Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[Boreades]

What's behind the crow?

[Mick Harper]

Not just miniscule writing but navigation. From Wiki

Among students of medieval architecture and engineering, such as are preserved in the notebooks of Villard de Honnecourt, Corbie is of interest as the center of renewed interest in geometry and surveying techniques, both theoretical and practical, as they had been transmitted from Euclid through the Geometria of Boethius and works by Cassiodorus (Zenner).

The thingy behind the raven is certainly intriguing. Could be a rose (as in Rosicrucian, compass rose etc) or a Catherine wheel (for measuring latitude) or something else entirely. But not it would seem just a piece of heraldic frippery.

[Royston]

The lynchpin of the Channel Islands, Jersey, named its capital after St Helier which sounds like a sun-god or helios but according to Wiki, St Helier is rather unexpectedly conflated with St Marculf or Marcouf. This Marculf bloke is said to have died on May 1st, 588 AD and the Îles Saint-Marcouf off the east coast of the Cotentin Peninsula were named for him.

St Helier's Hermitage is a sacred rock on the tidal island, L'Islet, that serves as the island's look-out, the site where Elizabeth Castle was built. Every year on 16th July a pilgrimage is made across the causeway to his chapel.



St Helier's chapel was erected by St Marculf but the site was 'chosen' by Helier who after his death by beheading (with a stone axe) is said to have picked his head up and walked with it to the sea shore. St Helier is the patron saint of Jersey and his legend has much in common with St Denis aka St Dionysus, another headless martyr and the patron saint of Paris, and France.



The coat of arms of St Helier parish shows two crossed axes which may refer to the double-headed axe often associated with Cretan bull worship.

[Mick Harper]

Talking of tidal islands called L'Islet, there's one on Guernsey, or at any rate there is a place of this name at the very spot where the pre-1806 causeway to the tidal island of The Vale was. The 31 bus used to go there for you numerologists.

[hvered]

Vale Church used to be a tidal island. It was surrounded by marshes supposedly inhabited by a fearsome fireball, Le Feau Boulangier, which sounds like a combination of dragon's breath and a will o' the wisp.

The church at Vale was founded by monks from Mont St Michel in Normandy, another tidal rock cum island, which according to legend was originally the site of a Druidic college and later dedicated to Belenus, a sun god. It may be that the Feau Boulangier is a Jersey version of Belenus. The 'ball of fire' could be describing a beacon fire. St Helier's rock, which also becomes an island at high tide, would have been a suitable beacon site.

[Boreades]

The Corbie coat of arms has two keys facing opposite directions (Janus-like) and a crow.

I wonder if this is a version of the Aker/Akeru/Shining Ones?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akeru

The two Lions are sometimes described as keys.
The hieroglyphs for Akeru include a raven/crow.

[Royston]

The Corbie coat of arms has two keys facing opposite directions (Janus-like) and a crow.

Is the crow showing the way between two reefs?

Etymonline says key means "piece of metal for unlocking" but also
"low island," 1690s, from Spanish cayo "shoal, reef," from Taino cayo "small island;" spelling influenced by Middle English key "wharf" (c.1300), from Old French kai "sand bank" (see quay).

Maybe the keys represent Scylla and Charybdis, the legendary clashing rocks guarding a narrow stretch of water; the line above the crow points to what looks like a ship's wheel but it could be a whirlpool which wouldn't be a desirable outcome.

[Boreades]

Has anyone seen the Mzora stone ring in Morocco? Mzora is also spelled variously Msoura/Mezorah.

From the size and shape, it looks similar to the Ring of Brodgar. The ellipse is constructed using a Pythagorean right angled triangle of the ratio 12, 35, 37.

Robert Temple mentions it in Egyptian Dawn
http://www.egyptiandawn.info/chapter8.html

and here
http://lostcities.weebly.com/1/post/201 ... ircle.html

and here
http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogsp ... ithic.html

[hvered]

Robert Temple's book has an excellent chapter on the north African megaliths. He traces the origins of megalithia to the Libyan coast which ties in with Phoenician trade and the megalithic coastline of western Europe.

[Boreades]

Robert Temple's book has an excellent chapter on the north African megaliths. He traces the origins of megalithia to the Libyan coast which ties in with Phoenician trade and the megalithic coastline of western Europe.

How do we get into that without disappearing down a time tunnel of who came first, or who started it?