A Critical Review and Update of Robert Graves "The White Goddess" - An Investigation (Page 4)

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Summary so far: The date for the events of the Cad Goddeu ('The Battle of the Trees') suggested by Graves seems too early for any supposed event involving replacement of an older alphabet with a newer alphabet in Britain to have taken place. However, the events may have happened earlier. If we explore 1700 BC as their possible date of occurence, there were several alphabets or collections of sounds that might have been the 13-consonant alphabet that Graves calls the "Beth-Luis-Nion", which Graves suggests was already in use in Britain by some group living there, at the time when what he suggested were the "Celts" arrived.


KEY QUESTION FIVE: Was a Semitic language spoken in Britain around 1700 BCE?
A Semitic language in Britain in 1700 BCE? This is not a generally-accepted theory! But hold on: there may have been Semitic tin-miners in or traveling to and from Ireland/Britain. With maybe a Hurrian or Hittite proto-alphabet being used for trade? Let's keep probing these possibilities.

So: What languages were spoken in Britain around 1700 BCE?

Stephen Oppenheimer in "Origins of the British" quotes the Venerable Bede, "Ecclesiastical History" in 731 AD, writing in Latin: that there were four indigenous languages spoken in ancent Britain: Gaelic [now called Q-Celt], British (i.e. 'Brythonic') [now called P-Celt], English [a proto-English similar to Frisian and Icelandic] and Pictish.

Pictish! What is Pictish doing in that list? And who were the Picts?

Bede describes Picts as invaders who arrived windswept in Northern Ireland in longboats from Scythia, who, not being allowed to settle there, made their home in Scotland." (page 81) Conceivably they were Phoenician traders from Cadiz (Gadesh in Punic).

Stephen Oppenheimer argues that Pictish might have been Semitic. He quotes German linguist Theo Vennemann: "as a result of Neolithic intrusions of forebears of the Phoenicians." Vennemann's book is in German, so I can only give Oppenheimer's quote. [Europa Vasconica-Europa Semitica, 2003]

Oppenheimer continues: "Barry Cunliffe . . . makes a geographic reconstruction of the mid-first millennium BC tin trade between the producers on the Atlantic coast (the Atabri/Cantabri of north-coast Spain, the Cornish and the Bretons) and the middlemen in southern France and Spain and the rest of the northwest Mediterranean coast. His reconstruction identifies two separate rival networks. [Cunliffe: Facing the Ocean 2004]

"The Punic/Phoenician state consortium to which Himilco belonged ran the southern and older of these two networks. The locations of Punic pottery suggest that it stretched mainly from Cadiz, north along the coast just as far as NW Spain. Since this western Mediterranean consortium also controlled the Straits of Gibraltar, the rest of the Mediterranean traders - in particular the Greeks - were prevented from using this gateway to the tin-producers." (page 41)

Oppenheimer likes the possibility, because: " The interesting point about Vennemann's hypothetical Semitic language 'Atlantic' is that it provides a linguistic geographic partner to male line J2 which does characterize Semitic-speaking peoples in the eastern Mediterranean. 'Figure 5.8b' . . . distribution . . . favouring . . . Scotland, particularly Pitlochry, a Scottish town with a Pictish place-name. (page 249)

Oppenheimer also makes an argument for a Spanish colony of miners in north Wales, which fits distribution of some Y-chromosome trait.
"This is the small town of Abergele, already mentioned as the British location with the highest Neolithic genetic input, on the north coast of Wales, situated near Llandudno. Until the nineteenth century, the nearby rocky promontory of Great Ormes Head had working copper mines. Recent archaeological excavations at Ormes Head reveal evidence of copper-working going back more or less continuously to the Early Bronze Age, 3,700 years ago." [That's circa 1700 BC.] (page 138)

And Oppenheimer argues that Pictish might have been Semitic, quoting German linguist Theo Vennemann: "as a result of Neolithic intrusions of forebears of the Phoenicians." [Europa Vasconica-Europa Semitica, 2003]

