DNA Consultants Home of the DNA Fingerprint

Or at Least One of Its Kings

The royal mound cemetery at Taillten, modern Telltown in County Meath, houses the burials of numerous kings and nobles from early Ireland. These begin with Ollamh Fodhla, whose death occurred in 1277 B.C.E., and run to just before Conchobar Mac Ness, who died in A.D. 33 according to the Annals of Tighernach, written in Old Irish and Latin in the early Middle Ages. Pronounced "CON ah war," Conchobar is the first of the name Connor or O'Connor in Irish annals. His mother was Queen Ness, and his nephew Cuchulain, the famous hero of the Ulster cycle of stories.

"Our oldest and most trustworthy authorities state that Taillten ceased to be used as a cemetery on the death of Conchobhor," wrote Irish antiquarian (the term used before "archeologist") William F. Wakeman in The Handbook of Irish Antiquities in 1891, drawing on field reports dating back to 1848 (London:  Studio, 1995). What made Conchobar's burial unusual was that, unlike the previous kings of Ulster entombed at Taillten, he "wished that he should be carried to a place between Slea and the sea, with his face to the east, on account of the Faith which he had embraced" (p. 94).

It seems obvious that Conchobar converted from pagan druidism to a new religion, one that emphasized burial facing east. The new religion could not have been Christianity, although Irish myths claim, anachronistically, that Conchobar died upon being told by druids that Jesus had just been killed "by the Jews." Christianity was not widespread until the fourth century of the Common Era. Jews, like Christians, are buried facing east.

According to Celtic tradition, Conchobar was one of the two men who believed in God in Ireland before the coming of the Faith, Morann being the other man. Such a statement can only mean that Conchobar and his advisor Morann were monotheists or Jews.

In Conchobar's day, Judaism attracted millions of converts. Eventually between one-tenth and one-quarter of the inhabitants within the limit of the Roman Empire professed Judaism. Often it was a syncretistic form combined with other rites and beliefs.

The story of a king converting to Judaism with many of his subjects and descendants following him is a phenomenon documented from more than one historical time point associated with mass conversions. The Hellenized Hasmonean dynasty established under Judas Maccabeus ruled the Kingdom of Israel for over a hundred years, spreading Jewish religion to many others in the Middle East. Bulan was a Khazar king who led the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism. The Babylonian prince Machir, also known as Todros, Theodore, Theodorich, Dietrich, William and by other names, converted most of the inhabitants of the kingdom of Narbonne/Septimania in southern France.

It is likely the Irish high king Conchobar inspired many of his people to accept Judaism. The introduction and early spread of Christianity in Ireland could have been facilitated by the pre-existence of Jewish institutions in the country.



King Ollamh Fodhla's Throne at Taillten, covered with tifinagh (North African) inscriptions. Conwell, On the Cemetery of Taillten (1879).

You hear a lot of talk about the Neolithic Revolution--the gradual adoption and spread of agriculture, animal husbandry and town life by our prehistoric European ancestors--but the most important epoch in the course of civilization goes largely unnoticed in the history books. That was the abrupt shift from matriarchy and worship of the Great Goddess to the warrior-based governments and language stocks of the steppe-dwelling Indo-Aryan barbarians who invaded Old Europe beginning in the late fourth millennium BCE.

The roots of Europe's original female-oriented religion are lost in the mists of the early Stone Age, and may even precede the arrival of "modern humans" in Europe and be part of the heritage of Neanderthals. This substratum of a long-lasting peaceful hunter-gatherer society organized around the religion of the Great Goddess absorbed the spreading practice of agriculture from the Middle East beginning in the fifth millennium and reached its apogee of development in a pure form in the fourth millennium.

The cult of the Great Goddess, depicted here in an enthroned version with flanking felines from Çatal Hüyük, an 8,000-year-old shrine in present-day Turkey (p. 107), was the lifelong object of study by Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose most influential book is The Language of the Goddess (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2006). 

The axe fell on this ancient civilization--quite literally--around 3000 BCE. As confirmed in Jane McIntosh's Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe (New York:  Facts on File, 2006), there was a clear line of demarcation between old and new Europe, from the Balkans to Britain, Spain and Scandinavia. The archeological record tells the story of a sweeping and abrupt end to things. The first metal weapons appear in the graves of elite males along with hoards of gold and jewels. Axes previously used to clear forests for agriculture are now battle-axes. Burials are single rather than family and clan-oriented. Whole villages were massacred and depopulated. Fortifications grew as violence escalated. The horse, venerated as just one of the totem animals of the Goddess since the early Stone Age, becomes the symbol of the warrior, along with the chariot and boat. Rock art features ithyphallic warriors wielding weapons or shooting arrows at each other. The transition can also be seen in the establishment of the Pharaohs in Egypt about 3500 BCE.

