File <bronze10.htm> ARCHEOLOGY>
The Language of Our Bronze Age Ancestors The English language is a member of
the Teutonic family of tongues, to which belong
also German and the Scandinavian languages.
Until now the oldest examples of Teutonic language have been short
runic texts from about the time of Christ. King Woden-lithi's written version of
his own tongue [at Peterborough, Ontario, Canada] has given us the first
decipherable information on how our ancestors spoke 4,000 years ago. With the aid of his American inscription,
the fragmentary related inscriptions in the same alphabet, found in
Scandinavia, can now also be deciphered, and they prove to be the same
language as Woden-lithi's, or nearly so.
Also, aided by this new information, we can now begin to solve the
late Stone Age hieroglyphic rebus inscriptions. Adding these Neolithic forms to the alphabetic versions given
us by Woden-lithi, one can now list some of the basic vocabulary of the
Bronze Age Teutonic peoples."
The list made from the above sources was provided by Fell (1982) in
Table 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e. "Words inferred from a Neolithic
rebus are prefixed with an asterisk (*).
Fell (1982) noted that several
outstanding facts become increasingly apparent from various epigraphic
expeditions. He stated, "One is
that we have greatly underrated the achievements of the Bronze age peoples of
northern Europe. We have long known,
from their conspicuous carvings that constitute the rock art of the Bronze
Age, that the North Sea and the Baltic were the home waters of fleets of
ships. What we have failed to realize
is that those same ships and characteristic Bronze Age style, are also
depicted on the rocks and cliffs of the maritime regions of eastern North
America. And now it is also apparent
that these same matching petroglyphs, on both sides of the Atlantic, are also
accompanied by readable texts cut in ancient scripts that are likewise found
on either side of the Atlantic. What this means, of course, is that
the ancient shipwrights made sound vessels, whose skippers and crews sailed
them across the ocean, thereby fulfilling their builders' dreams. Flotillas of ancient Norsemen, and Baltic
ships each summer set their prows to the northwest, to cross the Atlantic, to
return later in the season with cargoes of raw materials furnished by the
Algonquians with whom they traded. To
make these crossings they depended in part upon the sea roads that had been
opened up by the amelioration of the climate at the peak of the Bronze Age
[see Climate]. As oceanographers have inferred, the polar
ice melted then, and the favorable westward-flowing air and water currents
generated by the permanent polar high now became available to aid in the
westward passage. The return voyage,
as always, could be made on the west wind drift, in the latitude of around
40E-north latitude, as Columbus rediscovered. While these Norsemen traders opened up the northern parts of
North America, other sailors from the Mediterranean lands were doing similar
things..., but their outward voyage lay along the path that Columbus
employed, utilizing the westward-blowing trade winds, found at latitudes
below 30E N. Both sets of navigation,
though employing different outward routs, were obliged to use the same
homeward track, that of the west wind drift in middle latitudes. Along this common sea road the sailors of
the two different regions would occasionally meet, thus prompting
intercultural exchanges between the Baltic lands and North Africa. At least twice since the close of the
Stone Age, conditions have favored such events. The first occurred during the warm period of the middle Bronze
Age which was previously noted. Then
the world's climates cooled again, and the northern route to America became
too ice-bound and too dangerous to attract adventurers in those directions
any longer [see Climate]. It remained thus until about AD 700, when
once more the earth's climate ameliorated.
Once again the northern icecap melted and the polar seas could support
navigation that made use of the polar high.
Once more mariners came to northeastern America, this time under a
name by which they are known in history--The Vikings. Yet, as the inscriptions show, these
Vikings were not just Norsemen, they included as before men from the Baltic lands, Lithuanians and Latvians, as well as Celts from
Ireland and probably also Wales. After AD 1200 the earth grew colder again,
the thousand vineyards of William the Conqueror's England died out, and
Normans turned their attention to the south of Europe to bring in their
Malmsey wines, no longer fermented in England, where no vineyards now
survived. The old routs to America
were deserted, and that western land lay ignored by Europe until the voyage
of Columbus once more awakened the cupidity of monarchs who, by this time,
now controlled large populations of Europe.
