Quinn The Atlantean Irish

Ireland's Oriental and Maritime Heritage
1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-1-84351-304-9
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

Irish identity is best understood from a maritime perspective. For eight millennia the island has been a haven for explorers, settlers, colonists, navigators, pirates and traders, absorbing goods and peoples from all points of the compass. The reduction of the islanders to the exclusive category 'Celtic' has persisted for three hundred years, and is here rejected as impossibly narrow. No classical author ever described Ireland's inhabitants as 'Celts', and neither did the Irish so describe themselves until recent times. The islanders' sea-girt culture has been crucially shaped by Middle Eastern as well as by European civilizations, by an Islamic heritage as well as a Christian one. The Irish language itself has antique roots extended over thousands of years' trading up and down the Atlantic seaways. Over the past twenty years Bob Quinn has traced archaeological, linguistic, religious and economic connections from Egypt to Arann, from Morocco to Newgrange, from Cairo and Compostela to Carraroe. Taking Conamara sean-nos singing and its Arabic equivalents, and a North African linguistic stratum under the Irish tongue, Quinn marshalls evidence from field archaeology, boat-types, manuscript illuminations, weaving patterns, mythology, literature, art and artefacts to support a challenging thesis that cites, among other recent studies of the Irish genome, new mitochondrial DNA analysis in the Atlantic zone from north Iberia to west Scandinavia. The Atlantean Irish is a sumptuously illustrated, exciting, intervention in Irish cultural history. Forcefully debated, and wholly persuasive, it opens up a past beyond Europe, linking Orient to Occident. What began as a personal quest-narrative becomes a category-dissolving intellectual adventure of universal significance. It is a book whose time has arrived.

BOB QUINN, writer, photographer, film-maker and television director, is a member of Aosdana and has lived in Conamara in the West of Ireland since 1970. He is author of Sit Down and Be Counted (1969); Smokey Hollow (1991), a fictional memoir; An Tir Aneol (1995), a photographic record of Conamara; and Maverick (2001), a critique of modern broadcasting.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Quinn, Bob

Leseproben

Introduction

The original Atlantean project took four years to fulfil – from 1980 to 1984 – reading, researching and filming as I went. It was the most exciting and intellectually stimulating time of my life, and it resulted in three films and a book.

My purpose was to show that Irish culture – and especially that of my neighbours in Conamara – was not just a vestigial remnant of Celticism, a European culture that had washed over the island 2500 years ago, retreated and left us high and dry, to make an exhibition of ourselves with ‘the blind hysterics of the Celt’.

There were two starting-points: sean-nós singing, and the sea that surrounds Ireland and up to recently was the only approach to this island. The same sea touched many other shores and cultures. Was it a coincidence that the lateen sail used on the traditional Conamara púcán was an Arab invention still used on Egyptian dhows? Naïvely, then, I hypothesized that the Irish might owe as much to one of the great civilizations of the world, Islam, as they did to a focus on Eurocentric origins.

In pursuit of this hypothesis I wandered from Armagh to Árann, from a knitting shop in Oxford to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, from a sean-nós session in Carna to the monasteries of the Wadi Natrun Desert. I mostly travelled alone, was never mugged, never robbed (except by Moroccan security forces who appropriated a crucial part of my cine-camera), and I learned that the world was a far safer, friendlier and more interesting place than contemporary journalism would have had me believe.

The people I met during my quest were equally colourful. The expert Arabist in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, who pointed out the similarity of style between the Book of Durrow and early Islamic manuscripts, was convicted of selling some of those same manuscripts to unscrupulous dealers some years later. The late John M. Allegro, author of books such as The Mushroom and the Cross and one of the first Westerners to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, enthusiastically supported my interpretation of the obscene Síle na gCíocs (Sheela-na-Gigs). When, in the Isle of Man, I introduced him to these images for the first time, his glee was palpable. Subsequently I found that mention of his name was the only way I could enrage a calm friend of mine, the late Dominican priest, Father Romuald Dodd.

When it came to writing a book about my adventures I was academically ill equipped. In cramming entire courses of archaeology, navigation, religion, politics, history, geography et alia into frequent, sharp intensive bursts of reading and studying in libraries and museums, I aimed to restore the neglected faculty of imagination to the disparate details being uncovered while trying to view them as a coherent whole united by the sea. It was like learning joined-up writing having been taught only block capitals. Encouraged by the geographer E. Estyn Evans’ insight that in future all new discoveries would be made in the cracks between the disciplines, my approach was less scholarly than sociological, a discipline with which I had at least a passing familiarity.

