The theory Graves suggests is that the Amergin's poems relate to the Tuatha de Danaan of Irish myth, who came from Greece, and that they were carrying an alphabet with them. He writes: "According to an archaeologically plausible Irish tradition in the
Book of Invasions, the Tuatha de Danaan had been driven northward from
Greece as a result of an invasion from Syria and eventually reached
Ireland by way of Denmark . . and North Britain. The date of their
arrival in Britain is recorded as 1472 B.C. . . . The Syrian invasion of Greece which set them moving north is perhaps
the one hinted at by Herodotus . . .: the capture by 'Phoenicians' of
the Danaan shrine of the White Goddess Io at Argos . . . [page 50]
KEY QUESTION ONE:
Was the date used by Grave for the arrival of the Tuatha de Danaan to Britain, the standard in 1948, correct? (No.)
Graves got his dates from O'Rahilly, who dated the invasions a
thousand years later than the traditional dates in the Book of
Invasions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Rahilly%27s_historical_model
The dates of the Tuatha de Danaan have been re-considered. The reigns of Tuatha de Danaan kings are now thought to have been 1900-1700 BCE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_High_Kings_of_Ireland agrees.
Stephen Oppenheimer explains the re-consideration of these dates:
"Thomas O'Rahilly's reinterpretation of the traditional or legendary texts . . . O'Rahilly accepted the orthodoxy of the Iron
Age as the period for all 'Celtic' invasions and simply changed
the dates of the mythological invasions to suit, by cutting out
1,600 years between the last invasion and the birth of Christ.
He re-dated the Gaelic invasion at 100 BC, thus effectively
killing off nearly all the numerous pre Christian Irish kings.
But he still accepted the older mythological cycle of invasions
as valid evidence from before those king lists. O'Rahilly . . .
also accepted that there was an association between
the multiple earlier invasions, which O'Rahilly now dated over
the previous 600 years, and Brythonic languages arriving from
the nearby Continent. In arguing for these dates, and for the
final Milesian invasion representing the arrival of Goidelic or
Gaelic from Spain, O'Rahilly clearly creates a dating problem
or anachronism by comparison with the much older language
splits discussed above.
"O'Rahilly, if he were alive today, might not accept the new linguistic dates. However, the anachronism
can be addressed by replacing the southern Germanic homeland theory, for which there is less and less evidence, with a
Spanish homeland theory, for which — as we shall see — there is
ample genetic data and even archaeological evidence of cultural
connections." ["Origins of the British", 2006, pages 101-102]
KEY QUESTION TWO:
However, Graves' postulation may still hold up. Next, we must ask, are the new dates for the Tuatha de Danaan, 1900-1700 BCE, possible date for the events postulated in "The White Goddess"? (Yes.)
Possibly. Recent archaeological discoveries have uncovered an alphabet that was in existence that early, much earlier than previously thought. Let's see whether the events could have taken place around 1900 BCE.
By 2200-2000, the Egyptians had a proto-alphabet, developed to communicate with foreign mercenaries living in Egypt:
"There was a complete set of uniliteral glyphs from at least 2700 BCE — that is, the hieroglyphic script contained an alphabetic subsystem within it. . . . For literate Egyptians, whose livelihoods depended on their mastery of writing, there was little advantage to whittling the script down to a simple alphabet. Purely uniliteral (alphabetic) writing was used mainly to transcribe foreign names."
"However, from the 22nd - 20th centuries, central rule in Egypt broke down. John Darnell found contemporary references to an Egyptian named Bebi, General of the Asiatics. They speculate that, In the course of reunifying his fragmented realm, the reigning pharaoh attempted to pacify and employ roving bands of mercenaries who had come from outside Egypt to fight in the civil wars. Under Bebi's command, there must have been a small army of scribes in the military whose job it was to keep track of these "Asiatics". Scribes apparently came up with an easy-to-learn Egyptian shorthand to enable the captured troops to record their names and other basic information.The Egyptian alphabet was a utilitarian invention for soldiers and merchants. They developed a Semitic script in which the first sound of the Semitic name of an Egyptian glyph came to be the value of that glyph: i.e. the name of the hieratic glyph for house changed from Egyptian pr to Canaanite bayt, and the glyph came to stand for /b/. House and most of the other letters were not uniliteral glyphs in Egyptian: the Semitic alphabet is not derived from the existing Egyptian alphabet, but rather from the full set of hieratic hieroglyphs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Bronze_Age_alphabets#Origin_of_the_alphabet
By 1900, Linear A script was in use in Crete/Minoan (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A ).
