The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps

PH@NICIAN KINSMEN OF BRUTUS 159

Gildas the Elder of Dunbarton. He was a famous Briton poet, and either he or still earlier redactors of these Chronicles may have introduced it as a bardic embellishment to signalize worthily so important an historical event as the first coming of the Britons to Britain. Such prophetic visions, not to mention their familiar frequency in the Jewish Old Testament, are not unknown in the case of such historical personages as Alexander the Macedonian and even Cesar, to signalize some particular achievement or foretell a fate. So this vision in no wise detracts from the historicity of the British tradition.

Besides, it now becomes clear that Brutus was no Columbus in the discovery of Albion or Britain. Nor did he require any such adventitious aid as a supernatural vision to inform him of the existence of Albion and its attractiveness for annexation. Albion was already, at that period, well known to the Phoenicians, we shall find, as a rich tin-producing country, and Cornwall was already occupied by a small colony of the rival relatives of Brutus, before he arrived there. It thus appears that Brutus doubtless deliberately set sail with his fleet from the River Acheron for the express purpose of annexing and occupying Albion.

The colony of four clans of fellow-Trojans found by Brutus “on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea,” outside the Pillars of Hercules, is of immense historical and ethnological importance in establishing the affinity of the Trojan descendants of Dardanus with the Phcenicians, and the kinship of Brutus with the Phoenicians. The settlement of these Trojans on this ‘‘ Tyrrhenian Sea "’ was, of course, Gades, which was traditionally visited by Hercules' and contained one of his most famous Phcenician temples.2 It was founded traditionally as a colony by the Phcenicians of 7yre,* which thus accounts for the name of its gulf as the ‘‘ Tyrrh-enian Sea '’a title also applied to the Gulf of Tuscany where there was similar Phcenician or Punic colony at ‘‘ Punicum”’ bordering Latium, in a province ruled by the Pheenician “ Tyrrh-eni”’

1 Herodotus, 4, 8. Sh Shy oh sh key *Vellenis Paterculus ed. Elzevir Leyden (1639), 1, 2; and Strabo, 3, 5, 5-