Stuff thats not in our school books!

At primary school in Ireland we are taught that the Celts arrived from Central Europe to these shores around the 4th century B.C. 800 years later or so, Patrick a Roman boy was captured from Britain, brought here as a slave and converted them to Christianity.  We are led to believe he did this with ease, using the Celtic cross and the shamrock, banishing the snakes, and thus the origins of the Irish culture was born. 

Vatican approved! Plain and simple!

So here is a list of 21 reasons why the Irish are neither Roman Catholic or Celtic in origin. A clear path can be traced over the centuries from the fertile crescent through the Mediterranean, North Africa, up the Atlantic coast to Ireland, leaving Archaeological, linguistic, cultural and genetic evidence, showing that people and their ideas flowed back and fourth before Religious and Nationalistic mindsets were created and before borders ever existed. 


1.Irish D.N.A.

 
Eighty five per cent of Irish men are descended from farming people from the Middle East and especially Turkey, according to the research that was conducted by scientists at the University of Leicester in 2013. 

         Barry Cunliffe Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford.


2. The Irish Language.

Julius Pokorny (12 June 1887 – 8 April 1970) the Austrian-Czech linguist, listed 64 Hamito-Semitic features in the Irish language.

Remarks on the Insular Celtic / Hamito-Semitic question 

In old Irish a system of conjugated prepositions that is unusual in Indo-European languages, for example - dím "from me", dít "from you", de "from him", di "from her", diib "from them" (basic preposition di "from")  are found in many Semitic languages such as Arabic. 

3. Edward Lhuyd.

(1660 – 30 June 1709) A Welsh naturalist, botanist, linguist, geographer and antiquary.  Lhuyd wrote 'Archaeologia Britannica (printed 1707): An Account of the Languages, Histories and Customs of Great Britain, from Travels through Wales, Cornwall, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland. It was Lhuyd who first introduced the theory that the languages of these islands were 'Celtic'. 
Within a short period of time after the publication the term 'Celtic' was being given not just to these languages but to all things non English. Today everything from Newgrange (built 2500 years before the 'Celts' supposedly arrived) to Enya is labelled under the term 'Celtic'.

All the while keeping in mind his other theory:
 
"Lhwyd hoped that the considerable depth at which fossils are found could be explained by the hypothesis he put forward. He suggested a sequence in which mists and vapors over the sea were impregnated with the “seed” of marine animals."



4. Declán of Ardmore.

Declan is one of four Munster saints who had 'Lives' written for them claiming that they founded monasteries and preached the Gospel in Munster before their younger contemporary St Patrick ever set foot in Ireland.
These bishop saints, known since the 17th century as 'quattuor sanctissimi episcopi', also included Ailbe of Emly, Ciarán of Saigir and Abbán of Moyarney.

Their testimony, late though it seems, has often been treated in  relation to the historical question of pre-Patrician Christianity in the south of Ireland. It has been argued that before the coming of Patrick, the south coast of Munster would have provided the most likely point of entry for the introduction of Christianity via Britain or via Gaul.

The settlements of the Déisi and the Uí Liatháin in southwest Wales, as evidenced by the distribution of ogam-stones, provided an important connection between Britain and Ireland. A key aspect of this overseas link, the import of slaves, usually British Christians, by Irish raiders would have directly exposed Munster to the influence of Christianity. Further, Munster, lying opposite to Gaul, would have represented a first destination for Irish trading connections with the Continent. In the context of wine-trade, this is in some way corroborated by the archaeological record for pottery in Munster settlements.

Tobar Naomh Deglain Ard Mhór.

The credit traditionally given to St Patrick for bringing Christianity to the island appears to owe much to the propaganda of one particular foundation. As early as the 7th century, Armagh was busy bolstering its claim to the status of the principal house founded by St Patrick. By promoting the cult of the saint, which entailed that Patrick was propagated as the apostle and first bishop of the Irish, it sought to establish and control a network of religious houses throughout the country. The fact that a missionary sent by Rome, Palladius, had been active before St Patrick, in 431, possibly in Leinster, did not sit well with its agenda.

 

5. Saltair an Fheadáin Mhóir. 

The Faddan More Psalter (Irish: Saltair an Fheadáin Mhóir) (also Irish Bog Psalter or "Faddan Mor Psalter") is an early medieval Christian psalter or text of the book of Psalms, discovered in a peat bog in July 2006, in the townland of Faddan More (Irish: Feadán Mór) in north County Tipperary, Ireland. The manuscript was probably written in about 800 in one of a number of monasteries in the area.