However, according to wikipedia, Linear A and B were still syllabary (signs signifying individual syllables of words), not an alphabet.
And, in 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered the Wadi el-Hol script in Egypt, which has been dated to 1800 BCE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Bronze_Age_alphabets
http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/00_12/egypt.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing
"The first pure alphabets . . . emerged around 1800 BCE in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt"
Conclusion: An Egyptian alphabet was in use before 1900. And if an alphabet was known in Britain ca 1900 BC, it would have to be the Egyptian one, according to the most current archaeology.
However, the Egyptian alphabet was the only alphabet known at that time, and there is no evidence of it being more widely used. It is possible that there could there have been some secret alphabet held by only the priests. That is Graves' argument, that the Druids were closely tied to the cultures of Egypt, through traveling to study there. And the priests kept a lot of secrets, as a way to keep their power. But this is unproven.
Let's see what other possibilities there are. Could the events have taken place at a later date?
| A side-note on why the Semitic languages gave birth to the first alphabet: There is a reason the Semitic languages were particularly suited to make the leap from syllabary to consonantal alphabet. Different forms derived from the same root word retain the same consonantal skeleton and vary the vowels. The natural simplification is to confuse the syllable graphs used in writing the same segment of related words, which have the same consonant and differing vowel. Once the set of syllables with the same consonant are seen to be a related set and partially interchangeable, the next abstraction is to condense them to a single written symbol. The next step, from consonantal alphabet to consonant and vowel letters, was also facilitated by Semitic's guttural consonants which were lost in the northern languages, so that the letters for those consonants wound up standing for syllables containing only a vowel. Syllabaries are more natural in a way. Syllables are pronounceable independently and are often whole words. Isolated consonant and vowel letters are more abstract, often not pronounceable in isolation, and also require more symbols per word. All the known examples of writing systems designed from scratch without good knowledge of existing writing systems seem to be syllabic, or syllabic with a limited proportion of logographic. Denise Schmandt-Besserat first published her revolutionary theory of the Sumerian invention of writing 30 or so years ago in "How Writing Came About", John DeFrancis's "Visible Speech" considers the nature of writing, and the big question of whether Chinese, Egyptian, etc. are/were logographic / ideographic / hieroglyphic. His strong opinion is that full writing has always been more phonetic than logographic, and was an essentially phonetic invention; the number of pictograms and ideograms was always small compared to the total vocabulary of a language, but given enough logographs to cover the syllables of your language, once you start using them for their phonetic value, you can then phonetically spell out any possible word. |
KEY QUESTION THREE:
There is another possibility: that the poems of Amergin, "Bard of the Milesians", that started Graves on his quest refer to events that occurred later. The events fit better with the period of the Milesians, when there were a few more alphabets in existence, and since Amergin was "the poet of the Milesians", that makes additional sense.
The Milesians (also
fabled, perhaps even made up) are now thought to have arrived circa 1700. And they could have been speaking some form of what's snow called "Celtic" (Gaelic / Irish), and could well have been involved in the tin trade.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milesians_(Irish)
Around 1700 BCE, more alphabet possibilities appear.
And considering the events going on in the world around that time, the arrival of the Milesians could also fit Graves scheme. Around 1700 BCE, there were huge power struggles going on at that time, around control of the tin trade, for making bronze. And both Ireland and Cornwall had working tin mines.
Even Graves suggests: "the evidence of the oak coffin at the Isle of Avalon points plainly to the derivation of the Arthur cult from the Eastern Mediterranean by way of the Amber Route, the Baltic and Denmark between 1600 and 1400 B.C. "(page 111) and: "The evidence, given in the Gwyn context at the close of Chapter Six, for supposing that the oak-cult came to Britain from the Baltic between 1600 and 1400 B.C. suggests that the Beth-Luis-Nion sequence, in which Duir is the principal tree, was at any rate not elaborated before 1600 B.C., though the rowan, willow, elder and alder were perhaps already in sacral use." (page 179) Ignore the suggestion about the Arthur cult and connecting it with the Eastern Mediterranean. This is completely off. The life of King Arthur has also been re-dated. [see: Journey to Avalon: The Final Discovery of King Arthur by Chris Barber]. |
CONTINUE ON TO MORE DISCUSSION OF ROBERT GRAVES' THE WHITE GODDESS