The invaders brought their male pantheon of war gods, Indo-European languages, aristocratic forms of government and Central Asian/Caucasian genes. The goddess cult underwent radical male adaptations, surviving in out-of-the-way places like Crete and Brittany. 

So, rather than one transformation, European civilization first went through a Neolithic Revolution, then conversion to warrior-dominated patriarchal societies. It can be postulated that the matriarchal societies eagerly adopted agriculture but exhausted soils, destroyed vital forests and became weaker and smaller-bodied due to a changed diet, falling prey around 3000 BCE to the barbarian warriors of the steppe, who found the accumulation of wealth and unprotected agrarian settlements of Old Europe easy pickings. Climate change could have been a contributing factor.

James Joyce called history "the nightmare from which one cannot wake." If we take a long view of human events, this nightmare began about five thousand years ago. Other-worldly religions like Christianity introduced a further element of alienation and turning away from the sources of life. Before that, people were happily alive, awake, in tune with nature and celebrated life under the auspices of matriarchy.

Assailants with bows and arrows attack

a fortified Neolithic settlement in Furfooze,

France, who defend themselves by hurling

stones and raising clubs. Reconstruction

from Louis Figuier, Primitive Man (London: 

Chatto and Windus, 1876). 

They Probably Always Talked Like That

One of the startling revelations by Stephen Oppenheimer is that a form of English was probably spoken from the beginning of the colonization of the British Isles. Just as genetic bedrock was laid down by the earliest inhabitants, to persist relatively unchanged through subsequent invasions by other peoples like the Romans, the English tongue has been dominant as the language of the land, admitting little admixture with Anglo-Saxon and Celtic. (See Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British, pp. 303ff.)

Pretty heady stuff, but Mick Harper, author of The Secret History of the English Language (Hoboken:  Melville 2008), goes Oppenheimer one better by proposing that it was not proto-Anglo Saxon that the Ice Age inhabitants of Britain spoke but something very like Chaucer’s pilgrims, only lacking, clearly, later invasive elements due to the Celts, Belgae, Romans and Normans.

Harper compares a sample of Old English (which we are taught is the same as “Anglo-Saxon”) with Middle English and Modern English to show that Anglo-Saxon does not appear to be the same language as English—something all English graduate students suspect from the moment they are forced to read Beowulf for their comps. In the Anglo-Saxon epic (which survives in a single copy turning up in suspicious circumstances in Tudor England and is set in Sweden and never mentions England), “virtually every single word is incomprehensible except by translation,” while in “the early English poetry of Chaucer and Piers Plowman…virtually every single word is comprehensible except for spelling.”

In case you do not believe it, here are the samples:

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard,

Metudaes maeti end his modgidanc,

Uerc uuldurfadur, sue he uundra gihuaes,

Eci dryctin, or astelidae.

(Caedmon, ca. 8^th cent.)

A swerd and bokeler bar he by his side…

A whit cote and a blew hood wered he.

A bagpipe wel koude he blow and sowne,

And therwithal he brought us out of towne.

(Chaucer, The Prologue, 14^th cent.)

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.

(T. S. Eliot, 20^th cent.)

Harper’s comment is:  “If Anglo-Saxon/English is one language, it’s unique in the entire annals of languages on this our Earth, since it changes every goddamn word of itself” (p. 44). (Yes, he writes like that, too.)

The Anglo-Saxons were a small, obscure and illiterate tribe from, well, no one is quite sure, but perhaps northeast Germany, who arrived in waves after the Romans abandoned Britain in the fifth century, and who conquered most of the land and held it until the Danes and Norse (ca. 900) and Normans (1066) replaced them as rulers. In Harper’s view, they were just like the previous invaders, the Romans, Belgae and Celts, in having little effect on the language and customs of the populace. Just as there are only a handful of Celtic words in the English language, there was little impact on the linguistic bedrock of the kingdom the Anglo-Saxons carved out before they too had had their day. The fact that they left few monuments is unsurprising.

Which brings us to questions about the depth and breadth of Celtic heritage in Britain. If you are a Celtic fan (I’m not referring to the basketball team) you will not want to read The Secret History of the English Language. This book will disabuse you of many cherished notions. In Harper’s view, the Celts were just one of the alternating foreign conquerors of the long-suffering English-speaking peoples. Their numbers were few, even on the Continent, and they left little genetic or cultural footprint except on the “Celtic fringe” where they were squeezed in their final days.  

England has always been England. It’s always spoken English. And France has always spoken French. "But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead."We will have to save the French linguistic heresy for another post.

If you like the unusual and provocative ideas of M. J. Harper, who lives in London, check out the community of people who have bid farewell to the dunciad of academic research and unleashed their own personal pursuit of truth on a variety of intellectual topics at The Applied Epistemology Library. You can browse on the sly but must register (for free) to post your own comments and questions on threads.