This time the full force of European exploitation fell upon the
Amerindians, and the age of American isolation had ended. Another remarkable fact that is now
impressing itself upon our minds is that the ancient Europeans were not
barbarians. They not only spoke in
the chief dialects of the Indo-European tongues, but already by late
Neolithic times the Europeans could
write. The languages they wrote
now prove to have been comprehensible to us as representing the principal
tongues of modern Europe: Teutonic,
Baltic, Celtic, and also Basque. Yet
another surprising discovery is due to Professor Linus Brunner, who announced
in 1981 the occurrence of Semitic vocabulary in the newly identified Rhaetic language
of ancient Switzerland. The heretofore mysterious people, to
whom the archeologists have attached such names as 'Beaker Folk,'
'Bell-beaker People,' and so on, now prove to be Europeans of our own stocks,
speaking-- and writing-- in early variant forms of languages that we can see
as related closely to the classical Teutonic, Celtic, and other tongues of
Europe at the time of the Romans. The
inscriptions found on their artifacts prove this. That it was not understood before is simply because
archeologists have mistaken the writing for decorative engraving. When a loom weight has inscribed upon it
the word warp, it is quite obvious
that this is a purely practical identification label for a weaver. Decorative it may be, but let us not overlook
the fact that such a label tells us immediately the linguistic stock of the
person who engraved it. And, of
course, it also certifies that the engraver belonged to a literate society. The same is true of the engravers of
the rock and cliff inscriptions of Scandinavia. When we discover that the 'meaningless' decorations beside
their ship carvings is none other than a readable comment in Baltic speech,
appropriate to the scene depicted, we know at once that the designer was
familiar with the language spoken by the ancestors of the people who still
live along the Baltic coasts today.
They were, in short, Balts.
Let us recognize this simple fact, and call them by their proper
names. And when we find very similar,
and similarly lettered, engravings on North American rocks, it is our
obligation to our ancestors to recognize their European origins, and to call
them by their proper names too. Yet another of the new facts now
coming to our attention is the surprising discovery that words appropriate to
the contexts are painted or engraved beside the famous cavern paintings of
the great Aurignacian sites of Europe.
These works of art have been attributed to Paleolithic people of
20,000 years ago, yet we find now that they apparently used the same words
for the animals they painted as did German and French, Spanish and Basque
speakers within historic times. When
a German of the Middle Ages called a wild bison a wisent, he was using the same word that we find written in Baltic script beside one of the most famous ancient
paintings of a bison, that on the roof of the Altamira
Cavern. Other paintings in other caves are
similarly accompanied by ogam or Baltic script, rendering the names of the
animals in tongues of the Celtic and Basque families. We do not find such inscriptions beside
paintings of animals that disappeared from Europe during the last
glaciation. Thus the mammoths are not
identified by name (though the Basque word that means "Bogeyman"
appears beside one such mammoth picture).
This seems to mean that the paintings were added in sequence over a
long period of time, and only the latest of the series carry identifications
in written language. Thus it is
probably wrong to date all the parietal art to about 20,000 BC. In proof of the truth of this
contention may be cited the case of the Basque bone disk "coinage,"
[mentioned earlier.] This is
obviously a local Pyrenean copy, made by Basques from a silver model provided
by the Celtic coins of Aquitania in the second century before Christ. We have to correct the dating assigned by
archaeologists, for it is not 20,000 years old, but only 2,000 years of age,
and its purpose was not that of a bead or a button, but that of token coinage. The word engraved on it is still used in
present-day Basque. Thus, the forthcoming years will
doubtless witness more drastic pruning of the antiquity assigned to some
European works of art. They may have
been the work of Paleolithic hunters but, if so, then the Paleolithic way of
life as hunters and food-gatherers must have persisted in some parts of
Europe well into the era that is generally called late Neolithic. In the world today there are still Stone
Age peoples. So also in Europe in the
Bronze Age, 3,000 years ago, there may well have been pockets of isolated
people, living in the Paleolithic manner but acquainted with the writing
systems used by their more civilized neighbors, and applying it to the
labeling of their art work. We have been slow to recognize the
presence of written words in the Celtic, Basque, and Teutonic tongues beside
or on these ancient cave paintings.
But since we have begun to read the inscriptions, the time has come to
reconsider the role of linguists in archaeology. Have we, perhaps, devoted too much
attention to the grammatical niceties of ancient languages, and not enough to
the daily vocabulary of the simple country people who really constituted the
bulk of the population in classical times?
