King Arthur Ii & Prince Madoc's Voyage to America in Ad 562

Coming up in this half hour, Prince Madoc, King Arthur and Merlin. Did they once visit Kentuckiana in the 7th century? Let's talk about the first Europeans to come to America, we're not talking about Columbus 500 years ago, it's possible that Europeans were here in Kentuckiana in about the year 547 AD. I'd like introduce you to two gentlemen who are holding to that theory, first of all, Jim Michael of the Ancient Kentucky Historical Society and Alan Wilson of the Arthurian Foundation. Thank you both very much for coming in. Now, who wants tell the story about these ancient explorers; Jim would you like to start off? Jim Michael: Well basically you've got it right; 900 years before Columbus it appears there was vast migration, maybe 70,000, we've got 700 boats sailing, 10 manuscripts talk about it. We've got archaeological evidence. Host: What is the archaeological evidence? Jim Michael: OK that's slide number two. Host: What have we got here slide number one? Jim Michael: That's fine. That is the 'chunky stone' they call it, it's in the Museum at Lexington, it was found by an archaeologist, the head of the archaeologist department. You notice at the bottom of it, it's got an arrow on it. I sent this over to Alan Wilson and he sent back that 50 of them had been found at Troy. Alan Wilson: Well it's a relic found at Troy where the Welsh originally claim origin, it has on it an Awen sign (broad arrow), an Awen sign is the basis of the Welsh Coelbren alphabet and the alphabet it the root of it all. Host: and where was this stone found? Jim Michael: Hardin Village which is up by Portsmouth, Ohio. Host: How old is it? Jim Michael: 6th century probably. Host: Have they carbon dated it? Jim Michael: No, you can't carbon date stone. But it was found in in 1939 by William Webb the first head of the Archaeology department of the University of Kentucky. There's the Celtic cross, if you look closely there's a circle around the cross but more importantly it's got the three chevrons that the kings of Glamorgan, that was part of their shield, it goes all the way back in the Bible to the Ten Tribes. Host: Why don't you tell me about the kings of Glamorgan? Alan Wilson: It's one of best recorded history in Europe but it's a skeleton in the closet. It's never taught. You won't find it in the school curriculum. Host: Why not? Alan Wilson: It's possible that it offends the monarchy, the history has generally been structured around the monarch and promoting the monarchy in the UK and this is a little bit of a bed of thorns for them. Host: Now this is what I find fascinating; King Arthur who I thought was mythical, I didn't think he ever existed except in Walt Disney. You're saying that King Arthur's brother Prince Madoc died here in Clark County, Indiana and King Arthur very possibly visited Kentuckiana? Alan Wilson: Well the legend is English; the fact and the history is Welsh. So then you've got the light side and the dark side of the moon. It's almost an iron curtain between them and information doesn't seem to pass. You can find school books up to 1920 in Wales stating Arthur the son of King Meurig, the grandson of King Tewdrig being taught as fact. There's been a centralisation of history in the UK out of London to teach everybody the same story and there's stuff that doesn't to be said due to historical antagonisms and so on and they've thrown the baby out with the a bath water. It's as simple as that. Now there's a very clear record; the manuscripts we're talking about are of the greatest authenticity and antiquity. Many of the records written by a man called Taliesin who in his poetry says "I am Merlyn but men shall call me Taliesin" which means 'high intellect'. Host: So it's possible Merlin actually existed? Alan Wilson: The records are very clear they tell of a comet striking Britain in the mid-6th century; something like the terrible Tunguska explosion in Siberia in 1908. Host: Which maybe what caused 70,000 people to take to the ocean and come here to America. Alan Wilson: That's right. Host: Jim I want to ask you one last question. Is it possible that his is Camelot? America, Kentuckiana? Jim Michael: What a wonderful thought. We think we know where Camelot is over there (in South Wales). But to answer your question, we know Arthur was killed here and shipped out of here probably 14 miles north of the Falls. Host: The Falls of Ohio? Jim Michael: The Falls of the Ohio. We've got a stone that was set-up in his launching. He was mummified, wrapped and put in his golden armour wrapped in deer skin and taken back and hidden over there. Host: I'm sorry we've ran out of time here but you have more time tomorrow night to explain this at Jefferson Community College at 8pm in the Hartford Building. Also on October 27th at the university library and then on October 30th at the Oldham County High School auditorium. Jim Michael and Alan Wilson, thank you very much for stopping in this morning. Ladies and gentleman good evening and welcome to Jefferson Community College. This program tonight is sponsored by the humanities division and I would like to recognise somebody who's been very important in helping put this program together; Junior Ferguson. Junior would you stand. Let's give him a round of applause. The two people you are about to see tonight and the evidence you are about to see tonight perhaps will be just a bit startling. I know it was to me. I've got Glenda over here who is doing a research paper in my class on the mound builders and Glenda said to me 'oh by the way this weekend we're having a gathering and we're going to be talking about King Arthur in Kentucky and I smiled on the inside and outside and I thought probably as Glenda said later maybe Elvis would be there too. At any rate it was startling kind of news to me, I was certainly aware of the Prince Madoc tradition throughout Indiana and Kentucky because previously to that the only thing I ever learned from student, previous to that I had a student who did a research paper on Prince Madoc so I was familiar with that aspect. The evidence they showed made me do some flip-flops here and there and I think you're going to get a surprise or two tonight. We're going to start the program out tonight with Jim Michael who is president of the Ancient Kentucky Historical Association and Jim has been working on this project a few years and following him is going to be our guest from Cardiff, Wales, Alan Wilson and Alan Wilson although he doesn't look like he's old enough has been working on this more than 35 years. So would you give a nice welcome please to Jim Michael and George would you catch the lights over there? The Ancient Kentucky Historical Association is a chartered non-profit association, we've been in existence about six years and we've been looking at OOPArt's out-of-place artifacts, that's what the archaeologists call them, things that just don't fit but have never really been researched. We don't ask you this evening to believe anything that we're about to tell you but we do ask to research it for yourselves. Look at it, look at the information that we've uncovered and maybe it will make some sense one of these days. First of all these are the things that we found as we looked through the last 300 years of literature. There was some armour plating at the Falls of the Ohio that has a harp and mermaid and some letters on it that look Latin. There are forts and mounds, 10,000 mounds in the Ohio Valley. There were forts 20 or 30 recorded in 1820 up and down the river and around Kentucky. The Indians said we didn't make these. There are at least 20 very well documented stories of Welsh speaking Indians. Encounters where they spoke for months with these people and they spoke the British tongue. There are the stories of Melungeons, a strange group of people living in Hazard, Harlan and Sneedville, Tennessee that were white, had a British tongue and said they were Christians. Then there's the story of the Walam Olum which was a writing on sticks which was picked up by a Dr. Ward who turned it over to Rafinesque one of our first historians, and he and Eli Lilly of pharmaceutical manufacture fame published in 1833 the story of the Walam Olum. We have mummies in five different parts of Kentucky and they were all wrapped the same way in a cloth manufactured they thought from the bark of trees and then put into deer skin. We've researched those and we'll show you some of that tonight. Legends, everybody knew about a Prince Madoc, who's on everybody's tongue and then of course there is a strange writing that we found on rocks all around Kentucky. At first we didn't know there was any in Kentucky, now we do. This is John Filson's book and it was published back in 1784 and in the political year you should ask what did he know and when did he know it and he certainly had the Madoc tradition but he had the wrong family in that he had he wrong century. Then there was frequent stories about the Welsh speaking Indians and he even lists one here in Kentucky but he also talks about the Welsh speaking Indians retaining some of the ceremonies of Christian worship. Interesting. This is the first president of the Filson Club, Ruben Durrett and he published in 1908. Well we weren't interested in the 1900's because we were looking back at the 18 and 1700's. But this guy did a fantastic job at organising everything that we'd already been researching. Beautiful job of it and here it was all laid out for us; all the traditions of Madoc laid out, all the Welsh speaking Indian stories and this is just one of three pages. Then he talked a little bit about Atlantis and some of the other things in the first thirteen pages and the whole rest of the book is on the Welsh connection. One of the things he pointed out to us, which tells us exactly how Madoc got lost, is that there was a Richard Hakluyt who published in 1582 and he took work of Guytin Owen out of the abbey. Guytin Owen was a Welsh bard and the bards were the historians who did the recording and he wrote about the traditions of Madoc. Two years later another fellow named David Powel took Caradoc of Llancarfan's work out of an abbey and he published it two years later. He had all the traditions of Madoc but Ruben Durrett that Caradoc died in 1157 so the scenario of Madoc sailing 1170 just isn't on. Then when I talked to Alan Wilson in Wales I said hey we ought to look for this guy and he said OK we'll help you find him. He started looking and he found writing in 1130 about Madoc and someone in 1100 and he said, hey these guys have got the wrong Madoc and sure enough they did. Now had Ruben Durrett gone across the river or looked in the four ancient books of Wales he would have known about this. This is what he said, he said Taliesin was a Welsh bard in the 6th century and he says the Welsh bards had the traditions of Madoc and they did. If he'd gone to the book of Taliesin it says right there, Madoc was a son of Uther. Well that's a clue, Uther means 'amazing', 'wonderful' it's a title Uther Pendragon -- amazing commander-in-chief. So there's six of them, the question is which one was it? Now in his footnotes, he was this close, he said that the Archbishop of Canterbury in 'The History of the World' said that King Arthur had knowledge of America and a Prince of Wales found it first. He had it right on and this one in his footnotes. Here's an interesting thing we call it soft archaeological evidence because we can't really tag it definitely but this jug was found down along the Cumberland River but it's