad principles. The same identity may be found in Ceres and Persephone, who were adored at Eleusis as one divinity. Euripides| calls Ceres Proserpine Skwo/mi e«<w. In Egypt the same identity is found in Athor, Isis, Neith....
Maya is, according to the learned Hindoos, the tendency of the Divinity to diversify itself in creating worlds. She is regarded as the Mother of Nature, and of the inferior gods...The Persephone of the Greeks was also called Maia, and was the same as the Maya of India, and the Artemis and the Hyperborean Ilythia. To these the idea of magic was always attached. The Eo-Anu is the Maia of Ireland. She is often surnamed Bidhgoe, a name which literally means female, or woman of illusion, or of lying, (prastigiatrix,) in the same sense as Maia and Persephone. Bithe means female, and go deception. This is pro-bably the Biducht of the Persians, who was their Venus. Eo-Anu is the second Ith, and is opposed to Ain or Aion, which again leads to the idea of Magic, (Ainin or Oinin is to kill by sorcery,) and also that of real fire, not the intellectual, but real, tangible fire kindled by Aesar. This is proved by its being called Molc, Mulac, Mollac, or Molloch, a word which in Irish means fire. Ain, or Aion, is also called Onn,t which means the solar heat....
The Molc, or Mollac, or Molloch of Ireland, was the Moloch of the Ammonites, which was the sun.... In Irish the word Molloch means to devour or consume. An old Irish commentator says, Ain treidhe Dia ainm Taulac, Fan, Mollac that is to say "Ain, triple God, of name Taulac, Fan, Mollac." This is probably the Brama, Vistnu, and Seeva of India, and the Oromasdes, Mithra, and Arimamus of Persia, the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer.
Here we see that the name Ain, or On, the name of the city of destruction, or of Heliopolis, or the Sun, is declared to be, in the Irish language, the name of a God or triad of Gods, similar to the famous triad of the ancients, the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer. All etymologists have supposed the word On to mean the sun,...
In Fan is found the Phones or Erikapeus of the Orphic hymns, called Protogonos and Pan. Jablonski says that the Orphic Phones is derived from the Coptic word Pheneh* which means eternal.^ This is synonymous with the Greek word aumv aeternitas.
The Ain or Phan of Ireland, was Protogonos, first-born, begotten by the first breath or spirit Aesar, and night, Axire....
The third in the ascending chain of Deities are Cearas and Ceara. An old commen-tator says, " Cearas ainm don dagh," that is, Cearas name of fire. Cearas was the same as Daghdae, or Dogdha, which also meant fire, or the god of fire....Cearas is identified with Daghdae, who is called Cromeocha, the good Crom, and Rad or Ruad strong, powerful. Daghdae-Cearas has four daughters, Brid or Brit, Goddess of poetry, and Ceacht, Goddess of medicine, and for brother, Oghmo, inventor of the alphabet, and for children, Mithr or Midr, the rays of the sun.*
The wife of Cearas, Ceara, was the Goddess of nature, or nature in its maturity. The cultivation of corn and the instruments of agriculture are said to have been invented by her. She presided over the fruits of the earth. She is evidently the Ceres of the ancients....
Nath, the Goddess of Wisdom, and Naith, the God in opposi-tion to her. Nath is the Gaelic word for science in general. This is evidently the Neith of the Egyptians. In Irish, Neith means battle or combat. This is the Neton of the Spaniards....
Samhan appears to have been one of the Gods, the most revered, in Ireland, annual solemnity was instituted to his honour, which is yet celebrated on the evening of the first day of November ; which yet at this day is called the Oidhche Samhna,t or night of Samhan. This solemnity was consecrated by the Druids, to the intercession of the living for souls of those who had died the year preceding, or in the current year. For, accord to their doctrine, Samhan called before him these souls, and passed them to the mansion of the blessed, or returned them to a re-existence here, as a punishment for their crimes. He was also called Bal-Sab or Lord of Death....Samhan was also the Sun, or rather the image of the sun....This deity was above all the others whom we have named but he was below the supreme being Baal. If Samhan were the Sun, as we see here he answers to Mithra of the Persians, who was the middle link between Oromasdes and Arimanius — between the Creator and the Destroyer, and was called the preserver. Schelling says, the Irish doctrine was, that the souls did not descend to the sev Zeus, (Pluto, the Jupiter of the Styx,) but that they ascended to the merciful Osirus. Such is the meaning of the Irish Samhan...inferior to the great God, but superior to the other Cabiri....
Then the magic of Samhan, or Saman, or Cabur, will be the secret doctrines of the powerful one. In the ancient traditions of the Phoenicians, the Cabiri are said to have been seven in number, and to have had an eighth associated with them, under the name of Esmun. It was the same with the Cabiri of Egypt, who represented the seven planets, with Phtas at their head, making an eighth. The very same history is related by the Irish. Their gods or Cabiri were said to have been seven in number, and to have had an eighth asso- ciated with them, under the name of Saman..... The analogies between the Esmun of the Phoenicians and the Saman of Ireland are striking. Both terminate the chain of the Cabiri : both are gods of death : both are ap-plied to the sun, the source of light and life : both are at the head of seven others ; though inferior and subject to another superior* being, the highest and last of the Irish gods, called Baal, or Seadhac....
The supreme God above the rest was called, Seadhac and Baal. Seadhac is the Sydic of Eusebius* of whom the Cabiri were the sons.... The name of Baal, which is synonymous with Seathar or Seadhac, is found in Wales, Gaul, and Germany. This God is also called Bel or Beli.... With the Welsh, the God Bel or Beli was called Hu. On the first of May the Irish made great fires in honour of Bel or Baal, and offered him sacrifices. They have yet a festival on the first of May called Bealtine, when, on the tops of their hills, they light great fires. In one of the Welsh Triads, a collection of aphorisms supposed to be very ancient, Britain is called the island of Bel, and in an old Welsh prayer it is said, " Sincerely I worship thee, Beli, giver of good, and Manhogan, the king, who preserves the honours of Bel, the island of Beli. §
On the subject of this Bel or Beli, Mr. Maurice observes, It is Cicero || who acquaints us, that the Indian Hercules is denominated Belus, and I hope hereafter in the regular history of ancient India, to make still more and more evident what has already been asserted, that to this renowned Assyrian and Indian conqueror, who, under the name of Bali, engrosses three of the Indian Avatars, is to be ascribed the greatest part of the
numerous exploits of that celebrated personage in different quarters of the world...
Ausonius had noticed the worship of Belenus amongst the Armoricans. On this passage, Mr. Bryant says Belin, the Deity of whom he speaks, was the same as Bel and Balen of Babylonia and Canaan ; the Orus and Apollo of other nations. Herodian takes notice of his being worshiped by the people of Aquileia ; and says that they called him Belin, esteeming him the same as Apollo....the Canaanites are said to have passed their children through the fire to Baal, which seems to have been a common practice : and Ahaz, king of Israel, is blamed § for having done the same thing. In Ireland, this superstitious practice still continues. On particular days, great fires are lighted, and the fathers, taking the children in their arms, jump or run through them, and thus pass their children through them. They also light two fires at a little distance from each other, and drive their cattle between them. This Phoenician practice...
Many of the Irish Deities are precisely the Gods of Hindostan. The Neit corresponds to the Hindoo Naut, and to the Neith of the Egyptians. Saman to Samanaut. Bud to Bood. Can to Chandra. Omh, i. e. he who is, to Om, or Aum, And Esar to Eswara.* Chreeshna, the name of the Indian Apollo, is actually an old Irish word for the sun. The Irish had a Deity named Cali. The altars on which they sacrificed to her, are at this day named Leeba Caili, or the bed of Cali. This must have been the Cali of the Hindoos....
Of the Chaldeans, Dr. Aikin says, " The Chaldeans, or Celts, in fact flourished along the Euphrates, and supplied a vast mass of population to Judea. One division of diem settled on the Euxine coast, and bequeathed their name to Galatia. From among these Galatians, probably in consequence of the inroads of Sesostris, that tribe of Gaels ap- pears to have crossed the Euxine, which strolled along the middle zone of Europe, occupied in early ages the north of Italy, laid Rome in ashes during the time of Camil- lus, gave its name to Gaul, and was finally pushed, by the ensuing wave of Cimbri, from the mouths of the Loire into Ireland. There the language of this oldest of the northern European tribes is still in some degree preserved. It is said to resemble the Punic seen in Plautus, and has been employed to decipher the soliloquy of Hanno. The Fins of Lapland are thought to have branched from the same stock." If Dr. Aikin be correct in the Chaldeans and Celts being the same people, it is not difficult to account for a colony of them being found by the name of Culdees in Scot-land. This idea of Dr. Aikin's is nearly allied to that of the Chaldeans being the priests of the people residing on the Euphrates, or of the Celts. But the first migra-tion which brought the sixteen letters, must have been long prior to Cyrus. They must have come some time before Moses, and that a considerable time.
