The Atlantean Irish E-Book

Bob Quinn

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 449

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Irish identity is best understood from a maritime perspective. For eight millennia the island has been a haven for explorers, settlers, colonists, navigators, pirates and traders, absorbing goods and peoples from all points of the compass. The reduction of the islanders to the exclusive category 'Celtic' has persisted for three hundred years, and is here rejected as impossibly narrow. No classical author ever described Ireland's inhabitants as 'Celts', and neither did the Irish so describe themselves until recent times. The islanders' sea-girt culture has been crucially shaped by Middle Eastern as well as by European civilizations, by an Islamic heritage as well as a Christian one. The Irish language itself has antique roots extended over thousands of years' trading up and down the Atlantic seaways. Over the past twenty years Bob Quinn has traced archaeological, linguistic, religious and economic connections from Egypt to Arann, from Morocco to Newgrange, from Cairo and Compostela to Carraroe. Taking Conamara sean-nos singing and its Arabic equivalents, and a North African linguistic stratum under the Irish tongue, Quinn marshalls evidence from field archaeology, boat-types, manuscript illuminations, weaving patterns, mythology, literature, art and artefacts to support a challenging thesis that cites, among other recent studies of the Irish genome, new mitochondrial DNA analysis in the Atlantic zone from north Iberia to west Scandinavia. The Atlantean Irish is a sumptuously illustrated, exciting, intervention in Irish cultural history. Forcefully debated, and wholly persuasive, it opens up a past beyond Europe, linking Orient to Occident. What began as a personal quest-narrative becomes a category-dissolving intellectual adventure of universal significance. It is a book whose time has arrived.

Leseprobe

The Atlantean Irish

IRELAND’S ORIENTAL AND MARITIME HERITAGE

BOB QUINN

THE LILLIPUT PRESS • DUBLIN

For Miriam

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Barry Cunliffe

Introduction

1 Historical Origins: Vallancey and Ledwich

2 Sean-nós Singing and Conamara’s Boats

3 Gaels and Arabs: The Common Ground

4 Seafarers, Smugglers and Pirates

5 St Brendan, Sindbad and the Viking Connection

6 Wales and Europe

7 Ireland and North Africa

8 Deconstructing the Celtic Myth

9 Pre-Celtic Place-Names

10 Ireland’s Early Maritime History

11 Vikings and Trade in the Middle Ages

12 Moorish Spain and Ireland: A Golden Age

13 Myths and Storytelling

14 North African Influences on Early Irish Christianity

15 Irish and Eastern Illuminated Art

16 The Sheela-na-Gig

17 La Tène Culture

Conclusion

Sources

Index

Copyright

Acknowledgments

I have relied much on the labours of those who are referred to in the text and list of sources. However, I should also acknowledge my debt to many who encouraged the work, but who are otherwise unmentioned: they include the staff of the Thomas Hardiman Library, NUIG, Helen Carey of the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, Dr Ferdinand von Prondzynski of DCU, Hakim Bey of Autonomedia, Beatrice Kelly of the National Heritage Council, Miriam Allen and my extended family, as well as D.G. Bradley, Oisín Breathnach, Mary J. Byrne, Dr Richard Crampton, Michael Cregan, Clíodna Cussen, Jean le Du, Grattan Healy, Fred Johnston, Barry Mc-Donnell, Gareth Murphy, Dr Harvey O’Brien, Padraig Ó Mathúna, Alex Ó Scanaill, Caomhán Ó Scolaí, Norbert Payne, T.C. Rice, Michael Rudd, Sture Ureland, Ethna Viney and Dr Alfred Winter. I also owe much to Aosdána, and above all to Antony Farrell and to his staff at The Lilliput Press, who felt that The Atlantean Irish was worth revising and publishing.

Foreword

One of the great joys of studying prehistory is that the subject is ever-changing. Every day, whether as the result of carefully directed research excavations or simply as chance finds made during construction work or farming, new evidence is pouring out of the ground. Some of it is spectacular and headline-grabbing but much is unsurprising and, let us be honest, superficially rather dull. Some years ago there was a revealing cartoon that showed an excavation with a pontificating archaeologist and a television team who were packing up in bored disgust. The archaeologist was saying, ‘No, no treasure but a host of fascinating detail about the socio-economic structure of the Iron Age’ – ourselves as others see us! But it is in these details and in the painstaking search for patterns in the data – and then for more data to help consolidate and expand the patterns – that the very basis of archaeological reconstruction lies. Upon these studies prehistory is written.

Those of us who are ‘dirt-archaeologists’ spend a disproportionate amount of our lives struggling to contain the detail and may perhaps be forgiven for sometimes allowing our vision to be restricted by the edge of the trench or the strict chronological limits of the period we profess to specialize in. There is still, I believe, far too much chronological or regional blinkering in the approach of the discipline. Eighty years ago the great French historian Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the Annales School of History, wrote in characteristic style, ‘historians be geographers, be jurists too and sociologists and psychologists’. He went on to encourage us to abattre les cloissons (smash down the compartments). As a student, my own rather pathetic response to the clarion call was to smuggle into the pages of the august Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society a description of some Roman potsherds – then an unthinkable intrusion.

The Annales School, and in particular the writing of its most famous proponent, Ferdinand Braudel, has had a profound effect on the work of archaeologists and prehistorians. Braudel has taught us to think in terms of different rhythms of time. Perhaps of most use to those who work in deep time is his concept of la longue durée (geographical time) – it is ‘a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, of ever recurring cycles’. Such a way of looking at things is particularly helpful in the study of the intricately textured Atlantic façade of Europe – a landscape whose communities have forever been dominated by the constant rhythms of the ocean. It was the ocean that, for over 10,000 years, has bound these maritime communities together, encouraging them to turn their backs on the land. It has provided a corridor of communications along which commodities, people, ideas and beliefs have flowed with changing intensity over time.

