Oddities, curiousities and strangness in history [2]

To me they slid past each other.

If this reconstruction is accurate the colosseum had very nicely patterned marble floors, which I had never suspected. I don't appreciate the opera with this, it's not appropriate.

{{ Opera is never appropriate! (skip to 1.14)}}

This is fascinating. And yes, in Europe people DID carry things on their heads.

There's been some dust-ups about Netflix portraying Cleopatra as a black woman.   I watched the first episode some months ago and thought I had reviewed it but can't find it.  Now I've watched the first two episodes.

For me the only truly annoying part was the intro line by Jada Pinkett Smith: "There was a time when women ruled with unparalleled power...".  Um, no.   If they made it singular it would apply to Cleopatra, but it definitely did not apply to her time.

This is one of the Netflix dramadocs where they have historians jump in to comment, cutting back and forth to dramatized incidents. The lead historian is a black woman who recalls when she was studying Cleopatra in grade school her grandma told her "Whatever they tell you in school, just remember, Cleopatra was black!"  The thing is, I just love this woman to bits.  They used her in the similar docudrama about Ceaser, and she excels at filling out the personalities and interpersonal drama, eyes a-twinkle, relating it like fresh gossip from 2000 years ago.

So when they made Cleopatra black, it feels like something tongue-in-cheek based on that statement.  They never really try to justify the decision, except for some brief discussion about it being possible given the Egyptian ethnic mileau and the three centuries since Alexander.

And I'll forgive them their little fun, because they do bring to light details we normally never hear about Cleopatra; all the intrigues of the years before Caeser arrived and Cleopatra got herself thrust upon the world stage.

So I'd say go ahead and watch it.  It rounds out the story of one of the most interesting characters in history.  They don't put forward the assumption of blackness as anything more than a possibility, and I say let them have their fun so long as the other historical details are correct.  Little girls can dream.



"Just remember, Cleopatra was black!"

Really liked the Colosseum video, I can honestly imagine that and I wouldnt be surprised if it was just like that back in the day, just a bloody shame about Nessun dorma banging on, I guess it was thought a awesome song represents an awesome structure ?

So I finished Cleopatra, and quite enjoyed the historical tidbits we never see anywhere else. For example, when Octavian marched on Egypt after the battle of Actium, you'd think he'd carry the troops over by boat. But no, he in fact raised the largest army Rome had ever yet produced, and marched around the Mediterranean subduing any possible Egyptian allies along the way. This definitely proves they had accepted Cleopatra as a badass you didn't take chances with. Some of it was respect for Antony's military experience, but since half the Egyptian fleet during Actium defected to Octavian because they couldn't abide him, I think this weights Octavian's caution more towards respect for Cleopatra's political skills.

I didn't like HBO's version of Cleopatra much. Made her into a bit of a childish minx. The Netflix version points out that Roman male aristocracy likely never met a woman who dealt with them on the level of both social and intellectual equality. It must have been an intoxicating revelation, hence her ability to seduce two of the most powerful generals of Rome. I otherwise loved HBO's Rome, I just wish we had gotten a better version of Cleopatra out of it.

This vid (which really should show more) shows a massive set of wide steps going up the Acropolis. I've only bee there once decades ago, and remember only a dusty gravel road going up. Looking back on maps I don't see any signs of the steps, and can't even figure out how the gravel road gets up there. It seems a great loss as those steps would be a magnificent entrance.

{{ Either you forgot the vid or I'm even more drunk than usual! }}

Whoops.

{{ Well this confirms a theory I've had for a while now, turns out the Altar Stone, the single most important stone arguably, at Stone Henge does not like the standing stones come from Wales as assumed, but all the way from the North east of Scotland!