a three headed jug base and it was in the possession in 1820 of gentleman in Lexington, Kentucky. Nobody knew exactly what it was but certainly not American Indian. Up in Ohio another three headed stone was found; it has a head going this way, a head going this way and the face of an animal going the other way. Three different heads. There's some interesting looking things on the foreheads and it translates out in the Coelbren alphabet. The Coelbren alphabet we'll be talking about a little later is in fact the alphabet that was used by the Welsh speaking Indians. There's the translation. Back 200 and 300 BC there were three faces all over Europe, it was a pagan tradition they called it that came out of the Babylonian area where Alan Wilson is going to tell you these people came from. They were Chaldean. But there's the three headed jug and there's a three headed stone. In the church where King Arthur's father was buried King Meurig we took this picture of them sharing the eyes on three heads. This was ordered, a decree from Rome to destroy all these three heads all throughout Britain because they were thought to be pagan and they must have looked up and left this one there. Kind of neat. The important thing however is one of the those heads has on the very top of it, if you look up high, it has a broad arrow or a Awen sign, this is the sign of God. Anyway, unwritten silent word for God. It definitely belonged to these people. In Britain, a couple of blocks from Alan's house on one of the bridges we find this Awen sign, we find it on the churches, we find it on the prison jackets, we find it all over everything that is owned by the government, bayonets, you name it. It's interesting because here it is on what the archaeologists in Kentucky call a 'chunky stone' or a 'gaming stone'. So I sent this over to Alan and his partner and I said what do you make of this and he sent me back six more just like it from Troy where you'll find these people came from. But it isn't a 'chunky stone' or a 'gaming stone', it's a whorl and they used these to manufacture cloth, it's like a flywheel but you'll notice it has the Awen sign all over it. We started looking at Heinrich Schliemann's work who dug up Troy and the dates on these go back to 500 BC. Here's one down at the bottom here that I've enlarged to show you that they made the arrow with dots as well. So the 'chunky stone' that we have in Kentucky is rather hard evidence because there isn't anyone who could have faked this. I'm the first one who ever heard of it and they found it in 1938, the archaeologist found it, William Webb of the University of Kentucky. That's how the use the stone, as a whorl to manufacture cloth and of course the mummies that they found all over Kentucky had a woven cloth that was manufactured somehow. Now we think we possibly know how. Here's a Frenchman who came down from Manitoba, Canada and he found the Mandan Indians because he had heard there were Welsh speaking Indians and sure enough there were Welsh speaking Indians but isn't it interesting they wore a cross and they spoke the name Jesus and Mary, a little strange for Indians right. 1735. Now I mentioned William Webb he was professor and head of the archaeology department at the University of Kentucky; he found these strange things up the river up near where Portsmouth is today. It's called the Hardin Village site, it's on the Ohio River. This stone here, is drawn out here, you see there is a circle with a cross in it, we have a British looking cross here and we have the Awen sign in dots on the stone. Here's the actual piece and you'll notice the cross is entirely surrounded by the circle and that's the way it was back in the 4th and 5th centuries. In fact these are in graveyards over there and you'll see how the cross got away and came out beyond about 700 AD. Here's a 4th century, 5th century and 700 AD cross. So we kind of got a peg on when these people came. Here it is in a mound down in Georgia in a hand which is also a symbol we don't have time to go. This is a beautiful thing also found by Webb in 1939 at the Hardin Village site, again, a Celtic cross if you will. If you look closely there's a second ring here that goes all the way round, it's been chipped off. There are also four chevrons and there's an alphabet up here. A little strange for Indians to independently invent something like this on this continent. But when we looked at the family crests of all of the kings of Britain they are all of the twelve tribes. Amazing how this got into the culture of the British people. But you'll also see that the kings of Glamorgan were in fact chevrons. Then we find up the river some kind of amulet stone, we don't know exactly what it is but here you've got the three chevrons again, some going up, some going down. Here's another piece in the home of the sheriff, chief of police. There's an E and an A and I told you before that's their God, it's Ea, came to Earth in an egg half-fish and half-man. That's what was on it. They found armour plating at the Falls of Ohio, they said there was a harp and a mermaid. It wasn't a mermaid it was a fish god and it was the Chaldean god that came out and got into some of the Hebrew stuff. This is also in his collection, that is an A and that is an E, there's other letters on it, we didn't even see it until we photographed it and blew it up. Absolutely authentic because I'm the first one (in America) who knew about this (Coelbren) alphabet. This is also in the police chief's collection. We dropped this on the table at the British Museum and asked the archaeologist Dr. Young, "What does this look like to you? We're finding things like this over in Kentucky." So anyway here's what we find, this is Eastern Kentucky and if you go up the Ohio River you'll see up here, there was writing up here, the Celtic crosses and the letters we found here, at Charleston writing, writing at Brandenburg, the mummies found and at these three locations the mummies those mummies had cloth and deer skin wrappers. Writing found here and there's other writing all around this area. In Sneedville there were Melungeons, in Sneedville this whole valley area. Twenty-six miles away at Bat Creek there was some writing which you'll see in a little bit. This is what a Melungeon looks like and they were white. They'd tried to keep them from voting by telling them they were Indian or that they were black; couldn't do it. But they did say that they were Christian. This is a five factor blood study done by a Tennessee anthropologist in the spring of 1990 and you'll notice that the correlation in the blood factors with the Melungeons; Libya, Canary Islands, Portugal that's the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Cyprus, Spain, Wales is a close hit. But the American Indians appear to be the complete opposite blood factor, the Melungeons do not appear to be American Indian. Prehistoric Men of Kentucky written by Colonel Bennett Young in 1910 talks about a finding in 1776...(now that's three years before the first forts and cabins were built in Lexington)...finding some mummies in a cave. This was not reported by Constantine Rafinesque but Rafinesque, professor of Natural History and Botany at Transylvania College reported all the other mummies. In Scotland, in the archives of Scotland is this letter and it's from 1815 by a Dr. Mitchell written to the Earl of Buchan and he talks about these mummies found at two different locations and sure enough, we went back and compared this letter to the actual newspaper article and they were absolutely correct all the way. They did have deer skins wrapped around them, they did have a cloth, the skin looked like dried bacon. Up here, one of them had a fine linen shirt on. These are the mummies that came out of Kentucky this first is Short Cave which is about 8 miles out of Mammoth Cave. All those mummies are gone except for "Fawn Hoof", "Fawn Hoof" is in the Smithsonian Institute; we have a request working for a year now for DNA and for carbon dating on it. "Scudder's Mummy" oh here's a dead giveaway, one of the mummies that showed up in the literature in 1835, this was written by Josiah Priest and it says that the mummy down in Florida had an alphabet on it that looked exactly like the letters that he had seen in the British Isles. If he had followed this clue up it would have made all of our research redundant because here's the clue that would have given it all away. Again cloth manufactured from the bark of trees. This is "Scudder's Mummy" which went to Scudder's Museum and was burned up in P.T. Barnum's circus about 20 years later. It's gone but Rafinesque knew this. This is "Fawn Hoof's" skull, it's in the Smithsonian Institute, we did a cranial metric examination because American Indians had three plates, three sutures and three Inca bones they call them and those Inca bones differentiate all those people who came across the Baring Strait, Mongolian bloodline with the Caucasians. Well she didn't have those bones. We were looking particularly at the teeth would have large pulp chambers, all the Asian people have large pulp chambers but unfortunately the front teeth we're missing. They were on this mummy when she went up there because we've got the writing they were intact and in good shape. Anyway there she is, we hope to get carbon dating on her, there's enough tissue. This is a turn of the century photograph of her. She was named "Fawn Hoof" because of the little hooves that she had around her neck. Then we sent some of these messages over to Wales and hoping that if the Welsh speaking Indians had an alphabet we could identify some of the things that we found in Kentucky that had writing on them and Alan Wilson did that and Alan Wilson will now come up and talk. There's his book incidentally, we've got five or six copies. I started looking at the history of South East Wales about 35 years ago and the reason I started looking at it was because I didn't believe anything I was told in school. Thank you. Right I'll start again. I looked at the history of South East Wales and I started looking casually as a hobby, something to do on a winter weekend and so on because I didn't believe anything I'd ever been told about it in school. It's a neglected area, a neglected subject and I later found out it's a forbidden subject. One does not look into the history of South East Wales. It's very strange because it's the best recorded and the most detailed recorded in the whole of Europe and it's the best backed up by physical evidence and by that I mean Dark Age inscribed stones with people's names on, names of kings and princes and what they do; there are over 200 in Wales. Named battlefields with big grave mounds of the death, all the names around the place, ancient churches going back to the dawn of the Christian era, ancient castles and forts and a mass of records in different forms; lives of saints, genealogies of saints, the genealogies of the kings, the written histories, historical poetry, the Triads, everything is interlocking, the Charters of Llandaff cathedral going back to about the year 400 AD up to about 1100 AD, abbey charters and so on. The charters are important because king gives his charter to the church and all the princes and family line up as well and his brother the bishop or his son the bishop does the same so you've got a 'who's who?' down the centuries and everything seems to interlock and fit together. What seems to have happened is this; the British claim two places of origin, they claim a migration coming in from Assyria and the Assyrian migration is