There is agreement for this hypothesis in this more general theory:
"Barry Cunliffe . . . makes a geographic reconstruction of the mid-first millennium BC tin trade between the producers on the Atlantic coast (the Atabri/Cantabri of north-coast Spain, the Cornish and the Bretons) and the middlemen in southern France and Spain and the rest of the NW Mediterranean coast. His reconstruction identifies two separate rival networks." [quoting: Cunliffe: Facing the Ocean 2004]
   "The Punic/Phoenician state consortium to which Himilco belonged ran the southern and older of these two networks. The locations of Punic pottery suggest that it stretched mainly from Cadiz, north along the coast just as far as NW Spain.
   "Since this western Mediterranean consortium also controlled the Straits of Gibraltar, the rest of the Mediterranean traders - in particular the Greeks - were prevented from using this gateway to the tin-producers.
   "So instead, the Marseilles Greeks seem to have used their connections with the people of 'Keltike' (as Pytheas called southern France, according to Strabo) around Marseilles and Narbonne, who most likely used an alternative cross-country route just north of the Pyrenees to gain access to the Atlantic coast from the Mediterranean, thus bypassing Gibraltar . . . there are good waterways most of the way across, starting from Narbonne, moving up the river Aude and through the Carcassone gap to Toulouse, and then down the river Garonne to Bordeaux and the Gironde on the Atlantic coast. Cunliffe neatly . . . [uses] his own text to suggest that Pytheas, as a Greek pioneer, actually took this trade route across Keltike." [Oppenheimer; Origins of the British, page 41]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Vennemann
   "Punic, the Semitic language spoken in classical Carthage, is a superstratum of the Germanic languages. According to Vennemann, Carthaginians colonized the North Sea region between the 6th and 3rd centuries BC; this is evidenced by numerous Semitic loan words in the Germanic languages, as well as structural features such as strong verbs, and similarities between Norse religion and Semitic religion. This theory replaces his older theory of a superstratum of an unknown Semitic language called "Atlantic"." [This is an update and correction of what Oppenheimer had in his book on "Atlantic" quoted above- LINK XXX)]

Note that Vennemann is not just arguing that there is a superstratum of Semitic in Celtic, but in many/all European languages.

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CONCLUSION:
The complex of 13-consonants Graves re-discovered in his interpretation of Amergin's poems could have been some form of Sumerian or Hittite or "some other now-unknown substrate languages with some typological similarities to today's Semitic and possibly a distant relationship" in use by the Pict tin miners who were in Ireland and Britain from ca 4000 BC. They would have been goddess worshippers, some variation of matrifocal, and there may not have been all that many of them, just a colony of workers of the mines.

This is not to say that they had a group of signs in some alphabetical order. I am proposing only that the group of 13 SOUNDS were the basis of the language, and were known by some number of the learned members of the culture as some kind of grouping or order.

Their closest connections, and perhaps their origin, may have been the trading colonies of the Semites (Phoenicians?) in Portugal, there since ca 2700 as the Maritime Bell Beaker complex, which moved into Britain around 2400 (Cunliffe, quoted in "Origins of the British", page 268).

Maritime Bell Beaker culture, originating in Portugal, arrived in Britain circa 2400, and lasted there until 1900 BCE.
And that is the last big known cultural change in Britain and Ireland until historical times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_folk (intro at top: Beaker ended everywhere 1900)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Britain

And, in fact, there is evidence of an earlier language in the languages that came later:
"It appears that the peculiar Basque syntax (word order) is preserved in the modern Welch language. This much is certain. Someone, speaking some language (language X) was already in Great Britain when the first wave of Kelts arrived in about 1800 B.C. The questions are, who were they, and what was the language they spoke? Prof. Morris-Jones has answered the above questions by means of an intensive study of the Welch language. He explains the peculiarity of the Welch language by making the observation that it is composed mainly of a Keltic vocabulary, but having a non-Keltic syntax. . . . Morris-Jones concluded that the syntax most closely resembling that of Welch is the Berber and Tamachek languages of North Africa (both closely related to Basque)." http://www.atlantisquest.com/Linguistics.html

There are other notable characteristics of Welsh as well.
"The most interesting correspondence is the formation of passive and deponent in r. . . These r-forms appear in Welsh and Breton too, and they appear at the opposite extreme of the Indo-European area, in Tokharian, and also in Hittite. . . . It would accord well with the archaic character of Irish tradition, and the survival in Ireland of Indo-European features of language and culture that recur only in India and Persia, and, for language, in Hittite or in the Tokharian dialects of Central Asia." [The Celtic Realms: The History and the Culture of the Celtic Peoples from Pre-History to the Norman Invasion - by Myles Dillon & Nora Chadwick 1967]

CONTINUE ON TO MORE DISCUSSION OF ROBERT GRAVES' THE WHITE GODDESS