"Brit-Am Now"-782
Contents:
1. Francis Hynds: Ancient Ireland and Ulster
2. Emmet Sweeney and the dating of New Grange, Ireland
3. William Adelman: (Important) Genetic Links Between Vikings and Jews
1. Francis Hynds: Ancient Ireland and Ulster
From: Francishynds@aol.com
Subject: Re: "Brit-Am Now"-781
#1. Francis Hynds Irish Confusion
I find that I must reply to your comment concerning as you labellled 'Irish Confusion'.
The earliest evidence for man on the island of Ireland is at Mount Sandel in County Londonderry, this site using radiocarbon dating academically is accepted as around 6500BC. The monuments such as megalithic tombs/waymarks/dolmens are accepted as commencing around 3000BC. The oldest known stone building in the world, Newgrange, a spectacular passage tomb, County Meath, (now in the irish Republic) is radiocarbon dated as around 2500BC. The ancient capital of Ulster, Emain Macha, near Armagh city, is radiocarbon dated as 650BC. It is here that the geographer Ptolemy around 150AD records this royal site as 'Regia' in his map of Ivernia & Albion - the Pretanic Ilses. At this stage it is considered, practically proven, that Ulster expanded as far south as the river Boyne. Most, if not all the neolithic portal and court tombs are found and only found within this boundary. As national borders do, the Black Pig's Dyke, an ancient fortification, severs the island in two sometime later running from around Newry, County Down, to Sligo. The point here is that especially during earlier times the celts or Gaels were simply not there. So who constructed these lasting monuments, which I must emphasize have strikingly recognised simularities in the middle east? The Cruthin, the oldest accepted known people to reside on the island of Ireland could well be likely candidates and as suggested (by the gaels/romans) they are connected with the Picts, then this although not administratively may well be evidence of a Dal Riada long before it is ever considered. Maybe that is one reason that the Romans never considered/succeeded in invading either Scotland or Ulster/Ireland where the Cruthinic Picts lived. The celtic Ulaid were a later arrival than the settled Cruthinic/Pictish peoples and it is at this point that the historical corruption begins. At the time there is no known involvement of Angles or Jutes and certainly no Normans, it is the celtic/gaelic arrival and later invasion into Ulster that confuses this history, a history that they have written and many believe without sound evidence. By around the 600's gaelic Ireland had conceded to Romanism, it was not until the Battle of Moira that Ulster had no choice when the last identifiable Cruthin were defeated by what some historians say Roman assistance. On defeat they returned probably the way the came returning to Alba (Scotland) and their kith and kin. It is believed that the stone of scone travelled with them, another middle eastern connection. Since them times and the recognised Dal Riada, Ulster & Scotland have been some would say forever connected. The later Anglo/Welsh/Norman arrivals have re-written/ignored some very important historical facts. The blending with reformational arguments only served/serves to confuse the situation even more, but it is by no chance to this day that Ulster and Scotland are somewhat distinct from the rest of the British Isles.
Finally, this certainly is an area that needs a considerable amount of research, but if many of the peoples of the British Isles are lost of Israel, then it does stand out why a continual campaign for thousands of years has existed by one group to obliterate the separate entity of the other, from an Israelite prophetical point of view this may suggest that one or the other is not who they are perceived to be. The answer may well be obvious!
Answer: You have raised issues that should be returned to later.
Radiocarbon dating is not acceptable to us.
I doubt if in all our writings you will find a single instance where we refer to
it even if in some cases it should correspond to our own conclusions.
See the extract from the writings of Emmet Sweeney in the next item.
2. Emmet Sweeney and the dating of New Grange
New Grange is on the River Boyne in County Meath north of Dublin, Ireland.
http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2005/locations/newgrange.htm
Brit-Am Summary and Preliminary Comments
New Grange in Ireland also has monuments dated to the "Megalithic" Period of ca. 2000 BCE or earlier.
The evidence actually shows that New Grange belongs to the La Tene Iron Age period (ca. 400 BCE). Iron Age finds were found undisturbed in the "foundation layer" of New Grange by the archeologist Raftery (1943). Raftery explained the anomaly by assuming that New Grange had originally been built in Megalithic times then taken apart and reconstructed piece by piece in the Iron Age. [There appears to have been no evidence for such an action other than the finding of Iron Age materials at the foundation levels. These included Iron Age "bone plaques were actually in the stone-hole of one of the orthostats in the passage".] Alternately Raftery suggested that the use of New Grange may have continued into the Iron Age. Irish tradition and historical records show Megalithic monuments being erected in Iron Age times as well as in the Christian Period. Stonehenge is similar to the Stone circle of Dacia that the Romans destroyed. The Dacians believed in One God, had customs similar to the Druids, and after being defeated by the Romans moved to Denmark and later participated in the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England.