'The six-tonne Altar Stone at the heart of Stonehenge came from the far north of Scotland rather than south-west Wales as previously thought, new analysis has found...The discovery shows the construction of Stonehenge was a far greater collaborative effort than scientists realised.
It also means that the ancient monument, near Salisbury in south-west England, was built with stones from all parts of Great Britain.
The findings suggest Neolithic Britain was a far more connected and advanced society than earlier evidence indicated.
Stonehenge seems to be this great British endeavour involving all the different people from all over the island...The Neolithic people must have been pretty well connected, far more connected than people give them credit for. They must have been very well organised...These findings will have huge ramifications for understanding communities in Neolithic times, their levels of connectivity and their transport systems...This discovery certainly implies that there were great social connections in Britain at the time...It is phenomenal that the people of the time brought such a large stone all this way. They must have had a compelling reason to do it.'- BBC

Now, for a long time I've theorised that the culture that produced Stone Henge has its roots in the north of Scotland. But I think with this information it's rather there was a culture that spanned all of modern day Britain, but also I suspect Doggerland before it sank.

So, some dates here.
Doggerland began to go under between 16,000 bc and 8000bc.
By 5,500bc all that was left was the higher ground, east of the Midlands in modern England was Doggerbank, rising still above its now sunken valleys until as late as 5000bc, and in the far north what were now the islands of Orkney and Shetland, formerly the high ground in northern Doggerland and would have been the tops of its highest northern hills.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the oldest inhabited site in the UK is that of Starr Carr in northen Yorkshire on the coast of modern day England, but what would have been at the edge of Doggerland with low lying fens and fields below it full of a wide array of wildlife. Starr Carr dates to 9000bc. At this time it is still possible to walk to Doggerland, and in the south walk across what is now the English channel, though the waters were steadily rising, much would be now flood plains or marsh and fen, but it was still there.
Starr Carr also gives our first hint of culture, there were a remarkable amount of deer head masks being produced there assumed to be used for some ritual or shamanistic purpose, more than they themselves could possibly need, it is possible therefore that they were making them to be distributed to religious figures in other areas connected to Starr Carr. This I think is our first hint of how interconnected things were, these are not wandering separate tribes occasionally meeting, this is something closer to a shared culture with organisation, manufacturing areas and distribution networks. If this seem sunlikely at the same time on mainland Europe there were several neolithic centres making different types of items on scale for distribution, these included pottery vessels, statues and figurines and stone axes, the earliest of such dates to about 7000bc.

Our next date of note is at what is now Stone Henge, before it was Stone Henge it was a sacred stream at the nearby site of Black Mead and a Wood Henge where Stone Henge now stands, that it is estimated to date to between 8500bc and 7000bc. And there is growing evidence for more wood henges previously unknown in the area. This means that the area which Stone Henge sits in today was already considered a site of some importance to the culture that existed in the time of Doggerland.
It also indicates large scale community organisation and communications.

Now we are off to the north of Scotland for our next date, Stenness is on the island of Orkney off the north coast of Scotland, there we find the Stones of Stenness, the oldest known stone circle in Britain dating to 5,400 years ago, this is considerably earlier than Stonehenge, it was followed by several other stone circles erected in the region alongside impressive barrow tombs.
But much like at Stone Henge, though the evidence has not been found yet (the differences in soil being a major factor here) the stone circles in the north may well have been predated by much earlier wooden versions too.

Things seem to explode in 3000bc. In England Stone Henge is begun, it is a generational task to its final form taking abut 1,500 years from inception to final form.
Meanwhile a lot is going on in Scotland, at the Ness of Brodgar, a strip of land now forming a causeway in Orkney between two islands is a massive neolithic temple complex, the scale of which is unprecedented anywhere in Britain and still being uncovered. At the same time the stone underground village of Skara Brae is constructed and inhabited, we don't know who by but the fact that all the animal bones found there come from cuts of meat butchered off island, implies they were being supplied with meat from elsewhere, this has led some to believe they were some sort of elite class, I personally do not hold to this however.
The layout of Skara Brae and its houses would seem to go against the notion, all the dwellings are largely identical, none has prominence either in layout, decor or position. In fact, everything about the culture that began on Doggerland and developed into the one here and across Britain seems to me to have operated very much on a cooperative basis. The same can be said for neolithic tombs where a jumble of bones are found not entire skeletons, they it seems were not the tombs of the wealthy and elite alone, but the tombs of the people. So I tend to be against the notion there was some sort of priestly ruling caste.
The first circle at Stenness goes up within about 500 years of the tsunami that ended Doggerland once and for all, the temple is built 2000 years later onto the causeway that would once have been a ridge between two Doggerland valleys and would have been a prominent and visible sight for thousands of years to those living below before the waters rose. Perhaps it was always a place of significance, we wont know unless the archeoligists eventually go under the Temple they have discovered to see if wooden structures predate the stone, or perhaps its significance came about only as a survivor of the cataclysm that befell Doggerland.

