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
CASSI PHQENICIAN NAMES IN CORNWALL 201
Penzance and Cornwall with its Cassi-terides tin islands seem to have been especially associated with the “ Cassi” clan title of the Hitto-Phcenician Barats. We have seen that an ancient name for Penzance was “ Burrit-on,”’ presumably a form of “ Place of the Barats or Brits.’ And it was clearly the tin-mines of Cornwall and its outlying islands, the Cassi-terides?, which first attracted the Phoenician Barats to Britain in the Bronze Age of the Old World for a supply of tin, the sparsely distributed and most essential constituent for the manufacture of bronze, of which latter, 4s well as tin, the Phoenicians were the chief manufacturers and distributors; and their chief source of supply appear to have been the Cornish mines in Britain. Some of these mines were presumably worked by the Pheenicians about 2800 B.c. or earlier, as we have seen. From all accounts, it was the “‘ Cassi-terides ’ mines which were the first worked by them; and that name, as well as the old-world name for ‘+in ” of ‘‘ Cassi-teros’’ of Homer and the classic Greeks, or the Sanskrit Kastiva,2 appear to preserve the “ Cassi ” title of that leading clan of the sea-going Pheenicians, as the chief distributors of this invaluable metal of the Old World.
(This origin of that name seems confirmed by the fact that in Attic Greek the name for both tin and the Cassi-terides tinislands is spelt as ‘‘ Kaffi-teros” and Kaiffi-terides,”’ thus using the same equivalency which was used in Britain for the © Cassi ”’ and “ Catti”’ tribes and coins. And in the Indian Sanskrit tradition “ Kasftra”’ is tin, and the place-name “ Kastira,”’ or ‘ Place of Kastira or Tin,” was located in the “* Land of the Bahikas,’ a despised outcast tribe who also gave their name to ‘a sheet of water,’ and who now seem to be the Peahts or Picts of the Sea of ‘‘ Victis ’ or “ Icht ” in Cornwall. Moreover,
1 These islands, which lay to the west or south-west of Land’s End, are now submerged with the general sinking of the sonth coast of Britain.
2Tin was called by the Greeks ‘‘ Cassi-teros,” by the ancient IndoAryans “' Kas-fiva,”” by the Arabs “ Kaz-div,” and by the Assyrians and Sumerians, according to Prof. Sayse over forty years ago (S.1., 479) “ Kizasadir,” ‘‘ Kasduru or Kazduru ’’—though these latter terms are not found in the recent Assyrian and Sumerian lexicons. The term “ Stannum,’’ now applied to tin, was originally used, as by Pliny, for an alloy of silver and lead, not tin itself; and the latter (tin) was called by him ‘* White Lead ” (Plumbum album), in contradistinction to lead, which was called “ Black Lead” (Plumbum nigrum)—Pliny, Nat. Hist., 34, 16; 33, 9-