TRACING OUR ANCESTORS #1
Written in 1934
by Frederick Haberman
M I S S I N G L I N K S
Chapter I.
When Charles Kingsley chose the title of "Westward Ho" for
his story of adventure in the age of Elizabeth, he expressed in
that title that age-long urge of the race, "der Drang nach
Westen," as the Germans call it, to push forward towards the
setting sun. It was on the eastern shore that our nation was
born, and gradually it spread towards the west, towards the
Alleghanies and the plains of Ohio; then onwards to the
Mississippi and the western prairies, and finally across the
Rockies and the Sierras and down the Pacific slope to the Golden
Gate. Several American authors during the Depression have
reviewed those various stages and the spread of our civilization
towards the Golden West and have reminded the perplexed people of
America that we have reached the last frontier, as far as our
material progress is concerned. But others again can see farther
than their brothers, that America has reached a New and Spiritual
Frontier; and so America has: beyond the Golden Gate the sun dips
into the Pacific to rise again Phoenix-like every morning in the
East, bringing in a New Day.
Although the sun is sinking today upon the material
expansion of America, and for over three years the dark night of
the Depression has overshadowed us, we may be sure that there is
a morning coming, and with it a sunrise, when a new Phoenix will
arise "with healing in his wings."
The story of the colonization and founding of America is so
well known that it is useless even to review it here. From the
East, from Europe, our ancestors came; from the British Isles,
from Holland, Germany, Switzerland, France, and the Scandinavian
countries came the people that gave America her character. With
the history of those countries we are not concerned; we can read
their story in every library. We are merely interested here in
the question of the race from which they sprang, the so-called
Anglo-Saxon race, and their origin. No matter how long they lived
there, whether for one or for two thousand or more years, what we
want to investigate here is: Where did they come from? Did they
originate in Europe or did they not? If they were anything like
their sons, the pioneers of America, they were not content to
stay forever in one place, but kept moving, pressing ever from
the East toward the West. Such indeed are the facts, as every
evidence we have will show. As our fathers moved westward, let us
therefore retrace their coming in an easterly direction and start
with the Atlantic seaboard of Western Europe.
It is a curious phenomenon that our scientists who are so
interested in the origin and evolution of man should be searching
all over the globe for missing links, even deep beneath the
surface of the ground, going back for tens and hundreds of
thousands of years, while they know so little about the people of
Europe of three and four thousand years ago and overlook the many
"missing links" lying and standing upon the ground of Western
Europe. It is equally strange that our archaeologists should
spend millions of dollars and years of labor digging up the ruins
of Egypt and Mesopotamia, of Central America, and the Indian
relics of North America, while no efforts are being made to solve
the mysteries of Stonehenge and Avebury and other British stone
circles. Our great Ralph Waldo Emerson even expressed his
surprise at this in his essay on Stonehenge:
"The chief mystery is, that any mystery should have been allowed
to settle on so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all
the muses have kept their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We
are not yet too late to learn much more than is known of this
structure. Some diligent Fellowes or Layard will arrive, stone by
stone, at the whole history, by that exhaustive British sense and
perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of objects, which leaves
its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits, whilst it opens
pyramids, and uncovers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of the
simplicity of its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new
and recent; and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age
for the accurate history it will eliminate."
From the south of Portugal northward along the Bay of
Biscay, in Brittany, along the western side of the British Isles,
as far north as the Orkneys, and into Denmark, Sweden, and Norway
we find gigantic stones and stone structures erected by the hand
of early man. Several types of those structures have been
defined: menhirs or "long stones" standing on end; dolmens (table
stones), house-like structures with stone slabs or boulders for
walls and roof; most of the latter, serving originally as tombs,
were covered with mounds of dirt and are called tumuli.
A good description of these structures the reader will find
in the July number of "The National Geographic Magazine" of 1923,
which also produces many beautiful illustrations of them.
"Alignments are groups of menhirs arranged in line or in several
parallel lines. Cromlechs are groups of menhirs standing in a
circle or an arc of a circle, more rarely a square, usually
terminating an alignment or surrounding a tumulus. The dimensions
are sometimes incredible. The Great Menhir near Locmariaquer, now
thrown down and broken (probably by an earthquake), was nearly
seventy feet high and weighed some 375 tons. Some of the dolmens
have a height of 18 to 20 feet, with roof slabs 20 by 35 feet in
area and several feet thick. Baring-Gould indeed mentions one
near Nevez (Finistere) whose capstone measured 45 feet in length
and 27 in breadth and 6 feet thick. The alignments of Carnac, in
10 to 13 parallel rows, stretch across the country for nearly
five miles. The tumulus of Mont St.Michel looks like a natural
knoll, dwarfing the modern chapel which crowns it. It is hard to
realize that it was heaped by human hands. All menhirs,
cromlechs, and alignments were from their beginning open to the
sky. Dolmens and similar constructions were all originally
covered by tumuli, since removed, in many cases, in the course of
farming or building operations."