I don't think it is coincidental that three of these early sites - Starr Carr, the Ness and the Stenness Circle are all on what is now the coast, and what then would have been the tops of low-lying hills around Doggerland. I believe many of these sites were important before Doggerland was gone, and only grew in importance as the slow flooding and its devastating finale sinking under a tsunami pushed many of its inhabitants to the higher ground.

It seems to me that those who found themselves on what is now Britain already had a shared culture that spread across Doggerland and included Britain, one that only developed in its communal efforts, eventually, two thousand years after Doggerland vanished that culture produced the stone circles, the barrows and the temple complex of Orkney.
Working it seems in collaboration with people in Wales who supplied Stone Henge its Blue Stones, and people in the north of Scotland, where, maybe even taken originally from the temple in Orkney long before, the altar stone itself was sent from.

None of this would be easy, moving the stones from Wales is a feat enough and has been much debated on how they did it, moving a six tonne block 434 miles on brutally rough terrain that includes mountains and rivers and no roads, or down a coast that is no less treacherous in primitive rafts is even more mind-boggling, and they must have had a very good reason for wanting it from there in particular.

I think what we are seeing are echoes of the culture of Doggerland as it became with time, I don't think it's a coincidence that a site like Stone Henge is right on top of and develops the design of the original Wood henge from the time of Doggerland, or that sacred Temples were built on ground that would have overlooked Doggerland, but at its heart I think this culture still retained its communal ideals through time. Some of this arguably survives to this day, the association with stone and the dead seen in gravestones, the birth of the Masons based on that association between the spiritual and stone, the Stone of Destiny upon which all UK monarchs are still crowned to this day, the code of the Highlands echoes the same sentiment of communal spirit and brotherhood even with a stranger, it was not until the medieval period that the notion of hereditary rule arrived in Scotland, before the King was elected by his peers. And one could even plausibly argue there are echoes of it in modern Scottish culture with education for all, healthcare, medicine and prescriptions and travel for the elderly and young, all paid for collectively through taxation, based on the same principle of collective community spirit.

I think we owe that all the way back to the inhabitants of Doggerland for whom it seems natural disaster taught them only to help each other. Not a bad legacy. }}

The whole of England would seem a mystical highland plateau to the people of Doggerland. I've seen an explanation of the significance of the siting of Stone Henge, but it didn't really stick in the memory. There was some riverbed action going on, but I know there was much more than that.

The whole of England would seem a mystical highland plateau- Halfy

{{{ Not sure if you mean England or are just being American here Halfy From the evidence and the fact the largest most significant stone temple associated with stone circles predates Stone Henge's stone phase and is located in the far north of Britain, and that the Blue Stones of Stone Henge are from Wales, indicates the entire high ground of what is now Britain, not just England, was significant in the days of Doggerland, with at least two of the known sites being occupied and in use at the time of Doggerland.

With Stone Henge you may be thinking of the nearby sacred spring and settlement of Black Mead, which is the earliest known phase in the area of it having ritual significance. Its also possible you are confusing it with the discovery of the wood henge that seems to be in use at the same time and form part of the same sacred landscape, its speculated the recently dead were prepared at the wood henge, and then the funeral party would proceed with the body up the river by boat along a sacred route which connects it to the Stone Henge site, which was the land of the Dead. A similar layout can also be seen at the Brodgar with seemingly one island being the Land of the Living and speculated to have a woode henge on it, and you proceed through the temple complex (which seems designed for this with ritual rooms to pass through) to the second island the causeway connects to containing the stone ring, the land of the dead. This would indicate it is the same culture involved in both constructions (interestingly the temple complex in the north appears to have gone out of use around 2500bc, about the same time the Stone Henge complex is in full swing having been begun 500 years earlier). }}

