The Fomorians

The Parthalonians

The Nemedians

The Fir Bolg and the Tuatha De Dannann

The Milesians

Why Ireland was considered close to the Mediterranean

Why the Milesians came

The Origin of Gaelic

Militus the City

The Milesian Philosophers

The Stone of Destiny

Conclusion

Whoever the Irish are they are not Celts
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The Celts are a relatively recent and minor migration to the island of Ireland whose history is thousands of years older then the Celts. Nothing is known of the languages spoken by these Continental Celts, they left no written record, but the Irish did, in abundance. Much of what is attributed by modern scholars to the Celts in Ireland predated them by thousands of years.

Scholars simply assume that a people they call Celts conquered most of Europe including Britain a short time before the Romans and that they must also have conquered Ireland, but as the Romans did not conquer Ireland the Irish are the last remains of a pan-European Celtic people. 

Apart from the Oxford scholars our own Eoin McNeill writing in the early 20th century is one of the biggest culprits. Perhaps it was fashionable in intellectual circles at that time to attribute everything to the Celts. It will take a long time to correct it. So-called "History" is like that.

The Celts were an Iron Age people from the Danube basin who formed a Continental empire in the millennium before Christ. Just as the later Romans did they probably had some small influence on Ireland but were essentially a Continental phenomenon and left little mark on the aboriginal Irish. The fact is that neither one succeeded in conquering the Irish. Tara was there before and after the Celts.

The Fomorians
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Great Cairns, totally different from anything found elsewhere in Britain or Europe, predating the Pyramids of Egypt and Britain's Stonehenge by thousands of years, lie unexplored and unexcavated on the island of Ireland. Anywhere else in the world they would be considered a cultural marvel.

But we do have the equivalent of the Jewish biblical scrolls: the Lebor Gabála or 'Book of Invasions', passed down in Ireland from time immemorial. Just as in reading the Jewish Bible when you peer through the fantasy weaved by the storytellers you see the outline of the history beneath.

There is abundant reference to a race of people called the Fomorians who were an ancient race thought to have come from Northern Africa or Asia who had dark hair and dark skin and were great seafarers. The name in Gaelic means  faoi-mhuir  “from beneath the sea” (viewed from ashore arriving ships seem to come up from the sea, seafarers).

Anybody who stands upon their hilltop cairns today can only marvel at an ancient people who carried millions of stones, sometimes from far away, and placed them in great mounds on top of remote mountains. Were these the precursors of the Pyramids?

Obviously these people were very numerous and occupied Ireland over a vast period. They built Newgrange and Knowth yet we know nothing about them. But their Mediterranean contemporaries obviously did. They wanted part of it.

These Fomorians were not confined to Ireland. They colonized the whole western European seaboard as far north as Norway. (See accompanying video called "Atlanteans").

The Parthalonians
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They were defeated in Ireland by Parthalon who according to the Annals of the Four Masters came around 2,600 B.C. Despite the fact that the Christian monks tried to make it all fit into their biblical creationist beliefs, it still tells a story far older than Christianity or the Celts.

From that time on it appears that Irish invaders had something of a near common language, which is remarkable, probably mixed dialects of Greek and Hebrew. Parthalon certainly sounds Greek. This would suggest that subsequent invaders knew about Ireland from their home place, long before the Celts or the Romans. It would also seem that they were all sea faring peoples and all emanated from the Eastern Mediterranean where they mingled together as traders and wanderers.

Little is known about the the aboriginal Fomorians before the arrival of the Parthalonians except that they spoke a different language (which is why we know so little about them) but that they intermarried with the new waves of Mediterranean invaders and tried to get along with them.

There seems to have been a well-known trade route through the Mediterranean to Ireland for millennia. Tara and the civilization that flourished there would have been well known to the peoples of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

In the absence of any serious archeological studies to date we have to be content with a study of the written record from Parthalon onwards. Parthalon was the son of a Greek King who had killed his father in order to succeed to the throne but instead had to flee with his wife and followers. After 7 years wandering they arrived in Ireland. Obviously Ireland was already known to them. 

Around 300 years later or 2,300 B.C. according to the Annals of the Four Masters: “Nine thousand of Parthalon's people died in one week (of a plague) on Sean Mhagh Ealta Edair, namely, five thousand men, and four thousand women. Whence is named Taimhleacht Muintire Parthaloin. They had passed three hundred years in Ireland.” That must have been one nasty plague.

