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

34 PHCENICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS

|The forms of the letters, whilst approximating in several respects the semi-Phcenician ““Cadmean”’ or Early Greek, present several cursive archaisms not found in the later straight-lined lithic Semitic Phoenician; but this is not the place to enter into the technical details of these differences, which will be apparent to experts from the photographs and transcription. Here, however, must be mentioned an outstanding feature of this Aryan Phoenician script in its use of short vowels, and the frequent attachment of the vowels 7, ¢ and 0, and the semivowel 7, to the stems of the consonantsthe so-called ligature. This feature is found in the ancient Syrian and Palmyrene forms of Phoenician. In the interpretation of these ligatured vowels I derived much assistance from comparing them with those of. the affiliated Indian Pali script of the third and fourth centuries 8.c. The value of o for the horizontal bottom stroke was thus found along with that of the other ligatured letters. }

On paleographic grounds, therefore, the date of this Aryan Phcenician inscription can be placed no later than about 400 B.c. This estimate is thus in agreement with what we shall find later, that the author of the inscription, Prat-Gioln, was the sea-king “ Part-olon, king of the Scots ” of the Early British Chronicle, who, in voyaging off the Orkney Islands about 400 B.c., met his kinsman Gurgiunt, the then king of Britain, whose uncle Brennius was, as we shall see, the traditional Briton original of the historical Brennius I. who led the Gauls in the sack of Rome in 390 B.C. The archaisms in script of that date were doubtless owing to the author having come from the central part of the old Hitto-Sumerian cradle-land; as it is found that the cuneiform and alphabetic. script of Cappadocia and Cilicia preserve many of the older primitive shapes of the word-signs and letters, which persisted there long after they had become modernized into simpler forms elsewhere.

The fact that few examples of exactly similar cursive Aryan Phoenician writing have yet been recorded is to be adequately explained by the circumstance that, as Herodotus tells us, the usual medium for writing in Ancient Asia Minor was by pen and ink on parchments ; and such perishable documents have naturally disappeared in the course of