Conference tallis::celt

From:	ROLL::USENET  "USENET Newsgroup Distributor  17-Feb-1986 2204" 17-FEB-1986 22:04
To:	@[.net.nlang.celts]NEWS.DIS
Subj:	USENET net.nlang.celts newsgroup articles

Newsgroups: net.nlang.celts
Path: decwrl!decvax!bellcore!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!aglew
Subject: Re: europe vs the middle east in 20
Posted: 15 Feb 86 02:56:00 GMT
Organization: 
Nf-ID: #R:scc.UUCP:631:ccvaxa:19900001:000:387
Nf-From: ccvaxa.UUCP!aglew    Feb 14 20:56:00 1986
 
 
Was Stonehenge built by the Celts?
If I remember a bit of I don't know quite what you call this field of study
- historical ethnogeography? anyway - the Celts were rather late arrivals to
British Isles. Certainly, the stone circles in Ireland and the Hebrides
are pre-Celtic.
 
(source: a Penguin book entitled "The Celts" that my Aunts sent me a long
time ago when I was in high school)

Newsgroups: net.nlang.celts
Path: decwrl!pyramid!ut-sally!seismo!mcvax!boring!jack
Subject: Re: europe vs the middle east in 2000 BC
Posted: 17 Feb 86 00:07:19 GMT
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
Apparently-To: rnews@mcvax
 
In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Eli Liang) writes:
>
>How was it that a rather primitive people such as the celts could design
>and implement such a powerful astronomical "computer" as Stonehenge, when
>far to the east, much more advanced people, the Egyptians (who were well into
>their Middle Kingdom period) never developed anything comparable?
Well, obviously the Celts knew more about magic than the Egyptians.
 
Also, it is a misunderstanding that they had trouble aligning Stonehenge,
since what they did was first drop the stones whereever they liked,
and then tilt and move the earth to get all those nice features.
 
This tilting, by the way, caused some serious inconvenience in
other parts of the world, nowadays usually referred to as "the Flood".
-- 
	Jack Jansen, [email protected]
	The shell is my oyster.

Newsgroups: net.nlang.celts
Path: decwrl!decvax!bellcore!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!aglew
Subject: Re: europe vs the middle east in 20
Posted: 15 Feb 86 02:56:00 GMT
Organization: 
Nf-ID: #R:scc.UUCP:631:ccvaxa:19900001:000:387
Nf-From: ccvaxa.UUCP!aglew    Feb 14 20:56:00 1986
 
 
Was Stonehenge built by the Celts?
If I remember a bit of I don't know quite what you call this field of study
- historical ethnogeography? anyway - the Celts were rather late arrivals to
British Isles. Certainly, the stone circles in Ireland and the Hebrides
are pre-Celtic.
 
(source: a Penguin book entitled "The Celts" that my Aunts sent me a long
time ago when I was in high school)

Newsgroups: net.nlang.celts
Path: decwrl!pyramid!ut-sally!seismo!mcvax!boring!jack
Subject: Re: europe vs the middle east in 2000 BC
Posted: 17 Feb 86 00:07:19 GMT
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
Apparently-To: rnews@mcvax
 
In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (Eli Liang) writes:
>
>How was it that a rather primitive people such as the celts could design
>and implement such a powerful astronomical "computer" as Stonehenge, when
>far to the east, much more advanced people, the Egyptians (who were well into
>their Middle Kingdom period) never developed anything comparable?
Well, obviously the Celts knew more about magic than the Egyptians.
 
Also, it is a misunderstanding that they had trouble aligning Stonehenge,
since what they did was first drop the stones whereever they liked,
and then tilt and move the earth to get all those nice features.
 
This tilting, by the way, caused some serious inconvenience in
other parts of the world, nowadays usually referred to as "the Flood".
-- 
	Jack Jansen, [email protected]
	The shell is my oyster.

    Re .0, .1, .2: As far as archaeological evidences can inform us,
    the first Celts in the British isles came circa 300 B.C. (or was
    it the brittonic (i.e., 2nd) wave, I should check). Anyway there
    was no Celts as such before circa 1500 B.C. (cf some note I put
    around the first in this file).
    			Denis.

    On a recent trip to Malta I attended a very good sound and slide
    presentation called "The Maltese Experience".(Recommended). According
    to this, among the many significant things the Maltese have done
    for the world was to build Stonehenge.(Seriously!)
    
