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

300 PHGENICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS

emblem—“ the accursed tree’’ of the Hebrews, and the infelix lignum or “unhappy wood ”’ of the Romans,

Not even in the time of Constantine (d. 337 a.p.), the great propagator of Christianity (and born in York, it is traditionally reported, of a British mother), was the True Cross known in that faith—Constantine’s sacred emblem for Christ and Christianity was merely a monogram of the first two Greek letters of Christ's name, XP, which had no transverse arms, nor any suggestion of a rectangular cross. Yet, on the other hand significantly, Constantine before his profession of Christianity in 312 A.D. issued coins (some of them supposedly minted at London) stamped with the Cross, as the pagan emblem of the Sun, and associated with a figure of the rayed Sun-god, and eight-rayed Sun, and the pagan title “ To the Comrade of the Invincible Sun’’ (Soli Invicto Comiti).2 On one of the coins bearing this legend the Sun-god is represented standing and crowning Constantine. And it was obviously as a Sun-worshipper that Constantine erected at Constantinople the famous colossal image of the Sun-god brought from Troy. The Cross which he stamped on his early coins was the pagan Hitto-Sumerian form of Sun-Cross e in Fig. 46, that is to say, the ‘‘ Greek’ Cross. That pagan title of ‘‘ Comrade of the Invincible Sun” was also used by the Roman emperor of the East, Licinius, presumably before Constantine ;* and he was in especially close relations with the Eastern Goths, who used this Cross from time immemorial, and from whom he presumably adopted it. Yet when Constantine became a Christian, on giving up Sun-worship, he also gave up using the Cross, and used instead as his exclusive symbol of Christianity a device which had not the form of the Cross at all, as the latter was the exclusive symbol of Sun-worship.

The True Cross does not seem to have been certainly found

1F.C.A., 20.

“FP. W. Madden, N.C., 1877, 246-8, etc., 202.

*Ib., 253:

*“Tlium in Phrygia,’ #b.249. This appears to be Troy or Ilium. Old Phrygia formerly extended up to the Hellespont.

® Figures of these coins by Madden Joc. cit., Plate IT, 1 and 2.