a very early one; it takes place around 1600 BC. If that is correct there is an Assyrian population moving into Britain at the dawn of the Bronze Age. The reason for moving into Britain is very clear; if you've got tin you can make bronze and bronze weapons are infinitely superior to copper weapons. So it seems to be militaristic. At the same time this invasion is said to take place a vast explosion took place in Britain of what they call the Wessex Culture. Marvellous metal working emerged everywhere; they find it in ancient tombs and mounds and god knows where and it no base or pedigree it seems to come out of the blue out of nowhere. The second migration takes place around 500 BC and it's said to come from Troy and the British have always claimed to be Trojans and this was happily accepted until the beginning of the 19th century. Some people in Oxford had bright ideas and they said hang about a minutes Troy is a fiction, it never exited other than in the mind of Homer and if Troy is a complete fiction then the history of a people who claim to be descended from Troy is also a fiction. So you have to get rid of this history and throw it out and an onslaught developed on this history; people trying to gain reputations started saying I have disproved this manuscript and I have disproved that manuscript. Of course they hadn't disproved anything. What they're really inviting us to believe is that for 1200 years several thousand writers; bards monks, historians, all combined together over 1200 years spread over about 30,000 square miles of territory to produce a vast interlocking totally credible forgery which would fill a library, and does...and they backed this forgery up with skeletons in stone coffins with inscribed tombstones that are known to be 1500, even 1700 in some cases, years old. They back it up with battlefields, with graves with thousands of dead in, etc. In other words, something has gone wrong. So my colleague and I finally decided we'd look into this properly and in some detail. Well the way to go about it, we decided, was to see if we could track back on the migration stories. Now there is in South Wales an ancient alphabet known as the Coelbren and generally it was written on wood, they made a wooden frame, put triangular slats of wood across and they cut into the strips of wood with a little axe or a knife. So obviously the entire alphabet is a straight stroke alphabet, can't have any curves. It had the advantage that even if your site was going or you were in the dark you could read it, just like braille. When they threw the general history out said all this history is a big forgery, they also decided that the Coelbren alphabet was a big forgery so out of the window went the alphabet or the theory of the alphabet. The idea developed that it had been invented around the year 1800 which is remarkable really because there are books of 1580 and earlier and 1520 exhibiting the Coelbren alphabet. I can assure you the proof is enormous. So what are doing is something against the trend of academia, the academics are going in one direction and we are going in the other. We found that there are Coelbren inscribed stones in Wales, in England, dug up in London. They are in the north of England, in Scotland and all over the place. We decided to try the Welsh alphabet and a man named Llywelyn Siôn had preserved the cypher for the alphabet in 1560 then we would know which sign was A, B, C, D, E. Therefore if we had an inscription all we had to do was look at the sign, place the appropriate letter underneath and if we went along the inscription we should come out with a word and this is what happened and so we had Welsh words and if you're an English person all you have to do is look up the up the word in the dictionary, if you've got an English-Welsh dictionary which is easy to acquire and lo and behold you can read what's on the stone. Some of the first we did, one was of a stone known to have been erected around 950 and it said 'Hywel Rex'. Well is Hywel Rex in all the manuscripts is Hywel Rex and Hywel the Good who died in 948 and his grave mound is about three miles from this stone and his court is about six miles, what's left of his court, is Upper Court Farm and Lower Court Farm. We found another one that had a floral cross on the top, the figure of a man below carrying a sword in one hand, a sceptre in the other and the inscription below. It said "Gorddwfyn the Exile". We looked up the records Gorddwfyn the Exile is there and it says in the records Gorddwfyn was a turbulent, mad and wild king for which reason he was deposed and exiled and his brother Rhrun placed in instead. Now this proved to be the pattern right around Britain, everywhere we looked we found a stone; we could read it and it always had some correct historical reliability. So we were encouraged to think we were now on to something of a winner. We then found there are books in the Welsh National Library wholly written in Coelbren. Some of them are 6th century poems and so on. So the idea the alphabet was a forgery was going rapidly out of the window. What we then decided to do was to check back on the migration legends. The migration legend, the second one that we took started here and the people journeyed around here and they actually stopped off in Spain to pick up three groups of their countrymen and then went over to the UK. We also noted that coming out of here, Troy, about 100 years before this the Etruscans had moved out of the area and they'd moved into Italy and started the Etruscan Empire. So it seemed to us possible that we had an alphabet in Britain, possibly here, probably here and here because if these people moved it's highly likely that they took the language with them and their alphabet with them and we also knew that Pliny the Elder had said that the Rhaetians up in Switzerland were Etruscans who'd moved north. What we then found was that there are a mass of inscriptions here, there are a massive array of inscriptions here, some up here and quite a few over here and they all appear to be in the same alphabet. Well somebody had anticipated this, a man named John Williams of Oxford in 1846 had said isn't it strange that we find this Coelbren Welsh alphabet all over Etruria, the Etruscan Empire and all over Phrygia in Turkey. Of course he didn't say it too loudly when he published it because again, he's swimming against the tide. Everybody's saying this history is all forged, it's no good, don't look at it and he's looking at it. So we began to try and translate the Etruscan inscriptions in Etruria and logically we started off with bronze mirrors that only had one or two words on them. There was no problem there, they were reading out. There was one of a fellow leaning over an alter cutting something up and it says 'sacrifice', things like that. So we started looking at longer things such as inscriptions on jugs and wine jars, on a statue with a gladiator looking awfully sad with his amour broken up and a goddess has got her arm round him and it says how he's fallen down and he's passed over which is the traditional word for dying and he's seeking refuse and comfort from the Goddess. So we knew we could read Etruscan. We tackled the largest inscriptions we could find from Etruria, one is the Cippus Perusinus that has 46 lines of writing, another one is the Pyrgi Tablets -- three gold tablets, one in Carthaginian and two are in Etruscan, they were found in the port of Caere near Rome and they told a credible story. They tell of a league partly between Carthage and Etruria and what had happened was, when Cyrus the Emperor of Persia around 546 BC he sent his general Harpagus along the coast here and Harpagus's job was to clean up all of the Greek cities and most of them submitted and he went to the Phocaeans and said knock down one tower and your wall, give us one house in the city for the emperor and everything will be alright. They said give us 24 hours to think it over so he said fine, next morning he came along with his army and he found the entire town had taken to their ships with all their women and children and everything they could carry and had gone away. The Phocaeans sailed away, tried to get land here, couldn't get it so they came round to Sardinia and they thought it would be a very good idea to set up as pirates. So they set up as pirates and they preyed upon the Etruscan fleets and the Carthaginian fleets - the merchant fleet. So a league was formed between Carthage and Etruria to provide 60 ships each to track down these Phocaeans and destroy them which they did. So the Phocaeans were driven out of there and finished up in Sicily. But that's what these tablets tell you in Welsh Coelbren. I'm calling it Welsh because it's probably Khumric. We tackled the Agnone Tablet which told of the origin of these people; how they'd come to be in Etruria. I'll tell you that later. We were fairly confident we could deal with this. We tackled a few Rhaetian inscriptions and they read out as well, no problem. So we then moved further back in time and we got over to Turkey and tackled some of the inscriptions there. Primarily the longest one we could get our hands on was the inscription over the supposed tomb of Midas and that turns out to translate perfectly, logically, very well, using the same technique, reading in the same language. So what we've got is a language coming from the East to the West, dying out in the East, dying out in Etruria which is known to have died out there and if you read Pliny the Elder and others they will tell you how Etruscan is totally different from Latin, there's no comparison and it's totally different from Greek. So it died out in the Mediterranean areas but it's been preserved in Wales. Which is the situation we have. This is the background then against which we were working when we were approached by Jim Michael and he asked us for assistance and he said do you know what this alphabet might be and we said yes sure, we know what it is. So while he's pressurizing us to look West we're saying go away, we're going East, we're going backwards and we got a lot further, we got back to about 2000 BC and all of it seems to fit in with the known histories. When we were approached by Jim Michael we supplied him with a little bit of information. Now what we've found in the histories of Wales is what was taught in the schools until about 1920-1922. All the children in Wales were taught Arthur son of King Meurig, grandson of King Tewdrig, great-grandson of King Teithfallt etc, where they lived, where they were all buried. All this was going on. Now there was a centralisation gradually of education in Wales starting about 1860 onwards which culminated in the 1920's when everybody had to be taught the same thing. I don't know whether the English government were motivated by the Irish rising of 1916 and 1922 which frightened them but history is a powerful weapon. It's a powerful political tool and there are no textbooks in Wales to teach children Welsh history at this moment. There aren't any. No child is taught any Welsh history other than what the teacher might know. So they learn all about William the Conqueror in England and the Magna Carta but none of their own history. So we told what we thought would start him off. If you read the Life of Brendan it starts off 'and Brendan heard of the voyage of the teyrn' which means Brendan heard of the voyage of the monarch. Brendan also wished to visit the great lands across the ocean and they said to Brendan you will not get there in a boat made of skins, you must go to the men who make