The Nemedians
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30 years later Nemed and his followers arrived. According to Christian legend he was a descendant of Japheth, the son of the biblical Noah, probably because they knew he was also from the eastern Mediterranean.

He too had to battle the aboriginal Fomorians, who don't seem to have died out in the plague. He fought them just as his predecessors the Parthalonians did but with mixed success. The Fomorians were clearly part of a greater Atlantic rim people because they were always able to summon reinforcements from other islands as far away as the Hebrides and Norway for their battles with these waves of invaders from the Mediterranean. 

After 216 years of fighting the Fomorians “thirty persons alone of the race of Neimhidh (Nemed) escaped to different quarters of the world, and they came to Ireland some time afterwards as Firbolgs” according to the Four Masters.  So Nemed's fate was similar to that of Parthalon.

The Fir Bolg and the Tuatha De Dannann
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The Fir Bolg arrived back around 1,850 B.C., all the way from Scythia (the plains of Russia) where some survivors of the Nemedians are believed to have gone. They were followed and conquered shortly afterwards  by other descendants of the Nemedian survivors, the Tuatha De Dannann. Folk memories of a green and fertile land would have survived in both peoples' lore.

CELT
(Corpus of
Electronic Texts)

Why the Milesians came

The Origin of Gaelic

Militus the City

The Milesian Philosophers

The Stone of Destiny

Conclusion

The Milesians
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200 years later around 1500 B.C. both these people were overcome by our most enduring ancestors the Milisians who came from the same part of the world, the Middle East and the Ionian Sea.

The most interesting thing about all these peoples is that they were closely related racially and spoke much the same languages. For that reason scholars have wrongly assumed they were Celts, when they were clearly Ionian people who were seafarers and thrived much, much earlier than the Celts who were totally Continental and not very good seafarers, rather like the Swiss.

The Irish language and customs would seem to support a close affinity with ancient Greece, the Middle East and Persia. Their heroic stories of warriors and chariots for example are very similar.

Spain and Portugal was merely a stepping off point for the sea journey north to Ireland, but scholars have confused the much later Iberian Celts with the Milesians. Apart from the fact that Celts did not occupy any part of Spain or Portugal until long after the Milesians, believing that everybody who came from Spain was Spanish, let alone Celtic, is similar to the belief of many Americans that their Irish ancestors came from County Cork simply because that's where their ships left from.

Why Ireland was considered close to the Mediterranean
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Sailing on the open sea is still a lot easier method of travel than overland. Man hoisted a sail long before he saddled a horse. Trans-continental travel would have been very cumbersome and dangerous in ancient times.

Also because of unusually  dangerous sea conditions between France and England, Ireland being open to the sea, would have been less isolated than London or Paris, if they even existed in ancient times. Anybody who has every crossed on a car ferry between Ireland and France knows of the rough seas rounding the southwest tip of Britain where the Atlantic seems to pile up as the ocean floor gets shallower and the waters enter a funnel between the island of Britain and the Continent.

The ancient seafarers would have felt much safer standing further out to sea until they made landfall on the west coast Ireland. That is why Connemara on the west coast of Ireland means “calm of the sea”. Its quite inlets and deep harbors would have seemed very welcoming places compared with the treacherous coasts and currents between England and France. If they wished to make their way to Britain and the Continent they would have landed in Ireland first.

Why the Milesians came
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Ith, Mil’s uncle, is said to have seen Tara in a vision from Spain (Portugal). Maybe in looking for the ideal home for his people he had heard of its green plains and its mild weather. Some believe Ireland was the ancient world's mythical island of Atlantis. He decided to go and have a look for himself. When he got there he foolishly praised Ireland so much to the Tuatha De Dannann that they killed him believing that he wanted it for his own people.

The two sons of his nephew Mil, Eremhon and Emher, and their mother Scota, daughter of an Egyptian Pharoah, went to Ireland to avenge him and proved the Tuatha De Dannann right. They had finally found their Promised Land. These are whom we call the Milesians.

The Origin of Gaelic
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The language they spoke, Goidelic was named after their ancestor Goidel Glas. According to the Christian scribes he was the son of Niul son of Fenius Farsaid and Scota daughter of an earlier Egyptian pharaoh (not Mil's wife). Fenius Farsaid was the son of Bathath, son of Magog, son of Japheth and son of Noah. The monks liked to neatly connect everything back to the Flood.

According to the Irish Book of Invasions he was born in Egypt to where his father Niul had emigrated and married Scota. Goidel was instructed in languages by his grandfather Fenius who then migrated to the Russian Steppes in the region known as Scythia where he became a great king.

