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The Phoenician Origin Of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons
by Laurence Austine Waddell (1924)


The treasures of ancient high art lately unearthed at Luxor have excited the admiring interest of a breathless world, and have awakened more vividly than before a sense of the vast antiquity of the so-called " Modern Civilization," as it existed over three thousand years ago in far-off Ancient Egypt and Syria-Phoenicia. Keener and more personal interest, therefore, should naturally be felt by us in the long-lost history and civilization of our own ancestors in Ancient Britain of about that period, as they are now disclosed to have been a branch of the same great ruling race to which belonged, as we shall see, the Sun-worshipping Akhenaten (the predecessor and father-in-law of Tut-ankh-amen) and the authors of the naturalistic "New" Egyptian art—the Syrio-Phoenicians.

That long-lost origin and early history of our ancestors, the Britons, Scots and Anglo-Saxons, in the " Prehistoric " and Pre-Roman periods, back to about 3000 B.C., are now recovered to a great extent in the present work, by means of newly discovered historical evidence. And so far from these ancestral Britons having been mere " painted savages roaming wild in the woods," as we are imaginatively told in most of the modern history books, they are now on the contrary disclosed by the newly found historical facts to have been from the very first grounding of their galley keels upon Old Albion's shores, over a millennium and a half of years before the Christian era, a highly civilized and literate race, pioneers of Civilization, and a branch of the famous Phoenicians.

In the course of my researches into the fascinating problem of the Lost Origin of the Aryans, the fair, long-headed North European race, the traditional ancestors of our forbears of the Brito-Scandinavian race who gave to Europe in prehistoric time its Higher Civilization and civilized Languages researches to which I have devoted the greater part of my life, and my entire time for the past sixteen years I ascertained that the Phoenicians were Aryans in race. That is to say, they were of the fair and long-headed civilizing " Northern " race, the reality of whose existence was conclusively confirmed and established by Huxley, who proved that

"There was and is an Aryan Race, that is to say, the characteristic modes of speech, termed Aryan, were developed among the Blond Long-heads alone, however much some of them may have been modified by the importation of Non-Aryan elements." ("The Aryan Question " in Nineteenth Century, 1890. 766.)

Thus the daring Phoenician pioneer mariners who, with splendid courage, in their small winged galleys, first explored the wide seas and confines of the Unknown Ancient World, and of whose great contributions to the civilization of Greece and Rome classic writers speak in glowing terms, were, I found by indisputable inscriptional and other evidence, not Semites as hitherto supposed, but were Aryans in Race, Speech and Script. They were, besides, disclosed to be the lineal blood-ancestors of the Britons and Scots —properly so-called, that is, as opposed to the aboriginal dark Non-Aryan people of Albion, Caledonia and Hibernia, the dusky small-statured Picts and kindred " Iberian " tribes.

This discovery, of far-reaching effect upon the history of European Civilization, and of Britain in particular, was announced in a summary of some of the results of my researches on Aryan Origins in the " Asiatic Review " for 1917 (pp. 197!). And it is now strikingly confirmed and established by the discovery of hitherto undeciphered Phoenician and Sumerian inscriptions in Britain (the first to be recorded in Britain), and by a mass of associated historical evidence from a great variety of original sources, including hitherto uninterpreted pre-Roman-Briton coins and contemporary inscriptions, most of which is now published for the first time.

In one of these inscriptions, a bi-lingual Phoenician inscription in Scotland of about 400 B.C., now deciphered and translated for the first time, its author, in dedicating a votive monument to the Sun-god Bel, calls himself by all three titles " Phoenician," " Briton " and " Scot " ; and records his personal name and native town in Cilicia, which is a well-known ancient city-port and famous seat of " Sun-worship " in Asia Minor.

This British-Phoenician prince from Cilicia is, moreover, disclosed in his own inscription in Scotland to be the actual historical original of the traditional " Part-olon, king of the Scots," who, according to the Ancient British Chronicles of Geoffrey and Nennius and the legends of the Irish Scots, came with a fleet of colonists from the Mediterranean and arrived in Erin, after having cruised round the Orkneys (not far distant from the site where this Phoenician monument stands) and colonized and civilized Ireland, about four centuries before the Roman occupation of Britain. And he is actually called in this inscription " Part-olon " by a fuller early form of that name.

This uniquely important British-Phoenician inscription, whilst incidentally extending back the existence of the Scots in Scotland for over eight centuries beyond the period hitherto known for them to our modern historians, and disclosing their Phoenician origin, at the same time rehabilitates the genuineness of the traditional indigenous British Chronicles as preserved by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nennius. These chronicles, although formerly accorded universal credence in Britain and on the Continent up till about a century ago, have been arbitrarily jettisoned aside by modern writers on early British history, obsessed with exaggerated notions of the Roman influence on Britain, as mere fables. But the genuineness of these traditional chronicles, thus conclusively established for the period about 400 B.C., is also now confirmed in a great variety of details for other of these traditional events in the pre-Roman period of Britain.