ships of timber, so he did and they agreed to make him a ship of wood and some of the men who made the ship agreed to sail with him to show him the way. Well if they're going to show him the way, you've got to ask yourself the question and you've got to ask who was the monarch at the time? Well if you're talking about a British monarch then you're talking about Arthur II son of King Meurig, grandson of King Tewdrig. Taliesin ap Henwg is well known to be head bard of the court of Arthur II. Taliesin means 'high intellect' and Henwg was a saint if Gwent, there's two churches of Henwg still surviving there. Henwg advised the author of the Life of St. Samson how to write it around the year 600 AD. Samson being a nephew of Arthur II. What we didn't know is that there was haziness about Madoc because we had stopped our studies around the year 1100 AD because we said look we're going backwards in time not forwards in time. We're doing a little bit like what Alex Haley did in his route. We didn't want to go forwards we wanted to go backwards. Our assumption was that Madoc had been correctly dated around 1170 AD. There was so much written about him by so many people you would anticipate they'd done their homework. Well it's a problem because we knew in 1983 that Arthur had sailed West on the Western Ocean around 574 AD; we knew that because the evidence is monumental, there's not once source there's dozens. So we had this Madoc effort. So we said send us some information, so we were sent a book by a gentleman in America on Madoc and we looked at it in an effort to trace Madoc and we threw up our hands in dismay and thought this is ridiculous, what do we do? The only think we could think to do was to go back to squared one and start from scratch with it which is almost what happened. There were wild statements; 'nobody knows where Ely is? Wow. It's a big district in Cardiff, 60,000 people live there. Nobody knows who William le Fleming was? Wow. He was the high sheriff of Cardiff and so on and we said this is absurd we've got to get back to square one. So we really began to look at Madoc again just a couple of years ago and we found that he's harder to miss then he is to find and that's not an exaggeration. What had happened in the middle of the 6th century in Britain is one of the best recorded events in history, again multiple sources, at least a dozen Lives of Saints. It's in the histories. A great comet or other body from outer space struck Britain. It devastated the entire country right across the south of Britain and appears to have affected parts of Ireland. It may be the reason the Scots moved out Northern Ireland, crossed over and went to the west of Scotland. They were originally in Ireland and that's what they did at that time. The records are very clear that most of the country had to be evacuated, people fled to the south western tip of Britain to Cornwall, they fled to Ireland and they fled to their kingdom in Brittany and Ludow which later became Normandy. Huge areas could not be lived in for 7 and sometimes 11 years. This is probably the origin of the romance stories of the Arthurian knights entering the great wastelands which you'll find peppered all over the romance tales. What has happened is that independent of us, fortunately, Oxford University astrophysics department and Professor Dr. Victor Clube has come to the same conclusion that a comet struck Britain in the middle of the 6th century. Case names everywhere indicates that it did. So we've got records in the Lives of the Saints, we've got them in the Triads, we've got them in the histories, we've got it in the ancient poetry, we've got it everywhere. Comet strikes Britain. It seems to have had a similar effect to the disasters in Egypt at the time of Moses. The birds died, the animals died, that's the farm animals the wilds animals, the reptiles died, the fish in the rivers died, people died, the plants died, nothing lived. All the buildings were shaken to their foundations, the roofs fell in. This is probably why all the Roman cities and towns in Britain were totally ruined, whereas they survived in some cases in very good state in France and Italy and North Africa. But they were shaken to pieces in Britain. It must have been awesome and Oxford University estimate the blast to be something like 100 Hiroshima atom bombs. This is what happened. When it happened Madoc, Madoc Morfran is the fleet admiral and is at sea and he gets blasted out by the huge tornados and waves and wind and he doesn't know where he is. He comes back after 10 years when a lot of people have begun returning to the country including the king as the king had taken the army out of the country and planted it in Ludow, later Normandy. He took the army with him because he knew he might have to fight his way back in. Madoc comes back after 10 years and they say, 'where have you been?' because you can't stay at sea for 10 years, the ship will fall apart and you can't live. So he promptly told them of this wonderful, huge, vast land he'd been in where hardly anybody lived. It's says quite clearly in one record he was ridiculed because they couldn't follow his star directions. They used the stars as all people did throughout the ages for navigation. So they sent out an admiral named Gwenon, all I'm doing is telling you what's in the records and Gwenon came back and said he's right it's there. So now they hold a big counsel and the king calls all the government in and they decide what to do and they decide this is an act of God, because their country was destroyed, God has shown they another country. That's what it says and there's one long poem between Arthur son of Uthyr (King Meurig), and Lliwlod son of Madoc son of Uthyr, so this makes Arthur and Madoc both sons of Uthyr and therefore brothers so that makes Lliwlod Arthur's nephew. Interesting because Lliwlod means 'coloured man', it doesn't mean black man it means brown man. I find that astonishing. The poem goes on for about 40 verses where first Arthur asks questions and the other guy answers him and the king can't understand how there is such as vast country with nobody guarding it, no coast, no kings protecting their rights? Are they Christians? Do they have cities? You know, question and answer. He finally decides that he will sail for this country. We have so far located four ancient records and a further six medieval records of the fleet. He assembled 700 ships in Milford Haven, that's in the west of Wales and they sailed the Western Ocean for this country. So it was three voyages, first, Madoc by accident, checked out by the admiral and then the king sails with Madoc and others and they also brought a man named Ammwn Ddu with him who was the king's brother-in-law. The tale goes on of how the king was in America, or we assume it is America, for four years before being assassinated by a naked savage and I find that very difficult to place in Western Europe. The lady of the court wrapped the kings body in leather, deer skins, three of them, they place his amour on him so people would recognise him because they dry weather him which is a form of mummification. They place him in a boat and seven men begin a celebrated voyage which has been enumerated time and time again and this celebrated voyage brings him back. Well we already knew the other end of the voyage because we had several records, very, very clear ones in great detail of a ship arriving at the mouth of the mouth of the Ewenny River in South Wales with a body in a leather bag and they put it in a boat and take it down the river to St. Illtyd who is a first cousin of the this King Arthur. He takes it to a cave they put the body in the cave. If you go into that cave which is still there, obviously, there is a pit running east and west inside and it's about 11 feet long, very squared off, about 3 ½ feet wide and 3 ½ feet deep, man-made in granite and you wouldn't do that much work for a peasant. Later they take him out of the cave and they bury him on a hill nearby in a church and the church is easily identifiable from many records. So it's a rather odd circumstance; 'where did the ship come from?' has bothered everybody for centuries. We already knew something about this because everybody had spotted this "They know not the brindled ox, thick his head-band. Seven score knobs in his collar." They are describing a brown ox with a mane which in my opinion can only be the American buffalo. Here are the seven men. "And when we went with Arthur of anxious memory, except seven, none returned from Caer Vandwy." This famous poem is called the 'Preiddeu Annwn' which means 'The voyage to the other world' and they constantly alluded to the other world. Medieval people could understand all this and they thought the 'other world' was a mystic fairyland in what they call the Celtic imagination. Bit odd because we've already seen that the Welsh weren't Celts they were Chaldeans and they've never claimed to be Celts. But when they decided in England in the early 1800's to get rid of Welsh history because they were Trojans and Troy hadn't existed, of course later on Heinrich Schliemann found Troy and things took an about turn but of course nobody bothered to reverse the decision. So they had to give a label to them so they stuck Celts round their neck. To help you get the picture, I've drawn this little chart for you. You can see Arthur's in black, he's the son of Magnus Maximus, 383 Magnus was in Britain, married Helen, his second wife, daughter of King Euddaf. Magnus Maximus invaded France in 383 it's a well-known history. His chief general was known to the Romans as Andragathius but he's Arthur, Arthur I. He seized Paris under Lady St Genevieve, fought a big battle with the Emperor Gratian 12 miles south of Paris in 383, defeated Gratian, chased him down to Lyons, said to Gratian 'let's call it a day, let's have a banquet', Gratian comes to the banquet and Arthur cuts him in half with an axe. Magnus then becomes emperor of the West, Spain, all of North Africa, fights their way through Switzerland, down into Italy; that's why there is a carving of Arthur in Modena Cathedral showing all the character engaged in this expedition of 383. Down through Italy they go, another carving of Arthur, a mosaic in Taranto in a cathedral there, crosses over into the Balkans in Greece and he fights two big battles with the emperor Theodosius of Constantinople in 388. So you've got a real life Arthur doing the things the mediaeval records say, fighting the Romans. The problem in later times was people said, 'How can Arthur fight the Romans and fight the Saxons he's 250 years old? This is ridiculous.' But it's not, he's two people. They welded Arthur I with Arthur II who fights the Angles and Saxons and by welding them together they caused the problem. Once you read the Welsh records you sort them out with ease and they're not a problem and they both figure quite prominently and correctly in the histories. I've put this one in because when in about 920 a fellow named Owain son of Hywel Dda, Hywel the Good who I mentioned before his names in Coelbren on a tomb stone from 948. Prince Owain was getting married so they drew up all the necessary king lists to prove all his ancestry and pedigree for the marriage to all the other kings. The list of the kings of the West Midlands contains at the bottom tell you a very interesting statement, it actually tells you where Glastonbury is in Lichfield which is a shaker because it means Glastonbury is 200 miles from where people think it is. Glaston in Cornish and Breton means 'oak trees' and