{{ Turns out the altar stone is from the Orcadian Basin. Given the timing of the dates - Stone Henges main building phase being 3000-2000bc and that coinciding with the date of abandonment for the Temple on Orkney in about 2200bc, it seems increasingly likely to me that the stone was already important there and when the Temple was decommissioned and filled with sand (probably due to worsening climate) it was then transported to the new Temple at Stone Henge. }}

For something we feel is so very British, and how protective we are of it, we dont know an awful lot about it, a lot is guess work. One day we might find we were wrong from start to finish

{{ Another twist in the Stonehenge altar stone story - further research shows it did not come from mainland Orkney, it still came for the NE of Scotland somewhere in the Orcadian Basin, but exactly where is a mystery.
They compared it directly with the standing stones of Stenness and Brodgar on Orkney and found it was not a match for them.

I am not at all surprised by this finding as my own hunch is that they will never find the quarry from which it came as that quarry is long gone beneath the waves. I find the whole stones, the Neolithic and the survival of ideas from then to the present day fascinating.

Here's a map showing the area covered by the Orcadian basin where the Altar Stone at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain comes from-



As you can see most of the Basin is now under the North Sea.

And here is the same area as it was when Doggerland still existed-



The entire Basin was above the water, it slowly receded until by 8000bc it was entirely gone. But it was a slow incremental rising of water not all at once, taking thousands of years. Much of what is now under the water all around the coast line where the water is still very shallow, would have remained above water until about 8000 to 7000bc.

Now the Stones of Stenness and those compared at the Ring of Brodgar on mainland Orkney were put in place about 3000bc.

For my hunch to be true this would mean that the altar stone and the traditions surrounding it would have had to have survived an absolute minimum of 4000 years prior to the Rings going up, and 6000 years before its appearance at Stonehenge.
On the surface that sounds like a very long time for either it, or the traditions around it to have survived.
But we do have a comparison to make, the Stone of Scone, the King-making stone, said to be the original stone brought from Ireland by the Scotia to their new kingdom of Dalreida in western Scotland, the Lia Fáil, which had stood upon the Hill of Tara where Ireland's Kings would be crowned. The tradition of the stone is thought to go all the way back to the neolithic, and the stone tomb and circle builders themselves, this would place the origins of the stone, or at least the concepts around it at about 4000-2500bc.
Charles was crowned King sat upon a throne housing the Stone of Destiny 2 years ago, 6000 years later.
And of course if the ideas the Stone of Destiny represents are indeed the same tradition as those of Orkney and Salisbury Plain, then concepts behind Charles crowning are much older than 6000 years and closer to 8 to 10,000 years old, and had their origins in the religion and beliefs of lost Doggerland.

So it is not impossible the altar stone could have survived thousands of years, if it was quarried in what once Doggerland, and that it was sacred before Doggerland sank and preserved and placed at the heart of the new centre on the Ness of Brodgar about 3000bc, in the 'Temple' separating the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead and their associated circles, before that too was abandoned around 2500bc and the stone was once more transported to the new centre, now at Stonehenge, where it remains to this day.

As to how the tradition ended up in Ireland and with the Stone of Destiny, Ireland was the western edge of Doggerland, it has excellent examples of Neolithic megalithic stone works, from chambered tombs to its own circles and standing stones, it was clearly part of the same cultural Neolithic spread of ideas as Orkney and later Stonehenge.
But it all ended, as it did across Britain, pretty much at once. And ended because of a large scale influx of newcomers, the Beaker People, with their own traditions and burial practices, they arrived about 2,500 bc and are believed to have largely replaced the indigenous neolithic population, it does not seem to have been a friendly take over and blending of cultures so much as the eradication of one culture and its replacement. The Megalithic tombs of England were abandoned in favour of cremation, the circles and henges were abandoned and began their journey into becoming legends of forgotten purpose as too did their builders. The idea of a single important stone imbued with special powers, worth preserving all this time, worth transporting from the far north of Scotland all the way to Salisbury Plain was lost, along with all the other practises of the neolithic circle builders.

