106 Vestiges of the Earliest Inltahitants of Wiltshire. 



related : but without going farther into the question, it is unde- 

 niable that enough affinity exists between the Celtic languages and 

 those of the East, to attest their common oriental origin.^ 



One more proof of an early connection between the first inhabit- 

 ants of Britain and other tribes, scattered over great portions of 

 Europe and Asia, is an identity, or at any rate great similarity of 

 customs which they held in common : ^ so that, while diverging 

 from a common centre, they naturally in course of ages difiered 

 widely from one another in many of their habits and manners, 

 they yet retained enough, whether with regard to war, religion, 

 domestic life or sepulture, to prove that they all sprang from the 

 same stock, and had retained the same traditions. 



The Celts then, now settled in Britain, were for a long period 

 comparatively ^ unknown to the more civilized parts of the world ; 

 for though in very early ages, those bold mariners, the Phoenician 

 merchants* are known to have passed the pillars of Hercules, and 

 doubling round towards the north, to have coasted up the Atlantic 

 till they reached the shores of Britain ; yet no less cunning than 

 enterprising as they were, they studiousl}' concealed from jealous 

 and selfish motives the discoveries which proved so lucrative ; ^ or 



Cimbric, and tlie three latter the non-Cimbric branch of the nation. [Rawlin- 

 son's Herodotus, iii., 191.] See too Pilchard's Physical History of Mankind, 

 vol. ii., p. 116. 



' Pricliard's Physical History of Mankind, vol. i., p. 8, and above all, the veiy 

 learned work by Dr. Pritchard on the " Eastern origin of the Celtic Nations, 

 proved by a comparison of their dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and 

 Teutonic Languages," see pp. 202, 206. 



- See Rawlinson's Herodotus, Note on book i., chap. 133, vol. i., p. 274. 



^ That certain Greeks visited Britain, examined and described it in the tbird 

 century B.C., see Camden's Britannia, p. 28. Pythias of Marseilles B.C. 330, 

 was tbe first Greek geographer who gave any account of the British Isles. 

 [Henry's History of England, vol. ii., chap. 6. Prichard's Physical History of 

 Mankind, vol. ii., p. 152.] 



* Cffisar Eell : Gall : lib. iv. 20. 

 Strabo lib. iii., s_b fine. 

 Isaiah xxiii, 8. Ezekiel xx^ai. 

 Herodotus, book i., cap. 163. 



Rawlinson's Herod: vol. i., p. 582, ii., 81, 502, and see in vol. iv., 241—249, 

 Essay on the Early Migrations of the Phoenicians ; see also his Ancient 

 Monarchies, vol. ii., p. 169, 170. 



* Gladstone's Homer and the Homeric age, vol. iii, pp. 292—4, 297, 324, 341. 