also Glastennen means 'the scarlet oak'. There's a long pedigree to this but people have been looking in the wrong place because Glastonbury Abbey in South Somerset wasn't founded until 942 AD. It does tell you perhaps what's been going on and how a bit of mayhem has been going on with the histories. What we've got basically here is; Madoc is at sea about 562 and Gregory of Tours tells how the two great islands in the ocean, Gregory of Tours was in France, a French nobleman and Bishop, he writes the History of the Franks, he's alive at the time. These histories still exist in great detail. He mentions how the two great islands in the ocean were smashed to pieces, set on fire from end to end and people had to flee from them. So we've got a contemporary reference from another source outside the UK. Madoc's at sea, comet strikes Britain OK? 572 ten years later Madoc returns to Britain, 573 the admiral verifies it and 574 the king sails to the other world. It's what the Spanish called the "New World"; they called it the "Other World". The king is killed and mummified in 578, he's returned in 579 and put in an unmarked tomb but it's well described in the Songs of the Graves, it's in great detail, they name the field. In 580 Merlyn who is Taliesin, several references to Merlyn. "I am Taliesin (Taliesin" which means 'high intellect') He also says "I am Merlyn but men shall call me Taliesin". Merlyn actually means 'little horse'. These people are Gnostic Christians and 'little horse' is the sort of power appointed by God to control benignly the world with intelligence and enlightenment. So what he is saying is I am Merlyn and I am enlightened and men shall can me Taliesin meaning 'high intellect'. The king is later buried out of the cave into St. Peter's Church on Caer Caradoc and it's well known there are 168 histories in England that say that he's buried at Caer Caradoc and all you've got to do is find Caer Caradoc it's not hard. Most of the writing in Coelbren was done on sticks, they didn't often write on stone but fortunately for us they did enough of it for us to prove it and check it out. There's one stone in London dug up in St. Paul's cathedral churchyard and Arthur is always associated in the romance stories with stones in St. Paul's cathedral churchyard and that stone tells how the country is in a terrible rotten and decayed state and it also says that the king intends to take a voyage and it ties in with the prophecies of, the prophecies of toward that which is beyond which they constantly called this place and on that stone there are clear messages which tie in and there is a carving which clearly indicates the great dragon that they identified with the comet. The interesting thing is that tracing things backwards, we got back as you remember from Britain to Etruria back to the Turkish area, these people were coming through Asia Minor, Turkey and the same time another group or rather the same group were coming though known as the Kimmeroi and in Herodotus they are the Kimmerains. Herodotus was writing histories from 460 BC. Apparently these are the people who were planted in Northern Assyria by the kings of Assyria and in the various libraries of emperors of Assyria that were dug up by Leonard Woolley the archaeologist they are mentioned well they're not just mentioned they're described as the Khumry. The Khumry took off (if you read the second Book of Esdras) and they move westwards apparently when the mayhem was going on in the Assyrian Empire with the *** of the emperor by two of his sons and they moved westwards, crossed the Euphrates and into Asia Minor. So there's our trace of the Khumry becoming the Kimmeroi or Kimmerians moving into this Trojan area around 650 BC. It's a very strange thing but the Welsh are not the Welsh -- that's an English word which means 'strangers' in High German. They called themselves the Khumry. No different. And their language traces all the way back. Another strange thing in the Bible there are a dozen or more references, there are one or two at the bottom of this page here from Ezekiel and from Numbers and it says "son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph." The other one says "take of every one of them a rod...write thou every man's name upon his rod." Now we all remember how Aaron throws down his rod and it conquers the two rods of the Egyptian priests. They used to write on sticks too. So this writing on sticks is recorded, the Hittites used to do it. This was drawn up for Welsh school children in the 1800's by a couple teachers and you can see at the bottom there is the Coelbren alphabet or a version of it and you've also got above it Ogam and at the very top there is the Awen sign from which all these letters are derived and Jim Michael's told about that how it appears on everything, everywhere. In Britain it's on every government office, tax offices, department of agriculture offices, any jail they build, every army place and military piece of equipment. It's a state cypher and it's on state documents signed by the king as far back as 1250, probably earlier. It's a state sign. Here's a stone from Grave Creek Mound. The interesting thing is that it's obviously in the Coelbren alphabet, there's no mistake and then you have the Christian cross at the bottom. That's the most significant feature of it and the statement ties up very well; readable Welsh. That the alphabet as preserved by John Williams and by Llywelyn Siôn. Llywelyn Siôn in 1560 and John Williams published it in 1846. John William said "It is not a little remarkable, that the above comprise, with four or five exceptions, all the old Etruscan or Pelasgic (he really means Phrygian) letters which were probably but little different from the Greek characters used in the time of Caesar." When Julius Caesar landed in the UK, he wrote his 'wars' as he went along so he can extol himself, he said the British letters are very similar to the Greek. Ammianus Marcellinus another Roman writer said that the Greeks got their letters from the British. Then of course is the ancient story of Abaris the druid going to Greece around the year 650 BC and teaching the Greeks. You never know. This is published in 1906 by a lady and she exhibits variants of these alphabets as they were being mutilated a little because they were mixing it with Latin in the Dark Ages. This is an inscription from an overhang which I think is known as the 'Pig Pen' in Kentucky where a guy keeps pigs under this overhang, it's not quite a cave. You can see an Awen sign, you can see a tomb mound and you can see an inscription which is part of a larger inscription. Again more of that inscription from the 'Pig Pen', we have deciphered and translated the entire thing no problem. That another Coelbren inscription in America, this is a covenant inscription, it actually says, I'll translate it for you "Towards strength, to divide the land, we are spread over purely, justly between our offspring in wisdom." So in order to be strong we will stay united and we will divide the land between each other and we will see that our offspring get fair shares. What would you call it? A bill of rights? I don't know, maybe a declaration of independence. It's a constitution. This is a stone which was found under the head of a man who was clearly a very important man, a very large grave mound at Bat Creek. He had some bracelets which I believe not to be of American provenance because they are smelted metal and therefore copper and other alloy metal bracelets which apparently are of European smelting style. He did apparently have some wooden plugs with him, circular plugs which have been carbon dated to the 6th century and I can remember getting a letter from Jim Michael, sitting down with my colleague and we thought what is he going to say this time? We sat down and looked at it and deciphered it. We had photographs sent to us and we said he's got it upside down, we turned it the other way round and we could read it. It actually says "The ruler Madoc he is" or words to that effect. So it would appear that the man in this mound was named Madoc. Clearly an important man from the size of the mound so I'm told with the bits and pieces with it. Big tall man, bigger than the average Indian, about 6ft which you'd expect. That's a photo of Jim Michael holding the Bat Creek stone. There it is again. "Madoc the ruler he is" is how it actually translates. Here's another stone. I'm not sure how to say this, it's difficult to go with Welsh syntax, an Englishman will say 'you're a clever lad' and a Welshman will say 'there is a clever lad you are' the syntax is backwards speak it's all over the place it's not the same syntax as we would use in English. It says "Pure and fresh, sure and certain the great flood to render a straight" They're going through a straight on a narrow confined pass of water and they're heading for the Atlantic with Uther -- Uther actually mean 'wonderful'. These are just some lines of a very, very long poem of several hundred lines by Taliesin. It's means adofwynen 'I went for a while' Taliesin. So he went for a while and came back and it says repetitively through the poem 'brought back' meaning they're bringing somebody back, "through fog and mist the chief wolf of heaven. Arthur is frequently alluded to as 'chief wolf. "In a time to gather harvests" we know roughly when he's due in, "brought back on fair passage through the seas, brought back from Annwvn" and they're always referring to this distant place across the western ocean as Annwvn. To the Churchyard, he was brought to the Ewenny estuary in Glamorgan, "brought back the knight upon golden armour bearing". Three accounts say he's got his golden amour on, one account also says he has a gold face mask. "brought back in mind and thought to the tolement. So they brought him back perhaps to settle the succession to the throne. If they didn't bring him back there could be mayhem about who's going to be king. "Brought back in a leather bag, brought back in summer, brought back to a solitary spot in deer skin salved or embalmed and then they say brought back applied with salve, they embalmed him, brought back as a fish in the bottom of a boat". Now this gives you a little flavour of it, we can't obviously read the whole poem because these poems run into hundreds of lines and go into fantastic detail but it gives you an idea of what's going on. So what we've got is a bit of final proof as Jim would call it. If you've got any questions we'd be very, very happy to try and answer them. So what you've got is Welsh speaking Indians, the Walam Olum is their record, Guallam Olam in Welsh means the "Organization of Everyone." You've got the Melungeons with blood factors. The Melungeons used a lap harp, identical instrument in Wales called the crwth. Metalurgy, forensic dating of a 5th century manuscript, a mass of them not one or two, a mass of them, it was a celebrated event. We've inscriptions that have been deciphered. We hope to get DNA. What we're going to try and do is get some of the family over there, get a bit of bone or a bit of something, DNA it, we've got a university willing to do it and if we can get some items over here, if we can get this jaw bone of Madoc which is in the Smithsonian a DNA test will link them up and end the argument end of story. If you have any questions we'll do our best, because we've covered awful lot of ground, it's a massive subject and we know we can't really tell you everything. Jim Michael: We found them all the way out in Oklahoma there were 70,000 of these people so they could of gone