Source: Emmet Sweeney, "ARTHUR AND STONEHENGE: BRITAIN'S LOST HISTORY"
CHAPTER 1 A LAND OF LEGEND
The said work was once available on the web but has since been removed.
Extracts:
<<Possibly some of the most spectacular evidence of all has come from one of the megalithic mounds at New Grange in Ireland, Carn H. Here archaeologists found a whole series of artefacts of clearly Iron Age date. These included amber and glass beads, various iron objects, and bone plaques. It was the latter which caused most disquiet.
"The ornament on these bone plaques is by very general consent agreed to belong to La Tene art and probably date to the first two centuries AD. The problem presented by these objects of La Tene art together with iron objects was to explain their presence in a Passage Grave the walls of which were decorated with typical megalithic art and which was assumed by most people to have been constructed in or around 2,000 BC. It was argued by most archaeologists before Dr. Raftery's re-excavations that Carn H at Loughcrew had been used as a workshop in the Early Iron Age - perhaps the atelier of a Celtic artist. Professor MacAlister, for example, believed the metal-workers of the Early Iron Age produced these plaques as samples for the ornamentation of luxury items of bronze. Dr. Raftery disagreed with this view and in 1943 re-excavated Carn H.
"The 1943 Raftery excavations found no objects characteristic of the normal megalithic assemblage: what was found, however, were blue, green and yellow glass beads, small bronze rings, pieces of iron and 2,000 bone plaques of which 200 were ornamented in the late LaTene style. Raftery argued that all these finds dated to the Early Iron Age; he found some of them in what he described as an undisturbed foundation layer, while some bone plaques were actually in the stone-hole of one of the orthostats in the passage. In describing his excavations to the International Congress of Prehistoric and Posthistoric Sciences in Zurich in 1954, he thought the evidence in his excavations susceptible of only two solutions: first, that the site was a normal Passage Grave constructed , say in 2,000 BC. but entirely destroyed, removed and rebuilt in the Early Iron Age; or secondly, that it was an old style tomb or tomb still being used in the Early Iron Age. Having found no evidence for the first solution, he has put on record that Carn H was constructed in the Early Iron Age and that therefore megaliths in Ireland survived not only to the end of the second millennium BC. but to the beginning of the first millennium AD. [12] Glyn Daniel and Sean P. O'Riordain "New Grange" (1964) pp.123-4
"But as we have said, the excavators should not have been surprised by this discovery, in view of the fact that native Irish tradition has always insisted that the megalithic tombs of New Grange were the resting places of Ireland's Gaelic High Kings. Further proof that megalith-building continued into the post-Roman period is seen in a well-known cromlech at Ballina in the west of Ireland. This structure is reliably recorded as the burial site of four Connaught princes who had been implicated in and executed for the murder of bishop Ceallach, another royal prince of the region, who had eskewed worldly affairs and trained for the priesthood under St. Ciaran. The Irish annals record that the dolmen was raised for his killers and they were interred therein around the year 650 AD"
<<In Ireland, the great tombs of New Grange (Brugh na Boinne), which archaeology now dates around 3,000 BC., were said to be the burial places of the island's Gaelic High Kings, who sat at nearby Tara. That this tradition was based upon some amount of genuine knowledge is confirmed by the discovery of recognisably Celtic artefacts at the site. The medieval Irish, who preserved a written history of forty generations of pre-Christian High Kings, identified virtually every megalithic monument in the country with a specific ruler or warrior-hero. The standing-stone circles, they said, were temples where the god Beal or Balor was worshipped, and to this day stone circles in Ireland are named Beltanies (ie. Bealtaine - "Fire of Beal"), whilst the Irish word for temple - timpeall - is the same as the word for circle.
It is a well-recognised fact that the burial-mound, or barrow-grave, was characteristic of the Bronze Age/Iron Age Celts and Germans. The megaliths throughout western Europe are heavily decorated with spiral designs, a motif that would later, in a slightly more developed and sophisticated form, come to be regarded as typically Celtic. In Scandinavia menhir-style standing-stones occur with great frequency, and are virtually identical to those found throughout France - particularly Brittany. Yet the menhirs of Scandinavia are decorated with runic inscriptions - usually bearing the names of those responsible for raising the stone - and Viking Age artistic motifs. Again, Scandinavian chiefs of the Viking Age were buried, often along with a ship, in barrow-graves. Sometimes these boat-burials took the shape of the vessel they entombed, and were often surrounded by standing-stones.