The physical detritus of these contacts, and their echoes in written anecdotes and song and in the genetic make-up of the population, are the raw materials from which archaeologists, historians, linguists, ethnomusicologists and biomolecular scientists attempt to build models of the past. Each specialist will have a viewpoint – their own cognitive model of the past conditioned by the traditions of their discipline. These undoubtedly have a value but it is only when the compartments separating us have been swept away will new, and perhaps unfamiliar, pictures begin to emerge.

Bob Quinn, intuitively, has grasped the excitement of it all and has begun to explore many of the more crucial issues. In the story he tells there is much with which we can agree and things that we might feel less happy about – so, in bold reconstructions like this, it will always be. That said, his gentle, provocative style nudges us to confront our prejudices. If, at the end, we go away inspired by the author’s love of his subject, seeing the familiar in different perspective, making new connections and eager to know more, he will more than have achieved his purpose.

Barry Cunliffe. Professor of European Archaeology, Oxford

Pont Roux

Introduction

The original Atlantean project took four years to fulfil – from 1980 to 1984 – reading, researching and filming as I went. It was the most exciting and intellectually stimulating time of my life, and it resulted in three films and a book.

My purpose was to show that Irish culture – and especially that of my neighbours in Conamara – was not just a vestigial remnant of Celticism, a European culture that had washed over the island 2500 years ago, retreated and left us high and dry, to make an exhibition of ourselves with ‘the blind hysterics of the Celt’.

There were two starting-points: sean-nós singing, and the sea that surrounds Ireland and up to recently was the only approach to this island. The same sea touched many other shores and cultures. Was it a coincidence that the lateen sail used on the traditional Conamara púcán was an Arab invention still used on Egyptian dhows? Naïvely, then, I hypothesized that the Irish might owe as much to one of the great civilizations of the world, Islam, as they did to a focus on Eurocentric origins.

In pursuit of this hypothesis I wandered from Armagh to Árann, from a knitting shop in Oxford to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, from a sean-nós session in Carna to the monasteries of the Wadi Natrun Desert. I mostly travelled alone, was never mugged, never robbed (except by Moroccan security forces who appropriated a crucial part of my cine-camera), and I learned that the world was a far safer, friendlier and more interesting place than contemporary journalism would have had me believe.

The people I met during my quest were equally colourful. The expert Arabist in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, who pointed out the similarity of style between the Book of Durrow and early Islamic manuscripts, was convicted of selling some of those same manuscripts to unscrupulous dealers some years later. The late John M. Allegro, author of books such as The Mushroom and the Cross and one of the first Westerners to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, enthusiastically supported my interpretation of the obscene Síle na gCíocs (Sheela-na-Gigs). When, in the Isle of Man, I introduced him to these images for the first time, his glee was palpable. Subsequently I found that mention of his name was the only way I could enrage a calm friend of mine, the late Dominican priest, Father Romuald Dodd.

When it came to writing a book about my adventures I was academically ill equipped. In cramming entire courses of archaeology, navigation, religion, politics, history, geography et alia into frequent, sharp intensive bursts of reading and studying in libraries and museums, I aimed to restore the neglected faculty of imagination to the disparate details being uncovered while trying to view them as a coherent whole united by the sea. It was like learning joined-up writing having been taught only block capitals. Encouraged by the geographer E. Estyn Evans’ insight that in future all new discoveries would be made in the cracks between the disciplines, my approach was less scholarly than sociological, a discipline with which I had at least a passing familiarity.

From an academic viewpoint, my sin were twofold: not only did I confront the simplistic construction called Irish/Celtic/Catholic identity, I also recovered much of the Anglo-Irish, pre-Independence scholarly research that had proved inconvenient to the new state’s image-builders and had been dismissed from official history books. But my greatest sin was to attribute to oral culture and to personal observation – that is to say, common sense – as much respect as I accorded written evidence and armchair scholarship. In short, I went beyond theologically acceptable versions of history and tried to interpret the ‘good books’ for myself. However, it was an upstart amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who followed his instincts and uncovered the city of Troy in 1871, and Alfred Wegener’s suggestion in 1922 that the earth’s continents had moved in the geological past was vigorously dismissed until surveys of the sea floor in the 1950s compelled acceptance of the tectonic-plate theory.

E. Estyn Evans’ ‘Personality of Ireland’ lectures, first delivered in 1973, confirmed for me the limitations of exclusive reliance on written historical records. This Welshman, a Queen’s University Belfast scholar for fifty years, was a passionate advocate of reading the land and listening to the people, differentiating ‘dirt-archaeology’ from ‘desk-archaeology’. In some circles (as Paul Durcan wrote in a foreword to the current edition of the resulting book) Evans was referred to as ‘a crypto-Unionist’. His parallel between introspective scholarship and the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism clearly raised many hackles. However, the late Liam de Paor had long shown that the trappings of all European nationalisms, not just the Irish, were products of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and the Irish were not the only sinners in this respect. Retired Professor P.L. Henry of Galway University (who, along with musicologist John Blacking of Queen’s University, first suggested the Berbers to me as a relevant area of research) reconciled me to the professional silence that greeted my original research and findings; I had had to travel to Dublin and deliver copies of the original book to individual newspapers to encourage them to review it. He pointed out that I had touched on so many different disciplines that no single scholar could handle this vast canvas without betraying gaps in their own knowledge. It was more prudent for them to pass over my work.

One professional scholar, Dr Michael Ryan, now director of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, was courageous enough to review the first edition of this book in Archaeology Ireland. While disagreeing with me about almost everything, he paid tribute to my attempt to restore Islamic learning to its due place in the intellectual development of Europe. Dr Ryan had inadvertently encouraged me already by drawing attention (in his essay on the Derrynaflan Chalice) to ‘the problem of eastern influence on all aspects of early Irish art’, pronouncing that ‘there is need now to reopen the question’. My book was not at all what he had in mind, but it was a start. Other reviews were more encouraging, but Professor Henry had already warned me that my findings would be ignored, as I was not an accredited scholar.