This ascertained agreement of the traditional British Chronicles with leading ascertained facts of pre-Roman British History wherever it can be tested, presumes a similarly genuine character also for the leading events in the earlier tradition. This begins with the arrival of " King Brutus-the-Trojan " and his "Briton" colonists with their wives and families in a great fleet from the Mediterranean about 1103 b.c, and his occupation, colonization and civilization of Albion, which he then is recorded to have called after himself and his Trojan Briton followers " Brit-ain " or " Land of the Brits," after dispossessing a still earlier colony of kindred Britons in Albion. All the more so is this pre-Roman-British tradition with its complete king-lists and chronicles probably genuine, as the Ancient Britons, properly so-called, are now found to have been accustomed to the use of writing from the earliest period of their first arrival in Albion or Britain. And the cherished old British tradition that Brutus-the-Troj an and his " Britons" hailed from the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor is in agreement with the fact that King Part-olon " the Briton " actually records his native land as being also on the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor. And this tradition is now confirmed by the discovery that many of the prehistoric gravings and inscriptions on the rocks and monoliths in Britain are of the Trojan type.

Fully to appreciate the historical significance of these long-undeciphered Phoenician and Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, and their associated evidence, it is necessary to have some general acquaintance with the results of my researches into the racial origin and previously unknown early history and world activities of the Phoenicians for a period of over two thousand years beyond that hitherto known to our historians. I, therefore, give in the introductory chapter a brief summary of the manner in which I was led to discover that the Phoenicians were Aryan in Race, Speech and Script, and were of vast antiquity, dating back from the testimony of their own still existing inscribed monuments to about 3100 B.C.

My new historial keys to the origin and " prehistoric " activities of the Phoenicians in early Europe disclose these virile ancestral pioneers of the Higher Civilization as no mere dead figures in a buried past, but instinct with life and human interests, adventurously exploring and exploiting the commercial possibilities of the various regions along the unknown seas of the Old World; and indicating to us at the present day the paths which led to the propagation and progress of the Higher Civilization over the World.

Starting from the solid new ground of the positive, concrete, historical inscriptions, we are led by the clues thus gained to fresh clues which open up for us, as we proceed, new and unsuspected avenues of evidence, disclosing rich mines of untapped historical material, written and unwritten. These clues lead us from Britain back to the Phoenician and Hittite homeland of the Aryan Phoenician Britons in Syria, Phoenicia and Asia Minor of St. George of Cappadocia (and England), and there offer us the solutions to most of the long outstanding problems in regard to the origin of the Ancient Britons and the source and meaning of our ancestral British folklore, national emblems and patron saints.

In this way we gain not only a fairly intimate knowledge of the personalities of the Early Aryan Phoenicians who, as the ancestral Britons and Scots, colonized and civilized Britain, and the historical reasons for their various waves of migration hither with wholesale transplantation of their cults, institutions and names on British soil. We gain at the same time a considerable new insight into the remoter origin and racial character of the pre-Briton, non-Aryan aborigines of the British Isles in the Stone Age and their relation to the Picts and Celts which unravels to a great extent the hopeless tangle in which the question of the aboriginal races in Britain has hitherto become involved.

In thus enlarging, not inconsiderably, the boundaries of Clio's domain in Britain, we are led into several provinces not hitherto suspected of connection with Britain, though the relationship now becomes obvious. This wider outlook on the parent land, as well as its colony in Britain and their intercommunications, reflects fresh light on both the Ancient Britons and on their parent Phoenicians. Amongst the great variety of historical effects thus elicited by this new light may be mentioned the following:

Archeologically are disclosed the racial character, original homeland and approximate dates of our ancestral erectors of the prehistoric Stone Circles in the British Isles with the motive of these monuments, also the erectors of the prehistoric stone cists and long barrow graves of the " Late Stone Age." The discovery of the key to the script of the prehistoric " Cup-marks" engraved upon the rocks and monoliths unlocks the hitherto sealed messages of these prehistoric literary records of our ancestors, and gives us a vivid picture of the exalted ideals which already ruled their lives in those far-distant days. Relatively fixed data are obtained for the much-conjectured beginning of the Bronze Age in Britain, and of the race who introduced it and manufactured the Early Bronze weapons, implements and trinkets which are unearthed from time to time, and hitherto supposed to be " Celtic." The racial character and original homeland of the pre-Aryan aborigines of the British Isles in the Stone Age also become evident. And we discover that the hitherto inexplicable Unity in the essentials of all the Ancient Civilizations is owing to the original Unity of the Higher Civilization, and its diffusion throughout the world by its originators, the ruling race of Aryans, and especially by their sea-going branch, the Phoenicians.

