Keltic Seafaring

By Author: Robert Bruce Baird
Total Articles: 190
Comment this article

Many academics are unable to handle the possibility of ships that travelled the oceans as long ago as the Franchithi Caves dig that showed 13,000 B.C. community fishing fleets. It even was hard for most to accept the Kelts at the time of Caesar had this technology at that time despite the words of Caesar. Some people think knowledge once gained is never lost but that is far from true. Barry Fell was a Harvard Professor of Oceanography before he got the bug to expose the truth. Some (Like Wiseman in Archaeology Magazine of ‘Camelot in Kentucky' article from 2001) ridicule Fell as "self-taught" in matters such as Ogham. Truth is, Fell took one of the only small courses available at the time from Edinburgh University. Who can really learn the truth from academics that hide it? His name was made dirt by academics but his legacy from America B.C and Bronze Age America has been sweet vindication.

Here is a little of the story of his travails, which is presented for more reason than just the obvious need to reinforce on the existence and loss of Keltic seacraft technology. The rise and fall of Celtic sea power has ...
... been strangely neglected {Although the movie 'Spartacus' shows Kirk Douglas arranging passage to Italy from the Kelts[Silesians and Galatians are Kelts back to the time of Punt] who ruled the Sea.} by most historians and archaeologists as to prompt much skepticism when first I began to report Celtic inscription in America. 'I can't say I've ever heard that the Celts were seafarers,' was a typical comment. Those who recall that Julius Caesar described the Britons as mostly naked savages, wearing only iron torques about their necks, {A torquetum or tanawa is an ancient sextant known to have existed in this period as Maui navigated for a well known Greek and was able to calculate longitude.} sometimes with the skin of a beast cast over the shoulders, think of the Britons as having nothing better than one-man coracles for crossing water. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, most of Book III of Caesar's 'De Bello Gallico' is devoted to the greatest naval battle he was ever called upon to mount. And his adversaries? None other than the Celts of Brittany, whose fleet was swelled by the arrival of a flotilla they had summoned from their allies in Britain! The combined Gallic and British naval armament comprised an immensely powerful force, numbering, so Caesar tells us, no less than 220 ships, all larger than and superior in construction to those of the opposing Roman navy under Admiral Brutus. These Celtic ships, Caesar says, were so soundly constructed that they could outride tempestuous or contrary winds upon the very ocean itself without sustaining injury ('De Bello Gallico', books III,XIII,I.). It is clear that these fine vessels, which towered over the Roman galleys, had the capability of crossing the Atlantic Ocean 'vasto atque aperto mari', "upon the vast open sea," as Caesar indicates."(2)

Does it cross your mind that these ships were in fact employed in such voyages to the Americas? Why had Caesar never seen their like before? The wind went down and the Roman galleys threw grappling hooks into the Celtic rigging and sails then boarded them. Caesar made a deal (as was his wont) with the cousins of his ancestors who were not in control of all. He gave them full citizenship of Rome, which they in fact had established after defeating the Tarquin kings of Etruria. Thus the nature of Catholicism and the Anglican church has a long and sordid past association, as they outlawed the Druids and put a bounty on their heads. Can you see why we think the Toltecs or others in America might have Druidic roots? There is no further mention of British or Gaulish naval vessels in Caesar's commentaries, nor does Tacitus in the century that followed give any space or consideration to native naval might. It seems that the battle against the Veneti was the end of Celtic sea power in classical times. Except for the periodic truculence by British chiefs like Queen Boadicaea.

NORMAN TOTTEN: - The Eye of God and the Agricultural Grid
By Norman Totten
Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts

Impetus for this kind of research was the need to understand the atna-kuna motif so prevalent in Celtic New England and Iberia, and frequently associated with the eye of Bel. James Whittall has been locating examples of it in Portugal and Spain. Fell, Dix, and Oedel have recently published observations about it.