There have since been encouraging indications that an academic frost can thaw. In 1995 the then president of Dublin City University, Dr Danny O’Hare, reproduced my original (out of print) book and distributed fifty copies to colleagues in the United States. In Ireland’s Others (2001), Elizabeth Butler Cullingford put me in the company of Brian Friel (Translations), Frank McGuinness (Carthaginians) and even Joyce: ‘Quinn’s idiosyncratic researcher may be seen as performing what Luke Gibbons has called “lateral journeys along the margins which short-circuit the colonial divide”.’

Earlier, in the 1980s, Professor Hilary Richardson of University College Dublin showed me some of her comparative studies of Armenian cross-stones (kachkars) and Irish high crosses. ‘Alone in the Christian world,’ she wrote, ‘the extreme east – Armenia/Georgia – and the extreme west – Ireland – preserved an established convention of erecting monuments in stone.’ She emphasized Françoise Henry’s mid-century support for the idea of oriental influences on insular Irish art, an idea that was disputed by some of the old-school Irish archaeologists.

The opportunity to write the original version of this book had come when Naim Atallah, the Palestinian owner of Quartet Books in London, saw the films and commissioned the book. When the manuscript was ready he entrusted it to a young Lebanese editor. She dismissed it as wild imaginings and passed it on to Jeremy Beale, a man of patience, who shepherded it from then on. I wondered whether her reaction had anything to do with the Beirut war, which was still at its cruellest. How else could a Lebanese react to a book that did not condemn the Muslim Palestinians? Sadly, Quartet published the book without its intended illustrations and left my literary baby to fend for itself, with no launch or any publicity. It went out of print in 1994.

It is as unprofitable to be twenty years before your time as a score too late.

In 1993 a scholar named Orin Gensler completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, with a thesis on Afro-Asiatic languages and a study of eighty-five languages throughout the world. He is now attached to the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt. In his thesis he described my book as ‘the best overview of extralinguistic connections between the British Isles and North Africa that I have come across’. In fairness to Gensler, he stated that he was not equipped to substantiate my extralinguistic findings but he confirmed that his own conclusions supported Dr Heinrich Wagner’s North African substratum ideas, on which I had relied extensively in my text. In the following pages I report for the first time on my subsequent field research and findings on the phenomenon of ‘pre-Celtic’ languages in Ireland.

In 1999 Simon James, an archaeologist on leave from the British Museum, produced Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? In an acceptably scholarly manner he covered much the same ground and did an even greater demolition job on the Irish (and British) ‘Celtic’ invention than ever I could. His findings were greeted in an Irish Times article with disbelief as well as incomprehension by a friend of mine, Irish-language poet Gabriel Rosenstock. The most informed and devastating analysis of the whole ‘Celtic’ invention, however, was Hildegard L.C. Tristram’s essay, ‘Celtic in linguistic taxonomy in the nineteenth century’. In the same collection George Watson wrote: ‘the “Celt” has been a construction of urban intellectuals imposed on the predominantly rural denizens of what has come to be called the “Celtic fringe”’. Very recently a team of geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and the universities of Leeds and Cambridge published the results of their study of mitochondrial DNA in Ireland. They concluded that ‘the Irish are not Celts’. In this text I also refer to Oxford professor Bryan Sykes’ equally supportive findings in the same specialized area of DNA.

Dr G. Frank Mitchell, late of Trinity College Dublin, wrote a review in the Irish Times in 1987 suggesting that a study of the North African Latin Church would be rewarding and was quite overdue: ‘Art motifs could easily have reached Ireland from North Africa.’ My own investigations in Tunis and Carthage into this forgotten dimension of Latin Christianity were also supported by the words of Dr Michael Richter (a medieval specialist who lectured in University College Dublin for twelve years), who wrote in 1988 in his book Medieval Ireland: The Enduring Tradition:

The beginnings of systematic study of the Latin language in Ireland can be traced back to the end of the 6th century. As Latin was not dispensed with [i.e. could not be ignored] in the Irish Church, it was considered necessary to learn and teach the language thoroughly and for this the recognized authorities were used, particularly Donatus. [my italics]

Dr Richter went on: ‘By 650 AD … the Irish scholars had discovered Latin education for its own sake; in the following century they were to become famous and very quickly infamous for it. A Latinity developed which displays particularly eccentric features.’

In Atlantean I had featured a personality named Donatus, a fourth-century North African bishop excommunicated by Rome for leading a revolt. I suggested that the brutal persecution following his revolt might have driven many of the more ardent Tunisian Christians to a safe haven, far from Rome – even, possibly, as far as the Skelligs monastic outpost off south-west Ireland. Clearly this could not be proven, but at least it was possible to suggest that a heretical namesake of a North African dissident (if not the heretic Donatus himself!) had a direct intellectual influence on Irish monasticism and ultimately on the Great Western Church.

This ‘eccentricity’ or individuality of early medieval Irish monks was alluded to disapprovingly by Alcuin, the eighth-century Northumbrian adviser to Emperor Charlemagne. He said the Irish scholars were suspiciously more interested in philosophy than theology, i.e. they dared to enquire into the realities behind the approved ecclesiastical party line. Irish scholars had this in common with contemporary Islamic philosophers in Spain: they both tried to reconcile reason and religion and suffered much criticism for their efforts.

The most thrilling endorsement of my emphasis on the importance of a maritime interpretation of the Irish identity came quite recently. In Facingthe Ocean (2001), archaeologist Barry Cunliffe’s groundbreaking study, he revealed his development from a Celt-based interpretation of Britain and Ireland to a view focussed on the Atlantic seaways. He argued convincingly for what I had only speculated on many years ago: that the Irish language evolved not as a result of continental ‘Celtic’ influence but as a maritime language of the western coastal areas of Europe. Colin Renfrew suggested the same thing in 1987, when he wrote that the origins of ‘Celtic’ tongues were not to be found in the Iron Age but 6000 years ago with the first farmers on these islands. In 1958 Glyn Daniel wrote, ‘it seems certain that the megalith-builders did not speak an Indo-European language. We should expect them to speak a Mediterranean language, some pre-Indo-European language which may have survived to the present day as Berber or Basque’.

