Reddit Reddit reviews The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts

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The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts
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1 Reddit comment about The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts:

u/OllieGarkey ยท 10 pointsr/Scotland

Here is an actual Pictish stone, reproduced for clarity. It's based on an actual pictish stone that has been significantly weathered by time.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/HiltonofCadboll01.JPG

There's a big difference between the vaguely Celtic, but cool, symbols on your Ankh-Cross (which again, I think is neat) and the symbols on that Pictish stone.

As for the meanings of the pictish stone symbols?

We haven't a fucking clue. We have a lot of guesses, but being that the Gaels of the Highlands are almost completely lost to history, their predecessors the Picts are one of the least-known people.

Now, there has been a lot of really, really cool Scholarship lately.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Discovery-Middle-Earth-Mapping/dp/039308163X <- The Discovery of Middle Earth points out a lot of the geometric logic the celts used, and points out a lot of lost history. And argues that it may be that the old celtic scrollwork has actual geometric or mathematical meaning.

I'm not sure if that's true, but it's a fascinating hypothesis.

There is a lot to be learned, but unfortunately, the archaeology has in general been either poorly done many years ago or very poorly funded and done recently as a labor of love.

And so there's much that we really don't know. There's a lot just waiting to be learned.

But the recent scholarship on the Celts, in France and Germany and in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland has opened our eyes to a number of facts that we didn't know before.

A sampling:

  1. The Gauls were the richest people in Europe, which is why Julius Caesar invaded Gaul: he wanted their gold mines. Rome had run out of gold, and the only gold coins minted in western and southern Europe in the years just before Caesar's invasion bore names like Vercingetorix. It was only after his conquest of Gaul that the Romans started minting gold coins again.

  2. The Gauls were the original road builders in Europe, with most Roman roads being built over older, wooden Celtic trackways. Identical, pre-roman trackways have been found in Ireland and Germany, and almost all Roman Roads in Britain and France are built using Celtic celestial geography.

  3. Celtic Science, especially their use of astronomy and understanding of the calendar, was far more advanced than the Romans, and in some ways more advanced than the greeks. The Coligny calendar was the most accurate ancient calendar, and the best Lunar/Solar calender made probably until the advent of computers. It was extremely accurate, and also extremely complicated. But the Romans during Caesar's time were celebrating the fall harvest festival in the middle of August, so fucked was their calendar.

  4. The Romans were liars, thieves, and marauders. They were less advanced than every culture around them, the Greeks, the Celts, the Carthaginians, in nearly every capacity. Save one: Warfare. The Romans were not the bringers of civilization and reason, they were marauding barbarians who destroyed more advanced cultures, and plundered not just their wealth, but their ideas, as well.

    We've learned all of this in the last 10-30 years. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can learn in the next hundred.