After several years of conservation work, the psalter went on display at the National Museum of Ireland in Kildare St, Dublin in June 2011.
This discovery was hailed by the National Museum of Ireland as one of the most significant Irish archaeological finds in decades. Bernard Meehan of the Trinity College Library, who was called in to advise on the discovery, said that he believed the psalter was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval manuscript in two centuries. During the conservation process, in the period 2006–2010, the lining of the binding was found to have elements of papyrus, adding further evidence to the known links between early Irish Christianity and the Egyptian Coptic Church.



6. Sean nós singing.

Muslim call to prayer and a Traditional Irish Sean nós singer. (audio clip)




 

7. Ballycotton cross.

In 1875 a local antiquarian, Philip T. Gardner, donated the Ballycotton cross to the British Museum. It is a 9th-century jeweled  cross with a center glass jewel with an inscription of the Bismillah in Kufic script which may be interpreted as As God wills, In the name of Allah or We have repented to God.

 

It is held in the British Museum's brooch collection. It is an early indicator of possible links between Ireland and Britain, and early Islam, the cross has been cited in academic papers and histories of Islam's presence in Northern Europe in the late Dark Ages.

 
8. Eamhain Mhacha. 

Eamhain Mhacha (Navan Fort) is an ancient Irish royal site, dating back to the Neolithic period and occupied through the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age.  A number of comprehensive excavations were performed, revealing many artifacts of a domestic nature such as pottery, animal bones, shale armlets and glass beads. 

The most unexpected discovery, however, was the skull of a Barbary ape dated to 390 – 20 B.C. through carbon testing.
The Barbary ape is a species of Old World monkey, unique to North Africa and the island of Gibraltar.

 
9. Saltair Na Rann.

Saltair Na Rann, an anthology of biblical poems attributed to Oengus the Culdee, but containing the sixth or seventh century Book of Adam and Eve, composed in Egypt and known in no other European country except Ireland.

10. Barry Raftery. 

Paul Gillespie (Irish Times Jul 29, 2006).

Barry Raftery (1944–2010) professor of Celtic archaeology at University College Dublin, admits an enormous problem in justifying his subject: 

"there is no archaeological evidence for a Celtic invasion of Ireland". 


Over the period from about 450 BC to AD 450 when it is commonly agreed by scholars that there were Celtic societies and civilisations in western and central Europe, hardly any material evidence has been found here to substantiate the notion of Celtic Ireland.
There is no Celtic pottery - or pottery of any kind until well into the Christian period. Only 40-50 such swords or other military instruments are extant, six decorated brooches, eight scabbards - compared to the hundreds of thousands excavated in western France alone, for example.

There are no chariots in the 20-40 small burial sites unearthed, he told a conference on "European Culture: A Vision for the Future". The patterns of burials, settlements and material culture show fundamental continuity with the earlier prehistoric periods which brought the original settlers here 9-11,000 years ago after the last Ice Age. The fascinating new science of historical genetics finds no evidence of a specifically Celtic migration.

And yet by AD 500 certainly and probably much earlier, the Gaelic language was spoken all over the island. It is undoubtedly a Celtic language, and probably a distinctively archaic one. Raftery asked if there is no evidence of invasion, how did the language spread here? Through a small upper crust? Or the kidnap of women over many years? He recalled the remark of one scholar, that "early Celtic art has no genesis", to illustrate the intellectual difficulties involved. Can there be a culture without a people?

According to Barry Cunliffe's excellent survey, The Celts, A Very Short Introduction, despite the extreme paucity of evidence from the pre-Roman period "most philologists agree that early versions of Celtic were being spoken over much of western Europe by the sixth century BC from Iberia to Ireland to the Italian lakes".

But Cunliffe cautions against "two comfortable old myths". The first is that that there was a "coming of the Celts" - either to Britain or Ireland. The assumption that culture must arise from invasions comes from mindsets laid down during the 18th and 19th centuries, when imperial and colonial experience, together with the dominance of classical studies within the educational system, saw invasion and colonisation as the sole begetters of change. "Invasionism" has since given way to a diffusionism based on economic, migratory and cultural communication as the best way to explain these commonalities. 

