Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[Mick Harper]

If you look at the very old maps of Ireland you'll see populations of Brigantes and Dumnonni or whatever they call themselves and others.

What old maps? Brigantes are everywhere (but not Ireland or Wales as far as I know). Dumnoni are in Devon and Dorset, unless you know different.

So British tribes were in Ireland as we would expect considering that Ireland was once joined to Britain.

Well, we're not talking about the Ice Age. We are dealing with post-Roman times. Ireland's an island. But if you say British tribes were over there 400 - 1000 AD, then I'm open to offers.

Apart from that Ireland was mostly Viking before the Flemish/Norman./Welsh got there to help McMurrough.

Preposterous. What about the Irish? These are just occupying armies.

I don't think that we can stop the Irish and Welsh from having a genuine history of their own Just because it disagrees with something or other.

If they couldn't write they couldn't have a 'genuine history', as you put it. Nobody's arguing they were there. Just that they didn't do all the things the history books say they did.

The Normans were clever but not that clever at all. They were devious and they still are otherwise they wouldn't be in power.

I am saying how they were clever. Making up histories for people. There has to be a reason why the Normans were more successful in more places than any other post-Roman outfit. There's no point in denying it woodenly just because it's a brand new theory and unfamiliar to you.

However, the Welsh, Irish and English had and have a history in spite of the Normans.

So you keep saying. Where is it? What is it? If you can find anything, anything, before 1050, I'm desperate to hear of it as it will blow my theory out of the water.

[TisILeclerc]

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~irlkik/ihm/ire150.htm



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas

These include the Gangani from northern Wales, near Anglesey, and the Brigantes from a powerful Celtic kingdom in central Britain. Ptolemy positions these Irish Brigantes opposite their British counterparts, suggesting a strong kinship connection. Romano-British artefacts have been found at the promontory fort of Drumanagh, north of Dublin. The graves of British Brigantes, including their distinctive weaponry, have also been unearthed at nearby Lambay Island. Julius Caesar mentions a similar situation where Celtic tribes from Gaul occupied lands on either side of the English Channel. Caesar suggested that these cross-channel tribal alliances hampered Roman efforts to subjugate Gaul and used this claim to legitimise his incursions into southern Britain in 55 and 54 BC. Transmarine tribal links between Britain and Ireland may have been just as troublesome a century later when Rome considered invading Hibernia.

http://www.historyireland.com/pre-norma ... do-for-us/

Here are a few links. Although it's quite possible they are all Norman forgeries.

[Mick Harper]

The map is obviously modern -- we're talking fifteenth century? -- but generally speaking I accept Roman sources, including Ptolomy (and the Early Church fathers). It just doesn't move us very far forward since it is accepted by me (and by TME generally) that British tribes are present all over the shop. A name like Brigantes could mean anything and anyone. And anywhere. I also accept the genuine existence -- since it is inconceivable that the Normans could establish them post facto -- of all the various saint's place-names throughout Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and Ireland (and no doubt Scotland though I have not ventured up there much). All the rest is up to us to piece together. Forget Gildas (for certain) and Bede (it will probably turn out) and all the Saints Biographies.

[Mick Harper]

Parallel discussions for those of you who don't hop between are being conducted on the AEL site, the thread entitled Inventing History: Forgery, A Great British Invention http://www.applied-epistemology.com/php ... 3369#33369

[Boreades]

The map is obviously modern -- we're talking fifteenth century?

Do you mean it's a 15th C reproduction of a Roman map?
Evidence please!

[Mick Harper]

Sorry. I was just going by feel. Is Tissie (or you or anyone else) actually saying this is a Roman map? I have never seen such a thing! Now you ask, I quote what Wiki says this is

A 1490 Italian reconstruction of the map of Ptolemy. The map is a result of a combination of the lines of roads and of the coasting expeditions during the first century of Roman occupation. One great fault, however, is a lopsided Scotland, which in one hypothesis is the result of Ptolemy using Pytheas' measurements of latitude (see below).[12] Whether Ptolemy would have had Pytheas' real latitudes at that time is a much debated issue.

I don't think even the 1490 Italian is making any such claim. But if he is, he is lying. All the medieval cartographers went in for this kind of Classical provenancing.

[TisILeclerc]

If the Normans invented ogham why did they confine it to Wales, Ireland and Scotland?

Why did they leave England out?

[Mick Harper]

No need, they already controlled England, remember?

[Boreades]

Sorry. I was just going by feel. Is Tissie (or you or anyone else) actually saying this is a Roman map?

Not quite. The 14th Century reproductions partly confuse the issue by calling themselves Ptolemy maps. What seems to have survived from Roman times isn't any original maps, but documents that listed the coordinates produced by Roman Military surveys. In the same way that our UK Ordnance Survey was originally a military department, the Romans' military included surveyors of the lands they invaded.

In his ‘Geography’, of c.AD 150, Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy) catalogued these surveyed coordinates. They allow anyone with some basic map-making skills to draw a map of the world as the Romans knew it.

For example:

“Below the peoples we have mentioned, but more toward the west are the Demetae , whose towns are:
Luentinum [probably Pumsaint] 15°45 ,55°10
Maridunum [Carmarthen] 15°30, 54°40
More toward the east are the Silures whose town is:
Bullaeum [probably Usk] 16°50, 55°
Next to these are the Dobuni , and their town:
Corinium [Cirencester] 18°, 54°10
then the Atrebatii and their town:
Caleva [Silchester] 19°, 54°15
Next to these, but farther eastward, are the Cantii.

You can tell from the amount of rounding in the coordinates that by modern standards they are approximations, but pretty good ones for the technology of the time.

Ptolemy seems to have copied much of the raw data from Marinus of Tyre:

a Greek or Hellenized geographer, cartographer and mathematician, who founded mathematical geography and provided the underpinnings of Claudius Ptolemy's influential Geography....Marinus was originally from Tyre in the Roman province of Syria. He and his work were a precursor to that of the great geographer Claudius Ptolemy, who used Marinus's work as a source for his Geography and acknowledges his great obligations to him. Ptolemy said, "Marinus says of the merchant class generally that they are only intent on their business, and have little interest in exploration, and that often through their love of boasting they magnify distances." Later, Marinos was also cited by the Arab geographer al-Masʿūdī.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinus_of_Tyre

So, how did Scotland get turned by c.90 degrees? Anyone's guess, but probably errors in transcribing some of the coordinates, or confusions between the equirectangular projection used by Marinus and the different projections used by the 14th C and onwards.

[Mick Harper]

Perhaps Tis can pop along to this and ask a question or two:

The Bronze Age Neolithic? Problems of Continuity and Chronology
11th January 2016 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Lecture by Dr Alex Gibson, Reader in Prehistory, University of Bradford
In association with The Prehistoric Society

For some time it has been commonly acknowledged that Bronze Age ceramics developed from Neolithic forms. Radiocarbon chronology, however, has shown that there was almost a millennium between the demise of Impressed Wares and the advent of Food Vessels and Urns. Given this chronological gap, how do we explain the undeniable similarities? A closer inspection of Bronze Age culture and customs suggests that there was more than just pottery making a re-appearance.

For more details, and to book a free ticket see here:
http://www.socantscot.org/event/the-bro ... edinburgh/
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=6861