everywhere, 700 boats and each one hold 100-120, they could have had 70,000 and of course they've got animals and other things too. It's tagged to the Bat Creek stone we've got Madoc's name on the Bat Creek stone, unfortunately three years ago when I went up there they said they had it and when I got there, the secretary of the Ancient Kentucky Historical Association set me up with an interview with the archaeologist and he said gee we've lost it, but they've got something like 40,000 bones tagged in the Smithsonian, I don't think they know what they've got but we've been consistently asking, we've got a work order ready, we have a laboratory standing by to do the DNA and the carbon dating on the mummy, we're not getting very far they seem to be a little closed minded up there but they do want to prove that it's not an American Indian. We've got that going for us because there's a pressure on to bury all the bones that are up there. The Bat Creek was found in Loudon County, Tennessee and there are several Mounds there and it was dug by archaeologists in 1886 and all that stuff was taken to the Smithsonian and it's sat there in a draw for years and that's where we found that stone that they've got said comet for the Hebrews and all that kind of stuff. The letters look a little like Hebrew but they are Coelbren. A stone with an inscription on it this long that the archaeologists looked at in the 50's and said it was made by natural causes but every scratch on it went in the same depth, it's in a straight line, equally spaced and the god damn thing translates, it's a little hard to defend that it isn't writing. Unfortunately there's no funding for this kind of work, if there were we'd be right on it, absolutely they were Welsh, they were British no question about it, we found all the thing around that area are British, the forts, the mounds, the whole thing, these people buried their kings. Let me tell you about the Serpent Mound, there's a couple in Kentcky, there's four in Ohio and in West Virginia. We met a feller down there where we were presenting a couple of weeks ago, or last week down in Columbus Georgia and showed us all these pictures of these snake mounds and that the only place in the world they found them and he's going "what's going on, on this continent man?" few centuries back they were all over the place in the British Isles, don't they that Patrick was a Welsh monk who in 434 went up into Ireland to rid Ireland of the snakes, it's all in the legends. There are snakes all over Ireland but not stone snakes and he lit his fire in them and when the snake worshippers came it had been desecrated and he rid Ireland of stone snakes. We have a hunch that their measurements were just as accurate as ours, their days and their times and their clocks, very accurate. They knew this comet may be coming back, 2029, 2015 Victor Clube is pretty close to that, it's a recurring thing that could wipe out the continent which is a little scary, hope we've got that space telescope up there to see it far enough in advance and use some of those nuclear weapons that they stockpiled in Russia to divert it because it's coming and those ancient knew it. The comet was symbolised by the dragon, all over the old stones that we find. Mind boggling. We don't ask you to believe this, we ask you to look at it. Charlestown, Indiana, that's the stone that had Uther's name on it and what he didn't tell you was that at the top of it is shows a picture of a boat and it has a square box in the boat. Amazing. He had to go through a straight, the Fall of Ohio is a 20ft drop. Alan Wilson: In Welsh there's a lot of duplicate words, môr means the sea but môr means multitude and then you've got gŵydd means goose but then you've got gŵydd means cognition, recognition, presence. There's many of these dual words and we found that when we were looking further back about 2000 BC in the east these things came into play with hieroglyphic signs and so therefore the word dwy means 'two' but dwy also means 'ruler' so when you see 'two' you can often infer 'the ruler' and that picture actually reads 'around about, one went mutually together with the ruler to pass through' mutually together and there's a boat with a box in it so whether it infers to body in a box I don't know. But that's what Jim is getting at but that's what it actually said. Jim Michael: Yes Madoc's buried here, Arthur's buried back there because they took him back. He may have been dead but they took two of his sons back. Alan Wilson: Yes there were other sons and there were other brothers of Arthur. He had a brother Paul (King Poulentius), a brother Idnerth who was murdered and a brother Frioc who was Rioc in the Life of St. Finnian who was going to marry the daughter of the king of the Picts. So there were other people flying around who were in the picture. Also there were sons around, Morgan, Ethale so there were other people in the frame as well and Madoc was probably better off with a bigger country of his own. He had apparently one son named which means 'the glittering one' who was murdered. There seems to have been a lot of mayhem going on at the time over the throne. There's some confusion over whether Morgan and Ethale who then rule are sons of Arthur but other records clearly indicate they are sons of Madoc. The problem is the Welsh word 'ap' which means 'son of' but they also used it for 'successor to' so if a brother succeeds a brother on the throne they'd say Hywel ap Ieuaf but they're actually brothers but Hywel ap Ieuaf could be 'son of' and it does cause some confusion and it's taken a lot weeding out but it's highly likely that Morgan which means 'begotten overseas' is the son of Madoc. Jim Michael: Yes we're doing DNA from a son to a father or a grandfather or brother which ever we can get to. They're establishing parental responsibilities now in the courts from fathers to sons and assigning parentage; all we're doing is a 1500 year old paternity suit. But once we've got that, there's going to be a lot of people throwing stone at us because they're going to oh that can't be. They'll say I don't believe there was a real Madoc. No, he's a real man and we found him in 1989 and we knew where he was but we just can't get to him. Alan Wilson: This Madoc is clearly a very important man in the 6th century, a cousin of the king is the bishop Teilo, he became an archbishop and you get the Life of Teilo written out and one of the major events in the Life of Teilo is a visit to his monastery by Madoc who prays with him. The fact that they actually mention that Madoc is there means Madoc is a big man and the charters of Llandaff cathedral were signed by King Meurig and alongside him signing next is Madoc so Madoc is again a very important person and every indication and again you don't get mentioned in the Welsh Triads unless you're a leading price or a king and Madoc is all over the Triads so he's a very important person indeed he's no small fry. Jim Michael: Absolutely but unfortunately that area is now under water or it's right up to the mounds. There are five or six mounds, we've got a description; we think there will be DNA in those mounds also. The archaeologists have dug in there, they didn't want the bones they wanted the trinkets that's what goes in the museums. They threw everything away but thank god one of them kept a draw but it could be a problem because there were eleven people in that mound. If you got the wrong jaw it would probably be a descendant, it would probably match up but it won't be a father son relationship which we're looking for. Lliwlod is said to be a son of Madoc and could actually be Morgan because he was conceived overseas which is what Morgan means so were looking at someone who was probably ten years old who was back with him talking to King Arthur saying hey man we ought to go over to this place, this place is no good over here where we are. It says coloured, it doesn't say black. But nobody's looking and nobody's listening, that's all we ask. Thank you very much. Host: Thank you very much. I would like to say that Alan Wilson has some of his research books here if any of you are interested in purchasing tonight. In addition to that I sure that both gentleman would be happy to talk with you down at the front. We thank you very much for coming this evening. Hello I'm Jim Michael with the Ancient Kentucky Historical Association and we're affiliated with the Kentucky Confederation of Historical Association. Today I am recording a program for you that was presented in January of 1993 at Elizabethtown, Kentucky and it's 'How the alphabet was lost'. The alphabet that we're talking about is the Coelbren alphabet and is was found on a tablet at Grave Creek which is Moundville, West Virginia about ten miles south of Wheeling, West Virginia in 1838 by a fellow named Abelard Tomlinson. Now the tablet is only an inch and a half to two inches in diameter and about three quarters of an inch thick, sandstone, and yet it held 22 alphabetic letters. In 1843 Henry Schoolcraft came to West Virginia to look at the tablet, it had received worldwide publicity after it had been announced by Tomlinson about two years after he found it. This was about ten years after Joseph Smith had found the golden tablets and consequently Tomlinson said he didn't want to pick up the stigma of all the controversy that had been involved with Joseph Smith's tablets so for a couple of years he kind of didn't tell anybody about it then later he announced it and it received worldwide attention and that's when Henry Schoolcraft came to Moundville. Now Henry Schoolcraft was the co-director of the Bureau of American Ethnology of the later Smithsonian Institution and after he delivered his paper in the British Isles he set out immediately to figure out what this tablet was. He recognised 22 alphabetic letters and one hieroglyph. Now let's take a look at Henry Schoolcraft, if you read the Mound Builders you'll find out his background, he was commissioned by President Madison to take over a Indian outpost as an Indian agent on the frontier, he married a one half Native American woman and in the 1800's he had to have known of the legends of Madoc it was certainly published by John Filson in 1784 and in 1808 it was in the newspapers certainly in Kentucky and I'm sure West Virginia, two different places here in Kentucky so the question is if he knew about the Welsh speaking Indians and he knew about the Prince Madoc legends that were floating around practically every watering hole in Kentucky at that time period; why didn't he think that this was the alphabet of the Welsh speaking Indians which it was. Unfortunately he wrote to Copenhagen in Denmark and then he wrote to Paris and these people told him he's absolutely right it was an alphabet and that 16 of the letter were in fact Celt Iberian which they are, this alphabet was left on the Iberian Peninsula thought the Celt portion of it may be a misnomer but then 14 of the letter were definitely old British. Well he had all of this information; the question again is why didn't he write to the British Isles? He didn't. They also mentioned that one or two of the letters may be Phoenician so he wrote to Tunisia to see if some of these letters were Phoenician and then he wrote Greece and Italy through the Mediterranean and then he got confused. The his predecessors, people who followed him Cyrus Thomas, John Wesley Powell got caught up as the great debate is described in the Mound Builders book by Robert Silverberg and everybody had a view on who built the mounds, Thomas Jefferson certainly did, Ben Franklin did and of course the conclusion was nobody was here before Columbus and therefore it had to be the Native Americans, the American Indians had built them and that's the way it went down. So I'd like now to take you up the river to West Virginia, we have a record of General George Rogers Clark having gone up there in 1775 to look at this mound; the mound was the largest conical, earthen grave mound in the world and was certainly known by Jefferson at that time 1775 and by General George Rogers Clark who went up to look at it. You'd find it by simply going up the Ohio River I'm sure that's how he travelled at that time. Today we would go to Cincinnati on Interstate 71 pick-up Interstate 70 and go across through Ohio and at the end of Ohio we cross the bridge right into Wheeling, turn right and follow the river down 10 miles south until we get to Moundville and they're we'll see the historical markers of Moundville and of the Grave Creek Mound. We're going to look at a million dollar museum there; we're going to have a chance to talk to the curator the lady who called herself the superintendent who works for the park department and you'll hear some of the strange translations of the small Grave Creek Tablet. Named for the Grave Creek Mound. This Mound was 900 feet around. 