This presentation is limited to what seems to be the two predominant symbolic forms of the sun and earth in ancient inscriptions - - the eye of the sun god and the cultivated field grid. Both have occurred in numerous varieties, visually and phonetically. This paper should be read as a progress report, incomplete in its consideration and somewhat tentative in its conclusions regarding a vast and complex problem.

I. Morphology and Dissemination: Eye of the Sun

Though he later equivocated about which direction the evolution had occurred, Sir Arthur Evans (1984, p. 303) set forth the basic forms of the eye of Ra - - from one complete with lashes (rays) to a circle (pupil) enclosing a smaller circle or dot (iris). (6)

This is important to understanding the worldwide cultures and the elite corporate traders. The circle with a dot is the Mark of Qayin or Cain (Gardner's Genesis of the Grail Kings and other sources) and as such it is the adept cartouche or signifying token for the family of Jesus and the ‘arch-tectons' (Septuagint) of the Great Pyramid.

In ‘Bel' we have the Keltic God as well as the Mesopotamian (later) God. To find them so closely associated or connected in the Iberias that now carry names like Spain, Ireland and North America adds a great additional clue to the Tartessian (source of the ‘Biblical Ships of Tarshis') sites being excavated or studied in Anatolia and Portugal. They all start with Iberia in the Caspian and the Black Sea region that is the genetic homeland of the Kelts some 30-35,000 years ago. Because we can genetically and forensically trace and track these people and marry them to dateable artifacts we have a credible history untainted by kingly or priestly power mongers.

Another ESOP excerpt from the work of Totten deals with Moroccan monastics exiled to America in the 5th Century AD. In Figuig the monks were solitary (monachos), but in communal life (Koinos Bios) of brothers (fratres), a friary. Their form of testifying (martyrium) under persecution was not death in an arena for the pleasure of pagan spectators but exile, exile to the wilderness of America. (7)


TERRACOTTA HEAD OF A ROMAN IN MEXICO: - "This year, Scandinavians celebrate the 1,000 years since Leif Ericsson sailed to the New World from Greenland. Bjarni Herjolfsson was supposedly the first to step ashore on the New World. Historians have long believed that Ericsson's colony at L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern-most tip of Newfoundland, represented the first evidence of Europeans on the continent {When Farley Mowat wrote about it in 'Westviking' he was ridiculed.}. However, a wide variety of archaeological evidence points to earlier contact.
A black terracotta head of a bearded man, about 2 in (5cm) tall, found in the Toluca Valley about 40 miles (64km) west of Mexico City in 1933 and dated by thermoluminescence to about 200 AD, could be the first reliable proof that Roman sailors reached America. It is different in style from any other known pre-Columbian artwork and has been identified as Roman by art experts. Although much was written about the head since its discovery, its whereabouts were unknown until 1994, when it was found locked away in a Mexico City museum by a US anthropologist appropriately named Dr Roman Hristov.



A review of the circumstances surrounding the head's discovery confirmed it was placed in its burial ground no later than 1510 - a decade before the Spanish arrived in Meso-America. Crucially, the head was excavated from the site by professionals, said David Kelley, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary, in Alberta {Professor Emeritus} Canada. 'This was sealed under three floors, it's as close to archaeological certainty as you can get.' {Emphasis and N.B.}



Archaeologist David Grove, of the University of Illinois, agreed that the head was Roman, but pointed out that there was no evidence of Roman influence on pre-Columbian cultures. He suggested that the head could have been washed ashore from a Roman shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico. Even so, there seems no denying that Roman sailors had reached American waters. 'Ancient Mesoamerica, v.10, p.207; Scotsman, Guardian, D. Mail, 10 Feb; New Scientist, 12 Feb 2000.'