The second myth is that there was a pan-Celtic Europe counterposed to the dominant Mediterranean Greek and Roman cultures at the time. That there might have been such a commonly recognised civilisation arises from the way in which the classicals' use of the word Celts to describe peripheral barbarians was taken up by philologists studying European languages, also in the 18th and 19th centuries. They classified them into a single family tree of Indo-European languages.

The Celtic languages were finally included in this schema in the 1830s and 1840s, coinciding with the development of nationalist ideologies here and elsewhere in Europe. The habit of inferring racial characteristics from language use comes from then and was freely drawn on by Irish nationalism and its antagonists over the next hundred years. While Matthew Arnold counterposed Celtic creativity and imagination to its lack of capacity for self-government in an uncompromising unionism, nationalists from Devoy to Pearse made Celt and Gael synonymous, creating a binary counterposed to the Anglo-Saxon Gall or foreigner in their demands for independence.

As Vincent Comerford writes in his illuminating study of how Ireland was invented, "the same tendentious and frequently self-contradictory 'essentialising' process was being applied or had been applied to other nationalities, so that by the early 20th century, Europe was awash with rhetoric implying that each nationality had its own distinctive 'nature', a condition generally conveyed by the term 'race'."

We have remained peculiarly prone to such easy categorisations in Ireland during the era of the Celtic Tiger. In an earlier generation there was a tendency for circular argument between philology and archaeology, driven by nationalist assumptions.

Archaeology's task was to find the material evidence to confirm national philological theory. Perhaps this is why Prof Raftery's UCD chair was so called - and why the absence of archaeological evidence for the notion of a Celtic invasion can pose an existential problem.
Comerford points out that "nowhere is nation-invention more in evidence than in the matter of origins". It can be a political minefield. Furious accusations of post-colonial anglocentricity greeted the publication in 1999 of Simon James's The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention. It argued that they are a recent and bogus invention, since no one in Britain or Ireland called themselves Celtic before 1700 and the notion that they were so arose from the early 18th century scholar Edward Lhuyd's coining of the word from his comparative study of Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

James says it is folly to see such new perspectives as an English imperialist attempt to divide and rule a devolving Britain. Rather is it a "post-colonial emphasis on multiculturalism and the celebration of difference between cultures".
Thus all archaeology is contemporary archaeology. There is no Celtic section in the National Museum, where the period is classified as Iron Age, followed by Early Christian. An archaeologist there told me this reflects the problematically vague nature of the Celtic. The word is not used to describe the marvellous exhibition of bog bodies there, nor is it apt for the psalmary manuscript find announced this week. And yet there is a flourishing bookstall devoted to the Celts in the museum's foyer and the radio advertising for the exhibition freely uses the C word.

That there was no invasion reveals there was a rich indigenous culture open to external influence and internal innovation.



11. Faience beads.


Ó Ríordáin, S. P. 1955  ‘A burial with faience beads at Tara’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society . (Significant Unpublished Irish Archaeological Excavations 1930 - 1997).

Site location of Mound of the Hostages [OSI]

In 1955, archaeologist Dr. Sean O’Riordan of Trinity College, Dublin, made an interesting discovery during an excavation of the Mound of Hostages at Tara, site of ancient kingship of Ireland. Bronze Age skeletal remains were found of what has been argued to be a young prince, still wearing a rare necklace of faience beads, made from a paste of minerals and plant extracts that had been fired.

The skeleton was carbon dated to around 1350 BC. In 1956, J. F. Stone and L. C. Thomas reported that the faience beads were Egyptian: “In fact, when they were compared with Egyptian faience beads, they were found to be not only of identical manufacture but also of matching design.


12. Tartissian.

From Tartessos modern day Andalusia Spain, an important trading port of the Phoenicians, whose presence in Iberia dates from the 8th century BC.
 
The Tartessian inscriptions:

‘Fonte Velha 5’: lokooboo niiraboo too araiui kaaltee lokoon ane nar´kee kaakiis´iinkooloboo ii te’-e.ro-baare (be)e teasiioonii

'Invoking the Lugh-deities of the Neri people, for the nobleman the tomb is made; he remains unmoving within, invoking all the heroes, the grave of Tasiioonos has received him’. 

The god corresponding to the Irish Lugh, was sometimes invoked as a group, written Lucubo in Galicia and Lugouibus in Iberia.