Mr. Huddleston states Suadh or Suidh, pronounced Sui, to be the radix of the Latin suadeo ; that Suidh Bheil, pronounced Sui-Beil, signified the counsel of Bel, which, Graecized, became Sybela or Sybilla. In Aquitaine, in Gaul, was a people called Sybil- lates.* This was most likely from the temple of Apollo or Bel in Assyria, served by the Chaldees, one of the first of his temples. Mons. Baillie says, The Chaldeans (they say) were originally a college of priests, instituted by Belus, on the model of those of Egypt. " This he disbelieves, and shews§ that they did not come from Egypt" ; but yet, that they were strangers at Babylon, and that they were said to come there with Evechous, who was the first king of Babylon that bore the name of Chaldean.
When the Assyrians first began to cultivate the earth, those who dwelt in the wilder- ness were called Chaldeans. || In like manner when the borders of Europe began to be settled and cultivated by the land-workers, we hear of the Celtae, from the utmost bounds of the East to those of the West, variously pronounced Khaltee, Qualtee, Gualtee, Ga-latee ; from Khaldt, Waldt, an original word, signifying wood. In like manner, those woods, hills, or downs, which in the most western parts of Europe have been called Dun-keldy in the eastern, in Greece especially, are called Calydonian ; nay, our wolds in the southern, as well as in the northern parts of Britain, were by the Romans univer- sally called Calydonia. According to Mr. Whitaker also, the words Gathel, Gael, Gatal, Gait, Gaeld and Celt, are all the same, and signify wood-lander. The word is known to mean wood-lander, or resident in the wood, in opposition to the residents of cities.**
The Culdees of the British Isles were, in many other respects besides their names, similar to the Chaldees of Assyria. It appears that they succeeded to their office by hereditary descent in the church of St. Andrew's, leaving their property to their wives and children when they died....
Jupiter was nothing but Iou-pater. Both Bacchus and Jupiter had the epithet of Xarnip, Saviour ; Zeus Soter and Dionusus Soter...
Anu, the mater deorum Hibernensium She was called Anu, Ana, and Anaine....
...a colony of Dorian Phoenicians, from the city of Doro, or Dora, near Mount Carmel, between Ptolemais and Caesarea, in Syria. He supposes they were some of the same persons who erected the two famous pillars near Tangiers, which Procopius* says, had on them a Phoenician inscription of the following import : "We are of those who fled from the face of Joshua the Robber, the son of Nun." This Hercules he describes from Lucian, as Su minus decrepitus, recal vaster, reliquis capillis prorsus canis, cute rugosa, et in nigerrimum colorem exusta, quales sunt nautae senes. He supposes he was the same who built the temple at the pillars of Hercules, which Appian, in Ibericis, says, was built by the Phoenicians, and where the worship was con-ducted after the manner of the Phoenicians ; and that the God worshiped was not the Theban but the Tyrian Hercules. GaJlaeus then observes, that the language of Phoe-nicia, and the Hebrew and Chaldee, are very similar, as is witnessed by the Poenulus of Plautus and Jerom, and by Priscian.... Here the Romans found this Hercules, and they adopted him, and made the inscription to his honour. Gallaeus then goes on to shew, that the Melcarthus, or Melicerta of the Greeks, and the Hercules Magusanus, were the same God. That Melcarthus is derived from the words Rftip Y?D mlc krta. Melee Cartha, Rex or Dominus Karthae, a city of Spain, built by the Tyrians....
When the Israelites entered Canaan, the Canaanites had no other kind of places of public worship. When Moses ordered them to destroy all false deities of the Canaanites, he mentions no temples : Overthrow their altars, cut down their groves, and burn them, are his commands. The Scripture does not mention one temple destroyed by Joshua, his successor. " Such were the kind of temples Solomon built for his wives : according to the Hebrew text, he constructed mounts on the hill opposite to Jerusalem; the Scripture, speaking of the zeal of Josias for the purity of the worship of God, says, that he defiled the high places on the right band of the mount of Scandal, that Solomon had made to Astaroth, the God of the Sidonians ; to Chamos, the scandal of the Moabites ; and to Melcham, the abomination of the Ammonites— that he broke their pillars, and cut down their groves.
The Canaanites in after times, to obtain more respect for these places, destined to the public worship of their religion, and to prevent them from being profaned by cattle, inclosed them with entrenchments of earth, but they were always open at top. This intrenchment, in their language, was TTJ gdr, gadir: in Irish, Gathair and Cathair, the g being commutable with c, and the d with t, in all languages ; hence Cathair* a barrow, inp ktr, kether, circulus. Such was the temple near Orthopia, described by Maundrell : such was that on mount Carmel visited by Pythagoras : such was the temple of bpiMk aurkl y Orchol, or the Sun, falsely called Hercules, at Tyre : of Astarte, at Sidon : of Venus, at Biblos: and that consecrated at mount Casius by the descendants of the Dios- curi, was originally of this form. Such was the temple of Hercules at Gadir or Gadiz. " Wherever the Phoenoici went, and wherever the Tyrians followed them, they preserved this form....
Sir Isaac Newton observes, that altars were at first erected without temples, and this custom continued in Persia till after the days of Herodotus : in Phoenicia they had altars with little houses for eating the sacrifices much earlier, and these they called high places. 1 meet with no mention of sumptuous temples, says he, before the days of Solomon. Plutarch tells us, that the Egyptians in general had uncovered temples ; they are
only inclosures, says he, and exposed to the air. Clemens Alex, informs us, that all the temples dedicated to Neith y i. e. Minerva, were open. In this the Phoenicians differed ; for that dedicated to Ogga or Minerva, discovered by Abbe Fourmont, was covered, though built of rude stones, like our Irish temples. The Greeks too had their open temples. Vitruvius informs us, that those sacred to Jupiter, to thunder, to die sun, and to the moon, were open and exposed to the air. Those of the Assyrians, full of statues, must also have been open, for Baruch says, that owls perched on their heads, and that the faces of the Babylonian idols were black- ened by the wind driving the smoke on them. The ancient southern Scythians, from whom the Irish descended, ridi-culed the custom of shutting up the divinity, who ought to have the universe as an altar...
" And when Celsus wrote against the Christians, in the 2nd century of the church, the Scythians, the Nomades of Africa, the Seres, and many others, had only open temples. The foundation of the temple of the Syrian goddess at Hieropolis, is attributed to the Scythian Deucalion;... Pausanias, in Corinthiacis, informs us, that near the Chemarus is a septum or circle of stones. He also writes, that the Thracians used to build their temples round and open at the top in Boeotia.... the temples of the Persians were all, before the time of Zoroaster, open to the heavens ; for he it was who first taught them to worship in caves and inclosed buildings....
The following is a passage from Sir W. Jones, which, amongst various opposing doc- trines, admits enough to establish my system, if he be right. I beg my reader's attention to the parts which I have put in Italics : It has been proved by clear evidence and plain reasoning, that a powerful monarchy was established in Iran long before the Assyrian government; that it was in truth a Hindoo monarchy i though, if any choose to call it Cuscan, C us dean, or Scythian, we shall not enter into a debate on mere names ; that it subsisted many centuries, and that its history has been engrafied on that of the Hindoos, who founded the monarchies of Ayodhya and Indraprestha ; that the language of the first Persian empire was the mother of the Sanscrit, and consequently of the Zend and Parsi, as well as of Greek, Latin, and Gothic ; that the language of the Assyrians was the parent of Chaldaic and Pahlavi, and that the primary Tartarian language also had been current in the same empire ; although, as the Tartars had no books, or even letters, we cannot with certainty trace their un- polished and variable idioms. We discover, therefore, in Persia, at the earliest dawn of history, the three distinct races of men whom we described on former occasions as pos-sessors of India, Arabia, and Tartary ; and whether they were collected in Iran from distant regions, or diverged from it, as from a common centre, we shall easily determine from the following considerations. Let us observe, in the first place, the central position of Iran, which is bounded by Arabia, by Tartary, and by India; whilst Arabia lies con-tiguous to Iran only, but is remote from Tartary, and divided even from the skirts of India by a considerable gulf. No country, therefore, but Persia, seems likely to have sent forth its colonies to all the kingdoms of Asia: the Brahmans could never have mi-grated from India to Iran, because they are expressly forbidden, by their oldest existing laws, to leave the region which they inhabit at this day: the Arabs have not even a tradition of an emigration into Persia before Mohamed ; nor had they, indeed, any induce- ment to quit their beautiful and extensive domains: and as to the Tartars, we have no trace in history of their departure from their plains and forests till the invasion of the Medes, who, according to etymologists, were the sons of Madai, and even they were con-ducted by princes of an Assyrian family. The three races, therefore, whom we have already mentioned, (and more than three we have not yet found,) migrated from Iran as from their common country ; and thus the Saxon chronicle, ongodd authority , brings tie first inhabitants of Britain from Armenia; while a late very learned writer concludes, after all his laborious researches, that the Goths or Scythians came from Persia ; and another contends, with great force, that both the Irish and old Britons proceeded severally from the borders of the Caspian; a coincidence of conclusions from different media, by
persons wholly unconnected, which could scarce have happened if they were not grounded on solid principles. We may, therefore, hold this proposition firmly esta- blished, that Iran or Persia, in its largest sense, was the centre of population, of know- ledge, of languages, and of arts ; which, instead of travelling westward only, as it has been fancifully supposed, or eastward, as with equal reason might have been asserted, expanded in all directions to all the regions of the world." ....
