A Critical Review and Update of Robert Graves "The White Goddess" - An Investigation (Page 7)
Back to previous page
Summary so far: The date for the events of the Cad Goddeu ('The Battle of the Trees') suggested by Graves seems too early for any supposed event involving replacement of an older alphabet with a newer alphabet in Britain to have taken place. However, the events may have happened earlier. If we explore 1700 BCE as their possible date of occurence, there were several alphabets or collections of sounds that might have been the 13-consonant alphabet that Graves calls the "Beth-Luis-Nion", which Graves suggests was already in use in Britain by some group living there, at the time when what he suggested were the "Celts" arrived. And there may have been was a Semitic language spoken in Britain possibly even before 1700 BCE, by the Picts who were there mining tin.
KEY QUESTION SEVEN:What was happening in the world in 1700 BCE that supports the possibility of the arrival of a new alphabet in Britain, as described in "The White Goddess" taking place at that time? For example, is there evidence of a power struggleover tin to make bronze around 1700 BCE?(Yes.)
"Around 1800, tin became scarce in the Levant, causing a decline in bronze production. Copper, also, came to be in short supply. As a result, pirate groups around the Mediterranean, from around 1800-1700 BC onward, began to attack fortified cities in search of bronze, to remelt into weaponry." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age
1700 Harappan civilization in India came to an end.
1700 The Sintashta & Petrovka Sub-Cultures, who buried chariots, came to an end.
The Hyksos appeared out of "nowhere" and established themselves in Egypt just a few years before 1700.
1700 - large disturbance in Crete (earthquake, or possibly an invasion from Anatolia). Palaces at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, and Kato Zakros destroyed.
New mines were opened up in Ireland: Copper-working from copper mines on the rocky promontory of Great Ormes Head started. (OB, 269)
A later more extensive series of mines was opened at Mount Gabriel... west Cork... [They] were in use over about the two centuries from 1700 to 1500 BC. (OB, 103)
1700 - 1500 - A later more extensive series of mines was opened at Mount Gabriel... west Cork... were in use over [Cunliffe in OB]
Oppenheimer, in "Origins of the British" (Page 41):
"As an expert on the archaeology of the Atlantic coast, Barry Cunliffe . . . makes a geographic reconstruction of the mid-first millennium BC tin trade between the producers on the Atlantic coast (the Atabri/Cantabri of north-coast Spain, the Cornish and the Bretons) and the middlemen in southern France and Spain and the rest of the NW Mediterranean coast. His reconstruction identifies two separate rival networks. [Facing the Ocean 2004]
"The Punic/Phoenician state consortium to which Himilco belonged ran the southern and older of these two networks. The locations of Punic pottery suggest that it stretched mainly from Cadiz, north along the coast just as far as NW Spain.
"Since this western Mediterranean consortium also controlled the Straits of Gibraltar, the rest of the Mediterranean traders - in particular the Greeks - were prevented from using this gateway to the tin-producers.
"So instead, the Marseilles Greeks seem to have used their connections with the people of 'Keltike' (as Pytheas called southern France, according to Strabo) around Marseilles and Narbonne, who most likely used an alternative cross-country route just north of the Pyrenees to gain access to the Atlantic coast from the Mediterranean, thus bypassing Gibraltar . . . there are good waterways most of the way across, starting from Narbonne, moving up the river Aude and through the Carcassone gap to Toulouse, and then down the river Garonne to Bordeaux and the Gironde on the Atlantic coast. Cunliffe neatly . . . [uses] his own text to suggest that Pytheas, as a Greek pioneer, actually took this trade route across Keltike."
Corroboration from other sources that the Phoenicians controlled the sea route to Britain:
Phoenician remains are being found in the caves of Gibraltar:
"The Gibraltar Museum Authority, which set up the "Gibraltar Caves Project" in 1998 now controls no less than 140 caves all over the Rock of Gibraltar, which it is subjecting to a scientifically and authoritatively organised Archaeological Programme."
http://phoenicia.org/gibraltar.html
And there is more at: http://www.gib.gi/museum/phoenicians.htm
The Phoenicians have been said for some time to have made it around Gibraltar -
"the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon . . . The continued success of the Hellenic colonists on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean had compelled the Phoenicians to seek with redoubled boldness and activity in the Western Mediterranean some sort of compensation for the injury which their trade had thus suffered. They increased and consolidated their dealings with Sicily, Africa, and Spain, and established themselves throughout the whole of that misty region which extended beyond the straits of Gibraltar on the European side, from the mouth of the Guadalete to that of the Guadiana. This was the famous Tarshish—the Oriental El Dorado. Here they had founded a number of new towns, the most flourishing of which, Gadîr,* . . . it was the Tyre of the west, and its merchant-vessels sailed to the south and to the north to trade with the savage races of the African and European seaboard. On the coast of Morocco they built Lixos, a town almost as large as Gadîr, and beyond Lixos, thirty days' sail southwards, a whole host of depots, reckoned later on at three hundred."
from: HISTORY OF EGYPT: CHALDEA, SYRIA, BABYLONIA, AND ASSYRIA By G. MASPERO, d.1916
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17326/17326-h/v6c.htm
CONCLUSION: There was a power struggle over tin to make bronze around 1700 BCE.
CONTINUE ON TO MORE DISCUSSION OF ROBERT GRAVES' THE WHITE GODDESS