From an academic viewpoint, my sin were twofold: not only did I confront the simplistic construction called Irish/Celtic/Catholic identity, I also recovered much of the Anglo-Irish, pre-Independence scholarly research that had proved inconvenient to the new state’s image-builders and had been dismissed from official history books. But my greatest sin was to attribute to oral culture and to personal observation – that is to say, common sense – as much respect as I accorded written evidence and armchair scholarship. In short, I went beyond theologically acceptable versions of history and tried to interpret the ‘good books’ for myself. However, it was an upstart amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, who followed his instincts and uncovered the city of Troy in 1871, and Alfred Wegener’s suggestion in 1922 that the earth’s continents had moved in the geological past was vigorously dismissed until surveys of the sea floor in the 1950s compelled acceptance of the tectonic-plate theory.

E. Estyn Evans’ ‘Personality of Ireland’ lectures, first delivered in 1973, confirmed for me the limitations of exclusive reliance on written historical records. This Welshman, a Queen’s University Belfast scholar for fifty years, was a passionate advocate of reading the land and listening to the people, differentiating ‘dirt-archaeology’ from ‘desk-archaeology’. In some circles (as Paul Durcan wrote in a foreword to the current edition of the resulting book) Evans was referred to as ‘a crypto-Unionist’. His parallel between introspective scholarship and the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism clearly raised many hackles. However, the late Liam de Paor had long shown that the trappings of all European nationalisms, not just the Irish, were products of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and the Irish were not the only sinners in this respect. Retired Professor P.L. Henry of Galway University (who, along with musicologist John Blacking of Queen’s University, first suggested the Berbers to me as a relevant area of research) reconciled me to the professional silence that greeted my original research and findings; I had had to travel to Dublin and deliver copies of the original book to individual newspapers to encourage them to review it. He pointed out that I had touched on so many different disciplines that no single scholar could handle this vast canvas without betraying gaps in their own knowledge. It was more prudent for them to pass over my work.

One professional scholar, Dr Michael Ryan, now director of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, was courageous enough to review the first edition of this book in Archaeology Ireland. While disagreeing with me about almost everything, he paid tribute to my attempt to restore Islamic learning to its due place in the intellectual development of Europe. Dr Ryan had inadvertently encouraged me already by drawing attention (in his essay on the Derrynaflan Chalice) to ‘the problem of eastern influence on all aspects of early Irish art’, pronouncing that ‘there is need now to reopen the question’. My book was not at all what he had in mind, but it was a start. Other reviews were more encouraging, but Professor Henry had already warned me that my findings would be ignored, as I was not an accredited scholar.

There have since been encouraging indications that an academic frost can thaw. In 1995 the then president of Dublin City University, Dr Danny O’Hare, reproduced my original (out of print) book and distributed fifty copies to colleagues in the United States. In Ireland’s Others (2001), Elizabeth Butler Cullingford put me in the company of Brian Friel (Translations), Frank McGuinness (Carthaginians) and even Joyce: ‘Quinn’s idiosyncratic researcher may be seen as performing what Luke Gibbons has called “lateral journeys along the margins which short-circuit the colonial divide”.’

Earlier, in the 1980s, Professor Hilary Richardson of University College Dublin showed me some of her comparative studies of Armenian cross-stones (kachkars) and Irish high crosses. ‘Alone in the Christian world,’ she wrote, ‘the extreme east – Armenia/Georgia – and the extreme west – Ireland – preserved an established convention of erecting monuments in stone.’ She emphasized Françoise Henry’s mid-century support for the idea of oriental influences on insular Irish art, an idea that was disputed by some of the old-school Irish archaeologists.

The opportunity to write the original version of this book had come when Naim Atallah, the Palestinian owner of Quartet Books in London, saw the films and commissioned the book. When the manuscript was ready he entrusted it to a young Lebanese editor. She dismissed it as wild imaginings and passed it on to Jeremy Beale, a man of patience, who shepherded it from then on. I wondered whether her reaction had anything to do with the Beirut war, which was still at its cruellest. How else could a Lebanese react to a book that did not condemn the Muslim Palestinians? Sadly, Quartet published the book without its intended illustrations and left my literary baby to fend for itself, with no launch or any publicity. It went out of print in 1994.

It is as unprofitable to be twenty years before your time as a score too late.

In 1993 a scholar named Orin Gensler completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, with a thesis on Afro-Asiatic languages and a study of eighty-five languages throughout the world. He is now attached to the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt. In his thesis he described my book as ‘the best overview of extralinguistic connections between the British Isles and North Africa that I have come across’. In fairness to Gensler, he stated that he was not equipped to substantiate my extralinguistic findings but he confirmed that his own conclusions supported Dr Heinrich Wagner’s North African substratum ideas, on which I had relied extensively in my text. In the following pages I report for the first time on my subsequent field research and findings on the phenomenon of ‘pre-Celtic’ languages in Ireland.

In 1999 Simon James, an archaeologist on leave from the British Museum, produced Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? In an acceptably scholarly manner he covered much the same ground and did an even greater demolition job on the Irish (and British) ‘Celtic’...