The above is quoted from the magazine articles referred to,
but its author makes no attempt to investigate who may have
erected those gigantic structures; he is content to leave them as
mysterious.
In Britain we find several ancient circles of large stones,
standing on end. The best nown of them are Stonehenge, Avebury,
and Keswtck; all of them are known as Druidic circles. Avebury
cicle on the Wiltshire Downs is by far the largest and the most
ancient of the stone circles in Britain. It is of gigantic
dimensions and consists of three separate circles, two separate
smaller circles within a larger one, the small ones having
diameters of 325 feet and 350 feet respectively, while the larger
one has a diameter of 1260 feet. The circles were composed of
large unhewn sarsens (a Phoenician word for rock), weighing from
seventy to eighty tons each. Only a few of them are left; the
rest were broken up in the eighteenth century by firing, and the
broken pieces were used by the neighboring farmers for building
purposes, as witnessed and reported by Stukely, the English
antiquary of the eighteenth century. The only thing left intact
about this once magnificent structure is an earth wall forty-four
feet in height and one mile in circumference. No other circle in
the world can compare with it in size and construction except the
one near Darab in Persia, observed by Sir William Ousely,
one-time British minister to Persia.
Here is the first missing link that connects the early
inhabitants of the British Isles with the people of early Asia.
A second connecting we find in the highlands of Tibet in Central
Asia, where at Doring, which means "The Lone Stone," Prof.G.N.
Roerich found an "alignment" similar to that of Carnac in
Brittany. On Page 415 of his "Trails to Inmost Asia" he tells us:
"The megalithic monuments of Doring, situated some thirty miles
south of the great salt lake of Pang-gong tscho-cha, date back to
the pre-Buddhistic period of Tibetan history. They consist of
important alignments of eighteen rows of erect stone slabs. Each
of these alignments was drawn from east to west, having at its
western extremity a cromlech or stone circle consisting of
several menhirs arranged more or less in a circle. The menhirs
are vertically planted with a crude stone table or altar in front
of them. It was evidently a sanctuary of some primitive cult. But
what its age and use? If one compares the famous megalithic
monuments of Carnac in Brittany, to the discovered megaliths of
Tibet, he is at once struck by the remarkable similarity of the
two sets of monuments. The Carnac alignments are situated from
east to west and have at their western extremity a cromlech or
circle of stones. The Doring monuments have precisely the same
arrangement."
From Avebury in England to Darab in Persia and from Carnac
in Brittany to Doring in Tibet are thousands of miles; yet the
similarity of the monuments show that they were erected by one
and the same people and for a special purpose.
The first ray of light on the identity of the people who
erected Avebury Circle is gained from the name of Avebury, which
E.O.Gordon states, in his "Prehistoric London," is derived from
"Abiri." Now, the name of "Abiri" was the name given by the
people of Canaan to the Israelites when they entered that land
after the Exodus, and that word is the ancient form of "Hebrews"
as we shall see in Chapter VII.
Twenty miles south Avebury Circle is located Stonehenge,
the best known of British circles. It is compose of a circle of
stones and an outer circular earth wall ditch 360 feet in
diameter. The circle of stones is composed of stones thirteen
feet in height, set four feet apart, and was once surmounted by a
continuous row of lintel stones. Only seventeen of these posts
and lintels are still in position. Inside of this circle is an
open circle of five trilithons or groups of two immense pillar
stones 25 feet in height, surmounted by equally immense lintel
stones. This group of trilithons or gates, as they appear, is
open towards the northeast.
All the evidence connected with Stonehenge, as well as with
other British circles shows that those circles were erected as
centers of worship and or astronomical observations. A sight
taken through the post stones of the southwestern trilithon
towards the northeast across the two stones gave the exact
position of the sunrise at the Summer Solstice. The farthest
stone on the picture is named "the Friar's heel," a local
expression, the word heel being derived from "hele," the index
stone or helius, the Greek word for Sun, and over this stone the
sun arose on the morning of the Summer Solstice, on the 22nd of
June. Describing the scene of the sunrise, E.O.Gordon in his
"Prehistoric London" writes:
"It is not until the whole orb, slightly flattened by the
refraction of the air, has come into view, that the requirements
are fulfilled and then the coincidence is exact and the sun
appears, as if balanced on the apex of the stone. It is perhaps
possible to imagine the effect, but to an actual spectator the
picture is most impressive, and the dark mass of the bowing stone
as seen through the frame formed by the uprights in the center
lintel of the circle, adds brilliancy and completeness to the
effect of a sight never to be forgotten."
However, in the many centuries that have passed since the
erection of Stonehenge, Circle the position of the sunrise at the
Summer Solstice has changed, and as the rate of change is known
to astronomers, it is possible to estimate the date for the
erection of the circle. Today, the sun rises on the 22nd of June
no longer over the hele, but on the south side of it, Sir Norman
Lockyer, the famous astronomer and discoverer of helium,
determined from that change the period of about 1700 B.C. as the
time that Stonehenge Circle was erected. Let us consider what
evidence the Stonehenge Circle and its date of erection provide.