Mr. Huddleston has some very striking observations respecting the Celtic and Hebrew languages, characteristic of his usual masculine understanding, in some of which I quite agree with him. Of all the post-diluvian languages die Chaldaic has the fairest claim to antiquity. Abraham was called from Ur of the Chaldees, and must have carried that language along with him. The Hebrew language is, therefore, only a dialect of the Chaldaic. That the Celtic is a dialect of the same language is highly probable. Nations have, in all ages, been extremely solicitous to preserve their own name and the names of their gods. The Chaldaic Chaldach, and the Gaelic Caltoch, (a Celt,) are exactly the same. That the same god, Bel, was the chief object of worship, in both nations, is beyond dispute. From the same source the Bramins, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, &c, borrowed their Ianguage and their God Bel or Baal. The most probable etymon of the word Celt, or Caltach, is Cealtach, (Latine Caelestes) i.e. men addicted to the study of the heavens Ceal or Cal, in the Celtic, signifies heaven, and its regular adjective is Cealtach or Caltach. The Chaldeans, from the most remote ages, have been famed for judicial astrology; and the Celts, while their Druids remained, were equally celebrated." ...
From the whole argument I think a strong probability is made out, that an original system of letters, or alphabet of 16 or 17 letters, was in use by the first Bactrian nation; that it was brought by one colony along the 45th parallel of latitude to Gaul, Britain, Wales, and Ireland, where it was called the Bethluisnion ; and that it was brought by another colony through Asia to Phoenicia, and by certain sailors to Ireland by the way of the Pillars of Hercules, and was called the Bobeloth. This I think is pretty clear. But what was the name of these sailors who brought it ? Why should not die importers of the Bobeloth alphabet be the Pelasgi ? The Pelasgi were persons coming to Greece in ships from Asia, where the language of Phoenicia was spoken. They have been called D^a plgim* which I think in their language, (by some means or other which I confess I cannot, according to a very strict etymological process, explain,) meant sailors. Dr. Parkhurst says, " J^D plg^ a stream. — Hence Greek nXo?*?, the sea ; applied also to a large river and Latin pelagus" Dr. Jones says, " riXayi^m, to sail through the deep" From this I think came the vtXcuryoi or sailors, and the Latin pelagius, sea-bred, of or belonging to the sea....
He there points out, that Strabo attributes the establishment of die oracle at Dodona to them, which he shews is confirmed by Herodotus ;|| and that the rites of the Cabin, in the island of Somothrace, are attributed to them also by Herodotus,^ and he clearly enough traces proofs of their being in Thrace ; at the same time he is obliged to admit, that a tribe of them, <puXa Thxaaycov, entered Europe by the Hellespont,** and of course in boats. But the whole result of his diligent research proves, that the Greeks knew nothing about them, but that if any thing can be gleaned out of their discordant accounts, it is, that one part of them came into Greece by land from Thrace, and that the other part came after peopling the islands) by sea, and this certainly reconciles all the accounts ; though this is not observed by the Bishop....
In this short story we have the history of all the Pelasgic migrations of the ancients. They were a hardy, seafaring race, and soon subdued the Celtic inhabitants of Delphi in Greece, or of Cuma in Italy, who, from their first quitting the parent hive, never had occasion for an offensive weapon except against wild beasts. These Pelasgi were Canaanites, and were the people who settled Carthage, Gades, Spain, Ireland ; and they are only not called Pelasgi in these latter places, because there were no Greek Herodotuses in those countries, by their mistakes, to convert the term sailors into the name of a nation. But if they escaped the effects of one mistake, they were the subjects of another— for the writers of Ireland converted these very sailors Phoeni, or Pheni, or Phoenicians, into a man, and christened him Phenius Farsaidh, or Phenius the Ancient ; and, as he probably brought one of the system of letters, they made him the inventor of them. From the union of these circumstances it is, that we hear of the Pelasgi in all quarters, but can lay hold of them nowhere. Gallaeus has proved, in his Treatise on the Sybils, that the Dorians were Pelasgi ; that they came from the city of Dora, at the foot of Libanus in Phoenicia ; and that they had a settlement of some kind in Zealand, where their God, the Hercules Magusanus, was found....
The Thracian Pelasgi were, in fact, Celtae from the Hyperboreans, and were called Pelasgi by Herodotus and later Greek authors, because they found them nearly the same in letters, language, and religion, with the later comers, the sailors, their conquerors. They all had the same patriarchal religion of Lithoi and stone circles, or of open temples and grove worship....
Gallaeus has proved respecting the Dorians and the Syrian Hercules coming by the Pillars of Hercules, &c. ; and I ask this question, Might not the May-day festival of the Bull, the peculiar worship of Bacchus, be brought to the British isles by the Celt© through Gaul; and the April festival of the Ram, the peculiar worship of Hercules, be brought by the Pelasgi ? M. Dupuis has proved beyond all doubt, that the worship of Bacchus, the Baghis of India, the Baal, Bel, Belenus, or Apollo, was the worship of the sun in Taurus. This I suppose to have been the worship of the Celtae, who came to Britain through Gaul. The worship of Hercules is also clearly proved by Mons. Dupuis to have been the sun in Aries ; and therefore, according to the precession of the equinoxes, receding a degree in 72 years, it must have been founded 2160 years after the sun first entered Taurus. In all the histories of the colonies coming to the pillars of Hercules, to Spain, to Zealand, to Ireland, Hercules is the protecting god ; thence I conclude that after the sun entered Aries, some of these colonies of Pelasgi, from Sidon or Tyre, were the people who built the pillars of Hercules : and successors of them might be the people who set up the pillars at T1/71C, stated to have been set up by fugitives from Joshua, the robber, the son of Nun; and they might also be the people who brought the festival of the first of April to Britain * This seems to me to account for the April festival, to say the least, in a manner not entirely inconsistent with probability.
Moses is stated to have lived about fifteen hundred years before the time of Christ. If we suppose that the Dorian Pelasgi brought the worship of Hercules to the Western world, of course it would not have been before the sun entered Aries. But this must have taken place, reckoning by the real Zodiac, which is evidently the proper course, 4300 years before the present time, or about 2500 years before the time of Christ....
Col. Vallencey endeavours to trace the sailors who came to Ireland from a country a little to the North of the opening between the Black and Caspian Seas. It must be evident that this brings them to be the Celtae or their successors, and that they are the very people I call Pelasgi or Canaanites. I do not pretend to trace them farther than to the coast of Sidon or Tyre. All he says may be perfectly true, and is perfectly con- sistent with my idea of them, and with my hypothesis. He, Dr. Jamieson, Mr. Pin- kerton, and Mr. O'Connor, all agree that the Scythians found people in these countries, and conquered them. These people whom they found were the Celtae, Gomerians, or Cimmerians, who brought the Tauric festival to Britain, and who were called by Mr. Pinkerton and Mr. O'Connor aboriginal, people born from their own native mountains and valleys; so that there is not in feet so much difference between us as might at first be thought. With the exception of the earth-grown men, the two systems are perfectly consistent with each other....
To say that any of those tribes alluded to are not Celtae, is as much as to say, that the tribe of Cambells or M'Gregors are not Scotch. The Celtae and Scythians might be the same people at different times. They constituted a genus, the Cimbri, Etrusci, Picti, &c, might be called species. All the writers on these subjects seem to forget that these tribes are spread through a space of many thousand years. According to all ancient his-torians, they were first Gomerians ; a thousand years afterward they might be Scythians, They were then, perhaps, Parthians, then Huns and Goths, then Tartars, and conquered China. By and by they will be heard of again. They are not dead. The same causes will, probably, produce the same effects. They are now uncivilized, and have been so for many thousand years. When they were first settled in Bactriana they were the most enlightened of mankind...
Pelasgians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelasgians
refer either to the ancestors or forerunners of the Greeks, or to all inhabitants of Greece before the emergence or arrival of Greeks aware of their Greekness. In general, "Pelasgian" has come to mean more broadly all the indigenous inhabitants of the Aegean Sea region and their cultures, "a hold-all term for any ancient, primitive and presumably indigenous people in the Greek world".... An ancient etymology based on mere similarity of sounds linked pelasgos to pelargos ("stork") and postulates that the Pelasgians were migrants like storks, possibly from Egypt, where they nest.... the ancient Greek word for "sea", pelagos and the Doric word plagos, "side" (which is flat) shared the same root, *plāk-, and that *pelag-skoi therefore meant "the sea men", where the sea is flat. This could be connected to the maritime marauders referred to as the Sea People in Egyptian records....