The Christian monks even had Fenius at the Tower of Babel! It is sufficient to note that they accepted that Goidel his grandson came from Egypt and the language the Milesians spoke was therefore Goedelic, later Gaelic. In any case there is nothing Celtic about the origin of the Gaelic language of Ireland and later of Scotland. It came from the Middle East. How can modern scholars possibly call these people and their language Celtic?

Militus the City
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Militus was an ancient seaport and capital city of Ionia on the Asia Minor coast of the Ionian Sea, about 36 miles south of Ephesus in the present-day Turkey. It is now some 10 miles inland as the Mediterranean is considerable lower than in ancient times.

In those days Militus was the western end of a major land route stretching east through Persia to India and China. Goods from East and West were traded in its busy markets and the Miletians were host to a wide variety of cultures and ideas. It is probably for that reason that it became a great center of learning. The Greeks came to dominate it from about 1,000 B.C. but it was much older than that.

The Milesian Philosophers
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The three great pre-Socratic philosophers, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes all lived there around 600 B.C. and from them dates all history of Western science and philosophy, They were the first “physicists” (from phusis, Greek word for nature).

They were great observers of the physical or natural world and rejected the idea that everything came from the gods. They were thus the first evolutionists. Anaximenes for example suggested for the first time in Western philosophy that all substances are made up of or are modifications of one primary substance, which he believed to be air but Thales believed it to be water. Anaximander held that the ultimate reality is the apeiron, that boundless, limitless, imperishable, and eternal "surrounding". Later it became known as the ether, something which has still not been totally discounted as evidenced by a recently discovered gravitational anomaly in the observance of a pendulum during a solar eclipse.

No doubt these men benefited enormously from being able to ask the myriad of travelers through their city about accepted beliefs in their respective homelands.

Were Mil and his people originally from Miletus? We don’t know but it would certainly fit with their great seafaring skills and knowledge of the world.

Shortly after arriving in Ireland they decisively beat the Tuatha De Dannann at the Battle of Tailltin and ruled Ireland ever afterwards, until the Norman/English came in 1,169 A.D.

The Stone of Destiny
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One of the most interesting stories about their coming is the mysterious stone they apparently brought with them. We know that since they came in 1,500 B.C. they crowned their kings upon it at Tara. A band of Irish called the Dal Riada took it with them when they colonized what is now Scotland in 496 A.D. where it became known as the Stone of Scone. The English took it to London in 1,296.

Mil’s two sons, Eremhon and Emher, who certainly sound Hebrew, are said to have carried Jabob’s Pillar, the Stone of Israel from Bethel (meaning House of God) to Ireland which they called Lia Fail, the Stone of Destiny. If that is the case the Lia Fail is the very embodiment of Israel, representing the Covenant and "Bethel", the House of God!

In any case no inanimate object has ever been more revered down through history than this extraordinary stone. Though now in Scotland it remains the coronation stone of British monarchs at Westminster. Every British monarch has been crowned upon it since Edward I took it in A.D. 1,296. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Irish had used it at Tara for 2,000 years before.

It lay unexamined for centuries under the Coronation Chair at Westminster until relatively recently when it was removed to have its photograph taken. It was then discovered that it had two embedded metal rings through which would have been passed a single pole for carrying purposes. A deep groove was also found which appears not to have been cut but to be the result of frictional wearing from an enormous amount of pole-carrying.

If it really is the Stone of Israel it would have been carried by the children of Israel during their long wanderings in the great wildernesses of the Middle East for many generations. A truly remarkable thought indeed! Makes you wonder who the Milesians really were, the Lost Tribe of Israel?

A Yale professor of archaeology, fascinated by the ancient Irish texts regarding this Stone, did a microscopic study of all the known sandstone formations in Ireland and Britain but could find no location on the islands from where it could have come from.

A dedicated Canadian archaeologist and theology professor then went to Bethel in Palestine on a wild chance and after weeks of unsuccessful searching just when he was about to give up “discovered a stratum of sandstone near the Red Sea at Bethel, geologically the same as the Coronation Stone”, exactly where Jacob is said to have slept with his head on a "pillow-stone" when God spoke to him.

Conclusion
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Perhaps we will never know who the Milesians were, but whoever their descendents, the Irish, are they are certainly not Celts, nor is the Irish language a Celtic language. It seems unbelievable that so much has been so deliberately dismissed by so many "scholars" so easily for so long.

Ó Pat Flannery December 2004