Mark McManamin, professor of geography and geology at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, is convinced that the Carthaginians discovered America between 350 and 320 BC. In a recent issue of 'The Numismatic' magazine, and at a meeting of the American Friends of Tunisia Association in May 1999, he interpreted a series of puzzling gold coins of that period as depictions of the known world, including a land mass to the west of Spain. Experts on ancient trade routes believe that the Carthaginians almost certainly reached the coast of Brazil, where Punic amphorae (containing olive oil and wine) have been found; and Punic coins of the 4th century BC have been excavated at seven sites in the eastern United States, unfortunately not specified in our source ('Jeune Afrique', Paris,7, 1 Sept 1999).
According to the Xinhua Chinese press agency last August, similarities between nearly 300 markings found on pottery, jade and stone at unspecified ancient native sites in central America closely resemble 3,000-year-old Shang dynasty characters for the sun, sky, rain, water, crops, trees and stars inscribed on animal bones or tortoise shells, known as Jiaguwen. American and Chinese pictographs in 56 matching sets were shown to senior academics at a symposium in Anyang, former capital of the Shang dynasty.



These impressive similarities add fuel to theories that Chinese arrived in the Americas before the end of the Shang dynasty in 221 BC. Shang legends state that a king led his people on a journey to the east, with some scholars believing that it took them across the Bering Strait to North America. The Chinese classic, the 'Shan Hai King' of about 2250 BC, contains what seems to be an accurate description of the Grand Canyon. {We have articles describing a massive complex being found dug into the walls of the Grand Canyon at a significant height up from where the river now flows. Pictures of a Buddha-like statue that is a lotus god from Egypt are in the article. The US government put it off limits after the Smithsonian went and made a report verifying an earlier report from credible people early in the 20th century. You can't get to the area any easy way, even if you wanted to go behind the officials. The Grand Canyon was one of my accounts when I worked in the area.} Peanuts and maize have been found at ancient Chinese sites dating back to 3000 BC. The orthodox view is that neither of these plants left their native America before their export by European colonists in the 16th century AD.

In AD 499, a Chinese Buddhist monk, Hui Shen, returned to China claiming to have spent 40 years in the land of Fu Sang. He left a record of the country he visited, which has been recorded in official histories - a land thought by some modern scholars to be ancient Mexico.



Then there is the 3,000-year-old pottery found on the Valdivian coast of Ecuador, decorated and incised in exactly the same way as pottery from the Jomon area of Japan {We touched on the Canadian Museum of Civilization and a lie saying there was evidence of earlier local industry.}, and not preceded in Ecuador by plainer and simpler bowls and urns, 'National Post (Toronto), 27 Aug; D. Telegraph, 28 Aug 1999'.
The maverick historian Farley Mowat recently brought out 'The Farfarers: Before the Norse', in which he argues that the first Europeans to reach America were 'Albans' {A site in central America has a similar name.} who set off from the north of Scotland in the 8th century AD in search of walrus ivory (for centuries considered more valuable than gold), sailing from Iceland to Greenland and northern Labrador. The 78-year-old kilted Canadian author {Who my oldest brother's first wife's father spent two years with as a missionary in the Arctic.} maintains that the remains of long houses far above the tree-line in northern Quebec were built by these immigrants {Yet I've read articles saying Mowat has no first hand experience and other stupid remarks about an eminently honest person who has nothing but disdain for most academics.}. His 36 books on the life, history and ecology of North America have sold 15 million copies, and he shrugs off the scorn of conventional historians. 'Times, 9 Nov. 1999. For a general round up of pre-Columbian discovery-of-America claims, see FT61:26-28.' (3)

My first-hand viewing of many sculpted or cast heads at the Villas Archaeologique and the fresco of blond warriors at the Temple of Warriors there (Chichen Itza) is just one of a thousand other factual things you'll see in this encyclopedia. Botany brings the American sweet potato that convinced nay sayers in that discipline, which had been insistent they were right. Sociologists, geologists and map makers as well as historians and oceanographers and physicists are all included as every possible area of study has good evidence the liars had good reason to hide their true purposes from people they sought to abuse. 'Liars' is a very kind word, and it was quite gracious of the Amerindians to say the white man spoke with a tongue that is forked.


About the Author A fool thinks he is a wise man, a wise man knows he is a fool.
World-Mysteries.com guest expert
Columnist at The ES Press Magazine