Here is a structure, some of whose stones, weighing over two
hundred tons, were brought 150 miles from the quarries and
erected according to a definite plan and for the purpose of
fixing the date and position of the Summer Solstice and the other
cardinal points of the compass. Our school books tell us that the
early Britons of B.C. times were only skin-clad savages; yet is
it possible that wild savages were able to haul large blocks of
stone for over one hundred miles over solid ground and then erect
them according to a specified plan and to a definite astronomical
alignment?
Common sense answers no!
Moreover, we can readily see that there must have been a
large population in the land in those early days, for it required
thousands of men to move and erect such large stones. But who
were those early British astronomers and architects and from
whence did they come and where did they obtain their science?
Again the evidence is provided. Now, about the year 1700 B.
C. the 18th Dynasty ruled in Egypt at which time Israel dwelt in
that land. D.Davidson in his monumental work, "The Great
Pyramid," writes on Page 5: "18th Dynasty Egyptian glazed beads
(not made elsewhere or by any other Egyptian dynasty than the
18th and 19th) were found at Stonehenge, together with beads of
Baltic amber. Similar beads of Baltic amber were also found in
Egypt in 18th and 19th dynasty remains."
Evidences like these are important missin links; yet the
greatest is furnished by Sir Flinderts Petrie, who found that a
circle inside of great stone circle of Stonehenge has a diameter
of 1163 British inches. This value, approximately 1162.6 Pyramid
inches, is known by every astronomer and Pyramid student to be
the diameter of the Solar Circle of 3652.42 inches circumference,
or the value of the Solar year, multiplied by ten. Two deductions
we must draw from this: first, the builders of Stonehenge knew
the accurate value of the Solar year, and, second, they made use
of the Pyramid or Polar Diameter or sacred Hebrew inch. (The
present British inch is only eleven ten-thousandths smaller than
the original inch.)
Next, the dimensions of Stonehenge Circle, diameter 1162.6
inches and circumference 3,652.42 inches, are the dimensions of
the ancient Egyptian aroura, a unit of land measure and also
represented in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, as Mr.
Davidson has shown. The conclusions we must draw, therefore from
the evidence so far are that the early Britons who built those
gigantic structures in such a scientific way and to the standard
of the Polar Diameter or Hebrew inch were either Hebrews
themselves or progenitors of the Hebrews as were also the build-
ers of the Great Pyramid, which was erected by the
Aryan-Phoenicians precisely one thousand years before Stonehenge
Circle.
"Lockyer has shown us," writes Davidson, "that the Pyramid
builders of the 4th and 5th Egyptian Dynasties must, from their
astronomical cult, have come from the region of the Euphrates. He
also shows that nearly all the ancient year cults of the Nile
Delta are connected with the Euphratean equinoxial year. Petrie,
too, finds a Euphratean year origin for the 5th Dynasty of
Egypt."
Mr.Davidson also quotes D.A.Mackenzie from the latter's
work, "Ancient Man in Britain" "At an early period in the Early
Agricutural Age and before Bronzeworkings were introduced,
England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, were influenced more
directly than had hitherto been the case by the high
civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and especially by their
colonies in Southwestern Asia. Mackenzie, referring to the
eminent Belgian archeologist, M.Siret, also writes: 'Siret has
found evidence to show that the Tree Cult of the Easterners was
connected with the early megalithic monuments. The testimony of
traditions associates the stone circles, etc., with the Druids.'
'We are obliged,' he writes, 'to go back to the theory of the
archaeologists of a hundred years ago, who attributed the early
megalithic monuments to the Druids. The instinct of our
predecessors has been more penetrating than the scientific
analysis which has taken its place.'"
E.O.Gordon, author of "Prehistoric London," states on Page
22. "The footprints of these first settlers have been traced by
the remains of their religious monuments (circles and mounds),
from the district north of the Persian Gulf, along the trade
route of the Phoenicians, to the shores of the Mediterranean.
These material remains, when taken in connection with a
remarkable affinity in language, the discoveries of modern
travellers and the testimony of national traditions, afford
convincing proof that the original colonies came from Accad, or
Accadia, the Southern Province of Babylonia. They brought with
them their primitive religion,-- 'The first wave of the Aryan
family to overspread Europe before Greeks and Romans were heard
of.' The earliest recorded history of the British race takes us
to Central Asia, the fertile district watered by the Tigris and
Euphrates, lying between Mount Ararat on the north and the
Persian Gulf on the south. To this country of the ancient
Chaldees, the cradle of the human race, the earliest settlers in
Britain trace their origin."
All the evidences show that the early British astronomer-
priests the Druids came from the Near East, and Professor L.
A.Waddell, in his interesting work, "Phoenician Origin of
Britons, Scots. and Anglo-Saxons" provides the evidence from
hundreds of Phoenician coins and inscriptions found in both
Britain and the East that the earl Britons were the sea-going
Aryan-Phoenicians, who appeared in Western Europe as the Celts or
Kelts, which name can be traced to ancient Chaldea, from whence
indeed they came.
.......................
To be continued
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