Historically, besides recovering the approximate dates of the chief waves of Aryan-Briton invasions, and the political causes apparently leading to these invasions, we recover and establish the historicity, names, achievements and dates of a great number of the chief kings and heroes of the Ancient Britons in what has hitherto been considered " the prehistoric period." Amongst other results is the interpretation of the unexplained legends and the wholly unknown origin and meaning of the symbols stamped upon the very numerous coins of the Ancient Britons in the pre-Roman period, and now disclosed for the first time.

In British National Patron Saints and emblems of Phoenician origin are now found to be St. George of Cappadocia and England and his Dragon legend and his Red Cross ; also the Crosses of St. Andrew and St. Patrick, now forming with St. George's the Union Jack and the kindred Scandinavian ensigns, all of which crosses are found to have been carried by the Phoenicians as their sacred standards of victory and imported and transplanted by them in the remote past on to British soil. " Britannia " also is discovered to have been evolved by the ancient sea-going Phoenicians as their patronymic tutelary goddess, and under the same name and with substantially the same form of representation as the British " Britannia.'' And the Phoenician origin and hitherto unknown meaning of the Unicorn and Lion emblems in British heraldry are now disclosed for the first time.

Linguistically, we now find that the English, Scottish, Irish, Gaelic, Cymric, Gothic and Anglo-Saxon languages and their script, and the whole family of the so-called " Aryan " languages with their written letters, are derived from the Aryan Phoenician language and script through their parent, the " Hittite " or Sumerian ; and that about fifty per cent of the commonest words in use in the'' English'' Language to-day are discovered to be Sumerian, " Cymrian " or Hittite in origin, with the same word-form, sound and meaning. This fact is freely illustrated in these pages, as critical words occur incidentally as we proceed. And it is found that the English and " Doric " Scottish dialects preserve the original Aryan or "Sumerian" form of words more faithfully than either the Sanskrit or Greek. The Phoenician origin of the ancient sacred " Ogam " script of the pre-Christian monuments in the British Isles is also disclosed.

In Religion, it is now found that the exalted religion of the Aryan Phoenicians, the so-called " Sun-worship," with its lofty ethics and belief in a future life with resurrection from the dead, was widely prevalent in early Britain down to the Christian era. In this " Sun-worship," as it is usually styled by modern writers, we shall see that, although the earliest Aryans worshipped that luminary itself, they were the first people to imagine the idea of God in heaven, and at an early period evolved the idea of the One Universal God, as " The Father God," some millenniums before the birth of Abraham, and they symbolized him by the Sun. They further emblemized the Sun as " The Light of the World " by the True Cross, in the manner now discovered, and they carved the Cross, as the symbol of Universal Divine Victory, upon their sacred seals and standards, and sculptured it upon their monuments from the fourth millennium b.c. downwards; and invented the Swastika with the meaning now disclosed. This now explains for the first time the very umerous Crosses and Swastikas carved upon the prehistoric stone monuments and pre-Christian Stone Crosses with their other solar and non-Christian symbols throughout the British Isles. It also now explains the solar " wheeled " Cross, the so-called " Celtic " Cross, and the Red Cross of St. George, the Fiery Cross of the Scottish clans, the Bel Fire rites still surviving in the remoter parts of these islands at the summer solstice, and the numerous True Crosses with solar symbols stamped upon the ancient Briton coins of the "Catti" and "Cassi" kings of the pre-Roman and pre-Christian periods in Britain.

Geographically, the topography of the " prehistoric" distribution of the early Aryan Phoenician settlements throughout Ancient Britain is recovered by the incidence of their patronymic and ethnic names in the oldest Aryan place, river and ethnic names in relation to the prehistoric Stone Circles and monuments, before the thick upcrop of later and modern town and village names had submerged or obscured the early Aryan names on the map. The transplantation by the Phoenician colonists of old cherished homeland names from Asia Minor and Phoenician colonies on the Mediterranean is also seen. The Phoenician source and meaning of many of the ancient place, river and mountain names in Britain, hitherto unknown, or the subject of more or less fantastic conjecture by imaginative etymologists, is disclosed. And a somewhat clearer view is, perhaps, gained of the line of Phoenician seaports, trading stations and ports of call along the Mediterranean and out beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the prehistoric period.

In Economics and Science, the Hitto-Phoenician Aryan origin of our ordered agricultural and industrial life becomes evident. And the old British tradition is confirmed that London was built as the commercial capital several centuries before the foundation of Rome.