The Pelasgians first appear in the poems of Homer: those who are stated to be Pelasgians in the Iliad are among the allies of Troy. In the section known as the Catalogue of Trojans, they are mentioned between mentions of the Hellespontine cities and the Thracians of south-eastern Europe (i.e., on the Hellespontine border of Thrace).... In the Odyssey, Odysseus, affecting to be Cretan himself, instances Pelasgians among the tribes in the ninety cities of Crete, "language mixing with language side by side". Last on his list, Homer distinguishes them from other ethnicities on the island: "Cretans proper", Achaeans, Cydonians (of the city of Cydonia/modern Chania), Dorians, and "noble Pelasgians". The Iliad also refers to "Pelasgic Argos", which is most likely to be the plain of Thessaly, and to "Pelasgic Zeus", living in and ruling over Dodona... According to the Iliad, Pelasgians were camping out on the shore together with the following tribes, Towards the sea lie the Carians and the Paeonians, with curved bows, and the Leleges and Caucones, and the goodly Pelasgi....
Poets after Homer
One of the first was Hesiod; he calls Dodona, identified by reference to "the oak", the "seat of Pelasgians", thus explaining why Homer, in referring to Zeus as he ruled over Dodona, did not style him "Dodonic" but Pelasgic Zeus. He mentions also that Pelasgus (Greek: Πελασγός, the eponymous ancestor of the Pelasgians) was the father of King Lycaon of Arcadia. Asius of Samos (Ancient Greek: Ἄσιος ὁ Σάμιος) describes Pelasgus as the first man, born of the earth. In Aeschylus's play, The Suppliants, the Danaids fleeing from Egypt seek asylum from King Pelasgus of Argos...He claims to rule the Pelasgians and to be the "child of Palaichthon (or 'ancient earth') whom the earth brought forth". The Danaids call the country the "Apian hills" and claim that it understands the karbana audan (accusative case, and in the Dorian dialect), which many translate as "barbarian speech" but Karba (where the Karbanoi live) is in fact a non-Greek word. They claim to descend from ancestors in ancient Argos even though they are of a "dark race" (melanthes ... genos). Pelasgus admits that the land was once called Apia but compares them to the women of Libya and Egypt and wants to know how they can be from Argos on which they cite descent from Io. In a lost play by Aeschylus, Danaan Women, he defines the original homeland of the Pelasgians as the region around Mycenae.
Sophocles presents Inachus as the elder in the lands of Argos, the Heran hills and among the Tyrsenoi Pelasgoi, ..."Tyrsenians-Pelasgians"....
Euripides calls the inhabitants of Argos "Pelasgians" in his Orestes and The Phoenician Women. In a lost play entitled Archelaus, he says that Danaus, on coming to reside in the city of Inachus (Argos), formulated a law whereby the Pelasgians were now to be called Danaans.
The Roman poet Ovid describes the Greeks of the Trojan War as Pelasgians in his Metamorphoses....
Hecataeus of Miletus in a fragment from Genealogiai states that the genos ("clan") descending from Deucalion ruled Thessaly and that it was called "Pelasgia" from king Pelasgus. A second fragment states that Pelasgus was the son of Zeus and Niobe and that his son Lycaon founded a dynasty of kings of Arcadia....
Acusilaus asserts that the Peloponnesians were called "Pelasgians" after Pelasgus, a son of Zeus and Niobe.
According to Hellanicus, from Pelasgus and his wife Menippe came a line of kings:... During Nanas's reign, the Pelasgians were driven out by the Greeks and departed for Italy. They landed at the mouth of the Po River, near the Etruscan city of Spina, then took the inland city "Crotona" (Κρότωνα), and from there colonized Tyrrhenia. The inference is that Hellanicus believed the Pelasgians of Thessaly (and indirectly of the Peloponnese) to have been the ancestors of the Etruscans.
In the Histories, the Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus...classified the Pelasgian language as "barbarian" and discussed various areas inhabited (or previously inhabited) by Pelasgians/Pelasgian-speakers along with their different neighbors/co-residents:... Pelasgians who still exist in settlements above Tyrrhenia in the city of Kreston, formerly neighbors to the Dorians who at that time lived in the land now called Thessaliotis; also the Pelasgians who once lived with the Athenians and then settled Plakia and Skylake in the Hellespont; and along with those who lived with all the other communities and were once Pelasgian but changed their names. If one can judge by this evidence, the Pelasgians spoke a barbarian language. And so, if the Pelasgian language was spoken in all these places, the people of Attica being originally Pelasgian, must have learned a new language when they became Hellenes.... Furthermore, Herodotus discussed the relationship between the Pelasgians and the Hellenes, which, according to Pericles Georges, reflected the "rivalry within Greece itself between [...] Dorian Sparta and Ionian Athens." Specifically, Herodotus stated that the Hellenes separated from the Pelasgians with the former group surpassing the latter group numerically: As for the Hellenes, it seems obvious to me that ever since they came into existence they have always used the same language. They were weak at first, when they were separated from the Pelasgians, but they grew from a small group into a multitude,...
In Book 2, Herodotus alluded to the Pelasgians as inhabitants of Samothrace, an island located just north of Troy, before coming to Attica. Moreover, Herodotus wrote that the Pelasgians simply called their gods theoi [Thor, or Thauth?] prior to naming them on the grounds that the gods established all affairs in their order (thentes); the author also stated that the gods of the Pelasgians were the Cabeiri. Later, Herodotus stated that the entire territory of Greece (i.e., Hellas) was initially called "Pelasgia". In Book 5, Herodotus mentioned the Pelasgians as inhabitants of the islands of Lemnos and Imbros.
In Book 6, the Pelasgians of Lemnos were originally Hellespontine Pelasgians who had been living in Athens but whom the Athenians resettled on Lemnos and then found it necessary to reconquer the island. This expulsion of (non-Athenian) Pelasgians from Athens...
In Book 7, Herodotus mentioned "the Pelasgian city of Antandrus" and wrote about the Ionian inhabitants of "the land now called Achaea" (i.e., northwestern Peloponnese) being "called, according to the Greek account, Aegialean Pelasgi, or Pelasgi of the Sea Shore"; afterwards, they were called Ionians. Moreover, Herodotus mentioned that the Aegean islanders "were a Pelasgian race, who in later times took the name Ionians" and that the Aeolians, according to the Hellenes, were known anciently as "Pelasgians." In Book 8, Herodotus mentioned that the Pelasgians of Athens were previously called Cranai.
In the History of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek historian Thucydides wrote about the Pelasgians stating that: Before the time of Hellen, son of Deucalion [...] the country went by the names of the different tribes, in particular of the Pelasgian. It was not till Hellen and his sons grew strong in Phthiotis, and were invited as allies into the other cities, that one by one they gradually acquired from the connection the name of Hellenes; though a long time elapsed before that name could fasten itself upon all. The author regards the Athenians as having lived in scattered independent settlements in Attica; but at some time after Theseus, they changed residence to Athens, which was already populated....
In the Roman Antiquities, Dionysius of Halicarnassus...He goes on to add that the nation wandered a great deal. They were originally natives of "Achaean Argos" descended from Pelasgus, the son of Zeus and Niobe. They migrated from there to Haemonia (later called Thessaly), where they "drove out the barbarian inhabitants" and divided the country into Phthiotis, Achaia, and Pelasgiotis, named after Achaeus, Phthius and Pelasgus, "the sons of Larissa and Poseidon."...
In his Description of Greece, Pausanias mentions the Arcadians who state that Pelasgus (along with his followers) was the first inhabitant of their land...When Arcas became king, Pelasgia was renamed "Arcadia" and its inhabitants (the Pelasgians) were renamed "Arcadians". Pausanias also mentions the Pelasgians as responsible for creating a wooden image of Orpheus in a sanctuary of Demeter at Therae...
Strabo dedicates a section of his Geography...As for the Pelasgi, almost all agree, in the first place, that some ancient tribe of that name spread throughout the whole of Greece, and particularly among the Aeolians of Thessaly....
Pelasgians spoke Greek based on the fact that areas traditionally inhabited by the "Pelasgi" (i.e. Arcadia and Attica) only spoke Greek and the few surviving Pelasgian words and inscriptions (i.e., Lamina Borgiana, Herodotus 2.52.1) betray Greek linguistic features despite the classical identification of Pelasgian as a barbaric language....
In western Anatolia, many toponyms with the "-ss-" infix derive from the adjectival suffix also seen in cuneiform Luwian and some Palaic; the classic example is Bronze Age Tarhuntassa (loosely meaning "City of the Storm God Tarhunta"), and later Parnassus possibly related to the Hittite word parna- or "house". These elements have led to a second theory that Pelasgian was to some degree an Anatolian language, or that it had areal influences from Anatolian languages.... Pelasgians spoke an Indo-European language and were, more specifically, related to the Thracians... Pelasgians were a sub-group of the Bronze Age Sea Peoples and identifiable in Egyptian inscriptions as the exonym PRŚT or PLŚT. However, this Egyptian name has more often been read as a cognate of a Hebrew exonym, פלשת Peleshet (Pəleeth) – that is, the Biblical Philistines....
