January iS, 1906J 



NA TURE 



281 



England, and therefore Ireland and the Orkneys, than to 

 get to some of the islands in the Mediterranean itself ; and 

 the prevalence of solstitial customs in Sardinia and Corsica, 

 with apparently no trace of the May year, tends to support 

 this view, which is also strengthened by the fact that the 

 solstitial customs in Morocco are very similar to those we 

 read of in Britain. 1 The May year is unnoticed, and there 

 is a second feast at Easter (March 16). 



The May Year. 



I traced the May year in Egypt at Thebes, the temple 

 being that of Min, and the possible date 3200 B.C. Mr. 

 Penrose showed that the Hecatompedon and the Archaic 

 temple of Minerva at Athens were May temples, the 

 dates of the foundations being 1495 B.C. and 2020 B.C. 

 respectively; but the cult must have been there before 

 the foundations ; and the cult may well have come from 

 Thebes, and 1 fancy it must have been all over the known 

 world at the time. The warning stars at Athens were 

 the Pleiades for temples facing the east, and Antares for 

 temples using the western horizon. 



But the equinoctial pyramid- and Babylonian-cult in vogue 

 in Egypt in the early dynasties (4000 B.C.), with the warn- 

 ing stars Aldebaran (March) and Vega (September), was 

 also represented in Greece at a much later period. 



In Egypt generally, the solstitial worship followed that 

 of the Mav and equinoctial years. The religion of 

 Thothmes III. and the Rameses was in greatest vogue 

 2200-1500 B.C. 



We find little trace of it in Greece proper, though Mr. 

 Penrose has traced it in Calabria and Pompeii, and in 

 some of the islands. 



Because in the first glimpse of the May year we have 

 dates from 3200 B.C. at Thebes, it does not follow that it 

 did not reach Athens before 2000 B.C., because Mr. Penrose 

 found a temple of that date. It is clear, also, that with 

 the possibilities of coastwise traffic as we have found it, it 

 might have easily reached Ireland by then ; 2000 B.C., 

 therefore, is a probable date for the May worship to have 

 reached Britain, arguing on general principles ; we now 

 know as a matter of fact that it really reached Britain 

 earlier. 



May we assume, then, a traffic transferring even 

 astronomer priests from Egypt to Britain at that date? 



But why not Greece to Britain? Because by that time, 

 as we learn from Mr. Penrose, the equinoctial worship 

 from Babylonia lvid reached Greece as well as the May 

 year from Egypt, and traffic from Greece would have 

 brought both, but the equinoctial cult did not reach us 

 then ; there is no trace of Easter worship in the earliest 

 stone circles. 



The solstitial cult was born in Egypt ; it is a child of 

 the Nile-rise. I have shown in my " Dawn of Astronomy " 

 that the long series of temples connected with the solstice 

 may have commenced about 3000 B.C. ; but for long it 

 was a secondary cult ; it was parochial until the twelfth 

 dynasty, say 2300 B.C., Egypt's solstitial " golden age " 

 may be given as 1700 B.C., and her influence abroad was 

 very great, so that much travel, " coastwise " and other, 

 may be anticipated. It is for some centuries after the first 

 date that the introduction of the solstitial worship into 

 Britain may be anticipated. It, for instance, is quite prob- 

 able that the pioneers of sun worship should have reached 

 Stonehenge in 2000 B.C., but the solstitial worship can only 

 be proved after 16S0 B.C. 



A paper by Prof. J. Morris Jones on " Pre-Aryan Syntax 

 in Insular Celtic " appears in the " Welsh People," by 

 Rhys and Brynmor-Jones (Fisher Unwin), pp. 617-641. 

 Prof. Jones w-as led to make the comparisons contained in 

 it by the theory that the long-headed early inhabitants of 

 Britain had migrated into Britain from North Africa, lb- 

 finds that the syntax of Welsh and Irish differs from that of 

 other Aryan languages in many important respects, e.g. 

 the verb is put first in every simple sentence. Prof. Rhys 

 had suggested that these differences represented the per- 

 sistence in Welsh and Irish of the syntax of a pre-Aryan 

 dialect, and as the anthropologists hold that the pre-Aryan 

 population of these islands came from North Africa, it 

 seemed to Prof. Jones that that was the obvious place to 

 1 Westermarck in " Folk-lore." Vol. xxl, p. 27. 



NO. 189O, VOL. 73] 



look for the origin of these syntactical peculiarities. He 

 finds the similarities between Old Egyptian and neo-Celtic 

 syntax to be astonishing ; he shows that practically all the 

 peculiarities of Welsh and Irish syntax are found in the 

 Hamitic languages. 



1 lii- conclusion practically implies that the bulk of the 

 population of these islands, before the arrival of the Celts, 

 spoke dialects allied to those of North Africa. The 

 syntactical peculiarities must have represented the habits of 

 thought of the people, which survived in the Celtic 

 vocabulary imposed upon them. 



These conclusions were not known to me when I began 

 to see the necessity of separating the cult of the June from 

 that of the May years, and the identity of the conclusions 

 drawn from astronomical and linguistic data is to me very 

 striking, and also suggests further special inquiries. 



The temple conditions in Greece investigated by Mr. 

 Penrose, and on which the above generalisation is based, 

 mav be tabulated as follows : — 



Solstitial Year. 

 June 

 Athens. Dionysus (Upper I 



Temple) Antares 



1 (setting) 

 Pompeii (Isis) /3 Geminorum 



December. 



-112 lune 201 1 700 

 -1644,' ,, 19! 75° 



Britain — Canaan. 

 Since we have traces of temple worship in Britain 1000 

 years before the building of Solomon's temple, it may be 