The ideas in Atlantean were originally greeted with good humour. RTÉ television producer Larry Masterson gaily assailed me outside his prefab office: ‘Listen here! St Patrick came here in 432! He drove out the snakes! He converted us with the shamrock! Get that straight, OK?’

‘Are you the fellow that says we’re all Arabs?’ commented a judge in Kinvara, Co. Galway, before dismissing a minor charge against me. He added, glancing wearily around the miscreants in his court: ‘I’m sure you have found plenty of confirmation for your theory today.’

I was reminded how many Europeans, fed by racist and stereotypical images culled from feature films and other media, are completely unaware of the actual world of Islam. There is not a single reference to Islam in the 1075-page Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Centuries before Middle Eastern and North African peoples succumbed to colonialism and were carved up into manageable (and variously corrupt) client states, they had a world influence whose impact is rarely, if ever, mentioned. This convenient amnesia has resulted in a culpable ignorance of the Muslim world, one that has inexorably allowed a political exacerbation of the current artificial confrontation between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ civilizations.

I hope this book may soften some of the crude strokes with which this confrontation is painted – by Henry Kissinger, among others. At a time when BBC commentator Robert Kilroy-Silk feels safe in describing two billion Muslims as ‘suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors’, Western society has a long way to go. Fortunately he is no longer employed by the BBC.

While professionals on whose disciplines I dared to tread in the first edition of this book maintained a dignified silence towards it as well as, in many cases, a privately expressed disapproval, others were less reticent. ‘A compendium of nonsense’ was a description reported back to me of a late-night tirade by a fine Irish-language poet; her beloved Ottoman Empire had not been given sufficient credit for Islamic influence on this island. My rejoinder is that all empires use the indigenous peoples they control to carry out their further depredations: witness the Gurkhas, the South Vietnamese, the Afghans and, especially, the Berbers. The Mediterranean may at one stage have been described as a ‘Turkish lake’, but few of the sailors themselves were Turkish.

On another tack, an American lecturer attached to the University of Coleraine publicly proclaimed in 1985 in Miltown Malbay, Co. Clare, that the musicological ideas of Seán Ó Riada – which had made a good deal of sense to my ear and on which I had relied greatly – were really quite farfetched. That late and much-loved composer had said that Irish traditional music was non-European in that its original genesis was Indian and it had reached Ireland through North Africa and Spain. The American lady, on the other hand, followed the ‘Celtic’ trail and claimed an east European origin for sean-nós singing. She even played musical examples. What she appeared to be oblivious to was the 800-year Muslim control of the region from which she took her evidence. The same airy disregard was shown recently in The Journal of Music in Ireland by Dr Lillis O’Laoire, who attacked Ó Riada’s and my ideas on this music as ‘exoticization’. How many of us – apart from the late Hubert Butler – realized, before the sickening war in the Balkans, the extraordinary proportion of Muslims who are native to and still reside in these European regions?

Traditional Irish musicians are not usually burdened with such theological agonizing about the origins of their discipline; they simply play the music as they hear and feel it. Thus the wandering troubadour Andy Irvine pioneered the rhythms and harmonies of Bulgaria and Hungary (in the nineteenth century the latter banned all Turkish trumpets) and paved the way for the bouzouki in Irish traditional music. It is perhaps twenty years since Irvine, in Slattery’s of Capel Street, Dublin, exposed Irish audiences to the powerful sean-nós singing of the Hungarian, Márta Sebestyén. Not long after that P.J. Curtis introduced Irish radio listeners to the extraordinary Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. All of these musical forms have been informed by the Muslim presence in Europe. In 1994 Bill Whelan, a collaborator of Irvine’s, based his exciting Riverdance music on the same exotic rhythms.

In short, my findings were no surprise to the more adventurous of Irish musicians. Nothing I suggested about oriental influences had not already been intuited by them. But they did not go far enough east or south, to the original sources.

Visual artists in the main were also supportive, and indeed elected me to Aosdána principally on the strength of the Atlantean films. Painter Brian Bourke said: ‘There is nothing so potent as an idea whose time has come.’

And what exactly was this time, this context, this idea?

The 1980s were a period of intense revision of conventional ideas about Irish identity. Renewed emigration, decimating a generation of the newly educated, suggested that the Republic was also a ‘failed entity’. The barbarism of the war in Northern Ireland, and the fear of it spilling over into the South, produced a concerted political, journalistic and scholarly campaign to play down traditional ideas of identity such as Catholicism, the Irish language, a Gaelic culture, anything that could be depicted as underpinning or giving comfort to the Provisional IRA campaign. At the time it was as dangerous to be a free thinker as it was to be a fundamentalist; as intimidating, indeed, as it is now, post-9/11.

As I sailed unconcerned through that period, absorbed in my speculations, it surprised me how interested Irish people were in my alternative historical and cultural scenarios. It was as if, traditional bulwarks against life’s uncertainties having been discredited or discarded, we needed another identity, however fanciful, that our national make-up was much broader, more complex and even, yes, more exotic than had been hitherto taught. More through luck than judgment, my revival of the Atlantean/Oriental idea fell neatly into this category.

In 1995 I set out to show in a documentary film that in the so-called European Dark Ages business was actually carried on much as usual – a theory originated by a Belgian, Henri Pirenne, and supplemented by the late Professor Sture Bolin of the University of Lund, as well as by Hodges and Whitehouse in their book Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (1983). The latter quoted Pirenne’s maxim: ‘Without Mohammed, no Charlemagne.’ The theory propounded was that civilization did not die after the Roman retreat across the Alps; it was happily carried on by, among others, the Vikings and the Muslims on the seas and waterways surrounding and penetrating the European continent. I called my project ‘Navigatio: Completing the Circle’. It involved travelling widely in Scandinavia and even as far as Tatarstan, east of Russia, to search out and record musicians and singers.