In Orkney it was the same, the Ness of Brodgar as a Temple complex went entirely out of use by 2400bc, right after Skara Brae was likewise abandoned and left to be reclaimed by nature, the old temples were never revived, restored or maintained, left also to be covered over in time by sand and grass, turned to farmland and forgotten. The once great abundance of Doggerland and its temperate climate were also gone, replaced with open sea, increased cold, all the trees were long since stripped away and of course Orkney was now isolted as an island, cut off from the mainland. And so the knowledge here too was lost and forgotten.

But in Ireland it was a different story, Ireland got its invasion too yet the oral history of Ireland uniquely seems to have retained and carried on through this period the idea of the Stones as sacred, religious and spiritual, and to have packaged the whole set of concepts up into a single mythical stone, just like the altar stone, a stone of special significance, the Lia Fáil.
Lia Fáil is an odd one to translate, Lia is simple enough, 'stone' but Fáil can mean fatal but more likely could be translated to similar to English fate, or destiny, hence its other name of Stone of Destiny, however the oldest name we have for it is in fact Fal, which is much more obscure as it comes from Old Irish and has a meaning that either was multiple or shifting over usage, but it can translate as either or all of, "barrier", "chieftain", "abundance", "learning", and "valley".
Barrier and valley strikes me as an interesting one, the Lia Fáil famously stood upon the mythical Hill of Tara with its door to the Underworld (a neolithic chambered cairn) in the hill beneath it. So valley seems odd for something that famously is on top of a hill. But all the translations combined lead to an interesting possibility.

It makes me wonder if it alludes to its origins, in a valley of Doggerland such as would have been either side of Orkney, in the Orcadian Basin. And the Ness of Brodgar itself, with its neolithic temple complex, now a thin strip between the sea which links two bits of land together, would at the time of Doggerland have been a long ridge linking two hill tops, perhaps already places of sacred learning where Chieftains were officially made, a natural barrier seperating two valleys in a temperate land of abundance (Doggerland had everything from large game to small, from sea to fresh water food, to berries and harvestable nuts and plants all year round and in large numbers, all in a diverse biohabitat of river valleys, fens and marshes, alongside the forested hills and mountains of what is now Britain and Ireland as well as the wide high plains of southern England, truely an abundant land).

According to legend the Lia Fáil did not originate in Ireland, it was brought there by the part godlike Tuatha Dé Danann, 'The people of Danu' (a Goddess, thought to be some sort of mother earth type), most scholars seem to believe the most likely origin for the Stone in the oldest tales is Scotland. This opens up a whole other side possibility, that there were two stones of significance saved from Doggerland (the legends place the People of Danu contemporary with the last few thousand years of Doggerland's existence) one eventually ended up as the altar stone at Stone Henge via the Ness of Brodgar, and the other went to Ireland to become the Stone of Destiny (this moving of stones does not seem unlikely given Stonehenge itself is made up of stones taken from both Scotland and Wales as well as the north of England and Salisbury Plain). It would also mean if so that the stone came for the Orcadian basin in Doggerland, went to Ireland taken there by the Tuatha Dé Danann, then came back thousands of years later with the Dalreiada to Scotland to continue being the Kingmaker of the Scotia, then to all of the new kingdom of Scotland becoming renamed the Stone of Scone, after the Abbey in which it was housed and where the king of Scotland was crowned, and then after being stolen from the Abbey and taken to Westminster by Edward Longshanks, the Black Prince and Hammer of the Scots, reclaiming its old title as the Stone of Destiny, under which name it has been fulfilling the same purpose of King-maker to this day.

But at some point the Stone of Destiny seems to have become largely shorn of its religious meanings that were associated with it in the Neolithic, tying it to the Dead, Ancestor worship and the rituals surrounding them, though those ideas did survive, just no longer directly tied to one place or stone of power, and either a new purpose was put upon the Stone, or a pre-existing one amplified to the sacrifice of the rest (the old irish name including 'Chieftain' as a meaning implies it was an older preexisting idea just emphasised) - that of being a King Maker, a crowning stone, an endorsement of some sort from the universe or the gods or the ancestors onto the choice of the present. My own feeling is that this notion was emphasised or put onto the existing traditions around the stone by the later Celts, who didn't show up to dominate until about 800bc in Ireland, it fits for me their other war like approach to matters and to their religion, that the ability to imbue power and authority onto a person would be the thing that would be important to their culture seems fitting to me.