Tartessian lokooboo. In Roman times the Neri were a group in Galicia.
Welsh ner ‘lord, hero’ too is do ‘to’. For araiui compare aire (Irish) ‘lord, nobleman’. 
Kalite occurs in the ancient  inscriptions of northern Italy, meaning apparently ‘built a funerary monument’. Likewise, Cisalpine Gaulish lokan means ‘grave’; its root is the same as luigh ‘lie down’, Old Irish laigid, with several further examples in the Tartessian inscriptions: lakaatii ‘lies down’, lakeentii and lakiintii ‘they lie down’, and ro.laHaa ‘I have lain down’. For kaaki compare gach (Irish) ‘every’, cách ‘everyone’; for is´iinkooloboo see Gaulish Exkingolatos ‘Heroic man’. The compound verb te’-e.ro-baare ‘[this grave] has received him/it’ is a recurrent formula; it corresponds to beir ‘carry’ and the compound tabhair ‘give’, Old Irish d-a.beir, earlier t-e.beir ‘gives it’. 

The preverb ro is one of the most striking features of Tartessian, functioning just like Old Irish ro as part of past perfect verbs, hence ‘has received’. With teasiioonii compare the pre-Roman British king’s name Tasciovanos, the first element of which corresponds to the common man’s name Tadhg. 


13. Patrick banishes the snakes from Ireland.


The absence of snakes in Ireland gave rise to the legend that they had all been banished by St. Patrick  chasing them into the sea after they attacked him during a 40-day fast he was undertaking on top of a hill.

However, all evidence suggests that post-glacial Ireland never had snakes. "At no time has there ever been any suggestion of snakes in Ireland, so there was nothing for St. Patrick to banish", says naturalist Nigel Monaghan, keeper of natural history at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, who has searched extensively through Irish fossil collections and records.

14. Book of Leinster.

The Book of Leinster (Irish Lebor Laignech), is a medieval Irish manuscript compiled ca. 1160 and now kept in Trinity College, Dublin. It was formerly known as the Lebor na Nuachongbála "Book of Nuachongbáil", a monastic site known today as Oughaval.
 

The manuscript has 187 leaves, each approximately 13" by 9" (33 cm by 23 cm). A note in the manuscript suggests as many as 45 leaves have been lost. The book, a wide-ranging compilation, is one of the most important sources of medieval Irish literature, genealogy and mythology, containing, among many others, texts such as Lebor Gabála Érenn (the Book of Invasions), the most complete version of Táin Bó Cuailnge (the Cattle Raid of Cooley), the Metrical Dindshenchas and an Irish translation/adaptation of the De excidio Troiae Historia, and before its separation from the main volume, the Martyrology of Tallaght.

The Cattle Raid of Cooley contains the line (in relation to one of the heroes helmets): 

'do chumtuch ingantach tiri Arabiae i críchi na Sorcha'

(the wonderful workmanship of Arabia the land of Syria) 

Source - U.C.C. Cathcharpat serda 



15. Deirdre.

Deirdre is the foremost tragic heroine in Irish legend and probably its best-known figure in modern times. She is known by the epithet "Deirdre of the Sorrows" (Irish: Deirdre an Bhróin). Her story is part of the Ulster Cycle, the best-known stories of pre-Christian Ireland.

In W.B Yeat's 1907 version of the story mentions Libyans 5 times in the play.

"To strike a blow for Naisi,

If Conchubar call the Libyans to his aid. 
But why is there no clash 

They have met by this ! "

16. Ora maritima.

Avienus wrote Ora Maritima ("Sea Coasts"), a poem claimed to contain borrowings from the 6th-century BC Massiliote Periplus.  

Another ancient chief text cited by Avienus is the Periplus of Himilco, the description of a Punic (Phoenician) expedition through the coasts of western Europe which took place at the same time of the circumnavigation of Africa by Hanno (c. 500 BC).

Ora Maritima includes reference to the islands of Ierne and Albion, Ireland and Britain, whose inhabitants reputedly traded with the Oestrymnides of Brittany.  The work was dedicated to Sextus Claudius Petronius Probus.
The whole text derives from a single manuscript source, used for the editio princeps published at Venice in 1488.


17. The Scythians.

The Declaration of Arbroath was written in Latin and promulgated on April 6th, 1320, at Arbroath Abbey. Its purpose was to convince Pope John XXII, resident in Avignon, France, that Scotland was an independent country. This rebutted the English claim to rule Scotland. Famed Scottish leader, Robert the Bruce, had defeated the English at Bannockburn in 1314, and recaptured Berwick-on-Tweed  from the English in 1319.
Particularly interesting is that the Declaration claims a connection between the Scots and the Scythians. The ancient tribe of the Scythians were deported by the Assyrian Empire (according to the Bible and historical sources).

