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

28 PHCENICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS

photographs and eye-copies by previous writers, and the careful lithographs by Stuart from squeeze-impressions and photographs.

In constructing the accompanying eye-copy of the uniquely important central inscription, here given (Fig. 6), I scrupulously compared all available photographs from different points of view, for no one photograph can cover and focus all the details of these letters owing to the great unevenness and sinuosities of the inscribed surface of this rough boulder-stone. It will be seen that my eye-copy of this script differs in some minute but important details from those of Stuart and Lord Southesk, the most accurate of the copies previously published.

In my decipherment of this central script I derived especial assistance from the Cilician, Cyprian and “ Iberian”’ scripts and the Indian Pali of the third and fourth centuries B.c. and Gothic runes, which were closely allied in several respects; and Canon Taylor's and Prof. Petrie’s classic works on the alphabet also proved helpful.

So obviously Aryan Phenician was the type of the letters io this central script, when I now took it up for detailed examination, that, in dealing with the two scripts, I took up the central one in this “ unknown ” script first, that is in the reverse order to that adopted in all previous attempts. I found that it was Aryan Pheenician script of the kind ordinarily written with a pen and ink on skin and parchment, such, as we are told by Herodotus, was the chief medium of writing used by the early inhabitants of Asia Minor; and the perishable nature of such documents accounts for the loss of so much of the original literature of the Early Aryans both in Asia Minor and in Britain.

On deciphering in a few minutes most of the letters in this Phoenician script with more or less certainty, I then proceeded to decipher the Ogam version in the light of the Pheenician. I thereupon found that the strings of personal ethnic and place-names were substantially identical in both mscriptions, thus disclosing them to be really bi-lingual versions of the same.

This fortunate fact, that the inscriptions on the Newton