In 1988, as a curious by-product of the original book, I was invited to write a biography of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Even the Libyans appeared to have heard of Atlantean. For a worrying week I was the leader’s personal guest in his desert refuge and was promised access to a world of Arab scholarship. It was soon realized by his handpicked young lieutenants that I was not in the business of writing an unquestioning hagiography of their boss. The commission did not transpire. So far I have not written in detail about this Libyan experience (apart from an unpublished fictional account) for fear of putting some of Qaddafi’s lieutenants in peril; it is enough to say that during that strange week in Libya I was brought to a remote beach in Cyrenaica, west of Benghazi, and urged to inform the USA that this was the ideal spot to invade the country! How time heals all wounds; now Qaddafi is the prodigal darling of the West, having renounced weapons of mass destruction and paid millions in compensation to the relatives of the 1988 Lockerbie disaster victims.

Apart from many new ideas and the illustrations that give the reader practical examples of the argument, this edition differs slightly from the original in the following respect. When I gave a draft of the 1986 edition to Bearnard Ó Riain, an ex-military friend, he said: ‘Your readers are your company of soldiers. You are leading them on an assault, up the hill of imagination. You can’t afford to hesitate. Take them over the top with confidence.’ He was referring to an apparent diffidence in style I had adopted in order to seduce the reader and appease professional scholars. With more research and the reassurance of varied and nuanced reactions to the work, I can now develop and support my original ideas confident that they are as valid as anybody’s, and perhaps nearer the truth than many. If the pendulum has indeed swung from diffidence to arrogance I can only plead a different kind of naïvety, perhaps one that accompanies advancing years.

My object of attack remains the extraordinary adherence by generations of scholars, propagandists and tourists to the ‘Celtic’ explanation for all things Irish. This Celtic delusion seems to me to be one of those incantations described by E.H. Carr in his George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures of 1961 as ‘designed to save historians from the tiresome obligation to think for themselves’.

1

Historical Origins: Vallancey and Ledwich

CHARLES VALLANCEY, chief engineer of Ireland from 1794, was angry when he saw what Edward Ledwich, the upstart vicar of Aghaboe, Co. Offaly, had written. Vallancey’s work of a lifetime was dismissed as ‘soporiferous’ and ‘the ravings of a bedlamite’. The chief engineer, who had spent years studying the customs and antiquities of Ireland through the prism of the Irish language, who had even founded the respected periodical Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis, was accused of producing a ‘fairy labyrinth of absurdity’.

Vallancey (1721–1812), an Englishman, had developed such an interest in the small island of Ireland and its people that it had inspired him to construct proof of their antiquity. He maintained that not only was their language inherited from Eastern civilizations, but that the people themselves were almost full-blooded Phoenicians. Had he not demonstrated beyond doubt that their famous Round Towers were the ruins of ceremonial monuments built by Persian fire-worshippers? Who better than an engineer to analyse such structures? But the presumptuous Ledwich was dismissing all of that as ‘such a tissue of Hiberno-Oriental adventures as never before appeared on paper’.

Ledwich (1737–1823) even had the temerity to propose a system of his own: the Round Towers had been built by the Danes, who had also been responsible for megalithic Newgrange and constructed it in the ninth century. Ledwich declared that it was from these wild Northmen – whom he fatuously claimed had preceded the ‘Celtes’ – together with the Saxons, that anything worthwhile in Ireland was derived. With no command of Irish, the vicar presumed to ridicule the chief engineer’s linguistic discoveries, and wrote that Vallancey could not prevent his interpretation of the traditional Irish fables from ‘sinking under their own imbecility’. The famous mythologies of the Fianna were ‘total inventions, to amuse an ignorant and barbarous people’; the Irish were as nothing until the Saxons redeemed them. This criticism must have appeared outrageous to Vallancey.

Charles Vallancey (1721-1812) by George Chinnery (courtesy of The Royal Irish Academy, Dublin)

The bitter argument between Charles Vallancey and Edward Ledwich was paradoxical. An Englishman was proposing a substantial pedigree for the Irish; an Anglo-Irishman was declaring them to be barbarians. Each seemed to invoke the discipline of his opponent. Vallancey, whose training as a military engineer was practical, had used imagination and an Irish dictionary to construct an oriental and religion-centred past for the Irish. Ledwich purported to be a man of God, yet used the rationalist tools of the Enlightenment to demolish such a construct and erect a pagan Viking context in its stead.

If Vallancey was right, the Irish were civilized before the English took over; if Ledwich was correct, and the Danes had built Brú na Bóinne, then the Irish were doubly barbarian because everybody knew that the Northmen were uncivilized. To the modern reader, to whom such questions are academic and who reads these writings as literature rather than history, there is no doubt which is the more entertaining writer. The exuberance of Vallancey’s speculations is infinitely more attractive than the intemperate sneers of Ledwich.

The dispute between Vallancey and Ledwich might now appear to be the insubstantial squabble of two educated hobbyists, but at the end of the eighteenth century it was one of the seminal themes of the day. Vallancey was an idealist, while Ledwich was an opportunist, seeing clearly the political dimension of a respected antiquarian’s attempts to revive interest in a Gaelic past. In the growing pressure for an Act of Union with Britain, perhaps Ledwich also saw the possibilities of increasing his chances of advancement within the Established Church.

The Ledwich faction won. The Act of Union was passed in 1800, the possibility of Irish autonomy went underground and the vicar’s thesis was republished four years later. Although even James Joyce quoted Vallancey’s findings without demur, the engineer is still dismissed as an impractical romantic. Ledwich, who has earned no comparable odium, must have realized that Vallancey was more than politically incorrect, that it was essential to destroy his reputation; the antiquarian engineer was a figure of stature who showed too much sympathy for the native Irish and their language. Variations of the opposing perspectives of Vallancey and Ledwich are still the poles around which private and public debate inexorably revolve in the Irish cockpit. Even on that tiny eighteenth-century stage, the native Irish were rarely consulted. In a sense, Ireland may be approached as a figment of the imagination of visiting observers and their native agents.