Pelasgians had migrated from Asia Minor to the Aegean basin in the 4th millennium BC.... Certain mythological stories or deities that seem to have no parallels in the mythologies of other Indo-European peoples (e. g., the Olympians Athena, Dionysus, Apollo, Artemis, and Aphrodite, whose origins seem Anatolian or Levantine). Non-Greek inscriptions in the Mediterranean... Robert Graves asserts that certain elements of that mythology originate with the native Pelasgian people (namely the parts related to his concept of the White Goddess, an archetypical Earth Goddess) drawing additional support for his conclusion from his interpretations of other ancient literature: Irish, Welsh, Greek, Biblical, Gnostic, and medieval writings....
Pelasgians with the Ibero-Caucasian peoples of the prehistoric Caucasus, known to the Greeks as Colchians and Iberians....
Attica revealed Neolithic dwellings...Athenians as the descendants of the Pelasgians, who appear to descend continuously from the Neolithic inhabitants in Thessaly. Overall, the archaeological evidence indicates that the site of the Acropolis was inhabited by farmers as early as the 6th millennium BC....
Lemnos....Hephaisteia (i.e., Palaiopolis) where the Pelasgians, according to Herodotus, surrendered to Miltiades of Athens. There, a necropolis (c. 9th-8th centuries BC) was discovered revealing bronze objects, pots, and more than 130 ossuaries.... Early Iron Age inhabitants of Lemnos could be a remnant of a Mycenaean population and, in addition, the earliest attested reference to Lemnos is the Mycenaean Greek ra-mi-ni-ja, "Lemnian woman", written in Linear B syllabic script.
Boeotia...These fortified mountain settlements were...inhabited by Pelasgians up until the end of the Bronze Age....Pelasgian inhabitants sought to distinguish themselves "ethnically" and economically from the Mycenaean Greeks who controlled the Skourta Plain....
LYBIA AND POSEIDON HAD 3 SONS: BELUS, AGENOR, AND LELEX. LYBIA WAS SYBIL, DAUGHTER OF AN IMMORTAL NYMPH BUT HER FATHER WAS A MORTAL. (LYBIA IS SAME AS BERBA PEOPLE THE NATIVE EARTH BORN OF NORTH AFRICA PREVIOUSLY CALLED LYBIA.) POSEIDON WAS RULER OF ATLANTIS. THEIR CHILDREN WERE: BELUS, KING OF EGYPT OF WHICH DANAUS IS FROM. AGENOR, KING OF CANAAN OF WHICH THE PHOENICIANS DESCEND. LELEX WAS THE ORIGINAL INHABITANTS OF LACONIA. FROM THERE THEY CONTINUE AN EAST MIGRATION TO EGYPT, CANAAN, ANATOLIA, GREECE, ITALY, ETC.,... THUS BELUS, AGENOR,AND LELEX ARE PATERNALLY HALF GOD FROM ATLANTIS ATLANTEANS (R1b), AND HALF IMMORTAL NYMPH/HALF MORTAL MATERNALLY BERBA (U6)...
Danaus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danaus
In Greek mythology, Danaus (; Ancient Greek: Δαναός Danaós) was the king of Libya. His myth is a foundation legend (or re-foundation legend) of Argos, one of the foremost Mycenaean cities of the Peloponnesus. In Homer's Iliad, "Danaans" ("tribe of Danaus") and "Argives" commonly designate the Greek forces opposed to the Trojans.
Family: Danaus, was the son of King Belus of Egypt and the naiad Achiroe, daughter of the river god Nilus. He was the twin brother of Aegyptus, king of Arabia while Euripides adds two others, Cepheus, king of Ethiopia and Phineus, betrothed of Andromeda.
Danaus had fifty daughters, the Danaides, 12 of whom were born to the naiad Polyxo; six to Pieria; two to Elephantis; four to queen Europe; 10 to the hamadryad nymphs Atlanteia and Phoebe; seven to an Ethiopian woman; three to Memphis; two to Herse and lastly four to Crino. According to Hippostratus, Danaus had all these progeny begotten by Europa, the daughter of Nilus. In some accounts, Danaus married Melia while Aegyptus consorted with Isaie, these two women were daughters of their uncle Agenor, king of Tyre, and their possible sister, Damno who was described as the daughter of Belus.
Mythology: Flight from Aegyptus: After Aegyptus commanded that his fifty sons should marry the Danaides, Danaus elected to flee instead, and to that purpose, he built a ship, the first ship that ever was. In it, he fled to Argos, to which he was connected by his descent from Io, a priestess of Hera at Argos, who was wooed by Zeus and turned into a heifer and pursued by Hera until she found asylum in Egypt. Argos at the time was ruled by King Pelasgus, the eponym of all autochthonous [indigenous] inhabitants who had lived in Greece since the beginning, also called Gelanor ("he who laughs"). The Danaides asked Pelasgus for protection when they arrived, the event portrayed in The Suppliants by Aeschylus. Protection was granted after a vote by the Argives....
15 Major Ancient Celtic Gods And Goddesses You Should Know About
https://www.realmofhistory.com/2018/07/02/ancient-celtic-gods-goddesses-facts/
THE CELTS MAY BE THE ANCIENT CHALDEANS OR PRE CHALDEANS, A TURANIAN PEOPLE WHO INHABITED THE NEAR EAST, CENTRAL ASIA, IRAN, AND INDIA BEFORE THE SEMETIC INVASIONS. THE TURS, AND OR ARYANS MAY HAVE BEEN THE PEOPLE WHO BEGAN THE MESOPOTAMIAN CIVILIZATION. THEY PROBABLY WERE OF THE YAMNA CULTURE PRIOR, AND ALSO FROM THE SIBERIAN CULTURE PRIOR TO YAMNA. (I HOPE I AM NOT STRETCHING THE POSSIBILITIES OR BEING BIAS BUT, THE R HG SUBCLADES IS THE LIKELY CANDIDATE FOR THE TURANIAN SOCIETIES OF SIBERIA, YAMNA, MESOPOTAMIA, IRAN, INDIA, ETC...)
Assyrian Discoveries: An Account of Explorations and Discoveries on the Site of Ninevah
The early Chaldean period. The first of these is a stone written in old hieratic form of cuneiform, the language being the Turanian Babylonian, the tongue spoken in Chaldea before the Semitic period....
TURANIAN RACE Intimately connected with these historical studies is the question of the origin and history of the great Turanian race which first established civilization in the Euphrates valley It is the opinion of the majority of Assyrian scholars that the civilization literature mythology and science of Babylonia and Assyria were not the work of a Semitic race but of a totally different people speaking a language quite distinct from that of all the Semitic tribes
There is however a more remarkable point than this it is supposed that at a very early period the Akkad or Turanian population with its high cultivation and remarkable civilization was conquered by the Semitic race and that the conquerors imposed only their language on the conquered adopting from the subjugated people its mythology laws literature and almost every art of civilization Such a curious revolution would be without parallel in the history of the world and the most singular point in connection with the subject is the entire silence of the inscriptions as to any such conquest There does not appear any break in their traditions or change in the character of the country to mark this great revolution and the question of how the change was effected or when it took place is at present quite obscure The new syllabaries and bilingual tablets will assist in the discussion of these obscure and intricate questions but we cannot hope that they will be settled until the study of the inscriptions is much further advanced...
The value of the Assyrian and Babylonian mythology rests not only on its curiosity as the religious system of a great people but on the fact that here we must look if anywhere for the origin and explanation of many of the obscure points in the mythology of Greece and Rome It is evident that in every way the classical nations of antiquity borrowed far more from the valley of the Euphrates than that of the Nile and Chaldea rather than Egypt is the home even of the civilization of Europe...
The Chaldeans mapped out the heavens and arranged the stars they traced the motions of the planets and observed the appearance of comets they fixed the signs of the zodiac and the constellations of the stars and they studied the sun and moon and the periods of eclipses ...
CELT IS AN UNCLEAR TERM WITH NO EXACT KNOWN DEFINITION CAUSING MUCH CONFUSION. MANY DIFFERENT MEANINGS ARE GIVEN FOR THE WORD CELT.
THIS PAPER SEPARATES CELTS FROM THE PALEOLITHIC INHABITANTS OF IRLAND AND BASQUES OF IBERIA BECAUSE THE LANGUAGE CAME IN WITH OR AFTER THE FARMER.
GENETICALLY, THE PALEOLITHIC ABORIGINAL OF WEST EUROPE IS R1b FORMERLY HG1. THEY ARE THE BASQUE OF IBERIA, IRLAND, AND WELSCH SHARING THE SAME COMMON PATERNAL ANCESTOR.
THE PALEOLITHIC FEMALES OF EUROPE SUBCLADES OF U mtDNA HG CLEARLY WERE REPLACED BY THE MORE RECENT INVADERS OF THE H AND V mt HG's.