70 feet high and is the largest conical mound in America. The inscribed stone found in it has never been deciphered. (until now) Nearby there was an Indian fort built by Joseph Tomlinson. He was the one who dug in this mound and found the tablet in 1828. So here we stand in Moundville, the city of Moundville at Grave Creek. Grave Creek Mound. It says this world-famous burial mound was built by the Adena people (isn't that interesting) some time before the Christian Era. The mound was originally 68 feet high 295 feet in diameter and was encircled by a moat. (Isn't that interesting) There were many mounds in the areas hence the city's name Moundville. In 1838 the Grave Creek Mound was tunnelled into and two log tombs with several burials and grave offerings were found. And now were going to scan over here to the mound and you can see the mound from the back side, we'll try to get a little bit better view of it from the other side. There's actually a walkway up and around it where people can climb and it says it was 69ft tall. Other recordings reported it being 100ft tall. The 1838 investigation and later you see the second shaft being dug in at the bottom but the contents of the upper chamber indicated that there was one skeleton, 1700 disc shell beads, that there 500 shell beads, bar gorget a standard bar gorget, a diamond shaped bar gorget, five copper bracelets, 245 fragments of mica and an engraved stone tablet as you see here. In addition to that there were two skeletons, a standard centre bar gorget and 650 disc shell beads. I have not been able to see those here but here is a close-up of the tablet. There appears to have been a ring around it and the date again they say here was 1838 which differs a little bit from what we've read before. The letters beginning from left to right. Here are various attempts to translate the Grave Creek Tablet. It says that Henry Schoolcraft simply tried to identify it he didn't' try to translate it he simply reported it. The people who tried to translate it found many similarities to ancient alphabets such as Runic, Phoenician, Ancient Greek, Etruscan, Old British, Ancient Gaelic, Celtic, Libyan and Numindian. Between 1857 and 1875 three Frenchmen offered different translations: "The chief of emigration who reached these places or this island has fixed these statues forever" that was Maurice Schwab. Another one by Levy Bing: "Thy orders are laws, thou shinest in thy impetuous elan, and rapid as the chamois" Now here's some more, this time Jules Oppert: "The grave of one who was assassinated here. May God to revenge him strike his murderer, cutting off the hand of his existence" Next one by Buckingham Smith: "I pray to Christ, his most holy mother, son, Holy Ghost Jesus Christ God" And then in 1907 a Moundville resident provided this version: "United States of Egypt built by states of Western Union" Pretty wild. Then we have a couple more: 'Delf Norona who has been planning to publish a very complete article about the Grave Creek Tablet before his death claimed the most puzzling translation was made in 1928 by a man Andy Price in a booklet that was admittedly a fictional treatment Price said the character were original English letter somewhat distorted and read: "Bil Stumps Stone Oct 14 1838" What made this unusual (besides the fact the stone was found 4 months before that date) was that the authorities of the National Museum in Washington took Price seriously and accepted this as the correct interpretation for many years.' One over here, we have another one and this is 1953 'In an article published in the Pittsburgh press Joseph C Ayub believed the inscription to be Phoenician and to read: "You hope to be imbued with measures of purity, manners industry, misery, folly and strength" Olaf Stranwold in his book 'Norse Inscriptions on American Stones' published in 1948 offered this interpretation: "I knelt on the island Ons Yule site on meadow land. Now the island is a Hodd" Ons was a man's name and "Hodd" a sancutury for holy things. "Meadow Island" meant the mound was surrounded by grass before trees had grown there" The other explanation of the findings and it says 'On June 16th during the removal of artifacts from the upper burial tomb. Abelard Tomlinson along with several others including Dr. James Clements reported the discovery of a small greyish sandstone tablet. It measured 2" by 1 ½" and was about 3/8" thick. It was inscribed with curious unrecognisable characters or symbols. These inscriptions were arranged in three parallel lines of apparently 22 distinct characters plus a ideogram or a hieroglyphic symbol. Here is a replica of what they found and it does appear that the cross does have something around that looks almost like the head of a bird. Interesting. Now in addition to that there was a stone found at Braxton. The Shepherd Tablet was found in 1832, it simply has circles and the Cincinnati Tablet and it was found in 1841. This is an interesting reproduction of it. The Circular Inscribed Stone 1843 then we come to what they call the Wilson-Braxton Tablet and you can see the big cross with letters on it. We've looked at this one before the Lakin Tablet and they also put on The Lakin B tablet. The Wilson-Braxton Tablet you notice has this script as you see here and again what they've tried to do here, the inscription that they give us, and as you see from the one above it which is also what we've read before, unfortunately neither one of these is correct. Here's the new evidence and this of course gives credit in 1975 to Barry Fell from Havard for the inscription and he does say it's Iberian script but unfortunately he doesn't know about Coelbren and the British. And of course he's reading it from right to left which is absolutely wrong and he says that it was influenced by Carthage so a little different, the only problem is he has the same letters meaning different things in different places but interesting that his work would be here on this particular site. The view looking out of the window here at the museum of the mound, you can see the path as it goes up, we'll get another shot of it outside. A map showing the earthwork attributed to the prehistoric people. We'll notice that the town is in the centre in red. We've got the circular earthworks here, if we scan up a little bit here you'll there's a rock tower and if you notice on the terrain another tower, hilltop fortifications in just about all directions, I'll scan down here and there's the village and another mound, coming across another rock tower up at the top another mound, now notice the Ohio River comes right down through this area and certainly speaks well for this particular site being on the Ohio River. If we scan down the bottom you'll see another high point very likely another hilltop fortification. Little Grave Creek and as we come down the creek you'll see the circular mound, that's where it gets the name the Grave Creek Mound. I'm giving you a shot of the mound at the back side and again you can see the path that's been used to go up the mound to the top. When I first came here there children playing here up on top the mound. A table model that was built for display in the museum to give you an idea of what the mound looked like. There's the moat that goes all the way around it, a 5 foot earthen wall and then it has a ringed platform on the top, at least that's how they've displayed it. Tell us about where the tablet is? Curator: Well the tablet, the Grave Creek Tablet is actually in the collection of a family who live in Richmond, Virginia, in 1952 an Ohio archaeologist, I reads an article about a man who was at an auction and for 2 Dollars he bought the tablet. Jim Michael: The Grave Creek Tablet? Curator: The Grave Creek Tablet Jim Michael: Oh my God! What is the original? Curator: Yes it was the original. Curator: Now of course you know the Grave Creek Tablet is an 150 year old controversy to Grave Creek Mound between those people who think it is a legitimate thing and those of us believing that it is a genuine historical artefact that was found in the mound. But certainly it is not prehistoric. I don't think you can find a professional who thinks that the Grave Creek Tablet is legitimate. Jim Michael: I see, why is that? Curator: Because no matter how many people have claimed to determine the translation, if you talk to worldly a epigraphist who can actually go back to Gaelic and Ogam and all of those thing which have. Jim Michael: It's none of those is it. Curator: It's absolutely not. I just don't think it is a legitimate prehistoric piece. Jim Michael: And what about those five bracelets have they been analysed? We're talking about the bracelets that were found on the arms of individuals. Curator: Three of them I know are shell and two of them were made of copper. Jim Michael: Only two were? I see. It said five on your display but that's probably wrong, right? Your display's wrong. It said five copper bracelets. Well they've got a picture up there on my film. Curator: Those aren't on display; I don't know how many are on display. The remainder of the we certainly do have...the facility was built...so when this display when everything was brought over from the old museum in 1978 when it closed and this facility opened to the public, the thought process then was unlike the little museum which everything they ever found they had hanging, the process here was, don't duplicate a lot of things, tell a story, so that anyone coming through this display, if they take the time to read it is a self-read tour. The copper we know is from the Great Lakes. Jim Michael: But has it been analysed to see if it has been smelted because we have found some on the continent that has been smelted in great antiquity. Curator: Not to my knowledge. Jim Michael: Where are the copper bracelets? Curator: If they're not on display they're in our archive. There is one on display. Curator: A copper one? Oh excellent. Your job here is curator. You work for the park department? Curator: West Virginia. Jim Michael: Are you a historian or an archaeologist? Curator: Actually my degree is in biology, the state park hired me, I also function as a state park superintendent and I've been here since 1981 and the idea in those days, most state park superintendents