Vallancey was treated kindly by many, such as the Earl of Rosse (Sir Lawrence Parsons), by the politician Henry Flood (stimulated by Vallancey’s work to earmark £50,000 for Trinity College Dublin for the study of the Irish language) and, in recent years, by the essayist Hubert Butler. However, the Ledwich tactic of simple abuse is still echoed by modern historians; Roy Foster recently described Vallancey’s work on Irish philology as ‘hokum’. In other words, that 200-year-old squabble is still alive among the learned classes. But what proportion of these learned classes has bothered to wrestle with Irish philology? In 1901 Douglas Hyde, first president of Ireland, could write:

It is simply amazing that most Irish and many English writers, who have had to deal with Ireland from that day to this, have in their sketchy and generally unreliable accounts of the island, its people, and its social conditions, simply ignored the fact that any other language than English was spoken in it at all.

Vallancey was the principal exception. He over-elaborates, to put it mildly, and often reads surreally, rather like Lucky in Waiting for Godot, evacuating gobs of unintelligible erudition to the bewilderment of the reader. I have also encountered the sterile prose of Ledwich. Their arguments are irrelevant to subsequent assessments of them; Vallancey tried to understand the island’s complex history and was enthusiastic about the place and its people, Ledwich despised both. They each ended up as pawns in the intellectual schizophrenia that has bedevilled discussion in and about Ireland for over 300 years.

Another visitor to Ireland, the French Chevalier de Latocnaye, in 1796 supported the theory that Ireland’s origins lay to the west, that it represented the remaining fragment of a landmass submerged by the Atlantic in prehistoric times. A century later, this theory re-emerged in United States Senator Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis, the Antediluvian World. However, these theories that the Irish came from the north, south or west were never as widely accepted as the theory that they came ‘overland’ from the east, that they were Celts.

It was (and still is) widely held that a people called the ‘Celts’ migrated westwards across Europe. By the mid-fifth century BC, it has been maintained, these northern Europeans had begun to colonize Britain and Ireland. Whatever about parts of Britain, the archaeological evidence does not support the idea of a Celtic colonization of Ireland, or that such a people re-placed or mixed with the indigenous population.

But it was a useful myth.

The modern myth’s beginnings may be traced to a Welsh naturalist and polymath named Edward Lhuyd (1670–1709) who in 1700 was the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Lhuyd was inspired by the writings of a Breton, Paul-Yves Pezron, whose patriotic aim was to distinguish between the French and the Bretons. In 1707, in the parallel context of antipathy between Wales and England, Lhuyd followed the Breton’s example; in his Archaeologia Britannica he proposed that Irish, Breton, Welsh, Cornish, Manx and Scottish sprang from the same linguistic Celtic loins, and that they were all closely related to the ancient Gaulish and Iberian languages, thus making them ‘Celtic’.

In this context at least, both Lhuyd and Pezron applied their considerable energies in a spirit less of scholarship than of politics and culture. Romantic nationalism was at the embryonic stage. In retrospect this was not in any sense ignoble; the pipe dream of value-free science has long run out of tobacco. Can any modern scholars – any human being – declare themselves uninfluenced by socially interiorized cultural predispositions?

A century after Vallancey and Ledwich, the Gaelic Revival in Ireland came into its own. It supplied Ireland’s need for an identity other than that offered by the increasingly unpopular ascendancy. The foundation of such groups as the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, the National Literary Society and the Gaelic League reinforced the 200-year-old theory that the Irish were radically different from the English, i.e. that they were uniquely Gaelic and Celtic. It helped to focus the national feeling that led eventually to a form of Irish independence.

The theories of Vallancey, Ledwich, de Latocnaye and others were dismissed as quaint; a new orthodoxy was established that has ultimately produced, among other things, a Celtic ragbag into which everything from new-age religion to saccharine pop music can be awkwardly crammed. The term ‘Celtic’ has become a kind of cultural smog that has demonstrably impoverished Irish culture. Even the Gaelic Revivalists assuredly must be turning in their graves.

The sixteenth-century Anglo-Irish poet Edmund Spenser wrote: ‘It is certain that Ireland had the use of letters very anciently and long before England.’ But for obvious political reasons, Spenser was impatient with claims that the Irish were related to the Spanish: ‘Of all the nations under Heaven the Spaniard is the most mingled and most uncertain; whereof most foolishly do the Irish think to ennoble themselves by wresting their ancestry from the Spaniards.’

If Spenser had read that marvellous libel, Topographica Hibernia, by a Welsh cleric named Giraldus Cambrensis (1146–1223), he might have torn his beard out. Cambrensis purveyed his account of the Irish in the twelfth century. He was a churchman who accompanied the early Norman invaders, essentially a war correspondent with special privileges. He was given access to all available literary sources, but even if he had quoted accurately from these he would still have been in trouble. As Eoin MacNeill pointed out:

The 10th and 11th centuries produced a school of Irish historians whose chief work was to reduce the old miscellaneous matter of tradition to unity and sequence. In dealing with the pre-Christian period they tampered with tradition in two ways; when they found definite elements of ‘heathenism’ they either cut these out or furbished them in a guise which they considered consonant with Christian belief. This can be shown to have been done consciously and deliberately.

Historical revisionism is no new phenomenon; MacNeill called its first practitioners ‘the synthetic historians’.

Spenser might also have been incited to rage by Seathrún Céitinn/Geoffrey Keating’s History of Ireland (c. 1630). In this, using such Irish literary sources as An Leabhar Gabhála (The Book of Invasions), no fewer than five invaders are credited with an input to Irish identity. They are, variously, a granddaughter of Noah called Cesara; a grandson of same called Partholon; a Scythian named Nemedus, who held the country for 216 years ‘and for 200 years afterwards the land was empty’; somebody named Dela who came from Greece; and, finally, two brothers named Hibemus and Hermanus who came from Spain. To this list Keating added tribes called the Dé Danann, the Fomorians and the Fir Bolg.