Also the Kurgan Stelae or Babels, Iron Age stone figures identified with the Scythians and medieval Turkic peoples are found throughout the coastline of the Mediterranean sea and the western Atlantic. 

Boa Island (from Irish: Badhbha) north shore of Lower Lough Erne in County Fermanagh, Ireland.

 
Babels: (note the similarities of the figure in the right background to the one above) 
Buruna Tower, Tokmok, Chui Valley, Kyrgyzstan.





Fénius Farsaid (also Phoeniusa, Phenius, Féinius; Farsa, Farsaidh, many variant spellings) is a legendary king of Scythia who shows up in different versions of Irish mythology. He was the son of Boath, a son of Magog. According to some traditions, he invented the Ogham alphabet and the Gaelic language. 

According to the Lebor Gabála Érenn, Fénius and his son Nél journeyed to the Tower of Babel. Nél, who was trained in many languages, married Scota, daughter of Pharaoh Cingris of Egypt, producing their son Goidel Glas.






18. St. John Cassian.


It is not known exactly where John was born: some say he was from Dacia Pontica (or Dobrogea) in present-day Romania, others that he was from Provence in France. The son of wealthy parents, he got a good education: his writings show the influence of Cicero and Persius. As a youth he went with a friend Germanus to visit the holy places of Palestine. While at Bethlehem, both of them took on the obligations of monastic life.

After two years in Bethlehem they both journeyed for seven years through Egypt  in the Thebaid and Skete wilderness monasteries – interviewing and drawing on the spiritual experience of the monks and ascetics there. After returning to Bethlehem, they both lived the ascetic life for three years in solitude before going in 403 to Constantinople. Here Cassian was ordained deacon by Saint John Chrysostom.

When Chrysostom was deposed and exiled in 403, Cassian and Germanus were sent to Rome with letters to plead Chrysostom’s case before Pope Innocent I.  Cassian was ordained a priest, and then went on to Massilia (Marseilles) where about 415 he established the Abbey of St Victor, a complex of two communities, one of men and one of women. This was first monastic foundation in the West on the pattern of Eastern monasticism. Subsequently, Cassian’s monastic model and writings greatly influenced St Benedict and the growth of Western monasticism.

Between 417-419, at the request of Bishop Castor of Aptia Julia (in Gallia Narbonensis), Cassian wrote two major spiritual works, The Institutes of those living the common life (“De institutis coenobiorum”) and The Conferences (“Collationes”). The Institutes deal with the external organisation of monastic communities based on what he had learned in Palestine and Egypt.

Cassian died at Marseilles in 435. He influenced Western monasticism, especially through Benedict. His teaching on overcoming the eight evil tendencies were the inspiration behind the way the Irish monks practised asceticism, as shown in the Irish Penitentials.


19. Shamrock.

The first evidence of a link between St Patrick and the shamrock appears in 1675 on the St Patrick's Coppers or Halpennies. These appear to show a figure of St. Patrick preaching to a crowd while holding a shamrock, presumably to explain the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.  Patricia Monaghan states that "There is no evidence that the clover or wood sorrel (both of which are called shamrocks) were sacred to the Irish". 

The first written mention of the link does not appear until 1681, in the account of Thomas Dineley, an English traveller to Ireland.  There is nothing in Dineley's account of the legend of St. Patrick using the shamrock to teach the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and this story does not appear in writing anywhere until a 1726 work by the botanist Caleb Threlkeld.




20. Musical Instruments.

The Harp, The Bagpipes and the Bodhrán. (Traditional Gaelic Instruments)

The earliest harps and lyres were found in Sumer, 3500 B.C., and several harps were found in burial pits and royal tombs in Ur. The oldest depictions of harps without a forepillar can be seen in the wall paintings of ancient Egyptian tombs dating from as early as 3000 B.C. which show an instrument that closely resembles the hunter's bow, without the pillar that we find in modern harps.  The chang flourished in Persia in many forms from its introduction, about 3000 BC, until the 17th century.