In Art, a like origin is disclosed for many of the motives in our modern decorative art. The religious solar meaning of the " key-patterns " and spiral designs is elicited for the first time. And the art displayed by the Ancient Britons in the pre-Roman period is found to be based upon Hitto-Phoenician models, and to be of a much higher standard than in the Anglo-Saxon and " mediaeval" period in Britain.

Politically, the newly discovered racial link, uniting the Western Barats or " Brit-ons" with the Eastern Barats (or " Britons ") of India—still called " The Land of the Barats "—through the blood-kinship with the ruling chiefs of India now revealed and established, should favourably determine the latter, in these days of Indian unrest, to remain within the fellowship of the British Commonwealth, which is now shown to have retained the real " Swaraj " elements of the old progressive ancestral Barat Civilization in a much purer form than the Indian branch. And the intimate kinship of the Britons and British, properly so-called, with the Norse—the joint preservers of the ancestral Gothic epics, the Eddas—is now disclosed to be much closer and much more ancient than has hitherto been suspected; and long before the Viking Age.

Classic Legend and Myth is to some extent rehabilitated by finding that some of the great heroes and demi-gods of Homer had a historical human origin in the personalities and achievements of famous Early Aryan and Barat Kings, whose actual dates are now recovered.

The Psychologist and Eugenist may probably find a somewhat clearer standpoint for observing the effect of the mixing of racial elements in the composite British Nation, and in regard to the question of the racial element making for real progress in the complex conditions of our modem National Life.

Amongst the many minor effects of the discovery of the Aryan racial character of the Phoenicians and their merchant princes now disclosed, it would appear that the beautiful painting by Lord Leighton which adorns the walls of the Royal Exchange in London, portraying the opening of the Trade era in Britain, now requires an exchange of complexions between the aborigines of Albion and the Phoenician merchants, as well as some slight nasal readjustment in the latter to the Aryan type.

In thus opening up for us lost vistas of history adown the ages, and lifting considerably higher than before the dense veil that hung so long over the origin and ancestry of the composite races now forming the British Nation, the newfound historical evidence suggests that the modern Aryan-Britons or British, more fully than the other descendants of the Phoenicians, have inherited the sea-faring aptitudes and adventurous spirit of that foremost race of the Ancient World; and that the maritime supremacy of Britain, under her Phoenician tutelary Britannia, has been mainly kept alive by the lineal blood-descendants of these Aryan Phoenician ancestors of the Britons and the Scots and Anglo-Saxons.

In traversing such wide and varied fields of research in so many different specialized departments of culture and civilization, wherein a great mass of the new uncoordinated knowledge, laboriously unearthed by countless modern archaeologists working in separate water-tight compartments, now receives a new orientation, it is scarcely possible that one individual, however careful, in such a pioneer exploration for the path of Truth along this vastly complex problem, can escape falling into errors in some details. But no pains have been spared to minimize such possibilities, and it is believed that such errors of commission, if they do occur, are relatively few and immaterial, and do not at all affect the main conclusions reached, which are so clearly established by the mass of cumulative historical evidence.

The long delay in publishing these discoveries, which were mostly made many years ago, has been owing to the vast scope of this exploration over so many wide fields, with the re-orientation of much of the mass of knowledge unearthed by countless archaeologists working in specialized but isolated and uncoordinated departments. To this has been added the necessity for my acquiring a working knowledge of the ancient scripts and languages in which the original ancient inscriptions and records were written, in order to revise at first hand the spelling of the proper names in the original records in the Cuneiform and its parent the Sumerian hieroglyphic script, also in the " Akkadian," Hittite, hieroglyph Egyptian, Cretan, Cyprian, Iberian, Runic Gothic, Ogam, and the so-called Phoenician Semitic, and its allied Aramaic and Hebrew scripts, in addition to the Indian Pali and Sanskrit. This has entailed the spending of many additional years in strenuous toil for the necessary equipment for this pioneer exploration from the Aryan standpoint, as disclosed by my new historical keys found embedded in the Indian Sanskrit Vedas and Epics. And it has been supplemented by actual visitation of some of the chief sites in the ancient homeland of the Phoenicians and Hitto-Sumerians in Mesopotamia and Syria-Phoenicia. It is for the unbiassed reader now to judge whether these many years of intensive study are justified by their results. Some of the outstanding historical results of these discoveries are indicated in the concluding chapter.

And here I gratefully acknowledge the great obligations I owe to my friend Dr. Islay Burns Muirhead, M. A., who from first to last has favoured me with his helpful candid criticism on many of the details of the discoveries, with not a few suggestive comments, some of which I have gladly incorporated in these pages, and whose unflagging interest in the progress of the work has been a constant source of encouragement. I am also indebted to the courtesy of the several authorities mentioned in the text, for replying to my enquiries and permitting the use of a few of the illustrations. A list of the chief authorities and publications referred to is given at the end of the work.

A. WADDELL.
January, 1924.

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