    MFG

    The stones used were transported to Stonehenge from Ireland according
    to my (usually reliable) sources.

    re .5: As far as I remember the stones where studied carefully a
    few years ago and it was recognized that they came from some quarry
    in or near the south of Wales. The way they were brought to Stonehenge
    was reconstituted (is that the right word?): some archaeology students
    spent their vacations extracting some of these blocks with stone
    tools and then transporting them to Stonehenge on rafts on the local
    rivers with only one or two porterages(?) (the places where you have
    to take the stones from the raft to carry them over hill to the
    next river, in this case they were rolled on logs).
    	I don't remember the references but I read that in a paper a
    few years ago.
    			Denis.

    We bypassed Stonehenge last month on the way to Avebury.  Stonehenge
    was cordoned off to resist the onslaught of the hippie hordes who
    wanted to hold a solstice rock (!) concert.
    
    Avebury is definetely worth the trip.  The stone ring is much bigger
    and the village is actualy built up inside of it.
    
    While there you can visit and go inside the West Kennet Long Barrow
    burial chamber.
    

    Wasn't Stonehenge built by Druids? Did Celts originally inhabit
    the whole of the UK until the Romans drove 'em to the extremities?
    So even if they didn't call themselves "Celts" at the time, one
    could regard all Brits as "Celts" at the time of Stonehenge's
    construction.
    
    And my souces also tell me that the stone came from a quarry in
    South Wales.
    
    Ray.

    Re .8: There weren't yet any Celts or druids in Britain, or anywhere
    else for that matter when Stonehenge was built. The stones indeed
    came from South Wales. As for the Romans, they didn't drive anybody
    to the extremities, they simply became overlords of a celtic country,
    same as in Gallia (what's now France and Belgium). The Britons where
    driven out of England by the Saxons and Angles invaders (roughly
    6th century), after the Romans took their legions back to the continent
    in the 5th century, because they hadn't enough troops left to fight
    the Germans invaders there (that wasn't enough to keep the Germans
    off anyway).
    			Denis.

    Re .9: Last time I looked up some of this trivia, the sequence of
    events went something like this.
    	2000 BC Stonehenge 1 Earthworks and a ring of stones.
    	1500 BC Stonehenge 2 Outer ring of pits (postholes?) and
    		artificial horizon built.
    	1200 BC Stonehenge 3 The monster stones we see today.
    	 800 BC Celts / Beaker people take over the british isles
    	 300 BC Second Celtic invasion.
    	  45 BC Ceaser came and reported seeing druids
    upto 100 AD Romans take over England and Wales
         300 AD Saxons raid the east and south coasts
    	 350 AD The last romans legion leaves. Saxons and Angles begin
                to settle Kent and East Anglia.
         750 AD Saxons and Angles have taken over England, except for
    	        Cornwall and are beginning to be raided by the Danes.
    		Ireland has been catholic for a century and is sending
    		Clerics and missionaries throughout Europe.
    
    Now, all of that was from memory and so may be incorrect in some
    details. I have a lot of faith in my memory so I believe that I
    have got it all more or less right.
    
    What I remember about druids, is that the romans were so impressed
    that they wiped them out on Anglesey, also called the Isle of Mona,
    somewhere around 150 AD. On the other hand, the vikings claimed
    that they killed the last druid while fighting over dublin around
    1150 AD.
    
    All of this suggests that the druids were the priest class of the
    celts who invaded around 300 BC. At 300 BC STonehenge had been
    abandoned for around 500 years.
    
    Another point to remember, is that the precession of the axies of
    the earth renders Stonehenge virtually useless after as little as
    150 years. This presumeably why they rebuilt the thing in a completely
    different fashion after it got so out of alignment the first two
    times.
    

    Re .10: Your chronology is much more precise and accurate than mine,
    which I put in only from memory when I wrote note .9. Also, my Celtic
    archaeology books are showing their age, although they were quite
    reliable when first published. Do you have some recent references
    about both Stonehenge and early Celtic culture and history? I'd
    like to get some infos about the most recent foundings and theories.
    	As for the druids, the term is usually used for the Gauls and
    Britons priests, who were wiped off by the Romans because they knew
    that they were the heart of Celtic resistance. What little we know
    of them is from the Latin writers (mostly Julius Caesar) who were
    in contact with them. As for the Irish priests and religion we know
    only what was written about them much later by Irish monks in the
    middle age. I'm not aware of a specific name for them, although
    there was probably one. Does anyone has some more infos and/or
    references on that subject? Please put them here.
    		Denis.