But even without any Doggerland hypothesis the idea of the Stones, of their importance in ritual and imbuing power upon a leader in these islands goes back at least 5000 years. And if an origin in Doggerland, potentially double that. Yet there it remains in the background of our lives, in the grave stones in our cemeteries, in commemorating and honouring our dead and ancestors in monuments of stone such as cenotaphs, in the traditions of our Freemasons, and even literally embedded into our culture in the very throne upon which the monarch of these isles still sits, upon the Stone of Destiny, the Lia Fáil, the Fal of old, itself said by legend to have been brought to Ireland by the mythical Tuatha Dé Danann hinting at an even older origin in the mists of history in the long lost Doggerland.  }}

{{Stumbled on an interesting map from an archaeological survey site, but for those who don't know their barrows from their cairns or chambers here's a brief summing up of each type to help give context to the map.



Long Barrows-  usually trapezoid shaped structures made to appear almost like small artificial hills. They vary widely in length rang from about 20 metres to over a 100.



The smallest length barrows sometimes come in alternative shape which resembles somewhat the shape of a stone axe head, or as some other scholars prefer a shortened version of the lower half of a female, with the idea being the dead are going back into the womb of the earth.



Construction wise they are a single stone chamber made of roughly man sized stones placed upright with a lintel stone on top, with in the more fancy versions stone brickwork lining the exterior walls of the entrance and interior of the chamber and passage. They contain the remains of the dead with a short passage leading to an entrance blocked over with a stone. Everything else is just piles and piles of rubble covered over in earth and finally turf. The stone at the entrance is removable at need to access the chamber, but often this is in fact a  false door with nothing but rubble behind it and the real access is either through a more hidden side entrance or even at the back. Later burials and cremations were often also placed into the barrow exterior along its length.

The development of them is obscure, but there are clues. The shape seems to be reminiscent of the longhouses they built, making them a sort of nature version of a house for the dead. At Weyland's Smithy the earliest version of it was a wooden mortuary house containing the remans of 14 people. This would imply the practise was older than the evidence we have left in stone, stone lasts, the wooden version if they never got progressed to a stone one would leave little to no trace into modern times, so exactly how old the ideas behind these sites are is unknown, but likely more than 6000 years.
That many barrows felt the need to have a false entrance and a concealed real one also hint that grave robbing may have been a thing too, its possible it was purely for some symbolic or ritual purpose, but its just as likely it was for very practical reasons too.



Round Barrows- these are much the same thing save in shape, they were normally surrounded by a ditch and bank.
In the case of barrows there use went on far longer than their makers. It seems even those who replaced them respected the dead, and Beaker People, Bronze Age Celts and even Roman burials can be found in the surface of barrows ( they never opened them up to reuse the chambers, just used the mound of the barrow placing cremation s into the holes dug in the surface) showing they remained in use as places of burial for a very long time, right through into recorded history.


Cairns- for our purposes here you can largely ignore the cairns. They are bronze age in arrival for the most part, though the basic practise of burying the dead either in a hole lined with stone (a Cist) did preexist the burial cairns the larger versions of heaped exposed stone and boulders are later.




Chambered Cairns- the best way to think of the difference between these and a barrow is a barrow is a parish church, and a chambered cairn is a cathedral. Though its not the scale of the structure itself, barrows can be greater in length, its the scale and workmanship of the chambers inside. A Chambered Cairn has large interior spaces of incredibly well constructed stonework, some designed with clever tricks of the light, such as at Maes Howe where a stone above the entrance creates a 'light-slot' which creates abeam of sunlight on the rising sun on the solstice that goes straight down the interior passage to the central chamber where it strikes a rear wall made of quartz, causing it to shine and illuminate the chamber.
And as their name implies they contain more than one chamber, most usually a central main chamber with alcoves in the wall containing bones of the dead, and several side chambers, likewise laid out.