The evidence for pre-Roman era bagpipes is still uncertain but several textual and visual clues have been suggested. The Oxford History of Music says that a sculpture of bagpipes has been found on a Hittite slab at Euyuk in the Middle East, dated to 100 BC. Several authors identify the Ancient Greek askaulos (ἀσκός askos – wine-skin, αὐλός aulos – flute) with the bagpipe. In the 2nd century AD, Suetonius described the Roman emperor Nero as a player of the tibia utricularis.  Dio Chrysostom wrote in the 1st century of a contemporary sovereign (possibly Nero) who could play a pipe (tibia, Roman reedpipes similar to Greek and Etruscan instruments) with his mouth as well as by tucking a bladder beneath his armpit.  


The bodhrán is one of the most basic of drums and as such it is similar to the frame drums distributed widely across northern Africa from the Middle East, and has cognates in instruments used for Arabic music and the musical traditions of the Mediterranean region. A larger form is found in the Iranian daff, which is played with the fingers in an upright position, without a stick.  
According to musician Ronan Nolan, former editor of Irish Music magazine, the bodhrán evolved in the mid-19th century from the tambourine, which can be heard on some Irish music recordings dating back to the 1920s and viewed in a pre-Famine painting. However, in remote parts of the south-west, the "poor man's tambourine" – made from farm implements and without the cymbals – was in popular use among mummers, or wren boys. A large oil painting on canvas by Daniel Maclise (1806–1870) depicts a large Halloween house party in which a bodhrán features clearly. That painting, produced c. 1842, shows a flautist accompanied by a tambourine player who, in an Arabic style in contrast to standard bodhrán technique, used his fingers rather than a tipper.



 21. Bob Quinn.

Manchán Magan (Irish Times  Sat, Apr 20, 2013).

The mountain villages of Las Alpujarras near Granada are a warren of tiny flat-roofed stone houses built by Moorish Berbers in the 16th century following their expulsion from Granada. The houses are typical of Berber architecture in north Africa. Though the Spanish have been squatting in them for centuries, they still haven’t mastered their clay-roof construction. In fact, the only man guaranteed to make an Alpujarran roof watertight is Donegal native, Conor Clifford – a mountain guide, with a profitable side-line as a roofer.

For me, this hints at further proof of Bob Quinn’s contention that the Irish and north Africans are connected at a deep level. Quinn wondered why the sails of a Connemara púcán can be seen on Arab dhows on the Nile, leading him to reflect on the relations between maritime people along the Atlantic shore from Ireland to north Africa. The journey by sea along the coast was far safer and quicker than traversing the central swamps and forests of Ireland for millennia.

In his Atlantean books and films, Quinn dared suggest that Ireland might owe as much to Islam as to Europe. The Arabic resonances in seannós cadences was an obvious starting point, but then in Morocco he found a stone carving of a figure surrounded by a wavy serpentine line, with a series of overlapping, concentric half-circles. It reminded him of the entrance stone to Newgrange. 

He noticed the same snake-line motif throughout Ireland and up along the coast of Brittany, Galicia, Portugal and the Berber regions of north Africa. He then stumbled upon a circular cluster of stones between Tangier and Rabat that was dominated by a tall phallus stone identical to one at Punchestown and similar to one documented at New Grange in 1699. 
Either Neolithic man in the Boyne and north Africa simultaneously developed the classic passage tomb in the form we know it today or they were in contact.

Turning to linguistics he quotes Roman Jakobson’s delicious insight that while the archaeologist’s data is like a motion picture without sound, the linguists have sound without film, and he finds that: the Oman Arabic word for hope is Mwinenh, while in Irish it’s muinín; Gyarra (cut) in Irish is gearradh; Kh’ala (port) in Irish is caladh; Sikina (knife) in Irish is scian; Shkupa (brush in Maltese Arabic) is scuab in Irish. Berber has strong affinities with Irish that are not shared by other Indo-European languages. 

Michael Viney reported here last year on new DNA evidence linking the people of Ireland and north Africa, further strengthening Quinn’s Atlantean theory. Maybe it’s time to ditch the meaningless term Celtic in favour of something like “People of the Atlantic seaways”, 

as Quinn suggests.

He believes that coastal people should regard themselves as a unified cultural archipelago with more in common than the centralised powers that control them.

Further Material:

Barry Cunliffe: Who Were the Celts? (Full lecture) 
Atlantean - Clip 
Bob Quinn's Webpage 
History of the Phoenicians (Video) 


Gabhánach de Nógla - 16th July 2016.