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Phoenician alphabet in Britain

As always, it's easy to get led astray by the orthodox historians. What with their obsession with "High Status Priests, Rituals and Elites", it's no surprise either. The truly high-status elites, like Druids, went to an extraordinary amount of trouble to keep the teaching and practice of their knowledge and ritual as a verbal tradition. It’s often said that they (like the Druids) had no written language. But this is a misunderstanding of a passing remark by Julius Caesar in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War). Caesar said the Druids considered it sacrilegious to write down their teachings. He goes on to say :

But for all other purposes they use the Greek alphabet

All of which indicates (at least) a robust trading and communication connection between Britain and the Mediterranean that pre-dates the arrival of the Romans. The Greek and Phoenician alphabets have many similarities. So many that it's an ongoing bunfight in linguistic circles about which one came first.

Maybe the highest-status folks in ancient Phoenicia did the same as "our" Druids. From whence we have the traditions of Hiram King of Tyre, whose people had the skills and expertise to be the actual builders of King's Solomon's Temple, but it seems how they did it was never written down. We can find distant fragments of that in Freemasonry's verbal ritual.

Whereas more ordinary folks get on with life, trading and accounting. I would suggest that the Phoenician alphabet was created by practical folks who needed to keep track of everyday things. Like stock control, shipping inventories, land surveying records, and so on. As such, Phoenician traders would of necessity have spread the use of an alphabet along with their trade across the Med and the Western Atlantic seaboard. Maybe places like Mount Batten in Plymouth were the first places a recognisable alphabet reached Britain, with bills of sale for trade goods?

I don't think it's any coincidence that the first organisation in Britain to build what we would recognise as a truly usable computer was Lyons, a British restaurant chain involved with retail tea shops, hotels and manufacturing. Their computer was called LEO (Lyons Electronic Office), and used for accounts, payroll, stock control, order processing, logistics, etc.

Next : British Calendars

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