The entrance to a Chambered Cairn is designed to be removed and placed back at need, these were not one time use seal them up and its a monument, these were active places where the living interacted in some fashion with the ancestors, through rituals such as those indicated by the light-slot, and by the fact the bones found in such places are a jumble of individuals and never and entire skeleton of any individual and not from any one time, but span a period of use of about a thousand years or more.

Now here is the interesting thing, if you plot the so far discovered long and round barrows, and the location of the known chambered cairns you get something like this-



( In case that's too small to read the key, red are chambered cairns, green barrows and later cairns)

There are a few notable features here but the most obvious is the bulk of the chambered cairns lie in the west, and Ireland in particular has a lot of them.
This seems to me to harken back to an old idea, one even Tolkien made use of, that of going into the West upon death.
In Arthurian legend its Avalon, across the sea, the island of dead heroes. Older than Arthur is Tír na nÓg of Irish legend, the land even closer to Tolkien's version, in that not only did it lay to the west but was home to the Faery folk, the immortal beings.

Avalon seems to come from a root word associated to apples. Apples feature quite a lot in Irish myth and in association with immortal beings, the God Óengus offered three miraculous apple trees from the magical woods, Bruig na Bóinde,  Connla the Fair, an Irish prince, fell in love with a beautiful Faerie woman, who arrived on the Irish shore in a crystal boat. She offered him an apple from the world of Faerie; he took the fatal bite, and was hers forever.
By the 7th century the much more ancient legal laws that the Celts had been operating on via their traditional oral only system of record keeping, were finally written down, called the Brehon Law, in it we find it was illegal to chop down an apple tree in Ireland, punishable by death.
While researching this bit I came across this on an Irish cider producers site, a map of their orchards.



It seems Ireland is still quite a good place to grow apples, in the warmer climes of the past even better one would assume.

Looking at the map of burial tombs its not hard to think that the idea of sailing into the West after death to a land of immortal plenty and apple orchards is a very old one indeed. We know the sun was important as so many of the earliest remains indicate alignments to it, perhaps being buried as far west as it was possible to go was part of that.
And if chambered cairns denote those placed there were of some special significance over other types of burials, the houses of dead heroes as it were, then perhaps going west in death over the sea to Ireland was a very ancient idea indeed. }}

Somehow I never associate Ireland with apples. It's an interesting idea that it's the model for sailing into the west.

{{ Tír na nÓg the Land of Youth, the otherworld in the West goes by a few names, one of them is 'Emain Ablach.'
"Ablach" means "of the apples/fruits" in Old irish.
So Emain Ablach translates to Emhain of the Apples. Emhain isn't a word for a thing but rather most likely a place, as there is in Ireland another place by the name Emhain Macha.

The Welsh equivelent to Avalon and Tír na nÓg is Ynys Afallach, deriving from the Welsh afal, 'apple'. }}

So I just found out that most European countries use a comma for the decimal point. what the actual fook?

I've seen this before, but took it to be an affectation worth ignoring. But now with all the international commerce being done electronically I don't understand how all this is wrangled. yes, once numbers are translated into the computer it's all fine since it's binary, but an awful lot is transmitted by text file, and without some stamp to let you know what system to expect things can be royally bollixed.

This may be similar to how little and big endian is handled between computer systems (if you don't know what this means you are probably happier) but that stays buried pretty deep. The decimals are right on the surface so aren't so easy to hide. I suppose it goes with English/non English so it all gets translated together?

I have to admit, it makes a lot of sense.

O'er missus, that was really fascinating, I was so into that I couldnt believe when it ended, I wanted more !

I want them to exhume St Mark's body and carbon date it. Wouldn't that be something?

wow yes, that certainly would but, whats the chances of that happening ? The Italians would view it as a whim and as they are extremely religious and protective it will be denied. Arguing over the Turin Shroud has taken years,

I think most suspect the relics are fake and would rather not know, but if it's older rather than younger than 2000 years you've got something worth the angst.