Yet, contrary to what is stated in textbook after textbook, it is not just in Scandinavia that megaliths are linked to Late Iron Age cultures. Thus for example the megalithic monuments of Brittany are frequently associated with Gallo-Roman remains, in spite of being separated from these remains in conventional chronology by up to 2,000 years.[10] Again, the menhir stones of southern France, which are dated to the third millennium BC. "have their counterparts in Corsica (where they are dated to the 1st millennium BC.), and in the stelae of Luni, which on account of their inscriptions are unanimously dated to early Etruscan times."[11]
<<Clearly then the European megaliths were being erected well into the late Iron Age, and those located in the Celtic regions must indeed have been the work of the Druid priestly order. Caesar's remark that trainee Druids from Gaul went to Britain to complete their studies is perhaps a reflection of the power and prestige of the priesthood linked to Stonehenge. The Roman conquest of Dacia was followed by the destruction of a great standing-stone circle at Sarmizegetusa, which was "superficially" similar to Stonehenge, another stone circle ruined at this time.
3. William Adelman: (Important) Genetic Links Between Vikings and Jews
From: William Adelman <wda@bettervillage.com>
Subject: Jewish (Semite?) Vikings
Shalom Yair,
I looked at archaeological and linguistic connections to see if my mother's family (from Lundar, Canada, Lindakradalur, Iceland, and originally Western Norway), possibly had any jewish blood in them. I came across the following article regarding a genetic study done by another Aussie. Have you seen this? Also, do you know of any other evidence or studies that link the Scandinavian people to the Jews?
25 July 2003
By Alison Handmer
Sydney PhD candidate Marc Buhler believes he has tracked down the source of an inherited shield against AIDS, an allele of the CCR5 chemokine receptor, which is shared by many people of Jewish and Viking ancestral origins.
Mr Buhler made headlines with a talk at the recent International Congress of Genetics which examined why one in every five Caucasians appears to have a common ancestor who carried the allele, a 32-base deletion mutation of the CCR5 gene.
He believes the person with the original mutation lived around 800AD north-east of the Black Sea in the ancient Kingdom of Khazars, where the upper class became Jewish around that time.
The allele was carried to Scandinavia when Swedish Vikings came by river to the area between 800 and 1000 in search of Arab coins. Later, Ashkenazi Jews are thought to have come into contact with the allele when they left Germany after the Black Death in 1350, some travelling east to join their Jewish cousins in Khazaria.
Mr Buhler, who works at the Institute for Immunology and Allergy Research within the Westmead Millennium Institute, has been researching the incidence of the gene in Australia. He genotyped the CCR5-delta32 allele in 807 Australian Ashkenazi Jews and 311 non-Jewish Australians, and found the allele in one in four Ashkenazi Jews, and in one in three with grandparents from Russia, Poland, Austria, or Czechoslovakia.
A previous study had also found about one in three Ashkenazi Jews to have the allele, along with about one in four Icelanders. But how did people from such widely different regions come to share the same genetic inheritance?
Mr Buhler said: "Our early aim was to look at defining an ancestral haplotype, or linked common pattern, for this allele with a set of microsatellite markers.
"These are the sets of repeated units that are very polymorphic, found in various forms scattered all over the genome. They are used in paternity, forensic and various research areas such as genome screens."
A breakthrough came when he read a paper by Professor Gerard Lucotte from Paris suggesting that Vikings may have spread the allele across Europe. "I also recalled that a couple of papers had been published by Professor Charles Poser of Harvard about Vikings and the possible spread of susceptibility to multiple sclerosis," he said.
"One passage, about the Swedish Vikings going east and down the Russian rivers to establish trade with Arabs via the Khazar Kingdom, just clicked the idea into place for me."
Mr Buhler plans to finalise his PhD and then further explore the Icelandic population. "There are hints of differences in the decay of the haplotype between non-Jewish Caucasians - those the Vikings may have passed the gene on to - and the Ashkenazi Jewish community," he said.
"Further fine-mapping of the numerous markers the genome projects have defined in the region may also be worth doing."
He is also interested in the influence of smallpox, which is likely to be involved in selection for this allele, plus the influence of HIV and autoimmune disease.
William Adelman
Progressive Lenders, Inc.
22020 Clarendon St. 200
Woodland Hills, CA 91367
(800) 974-6302 Toll Free
(818) 632-8607 Mobile
(310) 496-1664 Fax
www.BetterVillage.com
Publications
NOW INDEX