CAN CELT ETHNICITY BE DEFINED GENETICALLY? IF SO WAS IT A MIX OF THE RECENT INVADER HAPLOGROUPS GENES FROM MANY HOMELANDS THAT MIXED IN WITH THE ABORIGINAL R1b DURING RECENT NEOLITHIC TO POST NEOLITHIC INTRUDER SUBCLADES OF I, E, OR J HAPLOGROUP MALES FROM THE BALKANS AND NEAR EAST MIGRANTS?
CELT DEFINED LINGUISTICALLY IS ANYONE SPEAKING THE CELT LANGUAGE. CELT THEN IS A MINORITY OF LATER ARRIVALS OF CELT SPEAKERS COMING IN WITH OR AFTER THE FIRST FARMERS.
COMBINING GENETICS AND LANGUAGE TO DEFINE CELT IT IS POSSIBLE CELT COULD BE A RETURNING R1b WHO HAD A NEW LANGUAGE FROM ONE OF HIS MANY HOMELANDS. THE ADMIXTURES OF CONTAMINATION BASED ON THE AMOUNT OF FOREIGN INTRUDERS WITHIN R1b HOMELANDS. THUS, WHAT ONCE MAY HAVE BEGAN AS A RACE TODAY CELT IS NOT A RACE RATHER IT IS A LANGUAGE, AND/OR ETHNICITY. WHETHER CELT LANGUAGE ORIGINATED BY ONE OF THE R1b PEOPLE, OR WHETHER IT WAS BROUGHT IN BY A FOREIGN INTRUDER INTO R1b HOMELANDS....
A Re-analysis of Multiple Prehistoric Immigrations to Britain and Ireland Aimed at Identifying the Celtic Contributions by Stephen Oppenheimer
no classical author ever referred to inhabitants of the British Isles as Celts,...neither labelled Belgae as Celts; Caesar explicitly excluded Belgae from that self-label...the inhabitants of middle Gaul (south of the Seine and the Marne, thus specifically excluding the Belgae and excluding the Aquitani to the south-west of the Garonne), called themselves Celts in their own language....Strabo (Geographia 4.1.14) and Diodorus Siculus (V.32) identify the non-Greek aboriginal inhabitants of Narbonne as Celts, again emphasising their distinction from the general Latin terms ‘Galli/Galatae’. The ancient Greek explorer Pytheas called Central Gaul ‘Keltiké’ (.e.t...) according to Strabo.... there is another large western European region, identified by Herodotus in the 5th century BC as the home of the Keltoi, namely Iberia... Many Celtic homelands...
One of the earliest suggestions of an Iberian connection with the western British Isles was perhaps Tacitus who when referring to the Silures, inhabitants of what is now south Wales, whom he called ‘a naturally fierce people’, stated: ‘The dark complexion of the Silures , their usually curly hair, and the fact that Spain is the opposite shore to them, are an evidence that Iberians of a former date crossed over and occupied these parts.’(Tacitus, Agricola 11.)
The collector of mythological love stories Parthenius of Apamea (first century BC) gave a version of the popular legend of the origins of the Celts in his Erotica pathemata, which preserves the Spanish connection and even hints at Ireland. Heracles was wandering through Celtic territory on his return from a labour—obtaining cattle from Geryon of Erytheia (probably Cádiz). He came before a king named Bretannos (..eta....). The king had a daughter, Keltine (.e.t...), who hid Heracles’ cattle. She insisted on sex in return for the cattle. Heracles, complied. The issue of this union
was a boy and a girl. The boy, Keltos (.e.t..), was ancestor of the Celts; the girl was Iberos (.ß....), presumably linking Britain and Celts to Iberia. Rankin speculates further that the homophony between ‘Iberos/Iberia’ and the Irish mythical ancestor, Éber, may be more than coincidence (Rankin 1996, 81, 166.). A similar claim of Iberian roots for the Irish was made in the Lebar Gabála Érenn, as already mentioned....
Dr Fagan, the proprietor of Llanabba School makes some offensive remarks about the Welsh on meeting the hapless new teacher Paul Pennyfeather, including the statement ‘The ignorant speak of them as Celts, which is of course wholly erroneous. They are of pure Iberian stock—the aboriginal inhabitants of Europe, who survive only in Portugal and the Basque district’....
Working with blood groups Mourant and Watkin argued in 1952 that: ‘There appear to us reasonable grounds for the belief that, prior to the advent of Celtic speaking immigrants, the British Isles were inhabited by a people whose domain had at one time extended over a considerable part of Europe and North Africa but who under ever increasing pressure from the east had been driven from their homelands. Some, no doubt, found refuge in the more isolated mountain regions, but the remainder were gradually driven westwards and finally came to occupy a limited area near the Atlantic seaboard of Europe....
Hill and colleagues (2000) noted a similar gradient of Y-chromosome haplogroup 1 with the lowest rates in the Near East and highest rates in western Europe in particular the Basque country, with haplogroup 1 rising to near fixation (98.3%) in Gaelic surnamed men of Connacht in western Ireland. This was interpreted as haplogroup 1 (in this instance largely composed of the more-recently characterized haplogroup ‘R1b’ (Y chromosome consortium (YCC), 2002 or ‘YCC 2002’) putatively characteristic of pre-Neolithic western Europe, and also identifying the earlier, indigenous Irish....
Wilson and colleagues took these comparisons further (2001) by comparing specific STR haplotypes of haplogroup 1 between the Basque countries on the one hand and Orkney, Wales Ireland and several northwest European populations on the other. They found no significant differences on this basis between Basques, Welsh and Irish and argued that such Basque-Celtic ‘. . . similarity not only implies that Basque- and Celtic speaking populations derive from common paternal ancestors, but that genetic drift in these communities has not been sufficiently great to differentiate them’. Note that Wilson et al. correctly qualify ‘Celt’ to Celtic-speaking. They also studied mtDNA and X-chromosome and conclude overall as follows: ‘Accepting the widely held view that the Basques are representative of pre-Neolithic European Y chromosomes, we have also shown that Neolithic, Iron Age, and subsequent cultural revolutions had little effect on the paternal genetic landscape of the Celtic-speaking populations (there has been continuity from the Upper Palaeolithic to the present).’... Cornwall and western Britain, in general, additionally shared the close relationship with Basques. They attributed this relationship to expansion from an archaeologically identified glacial refuge in northern Iberia....
Genetic dating and founder analysis
Richards and colleagues’ major European founder analysis (2000) estimated dates and sizes of mtDNA founding events in Europe arriving from the Near East since the earliest Upper Palaeolithic. When partitioned by region, north-west Europe had its largest tranche of founding events between the LGM and the start of the Neolithic (52.7% +/– 4.5 divided between Late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic), with the Neolithic accounting for 21.7% (+/– 4.5) and Bronze Age and later only 4.6% (+/–1.5). However, because of sampling and methodological issues, nothing could be inferred specifically at the scale of Britain and Ireland, although a relevant point noted was that ‘the Basque Country has the lowest [Neolithic] value of all, only 7%’ Indeed no founder analysis has yet been published for these isles in a peer-reviewed journal....
Pre-Neolithic
Nearly three quarters (73%) overall of British and Irish ancestors arrived before the first farmers. This proportion increased progressively in western Britain and Ireland: 88% of Irish, 81% of Welsh, 79% of Cornish, 70% of the people of Scotland and its associated islands and 68% (over two thirds) of the English and their geographically associated islands. Nearly all of the founding clusters dating to the pre-Neolithic belonged, as expected, to haplogroup 1 (RxR1a1 i.e. R1b in this context (YCC 2002, confirmed on STR, Athey, 2006; see Figure 6.2 this paper). The remaining four percent was mainly contributed by haplogroup I1c (Late Glacial according to Rootsi et al. (2004); I2b in YCC 2008), and I1b2 (now I2a2 in YCC 2008). The I1b2 subclade is included in this section on the basis of Late Mesolithic estimated age in the British Isles...
Using STR markers to create a phylogeny, the R1b haplotypes were broken up into 13 putative founding clusters deriving ancestry from northern Iberia. Six of these founding clusters arrived in, what is now, the British Isles during the Late Upper Palaeolithic prior to the Younger Dryas cold episode (assuming that lasted between 13,000-11,500 corrected years ago), and impinged mainly on Cornwall, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, which then formed the west coast of Europe. The other seven clusters arrived during the British Mesolithic (between 11,500 BP–7,500 BP). There is some phylogenetic Uncertainty for estimating the age of the main R1b sub-cluster characterising Ireland, which is assigned here to the Late Upper Palaeolithic, but it could have possibly have arrived during the early Mesolithic. Much of the subsequent diversity of these clusters derives from local re-expansions occurring during the Late Mesolithic and in the Neolithic.