Vallancey tore Keating’s ideas apart: ‘The Translator [Geoffrey Keating], entirely ignorant of geography, has given this history an English dress so ridiculous, as to become the laughing-stock of every reader.’ He also dismissed the classical authors: ‘The Greeks, to whom we are much indebted, are still more fabulous; they knew little of the geography of the Globe; and the Romans even less … Herodotus, the oldest Greek historian, knew nothing of Britain.’

Such exchanges tarnish the image of scholarly gentlemen discussing matters calmly. The groves of academe can sometimes resemble a jungle.

Newgrange, Co. Meath, after its ‘reconstruction’

Neither did scholarly habits seem to improve in later centuries. According to Séamus Delargy (1899–1980), a leading folklorist, the scholars and literary men of Ireland, whether they were Irish or Anglo-Irish, wrote exclusively in English and were, in the main, ‘completely ignorant of Irish and contemptuous of the language and the people who spoke it’. Oddly enough Vallancey, the most ridiculed of these scholars, seems to have been one of the rare exceptions, having at least gone to the trouble of familiarizing himself with Irish.

Delargy continues on a mournful note: ‘The loss of the language over most of Ireland brought about the destruction of the oral literature enshrined in it, leaving a gap in our knowledge of Irish folklore which can never be filled.’This is a pity because the oral traditions of a people can valuably complement empirical evidence.

Throughout the twentieth century, scholarship in Ireland lost much of the exuberance of the Vallancey-Ledwich controversy and seemed to be governed by an orthodoxy imposed by the hidebound perspective of the area traditionally called the Pale, centred on Dublin. Interlopers were discouraged from offering opinions.

In the late 1970s a young American, Martin Brennan, dared to interpret the famous Boyne Valley passage tombs in terms of astronomy – positing that they were solar laboratories as much as burial places and therefore built by a highly sophisticated people. His book, Boyne Valley Vision (1980), suffered an unprecedentedly savage review from the widow of Michael O’Kelly – a fine archaeologist/excavator but tourist-oriented reconstructor of Newgrange; Liam de Paor described O’Kelly’s reconstruction as ‘kitsch’. The young American’s reputation was further damaged when he left Ireland, allegedly deported for drug offences. In fact, Martin Brennan recently confirmed to me by letter that he had been harassed, but that it was a case of mistaken identity by the Special Branch – they had taken him for a well-known IRA member who was later deported.

In the light of this – the condition of Ireland that W.B. Yeats called ‘Great hatred, little room’ – nearly a quarter of a century ago I began to research the subject of Ireland’s connections with, among other places, North Africa.

I sympathize with the prudence of scholars. Too often their findings, carefully qualified, have been plucked out of context and used for crude propaganda purposes. The pleading by Herder in the eighteenth century for the dignity of the German language and people was a reaction to the arrogance of the Frankish courts. Who could have foreseen there the seeds of an Aryan nightmare in the twentieth century? English chauvinists in 1912 tried to ‘prove’ that a certain skull belonged to one of the earliest examples of Homo sapiens in England. This became known as the Piltdown Man, and it was forty years before it was exposed as a hoax.

The history of such hoaxes and fakery has its serious side. Truth may always be relative, but provisional intellectual findings can often coincide with the prevailing political and national ethos. Such arbitrary conclusions can then become conventional wisdom. Thus, the British will say that the reason the Romans did not invade Ireland was because there was nothing there worth conquering. The Irish will retort that the Romans were nervous about taking on such a redoubtable foe. The British will contend that they sent the first people over the Scottish landbridge to Ireland in Palaeolithic times; the Irish will say it’s just as likely they came directly from the Continent. The British will claim the Book of Kells for the north of England; the Irish grow indignant at such a suggestion, because they know their own scholarship was the basis of Northumbrian learning.

In the island of Ireland itself a parallel friction persists. Northern scholars traditionally pointed to a greater incidence of Mesolithic flints in their area as evidence of the earliest habitation of the country. Their southern counterparts might reasonably say that if as much attention had been paid by colonist antiquarians to the south, a similar density might be found.

Seán Ó Loideán with his find on the Seana Mhac bog, south Conamara

Rarely are the footsoldiers, the people who actually live on the land, consulted. An elderly neighbour of mine in Conamara, the late Seán Ó Loideán, told me that he was cutting turf on the Seana Mhac bog in 1941 when, beneath the 4000-year-old blanket of peat (from the medieval Irish puiteach – boggy) and lodged in the granite below, he found a polished stone axe. It was identified by the National Museum as being identical in style to those manufactured in Tievebullagh, Co. Antrim, and Rathlin Island, 320 kilometres to the north. Fifty years later Seán could proudly show me the axe and was able to bring me to the precise spot where he had found it. Countrymen like Seán Ó Loideán often retain a deep interest in the origins of things; he was the kind of man Estyn Evans respected as a keeper of invaluable, if unwritten, records.

Irish archaeologist Peter Woodman, who had conducted an up-to-date investigation of the flints in the north, came to the conclusion that they were not necessarily made later than their equivalent in Scotland, from where it had been suggested the first settlers came. Subsequently, archaeologist Michael Ryan found material in Lough Boora showing that such early first settlers could have arrived in Ireland at almost any point on the east coast. Woodman moved on to work in the south-west of the island and expressed confidence that he could find similar flints there. It was not long before he had found evidence in Ferriter’s Cove, Co. Kerry, that pushed back by 2000 years the estimate of the earliest date at which people were arriving on the Dingle peninsula in Kerry. Since then other sites in the area have suggested that the earliest settlers could have arrived as early as 8000–7000 BC.

In other words, the ‘truth’ in these matters is simply a working hypothesis to be confirmed or denied by whatever new evidence is found. However, as Thomas Mann once wrote: ‘In modern times man’s destiny is stated in political terms.’ Archaeology is not immune to this disease.

