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
STONE CIRCLES & MORITE PHGNICIANS — 217
It was long ago observed that the distribution of these prehistoric megaliths or ‘‘ great stones,” over a great part of the world followed mainly the coast lines, thus presuming that their erectors were a seafaring people, though of unknown prehistoric identity and race. Moreover, as these monuments are most numerous in the East, it is generally agreed that this cult in Britain, Brittany, Scandinavia, Spain and the Mediterranean basin was derived from the East. Latterly, owing to the great antiquity of Egyptian civilization, and to a few of these monuments (of which some are funereal) being found on the borders of Egypt, it has been conjectured by some that this cult arose in, and was spread from, Egypt. But as there is no evidence or presumption that the Ancient Egyptians were ever great mariners, it is significant that the agents, whom Prof. Elliot Smith is forced to call in to distribute the monuments over the world, are the Phenicians. Prof. Smith supplies a great deal of striking evidence to prove that the chief agents in spreading these megalith monuments (as well as other ancient Eastern and characteristically Phoenician culture) “‘ along the coastlines of Africa, Europe and Asia and also in course of time in Oceania and America” were the Phcenicians ;? although as an ardent Egyptologist he still credits the origin of the cult of these rude stone prehistoric monuments to the Egyptians, notwithstanding the relative absence of such unhewn monuments in Egypt itself.
This Phoenician agency for the “ distribution ’’ of these megalith monuments is further attested by an altogether different class of evidence, even more specifically Phoenician than the seafaring character of their erectors. It has been observed by Mr. W. J. Perry that ‘the distribution of megalithic monuments in different parts of the world would
Britain, associated with Stone Circles and megaliths and mostly on the coast, @.g., Mori-dunum, port of Romans in Devon, and several More-dun, Moy-ton and Martin, C#r Marthen, West Moy-land, rich in circles and old mines, More-cambe Bay, Moray and its Frith and seat of Murray clan, &c.
1 Pitt-Rivers, J.E.S., 1869, 59, etc.; J.(R.)A.I., 1874-5, 389, etc. And Ferguson, F.R.M. map, p. 532; and T. E. Peet, Rough Stone Mons., 1912, 147, etc.
*S_E.C., 3, etc., based partly on Mrs. Z. Nuttal’s great work on J*undamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations, Harvard. 1901.