The Y-chromosome pre-Neolithic colonisation pattern was mirrored in size, age, and geography by inferred expansions of mtDNA haplogroups H and V out of northern Iberia (figs 3.4 and 3.5 in Oppenheimer 2006/7), H subgroup 1 and V expanding pre-Younger Dryas and H subgroups 2, 3, 4, and 5a during the Mesolithic (Achilli et al.,2004; Pereira et al., 2005).
Neolithic
Taking the archaeological evidence for the British and Irish Neolithic to span 4500BC to 2000BC (Cunliffe 2004), over a dozen putative Y-founding clusters were identified as intrusive (i.e. excluding re-expansions of pre-existing lineages) over that period. These belonged to four major Y-haplogroups: R1a1, I, J and E3b (E1b1b1 in YCC 2008). Other minor paragroups in the British database most likely associated with the Neolithic included paragroups FxIJK and KxPN3, which are not discussed further here, due to dating problems, although FxIJK tends to follow the same distribution as J2, while KxPN3 follows that of E3b in these datasets.
The two haplogroups, J and E3b, are fairly well recognized in the literature as moving westwards from the eastern Mediterrean/Near Eastern region via the north Mediterranean coast during the Neolithic and later (Scozzari, et al. 2001; Richards 2003; Semino et al. 2004; Di Giacomo et al. 2004; Cruciani et al. 2004; 2007), with subgroups of both haplogroups expanding again and spreading westwards from the Balkans in the Northern Mediterranean in the Early Bronze Age...
In north-west Europe, Y-haplogroup R1a1, characterizes mainly Scandinavia and north-west Germany, and its sparse presence in Britain,...
Haplogroup I is not normally included in the literature as a candidate for European Neolithic gene flow (Richards 2003, but see Rootsi et al. 2004), probably because it originates within Europe rather than the Near East, the latter region tending to be more perceived as associated with Neolithic expansions. However, not all of the Neolithic gene-flow need have come from outside Europe, since there was a thriving Neolithic in the Balkans prior to its spread up the Danube with Linearbandkeramik (Gronenborn, 2003), and the Balkans have the highest frequencies and diversity of haplogroup I subgroups (Rootsi et al. 2004). In my analysis, sub-groups of haplogroup I account for a considerable amount of westward gene flow during the Neolithic and less so in Late Mesolithic. I1a (I1 in YCC 2008) is a good candidate for association with the LBK movement up the Danube with ages of STR variation of 8,800 years ago (+/–3,200) overall in Europe (Rootsi et al. 2004, table 3), with later movement into Eastern Britain shown by five founding cluster events dating from 4,000-7,000 years ago (Oppenheimer 2006/7). The latter make up a larger proportion of the Neolithic input than R1a1, mainly to eastern Britain from north-west Europe and Scandinavia.
I1b2 (defined by M26 & P37.2) and I1b*(defined by P37.2) are also good candidates for Neolithic spread from the Balkans ultimately as far as Ireland...Both sub-groups date, by STR analysis, overall in Europe to the early Neolithic (I1b*: 7,600 yr +/– 2,700; I1b2: 8,000 +/– 4,000 Rootsi et al., 2004), but I1b* concentrates at high rates of 20–40% (40% in Bosnia) in a presumed I1b homeland in the Balkans (Rootsi et al., 2004). I1b* spreads at high rates extensively further east in Europe, but is also found scattered west of the Balkans at much lower rates of 1–2% in Western Europe, including Italy, Portugal (Rootsi et al., 2004), Catalonia and 2%–5% Ireland and western Britain...
Further west, the I1b2 frequency follows that of I1b* in Portugal, but relatively high rates of I1b2 (6–8%) are found in the Basque Country and Bearnais in southern France (Rootsi et al., 2004) in addition to appreciable rates of 2–3% in Ireland, Wessex, and the Channel Islands...I1b2 dates as a whole in western Europe to around 8,000 years ago in the early Neolithic (Rootsi et al., 2004) with a similar founding date within the British Isles of 8,600 years (+/– 4,270 Oppenheimer 2006/7, chapter 5). I1b* has a slightly younger overall STR age (7,600 yr +/– 2,700, Rootsi et al. 2004).... At any rate, I1b* and I1b2 (and KxPN3) are the only putative Mediterranean-route Neolithic migrants to reach Ireland (Figure 6.3).
The Y-haplogroup J has been argued to be a marker for the movement of Neolithic farmers into Europe (largely as J2) from the Near East, spreading a dense swathe across the northern Mediterranean from the Levant through Greece, the Balkans and Albania, and Italy, where J2 accounts for up to 30% of Y-lineages, to Iberia... a secondary expansion west in a more focused way in the Early Bronze Age of expansion of J2e-M12: 4.1ky and 4.7kyr... evidence ‘of a recent population growth in situ[i.e. from the Balkans] rather than the result of a mere flow of western Asian migrants in the early Neolithic.’ In other words J2e–M12 (J2b in YCC 2008) expanded locally from the Balkans to Italy, France, and Iberia in south-western Europe during the Early Bronze Age, (see also Di Giacomo et al. 2004, and data in Semino et al 2004, 2007, Scozzari et al 2001.). This Late Chalcolithic/Bronze Age expansion scenario could even be consistent with the anomalous finding of significant frequencies (1%–8%) of J2e–M12 among Indic (Indo-European) speaking populations of south Asia.
In the British dataset I examined, nearly all of J belonged to the J2 sub-group; further, all the STR marker profiles of J2 were most consistent with the J2e–M12 subgroup (as inferred using both STR table 3 of SOM in Cruciani et al 2007 and Appendix table in Di Giacomo et al. 2004), thus implying a Balkan Bronze Age source for much of J2 in Britain. J2 is found throughout Britain mainly concentrating in southern England and in central Scotland in a formerly Pictish region. In both regions it is present at rates from 2% up to 7%. It is absent from Ireland and large islands clustered near Britain such as the Isle of Man, Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles (Figure 6.4).
Y-haplogroup E3b accounts for a substantial proportion (10%–30%) of males in Balkans populations. This proportion is highest (32%) in the case of Albania (Cruciani et al. 2004, 2007) and is entirely made up there by the subclade E3b1... E–M78, ultimately derived from northeastern Africa... (E3b1a2*) originates in the Balkans (highest rate of V13: 32.29% in Albania) and dates there by two methods to 4.0–4.7 ky, (95% CI 3.5–4.6 kyr and 4.1–5.3 kyr, respectively).... Y-haplogroup E3b is unique among putative Neolithic/Bronze Age entrants to Britain and Ireland in that it shows a large, clear, focal founding-event centred in northern Wales...north Wales and England also have relatively high rates of E3b (4.5%-5.6%)...mostly absent in Ireland...estimate of the age of one of these cluster-founding events: 4,500 years...
Discussion
The evidence on the age and origins of the British mtDNA and Y-chromosome haplogroups, discussed above, leads to the conclusion that pre-Neolithic colonisation of Britain and Ireland up the Atlantic coast from the former glacial refuge in northern Iberia contributed by far the bulk of ancestors for pre-1950s populations. This in turn makes for a low likelihood that ‘Celts’, defined as speakers of Celtic languages and the language that became Celtic, formed a homogeneous indigenous aboriginal population in Britain and Ireland since there is general agreement that they arrived either after or with the first farmers, but not before. Rather, by inference, Celts and their cultures were minority later arrivals whose languages replaced some or all of those spoken by the real indigenes. This perspective puts the identity of western British and Irish genes as representative of Celts on a shaky footing.
Furthermore the pre-Neolithic Y and mtDNA genetic ancestry of two-thirds of English populations makes the claimed Anglo-Saxon genocide of the indigenous population living in the sout-east of Britain a scenario unsupported by genetic evidence and more likely to be due to a small elite invasion. Additionally, the origins of the genetic differences between east and west Britain appear to be more seated in the late prehistoric period, than during historic times. In fact there is little further genetic evidence of significant inward migration after the Bronze Age and during the Iron Age until the
modest contributions of the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings (Oppenheimer 2006/7)....
For each of the three sets of candidate Y-lineages (subgroups of I1b, J2 & E3b1) moving from south-west Europe to Britain and Ireland during the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age...The possible archaeo-linguistic counterparts of these three north-western Mediterranean genetic trails, all arising apparently in the Balkans, have to be highly speculative. The I1b*/I1b2 trail differs from the other two in having a Bosnian rather than Albanian source focus in the Balkans...
In contrast, given the phylogeographic evidence and dating of J2–M12 and E3b–78a that dually links an early Bronze Age lineage expansion from the Balkans with western Iberia and Britain, in particular with northern Wales, Pictish Scotland and southern England,...
An obvious common factor is copper exploitation and the chronological archaeological evidence of the earlier Balkans Chalcolithic with its postulated influence on the Iberian Chalcolithic (Scarre 1995, 110–1), implying focused migration of specialist copper miners. This would certainly provide an explanation or narrative for the subsequent and final dated E3b1 demic founding event near the Great Ormes Head copper mine....
