FIG. 8.-Ogamoid Inscription from Hittite Hieroglyphs on the Lion of Marash.
(After Wright.)
Disclosing special features of Aryan Phoenician Script, also Ogam as sacred Sun-cult Script of the Hittites, Early Britons and Scots.
THE date of these two inscriptions on the Newton Stone is fixed with relative certainty at about 400 B.C. by palaeographic evidence, from the archaic form of some of the letters in the Phoenician script.
The hitherto "unknown" alphabetic script, in the face of the monument, I have called Aryan Phoenician, as it is written in the Aryan direction, like the English and Gothic and European languages generally, from the left towards the right, and not in the reversed or Semitic direction. This distinguishes it sharply from the later Semitic retrograde form of writing the later form of Phoenician letters which has hitherto been universally and exclusively termed "Phoenician." For I had found, as already mentioned, that the Phoenicians were really Sumerians, Hittites and Aryans; and that the Sumerian script, always written in Aryan fashion towards the right, was the parent of all the alphabets of the civilized world.
The cursive shape of the letters in this Aryan Phoenician script suggests that the Phoenician dedicator of this inscription had written it himself on the stone with pen and ink in his ordinary business style of writing for the mason to engrave -as the practical necessity for the Phoenician merchant-princes "to keep their accounts in order" must early have resulted in a somewhat more cursive style of writing than the "lithic" or lapidary style engraved on their monuments and artistic objects, a difference corresponding to that between modern business writing and print.
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[The forms of the letters, whilst approximating in several respects the semi-Phoenician "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 i, e and o, and the semivowel r, to the stems of the consonants - the 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 BC. The value of o for the horizontal bottom stroke was thus found along with that of the other ligatured letters.]
On palaeographic grounds, therefore, the date of this Aryan Phoenician 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 form 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
the subsequent ages. Moreover, there was wholesale exterminating destruction of the pre-Christian monuments and documents by the early Christian Church, as we shall see later.
The Language of this Aryan Phoenician inscription is essentially Aryan in its roots, structure and syntax, with Sumerian and Gothic affinities.1
The Ogam version is clearly contemporary with, and by the same author as, the central Phoenician inscription, as it is now disclosed to be a contracted version of the latter. This discovery thus puts back the date of Ogam script far beyond the period hitherto supposed by modern writers.
Ogam, or "Tree-twig" script, which is found on ancient monuments throughout the British Isles, though most frequently in Ireland, has hitherto been conjectured by Celto-Irish philologists to date no earlier than about the fourth or fifth century A.D., and to have been coined by Gaelic scribes in Ireland or Britain,2 and to be non-Aryan.3 This late date is assumed merely because some of the Ogam inscriptions occur on Early Christian tombstones, which sometimes contain bi-lingual versions in Roman letters in Latin or Celtic, which presumably date to about that period. But I observed that several of the letter-forms of this cumbrous Ogam script are more or less substantially identical with several of the primitive linear Sumerian letter-signs, which
possess more or less the same phonetic values as in the Ogam. Such Ogamoid groups of strokes also occur, I observed, in ancient Hittite hieroglyph inscriptions devoted to the Sun-cult and containing Sun-crosses, as in the group here figured (Fig. 8).2
Now, however, as this Ogam script is here found in the earliest of all its recorded occurrences at about 400 B.C., at Newton and in the adjoining and presumably more or less contemporary pillar at Logie (see later), inscribed upon Sun-cult votive monuments in association with the Sun-Cross, just as quasi-Ogam letters are also found in Hitt-ite hieroglyph votive monuments of the Sun-cult, and also accompanied by Sun-Crosses, it seems to me, in view of these facts, that this bulky stroke-script, which possesses only
sixteen consonants, and thus presumably not intended for
ordinary secular writing, was a sacred script composed by later Aryan Sun-priests for solar worship and coined upon a few old Sumerian signs of the twig pattern. And we shall see later that the Sumerians and Hitto-Phoenicians symbolized their Sun-cult by the Crossed sticks or twigs by which, with friction, they produced their sacred Fire-offerings to the Sun, just as the ancient and medieval Britons produced their Sacred or "Need" Fire offering.
Moreover, this solar cult origin for the Ogam script seems further confirmed by its title of "Ogam." It was so named, according to the Irish-Scot tradition, after its inventor "Ogma," who is significantly, called "The Sun-worshipper,"1 and is identified with Hercules of the Phoenicians.2 Such a pre-Christian and solar cult origin for the Ogam also now explains its use on the Newton Stone, as well as the Irish-Scot tradition that Ogam writing, which was freely current in Ireland in the pre-Christian period, especially for sacred monuments and tombstones, as attested by numerous surviving ancient monuments, was denounced by St. Patrick as "pagan" and soon became extinct.
We are now in a position to examine the rich crop of important historical, personal, ethnic and geographical names and titles preserved in this Brito-Phoenician inscription of about 400 B.C.