    *Flame On* 
    
    > We bypassed Stonehenge last month on the way to Avebury.  Stonehenge
    > was cordoned off to resist the onslaught of the hippie hordes who
    > wanted to hold a solstice rock (!) concert.
    
    Stonehenge is not cordoned off to resist any hippie onslaught. The
    'hippies' are a mixture of people who used (until 1985) to congregate
    at stonehenge to meet people from all corners of Britain, old friends,
    new friends & party, culminating at the solstice itself. Some are
    very into the religious aspects, some come to watch the (modern)
    druids, some _are_ modern druids (whatever that implies), a lot
    of them simply have a belief (vague or otherwise) in Mother Earth
    or whetever else it may be called. Others go just for the party.
    (something the ancient Celts were truly into :-)
    
    I've attended several stonehenge festivals (initially just for the
    party) & I'm certain that there is something special about the land
    around it. Having slept among the burial mounds, stayed up all night
    with thousands of others to wait & catch a glimpse of the first
    sunlight etc - it ain't an ordinary field.
                                              
    English Heritage (the group who took over management of the Stonehenge
    site in 1985) & the Wiltshire Police have done more to damage
    Stonehenge (visually & morally) than the festival ever did. The
    festival simply put the stones to use, in a way similar to the way
    the Celts used monoliths.
    
    *Flame off*                   
    
    Sorry, but this isn't just a stale academic subject for me.
    
    Steve (newcomer to this conf.)
                                                               

    RE: .12  "I'm hip"
    
>        Stonehenge is not cordoned off to resist any hippie onslaught. 

    
    It was when we were there.  The police almost didn't let me drive
    through because I had a beard.  :-)
    
    

    I remember visiting stonehenge as a child and seeing the huge triliths
    dominating the Salisbury plain.  I can't help but agree that the
    attempt to cordon them off from the public has spoiled the effect of
    the monument, but it does prevent the dick-head element in the
    travellers (hippies) from damaging the area.  I'm not saying that this
    is deliberate, and I abhor the violent action that was taken against
    them by the Police last year.  But the stones have been there for
    thousands of years... 
    
    I'd also like to add a few comments on the various opinions in this
    note.  the Henge is not an accurate astral computer, as other readers
    have been quick to point out.  In fact, the Egyptions used their
    constructions to calculate the circumference of the earth, and the
    distance to the moon by triangulation.  But there is little doubt that
    it pre-dates the Celts, and pottery shards found under the stones tends
    to support this. 
    
    The tale that the stones come from Ireland is part of the Merlin
    mythology as I remember.  Merlin took the black stone, that was
    the heart of Ireland and set it up in Stonehenge (The Giants Dance)
    in order to subdue Ireland for the king of the Britons (Ambrosius).
    Are there any Irish myths that support or deny this?
    
    Some of the stones are blue pennant sandstone, which geologically only
    occurs in the Cambrian mountains in Mid-Wales, not South Wales and
    no-where else in the UK. They were probably rafted down to Avon and
    thence overland to Salisbury.   There has been a very recent report
    that divers have discovered a huge stone block in the mouth of a river
    (Either the Tywi or the Teifi) on the west coast of Wales.  It has been
    suggested that this was destined for Stonehenge, but fell of the raft. 
    
    Finally, as with other henges, it is supposed to be situated on a
    ley-line, a line of mystical force crossing the land between centres of
    power.  People sensitive to these forces can `feel' the power of
    monuments such as Stonehenge, which are said to concentrate the energy
    in ley-lines.
    
    I have not ready anything that can prove that the druids used
    Stonehenge - If anyone could point me to some sources I would be
    grateful. 
    
     
    It's mythical and mystical to be a Celt, right?
    
    Regards  
    
    Colin 
     
    
    
    

    It is true that Stonehenge is not an accurate astrological calendar.
    However, across the pond, on the rollong plains of Co Meath there
    is one. 
    
    It predates Stonehenge and the Pyriamids. It accurate for both the
    midsummer and midwinter solstice. It is called Bru Na Boinne. It
    is also called Newgrange.
    
    It is definitely worth a Visit if in Dublin
    
    		Mbr