Was there any connection between the simultaneous spreads of J2e–M12 and E3b1–78a with the separate, and the apparently earlier movement of the I1b Y-lineages from nearby homelands in the Balkans, probably via Italy, Sardinia and France, to Ireland, Wales and southeast England as well as Galicia?...
Conclusion
In line with the title of this symposium, Celticization from the West, this genetic review is aimed at providing some perspective as to the possible relative demic contributions of the people that Romans called Celtae and Greeks Keltoi to the prehistoric colonization of the British Isles. As stated in the introduction to this paper, this may be an impossible
task, since genes do not carry ethnic or linguistic labels and there is no agreement as to who the Celts were or when and where they came from. Given the general consensus that they did not arrive before the first farmers, it is probable on present evidence that, like other Neolithic and post-Neolithic invaders, they would have represented a minority intrusion to the gene pool, overall perhaps less than ten percent. In other words, genetically, their descendants could not qualify as aboriginal especially in Ireland and on the Atlantic side of Britain....
Analysis of Y-chromosomes that could have arrived in the British Isles from the south west, during the Neolithic and onwards, reveals a limited choice of three main groups of lineages I1b*/I1b2, J2e–M12 and E3b1, which are all found in the same distribution as the three putative western Celtic homelands as well as in the British Isles. While I1b*/I1b2 appears to have expanded in the early European Neolithic, recent studies show that J2e–M12 and E3b1a2 both expanded from Albania in the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze age. STR haplotypes of J2 and E3b1 in Britain are consistent respectively with J2–M12 and E3b1a2, and the E3b1 founding event in north Wales is close geographically and in
age to the Great Ormes Head copper mine of Llandudno, consistent with it being the terminus of a rapid focused movement associated with copper exploitation during the late European Chalcolithic, and possibly with the spread of Celtic languages....
THIS ARTICLE PICKS UP AT LATE NEOLITHIC TIMES DESCRIBES A MIGRATION OR BACK MIGRATION OF AN EAST EUROPEAN / WEST EURASIAN R1 BACK TO THE WEST. WHO FORM A HOMELAND IN NORTH GERMANY/LOWER RHINE ABOUT 3000BC SPEAKING AN ARYAN LANGUAGE BEGAN IN UKRAINE. PROBABLY PROTO TOCHARIAN YAMNAYA EXCLUSIVELY R1b. bELL BEAKER FORMS IN NETHERLANDS ABOUT 2500BC, AND THE PROTO CELTIC R1b-L21 DEVELOPS IN CORNWALL DEVON. IT THEN SPREADS OUTWARD DOWN INTO IBERIA, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND SOUTHWARD AND EASTWARDS....
Celtic and Italic from the West – the Genetic Evidence
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1782.
originated in the late Bronze Age Britain and Low Countries and have later spread from the West to East to spread further from the Halstatt Alpine Iron Age...
Recent archaeogenetic studies proved that R1b-M269 males, today dominant lineage
in Central and Western Europe originate from the Pontic-Caspian Steppes that is today’s Ukraine and Southern Russia. A pre-M269 but non-M73 male, i.e. leading from P297 towards M269 ancestor was found in Samara culture on the Volga River living around
5500 BC. It was also confirmed that the Kurgan-building Yamnaya steppe herders and their eastern offshoot Afanasievo culture (probably proto-Tocharian) belonged predominantly to Haplogroup R1b-Z2103....
late Proto-Indo-European (“Aryan proper”) language was most likely spoken in the Corded Ware Cultural (CWC) complex (2900-2350 BC). It shows significant Yamnaya-related Western Steppe Herder (WSH) autosomal ancestry, and has geographical subgroups fitting the spread of specific subfamilies. Proto-Indo-Iranians derive from Sintashta culture (2200-1800) coming from the eastern side of CWC Fatyanovo-
Balanovo culture (2900-2200 BC), being mostly R1a-Z93 on the paternal line. Proto-Balto-Slavs are the candidate for descending from CWC Middle Dniepr culture (3200-2300 BC) being R1a-Z280 and moving north to replace the Mesolithic Narva culture. Battle Axe culture (2800-2300 BC) is the CWC branch in Scandinavia where R1a-Z284 and I1-M253 prevails, replacing Pitted Ware Mesolithic. Last but not least,
Single Grave culture (2800-2200 BC) replaced TRB Neolithic in the North German Plain and Denmark, being ancestral to later Bell Beaker culture from 2500 BC (R1b-L11/P311)....
R1b-L52>P311 subgroup (leading to U106 and P312) dwelled in Southeast Poland, on the present Ukrainian border in the late Corded Ware culture times, while most other CWC samples from Germany through Northern Poland to Estonia belonged to Hg R1a-M417. These SE Polish CWC samples also exhibit higher genetic affinity to later Bell Beaker culture samples than to CWC remains from other regions. The only CWC group related to this group is the Single Grave Culture in the Lower Rhine-Lower Elbe area.
Therefore it is a safe conclusion that P311 ancestors migrated from the PIE homeland through Southeast Poland, north of the Carpathians towards the North Sea coast between 2900 and 2500 BC. This route is autosomally supported by Olade et al. 2017, where they concluded that Bell Beaker samples outside Iberia (exclusively R1b-P312) are an admixture of Yamnaya-related ancestry with North European Neolithic groups (Globular Amphora and TRB), without any ancestry from Iberian Neolithic.
We can conclude that the Corded Ware (CWC) horizon was the source of autosomally
un-admixed late PIE” people, being source of the proto-Italo-Celtic (Single Grave part), proto-Germanic (Battle Axe part), proto-Balto-Slavic (Middle Dnieper part) and proto-Indo-Iranian (Fatyanovo-Balanovo part). Autosomal evidence makes it clear that there is full autosomal continuity in the British Isles, Northern Netherlands and Scandinavia (incl. Denmark) since the Bell Beaker and Battle Axe period (as also shown by Y-DNA)....
the autosomal genetic results support the Y-DNA branching observation that L11/P311 is the most diverse in the Lower Rhine-Lower Elbe area where U106 and P312 as well as rare brothers S1194 and A8053 could have lived next to each other around 2800-2500 BC before the P312 branch started the Beaker expansion.
It is widely known that the paternally the most “Celtic” subgroup, R1b-P312 is most frequent in the Celtic parts of British Isles and in Iberia (above 50%), significant in France
(40-50%) and has decreasing frequency towards Central and Eastern Europe. R1b-L21, the typical P312 subgroup in British Isles was found among the earliest Bell Beaker settlers. There is no reasonable scenario to expect a Carpathian Basin–North Alps or Carpathian Basin–Italy migration route for proto-Celtic based on the paternal frequencies of R1b-P312. This is also underlined by autosomal DNA evidence, as shown by early British Bell Beaker samples, as their genetic distance is measured from modern populations.
British Isles Bell Beaker samples cluster with modern Northern European populations, whether today Germanic or Celtic speaking. It is also notable that most distances are below 10.00 that means these modern populations are direct autosomal descendants of Bell Beaker groups, without any admixture break, testifying the North to South and West to East direction of gene flows in the Bronze and Iron Ages....
The Italo-Celtic homeland can be firmly set in the North German Plain/Lower Rhine area based on Y-DNA and autosomal DNA evidence.
Conclusions:
Proto-Italo-Celtic speakers (Y-DNA R1b-P311) migrated from present-day Ukraine
through South-East Poland to the Lower Rhine area between 2900 and 2500 BC, identified by the Single Grave Culture belonging to the Corded Ware horizon.
The Bell Beaker culture formed around 2500 BC in present-day Netherlands / NW Germany, spreading with R1b-P312 males between 2500 and 2000 BC to the British Isles (later Proto-Celtic, R1b-L21), to Iberia and Southern France (Liguro-Latin-Sicel R1b-DF27 and R1b-Z56), to Denmark and Scania (R1b-U106, later basis for West Germanic)
and to the Northern Alps-Bohemia-Poland (R1b-L2, later Osco-Umbrian and from Halstatt to the East “Gelonian/ Scythian”).
Autosomal DNA proves that un-admixed Italo-Celtic and Germanic populations lived
in Corded Ware Culture, while in the Northern Alps and the Carpathian Basin non-IE
autosomal components (Rhaeto-Etruscan, Vasconic) have significant presence well into
the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age.
“Royal Scythians” (Gelonians) are autosomally Eastern Gauls in the 6th-3rd centuries
BC in the Carpathian Basin and Ukraine, showing the Easternmost limit of the spread
of Celts after Halstatt C. Preceding Cimmerians and following Sarmatians have Steppe
Nomadic ancestry, mainly Iranian but partly also Caucasian and Turkic.
Italic languages are not coherent as such. There was a first wave from the Western direction into Italy bringing Ligurian, Latin and probably Sicel at the same time Lusitanian
(directly from Britain) and proto-Tartessian (through Catalonia) reached Iberia. Later,
there was a second migration from the Carpathian Basin/Alps in Urnfield-Villanovan
times to Italy: Etruscan speakers splitting Ligurians and Latins and Illyrian-influence
Osco-Umbrians spreading along the Adriatic coast.
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