were coming out of biology and history and then state parks became a large revenue for the state of West Virginia and they decided maybe they needed business people so what they've done with us and now the new superintendent is coming out business. Every state park is different. West Virginia is a magnificent state park system so what happens is over the last ten years I've probably read everything, attended many classes as you do once you become engrossed in your job. Jim Michael: Now you can see after listening to Susan why, I stopped the camera at that point and went out to the car and got the alphabet and showed it to her but you can see why she was so confused and so was everyone else after seeing the multitude of crazy translations that these people have hung on the Grave Creek Tablet. So at this point I'd like to stop and give a little bit more background on the mound. Now you heard they thought it wasn't Christian and the reason for that...it was before the Christian Era they say, the reason for that is the carbon dating that they did. They took core samples by running the drill bits down through the periphery of the mound and they did not take from the log tombs samples for carbon dating. There may not be material there, I don't know but they got it from the fill material and it went back 2150 years plus or minus 225 which put it back to 175 BC to about 53 BC so unfortunately, they say that's perfectly alright, it fits with the Adena, the model that they have. They really don't have the Adena people pegged down if they're calling this Adena because they didn't get here we think until the 6th century and the certainly were Christians, the Christian cross on the Braxton, the Christian cross at the bottom of it certainly indicates that. Now they could of gotten here before that, however the Christian cross certainly puts it into the Christian Era and I'm sure that it got here much after 55 BC. So we have a problem with the carbon dating and problem basically is that. Now something you may have picked up on is that there was a moat all the way around this great mound but there was another moat in Ashland around that big mound and there were circles and moats around many of the other mounds we've found. The one we've all looked at, at Mount Orab for example. It certainly has a moat and a ring around it. Now the literature indicates that the moat was filled in, in the early 1800's, it wasn't there when it was surveyed and of course that would be at the time when Henry Schoolcraft came to look it over. So now we'll go to a few of the charts that I'd like to show you. Susan was a little confused on the translations with all those translations and such weird ones too. Well let's take another look at the mound itself, this is of course the famous Squier and Davis etching that was done in 1848, this is about five years after Schoolcraft had visited the mound, 75ft tall and has a little superstructure at the very top like a kind of little amphitheatre. This is from Barry Fells book, it does show the two different burial chambers, you'll notice there's about 38ft difference between them and it's important to understand this is where they found the actual small tablet with the writing on it. Now this is an important document because it does show you all of the mounds in West Virginia and if you look where it says map location it shows you the distance from Pittsburgh all the way down, many, many mounds that were identified as being Adena, whatever that means to them, but we think their dating wrong but it does list the references and if anybody wants to do some research in this area, wonderful, we've certainly now got some things that we could look for. So here is, coming down the river from Pittsburgh down to Grave Creek which is 102 miles down right here at Moundville bottom. Here's another glance at the actual stages, they call them stage one and stage two because they thought this is the way the two tombs were developed, at two different time periods, I don't think so, I'm not sure, they may have been, the writing however was in the top one and it's certainly the top one that with the writing would come out at our time period, with the alphabet and certainly with the Christian crosses. Now the problem with the dating, you heard them talk about pre-Christian, the problem with the carbon dating is, is that the carbon dating was taken at the bore sites, you can see where it says C14, that is where the carbon dating was taken out, in the fill portion of the mound, these were bore drill holes that went down, had they taken it from the wood that was in the tomb we would have had a much more accurate time, however the time period that come up on the carbon dating from these bore holes sites, this is looking down on the top, you can see how conical and cylindrical it is and incidentally you'll notice that running out from it there are trenches that go up through the actual moat but all that was modern fill in there because it appears that the moat was filled in around the 1800 time frame. Now with the radio carbon dating it says 2150 plus or minus 225, that really takes us to about 175 BC not 200 up to about 75-73 BC, so there's your timeframe based on the carbon dating of little pieces of charcoal that they found in the fill portions of the mound and certainly not good enough for the type of work that we need to date this, it really needs...and then they even add insult to it, they say the 200 BC date seems entirely satisfactory for the late Adena activity at Grave Creek Mound but we know it's not because of the Christian cross and so on. You'll notice the black portion on top of this map, that portion is the actual part that we're looking at, a tiny pan handle of West Virginia, a very tip, needle, rabbit ear if you will, but as you come down that stretch that where you will find the map, you see where Wheeling bottom is that's about where the bridge comes across the I70 today and then about 10 miles down Moundville is what you have. Now Moundville you'll notice that sharp hairpin turn there that is the part we're going to be looking at a little closer. Now this is the map that Schoolcraft sketched out in 1843, now the important thing here is that his north is going sideways so this hairpin turn would really look like this if we put it on the map correctly, I'd like to come back because all of his lettering goes the other way and you'll see that we have ancient earthworks in several different places and you'll notice that hilltop, it says lookout but those hilltop fortifications are lookouts alright because they control the river and you cans see both sides of it from those lookout points, just like our hilltop fortifications that we have up and down. Now where it does say large mound in red that's where the actual Grave Creek Mound is located. Over to the right now is the mound in red down by the city. Here is the tablet and it brings us to the question of what is the hieroglyphic symbol at the bottom, is it a Christian cross or does in fact have an animal head on it? Well if the cross had extended out as it did in Braxton which is very definitely a British Christian cross it would have gone further than that little animal and the animal is not a chip, I think it's purposeful, I believe that is an eye on it and I believe that is a bird or a horse's head but it is part of the Christian trilogy. If you look at the letters, take for example the first one on the Grave Creek Stone right here you'll find it by going through the list here and it's an R-H, the important thing is that you don't find that letter any place else, this is simple, this is a T, no problem with the A, that's simply without the crossbar, the A here is duplicated it does have a crossbar, this is a combination letter with an A and an M type of box, this is a combination of both of these, so we've got a combination letter here and a combination letter here, this letter is a D, we don't understand what the crossbar is we've translated it without that. But there is the Grave Creek Stone compared with the Braxton Stone, it appears that the Braxton Stone is a little bit larger but there's no question about the alphabet being the same on both of them. This the alphabet as it appeared on a school wall in Wales in the 1840 timeframe, the same time that Henry Schoolcraft was writing around the world, and if you notice a the very top of it, I've highlighted it here, at the very top there is the Awen sign, the trinity sign, the basis for this alphabet and there are the letters all sketched out at that time an here is the stone that Susan talked about and you recall she said it's in the home of some private people who bought it for a couple of Dollars in the 1950's and it will be donated back to the museum upon death and the did say that there's one letter that's missing and you can see right in the middle it appears to be chipped out, I can't get my light out so I'm going to come up here and point to it, but it's this portion right here that appears to be missing, if you put a stroke in here that does become a P and it does then become meaningful. So there you have the alphabet and now you know how it became lost to American, the people who followed up the predecessors to Schoolcraft; Cyrus Thomas and John Wesley Powell simply got tied up as the Mound Builders book says in who built the mounds and by the time the argument which was never really settled got debated with Benjamin Franklin's theories and everybody else's theories, they simply lost track of the fact that this alphabet was out there and is there. It showed up other places and each time it's put under because nobody could adequately translate it. So there we have how the alphabet was lost and we thank you very much for the time it has taken to watch this particular film. Alan Wilson: Schoolcraft knew it was an alphabet and when he wrote to Copenhagen and Berlin and Rome and all round Europe trying to find information on alphabets, yes it is incredible that he did not go to Wales, it beggars the imagination but nonetheless everybody he wrote to recognised it as an alphabet and the modern stance that it's petroglyphs of none alphabetic origin is simply untenable and this is the stance that's been adopted because people simply couldn't read it, couldn't identify it, didn't know what to do with it and wouldn't admit that they didn't know so they then made it out to be Indian petroglyphs. Jim Michael: If in 1840 Schoolcraft had written to Wales would anybody there have recognised it? Alan Wilson: In every circumstance in any crowd of three, two people would have known it and could have translated it. You'll find the alphabet is sold in Wales at conventions or meetings and at the national Eisteddfod and local Eisteddfod where people set up stalls and they have illustrated cards with the alphabet on it with all sorts of decorations on it and they sell thousands and thousands every year and most homes have probably got one hanging on the wall. Jim Michael: In fact I think one of the teacher had one in one of the schools. Alan Wilson: What they did is that they drew up a chart of the modern alphabet A,B.C.D.E and then at the bottom the Ogam musical system and then they put the Coebren alphabet in detail of what is A what is B and what is C and they were using this in schools teaching the children so every school child in Wales, if you approached a ten year old child in the street would have said oh yes that's what we have in our school and would have known the alphabet and Schoolcraft chose to write to everywhere in Europe except Wales.