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
176 PHGENICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS
that the Celts were Aryan in race, and a branch of the round-headed Celts of Gaul and conjectured to have entered Britain from Gaul for the first time about ‘‘ the seventh or sixth century B.c.,’! although there is no tradition of such a migration, nor is the word “‘ Celt’’ even known in the “ British Celtic ” languages.
The real introducers of the Aryan language into the British Isles are now disclosed to be the Aryan Phcenician Britons under King Brutus.?_ As the conquering and civilizing race they imposed their own Aryan speech, as the official language, upon the aborigines of Britain. And they gave their own Aryan names, in the manner we have already seen, to most of the places, mountains and rivers, forming the hitherto so-called “ Celtic’ place- and river-names.
The Aryan language, thus introduced and spoken by these ruling Early Britons under King Brutus about 1103 B.c., was clearly neither ‘“‘Celtic’’ nor the supposititious ‘“ Gaulish Brythonic of the Welsh of the fourth century B.c.,”’ which are disclosed to be relatively modern provincial dialects of this original Briton Speech. What, then, was this Early Briton Speech, as it is given no place whatsoever in any of the schemes of classification of the languages of Britain by our modem philologists? It is called, in Geoffrey’s translation of the Early Chronicles, as we have seen, “‘ Tvojan or rough Greek which [thereafter] was called British.’ The actual words for these terms, as they occurred in the “ very ancient book [MS.] in the British tongue ” translated by Geoffrey into Latin are unfortunately lost. The term “ Greek’ (or Grecum) could not have been employed in any very ancient text, as it is merely a term introduced by the later Roman writers about the middle of the first century B.c. for the country, people and language* of the Attica peninsula, and whose people latterly called themselves ‘‘ Hellenes’’ and their country “ Hellas,’ and
1 Rhys, Rept. Brit. Ass., 1900, 893. In R.C.B., 1904 (p. 2) the supposed date is conjecturally extended to be ‘“‘ probably more than a millennium B.C.”
* The slight aryanizing influence of the Phoenician Morite merchants previous to Brutus is here disregarded.
*T.W.P. 93—4.