Too many published papers appear with titles like "On the Use of
the Optiative Mood in Aeolic Greek after the Time of Alcaeus." Many more papers ought to be written under
headings such as "The Vocabulary of Six Greek Graffiti from a Mycenaean
Village. Grammar without vocabulary is
useless. Vocabulary without grammar
is decidedly useful. With a slight
knowledge, and dreadful pronunciation, of Berber, Fell was able in North
Africa to elicit friendship and valuable aid during his North Africa
work. Elegant Arabic, however
literary and grammatical, would not have availed so well as a few uttered
words of Berber that Fell had recognized as belonging to the Indo-European
vocabulary of ancient Europe. The
white Berbers have no recollection of their ancestors' having come from
Europe, yet their anatomy declares them to be Europoids. Their vocabulary also yields European
roots, whereas their grammar tells us nothing about the origin of their
language. During Norman times the English
tongue was shorn of nearly all its characteristic Teutonic grammar, and
instead a simplified Anglo-French set of grammatical rules took its
place. On the other hand, the
vocabulary retained most of the old Saxon roots, and added much French and
Latin to them. To modern students from
Asia, English seems to be (as one of them described it to me) "a kind of
French." His ideas were based on
shared vocabulary and such grammatical features as the use by modern English
of the French plural in a terminal -s,
almost all the old Teutonic plurals in -n
having disappeared, except in rural dialects. A farmer still makes kine
the plural of cow, but the city
dweller does not. So it is from the
farmers and other village folk that we can get best information on the older
forms of European languages. This is a general rule. When Sir henry Rawlinson set about the--
seemingly hopeless-- task of deciphering the cliff-cut cuneiform inscriptions
of Behistun [Iran], he made the basic premise that the tongue of the local
Iranian villagers might be the closest he could find to the language of the
ancient inscription cut by Darius.
Jus as Champollion used Coptic to guide him into ancient Egyptian, so
also Rawlinson used the local idioms of Behistun itself. These approaches, which sound naive, are
in fact well founded on reason, and they produced results. It is expected that a younger
generation of linguists will arise from our hidebound universities, and turn
once more, as Jakob Grimm did a century ago, to the village communities of
Europe. Let them collect the old
vocabulary and discover whatever words they can, however vulgar they may seem
to the city ear. it is from these
ancient words that we shall garner the most useful guides to the speech of
our ancestors 5,000 years ago. Much
that Julius Pokorny has done, by way of extracting the "highest common
factor" from each set of related Indo-European words, has helped in
reading the old inscriptions. He and
his predecessors and his successors, such as Linus Brunner and Imanol
Agiŕe, are worthy explorers of the tongues of our ancestors. The inscribed artifacts of Stone Age
people also bear information that has been overlooked. It is not a random harvest, but one
already partly organized. The harvest
is ripe for the gathering, and now is the time to bring it in.
Agiŕe, Imanol. Vinculos
de la Lengua Vasca Allen. Derek 1978. An Introduction to Celtic Coins. British Museum Publ., London. 80 p. de Azukue's , Resurrección María. 1969.
Diccionario Vasco-Español-Frances,
Bilbao de Retana , José María Martín. 1966.
Gran Enciclopedia Vasca. ,
Bilbao [Editorial La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca] Engler, H. Rudolf. 1962. Die Sonne als Symbol; der Schlüssel zu
den Mysterien. Küsnacht, Helianthus-Verlag. 302 p. illus. 26 cm. Epigraphic Society's Occasional
Publications. 1981. Epigraphy Confrontation in America Fell, Barry. 1974. Life, Space and Time: A course in
Environmental Biology. Harper
& Row, NY. 417 p. Fell, Barry. 1974. An Introduction to Polynesian Epigraphy
with Special Report on the Moanalla Stele known as Pohaku ka luahine. Polynesian Epigraphic Soc. Fell, Barry. 1976. America BC. Ancient Settlers in the New World. Pocket Books, NY. 312 p. Fell, Barry. 1982. Bronze Age America. Little, Brown and Co., Boston,
Toronto. 304 p. Fell, Barry. 1983. Saga America. A Startling New Theory on the Old World Settlement of America
before Columbus. Times Book,
NY. 392 p. Fell, Barry. 1985. Ancient Punctuation
and the Los Lunas text. The
Epigraphic Society. p. 35-43. Fell, Barry. 1989. America BC: Ancient Settlers in the New World. Pocket Books, NY.
(revised ed.) Geir, T. Zoega. 1932.
English-Icelandic Dictionary. Bokaverslun Sigurdar Kristjanssnar,
Reykjavik. 712 p. Gran
Enciclopedia Vasca Heizer, R. F. & M. A.
Baumhoff. 1962. Prehistoric
Rock Art of Nevada and Eastern California. Univ. of Calif. Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. 412
p. Oxford
Dictionary of Old Icelandic Vastokas, Joan M. & Romas. 1973. Sacred
Art of the Algonkians: A study of the Peterborough Petroglyphs. Mansard Press. 1694 p. Vastokas, Joan M. 1984.
Native and European Art in
Ontario 5000 BC to 867 AD. Toronto,
Canada, and Gallery of Ontario. 48 p. Zoega's, Geir T. 1910.
Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Oxford University Press |
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