The African Presence infusing Welsh History
y ddraig goch
The Red Dragon Will Show the Way
To be a leader you must be a bridge.
The above is quoted from: Alice Thomas Ellis. A Welsh Childhood. [1990] p117.The Welsh tend to be small and dark, descended -- so it has been alleged and subsequently, I believe, disproved -- from people of Iberian stock who migrated from Asia when the world was young. I have just read in a book of 1903 that the primeval population belonged to what is called Hamitic stock represented by ancient Egyptian and modern Berber, and that many words common to Welsh and Hebrew are borrowed from the Tongue of the Hamitic people.
This interests me strangely, for I went to Egypt a few years ago and people kept saying to me, "If you're Welsh you're going to enjoy this soup" (pressing upon me a green liquid the ingredients of which I could not begin to recognise), or, "If you're Welsh you will like this monument." I couldn't think what they were talking about, but then I began to discern similarities between Welsh and Egyptian in the family structures, the most marked being the preponderance of aunties common to both peoples.
When I came home I read about a 'new' theory that the Welsh and the Berbers share the same blood group to an unusual degree. And death. The Welsh -- or their ancestors, whoever they may have been -- and the ancient Egyptians felt the same way about death. The master idea in both their religions was the cult of ancestors, and the menhir and the obelisk have much in common. The dolmen, the burial mound, expresses the same concern with the afterlife as the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
|
From New Advent (Encyclopedia) What the anthropologists can tell us: The Welsh, though mainly a Celtic nation, are a composite folk made up of Celts and of many pre-Aryan peoples--a mélange of all the aborigines of the Isle of Britain. Remains of paleolithic man have been found in the limestone caves of the Wye Valley, along with bones of the cave-bear, hyena, etc. How far this early human race has influenced the Welshman of the present age, it is impossible to say; but there is no doubt that the racial type known as the "small dark Welsh", prevalent in certain districts (and, curiously, indigenous in the coal valleys of the south), is that of the latest pre-Aryan folk with whom the first Celtic immigrants came in contact. That race has been identified with the Basques of the Pyrenees and the Berbers of North Africa. Though there are no linguistic evidences to support either identification, there are reasons for believing that the "small dark" Welshmen are of the same race as the original Iberians of Spain and Portugal. It is, in any case, certain that they are the Silurians of the period of the Roman invasion under Claudius (A.D.43). We are on equally sure ground in saying that the Celts of the first immigration, the Gael (akin to the Irish, Highland Scots, and Manx), have preserved their racial identity more or less completely in certain parts of both North and South Wales. The largest section of the Welsh nation, however, are Celts of the British stock, a pure tribe of which stretches in a wide band across Central Wales. Many of the ogham and Latin inscriptions on rude stone monuments of the Romano-British period in Wales were evidently made not by British but by Gaelic Celts. It is, however, as yet uncertain what proportion (if any) of these stones commemorate invaders from Ireland. |