Scholars themselves are most conscious of these grey areas; hence their prudence, but also their wrath when mere laymen intrude. It is akin to the relationship between theologians and the faithful. Robert Graves has written trenchantly on this subject from the perspective of the poet:

That so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to keep civilization alive. The scholar is a quarryman, not a builder, and all that is required of him is that he should quarry cleanly. He is the poet’s insurance against factual error … the poet’s function is truth.

I have found individual scholars to be unreservedly generous with their knowledge and time. Graves was harsh on them; a scholar can be as imaginative as a poet: each desperately, single-mindedly, tries to forge an order out of chaos. It would be interesting, however, for a sociologist to plot a graph showing the correlation between scholarly consensus in a society and the dominant political ethos that prevails at any given time. The relationship between Europe and the Middle East is a case in point. It is clear that the colonial experience has complicated the history of ideas here and significantly coloured the accounts. How much does the West owe to the East? Did ideas and cultures, even civilizations, move from East to West or vice versa? At one stage Mesopotamia and Egypt were credited with the beginnings of everything. Alternatively Western Europe is proclaimed to have had a separate and quite autonomous development. The truth always lies in the fissures between the tectonic plates of ideologies.

A cause célèbre of recent decades has been Black Athena (1987), Martin Bernal’s thesis that ancient Greek culture is at its base Egyptian and that classical historians since the late eighteenth century have conspired to deprive Africans of credit for it. His thesis, subtitled The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, implied that several centuries of European scholarship were guilty of racism. Afro-Americans instantly saw the implications and gleefully championed his thesis; the book became obligatory reading for millions.

It took a few years for American classical scholars to organize their defence. In 1996 classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz edited a collection of essays entitled Black Athena Revisited, the work of twenty heavyweight scholars who tore into Bernal’s ideas with scarcely concealed rage, consigning them to perdition in terms such as ‘Afrocentric fantasies’, ‘tendentious’, ‘incredible’ and ‘selective’. It reminded me of Vallancey’s treatment. Fortunately not all academics agreed. Paul Edwards of the University of Edinburgh elsewhere described Bernal’s work as ‘carefully considered and very well informed’.

It would be impertinent of me to even attempt to arbitrate in this dispute, but Bernal was at least fluent in Greek and could also read Egyptian hieroglyphics. His target was the gradual establishment in the nineteenth century of what he called the ‘Aryan model’ of ancient history. He was not the first to air such a thesis. Gerard Manley Hopkins, who taught Greek in Dublin in the late nineteenth century, also desperately sought evidence of such Egyptian foundations for ancient Greek. He suffered the same fate as Bernal. According to Lefkowitz, even Hopkins’ own biographer dismissed the poet’s enquiries as ‘wild linguistic surmises’ based on ‘obscure etymological instances’. Hell hath no fury like a scholar roused. There is an echo of this dispute in the ironical writings of Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810–66), as quoted by Daniel Corkery, when he suggests the Greeks should consider themselves to be ‘Northwest Egyptians’.

Linguistics and archaeology were once the preserve of amateurs – gentlemen who had the money and leisure to read and excavate at will, collect archaeological artefacts and speculate freely; they had not the scientific equipment to date their finds precisely. But the advent of professional archaeology also had its limitations. It was not until techniques such as dendrochronology (tree-ring examination) and carbon-14 dating were refined that there was any hope of precision. In the constant pursuit of certainty the archaeologists had had to become historians and geographers; they now found themselves having to consult botanists, chemists, geologists, linguists, anthropologists and other specialists. The new techniques altered some agreed dates by up to a thousand years, challenging the entire canon of archaeological and historical faith. As one archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, stated: ‘Once it is accepted that no model of the past can claim to be uniquely correct – any man is free to claim his own – it follows that no theory relating to past events can ever be final.’

However, ‘any man’ is likely to be so intimidated by the vastness and complexity of available evidence that he will rarely try to construct his own model of the past. The honest seeker of the truth will find himself drowned in a sea of statistics, scientific jargon and opinions so qualified as to be useless. Even the solid common sense of the archaeologist in the field tends to be overwhelmed by the flood of information. The ill-equipped antiquarians, with their romantic, sweeping generalizations, seem attractive in the face of what Canadian poet F.R. Scott has described as ‘the rain of facts that deepen the drought of the will’.

Scholarship and science are invoked to support cultural and political attitudes. One scholarly hypothesis can become the orthodoxy of the mob; historians must despair at the use to which their findings are put. In Northern Ireland, Protestants could point to the fact that Catholic Irishmen in the British forces put down the Irish nationalist rising of 1798 in the north, where the rebels were largely non-conformist Protestant. Catholics, for their part, could quote the Protestant leaders of the United Irishmen support of their nationalism. And everybody knows that the Protestant William of Orange had the backing of a Roman Catholic Pope, who said a Mass in Rome when the Catholic King James was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

The Bible itself is one of the most abused products of scholarship. In the Middle East, the government of Israel still uses the Good Book to justify its increasing takeover of Palestine. Arabs can plausibly argue that the Old Testament and its writers had their origin not in the Holy Land but in the Arabian peninsula. The Bible was used in the seventeenth century by Archbishop Ussher of Dublin to prove that the world was created in exactly 4004 BC. Even today there are thousands of sincere evangelists relying on the book’s authority to prove everything ranging from Armageddon to the reality of eternal life. No wonder the Roman Catholic Church traditionally discouraged the faithful from reading the Bible for themselves.

Chart from Libro de Todo el Universo by Lazaro Luis, 1563 (Academia das Ciências de Lisboa)

In the secular arena, the Irish, Norwegians and Spanish claim that, respectively, St Brendan, Leif Ericsson and Christopher Columbus first discovered America. The claims of the ‘Indians’ who were there before them all do not count as they were pre-literate Stone Age people.

No wonder scholars so cloak their words in circumlocution that few can misquote them, never mind understand them. Specialization in the sciences and the humanities can approach the point of absurdity. In the focussed world of the specialist – however brilliant the individual – the human capacity for making imaginative leaps is in danger of atrophying. Robert Graves stated: ‘To know only one thing too well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought.’

For over thirty years I have lived, worked with and observed a living community