Atlantis and the Silver City by Peter Daughtrey Read Free Book Online Page B

Eighteen will deal with this mysterious script and will agree with the opinions of a few other dedicated researchers that it is extraordinarily ancient and that Phoenician and Greek developed from it.
    Some historians believe that during the first millennium B.C. , the Conii were infused with a migration of Celtic people. The academically approved view is that they came from north of the Pyrenees. Principally pastoral people, these Celts were also skilled in working with metals. Exactly who the Celts were, however, is nowadays exciting conflicting theories. It seems there were two completely different groups, both called Celts by historians. Hitherto, the classic textbook claim has been that they originated in the Hallstatt region of Austria and migrated from there. Yet toward the end of the last century, research into blood groups generated a whimsical headline in a highbrow English national newspaper …“Taffy Gaddafi.” “Taffy” is,of course, the nickname given by English people to the Welsh, indisputably a proud Celtic nation. The research proved that their principal blood group was of Middle Eastern origin. Unlikely as that may seem, ancient tradition in south Wales and England claims that the Welsh ancestors were Trojans (of wooden horse fame). As they fled from persecution in Troy under their leader, Brutus, southern Portugal would have been on their route as their boats hugged the coast all the way up to Brittany in France and, eventually, to Britain. Anyone interested in exploring their story further should read the excellent book The Holy Kingdom by Adrian Gilbert, Alan Wilson, and Baram Blackett. 21 As my research developed, it became apparent that the Conii and the Celts may well have been one and the same—originating in southwest Iberia and migrating in several directions from there. See Chapter Seventeen and the latest research from the University of Wales.
    The so-called Celts who it is thought migrated down from Hallstatt principally occupied the central area of Portugal and Spain, around the Guadiana River but well north of the Algarve.
    Apart from the alphabet, other research threw up yet more startling information. I referred earlier to the mining wealth exploited by the Romans; but they were not the first to do so. It may surprise readers to learn that southern Iberia was the largest producer of metals in the Western world during at least the last three millennia B.C. Much copper, as well as silver and gold, was mined in southern Portugal, but the real El Dorado was over the current border in the Spanish Sierra Morena mountain range north of Huelva, a large Spanish port. There, the Rio Tinto mines alone produced slag heaps comprising many millions of tons. 22 Even the Romans were taken aback by the obscene wealth that awaited them there.
    Accepted history has it that this metal trade had first been exploited by the Semitic Phoenicians from the eastern Mediterranean, who exchanged it for goods with the locals, then traded it back into the Mediterranean. They were followed by the Carthaginians, the last invaders before the Romans. So important was this trade to them that they imposed an embargo on any ship trying to muscle in by sailing out of the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar. They enforced this restriction by permanently stationing forty war galleys in the straits. Any passing sea traffic from another nation was unceremoniously rammed and sunk, no questions asked.
    The Carthaginians were more ambitious, ruthless, and cruel. They were the heirs to the Phoenicians, formed largely from the remnants of their broken and defeated state. Their ambitions went far beyond mere trade. They wanted to control the entire area and, with it, the metal production. They swept through the territory from Cádiz to Cape St. Vincent, cruelly wasting any cities that opposed them. Surviving nobility fled to the hills, while the hoi polloi were enslaved to work the mines. 23
    Contrary to contributing to my