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 BARAT PENETRATION OF BRITAIN 189

Ancient racial, place and river names are found to be amongst the most imperishable of human things. This persistence of ancient place-names has been fully recognized by the leading archzologists as a “ safe ’’ means of recovering ancient history. Thus Sir F. Petrie remarks with reference to the ancient place-names in Palestine and Phoenicia as found in the Amarna cuneiform letters of about 1400 B.C. :—

“‘ When we see the names Akka, Askaluna, Biruta, Gazri, Lakish, Qidesu, Tsiduna, Tsur, Urashalim [that is the modern “ Akka” or Acre, Ascalon, Beirut, Gezer, Lachish, Kadesh, Sidon, Sour, (the ‘“‘ Tyre” of Europeans) and ‘‘ Jerusalem ’’], all lasting with no change—or only a small variation in the vowelsdown to the present day . . . it needs no further proof that ancient names may be safely sought for in the modern map.”

By the survey of these persistent ancient names surviving in the modern maps, we thus discover the early locations and distribution of the Barat Phcenician in their colonizing penetration of Early Britain. These names originally designated, presumably, isolated settlements and ports of the Barats, which were simply called ‘‘ Barat town ” in contrast to the aboriginal village in the neighbourhood. (See next chapter for the place-affixes to the tribal name Barat or Brit.)

We shall now survey briefly, in the light of our discoveries, the occurrence in the maps of this dynastic clan-title of Barat or “ Brit-on”’ bestowed by these Brito-Phcenicians upon many of the early sites selected by them for colonization on the coast and in the interior of Britain, when they began to penetrate the land and form permanent settlements therein. As most of these ‘‘ Barat ’’ place-names presumably designated early settlements of the ruling clan, as attested by the very ancient remains at most of them, they afford, along with those of the “ Catti’”’ series of the tribal title, some clue to the routes and avenues by which this civilizing penetration was effected, and also a clue to some of the chief early centres from which the Aryan Civilization was diffused over the land. Most of these early “ Barat ’’ centres have now

1Sir W. F Petrie, Syria and Egypt 15.