The Mystery of Skara Brae: Neolithic Scotland and the Origins of Ancient Egypt

INTRODUCTION

SOME THOUGHTS ON COMPARATIVE COSMOLOGY

My field of study is called comparative cosmology. Most simply, this means that I compare the similar symbols, words, concepts, rituals, and deities of ancient cultures in the hope of learning more about them. Ancient cosmology is a field of study that, more than many others, is founded on inherent uncertainties. As any good criminal investigator eventually discovers, first and foremost among these are the uncertainties of eyewitness testimony, which is what many historical accounts effectively represent. Any researcher of ancient culture understands before he or she even begins work that his or her chosen field rests on a foundation of incomplete knowledge, often made even more uncertain by the compounding distortions of interpretation and entrenched theory.

Added to these are the uncertainties of an inexplicable phenomenon I call informed blindness—situations in which a person’s own preconceptions induce him or her to look past significant facts. As an example of this phenomenon, I ask myself, how is it possible that Egyptologists, over the course of two centuries, never noticed that the glyphs of the Egyptian word for week symbolically defined the Egyptian concept of a week? Likewise, for more than six decades, how could researchers of Dogon culture not have recognized the Dogon granary as a form of a Buddhist stupa? Myself having occasionally been subject to this same inexplicable inability to see what is flatly before my eyes, I understand that this phenomenon might simply be an unavoidable circumstance of cognition and pursuit of a working theory—something that unfathomably just happens.

The main goal of a comparative cosmologist is to increase the value of this uncertain body of knowledge by using powers of comparison. We know that the net benefit of comparing two versions of a myth or symbol is akin to scanning an image with two eyes, rather than just one. What is ultimately gained by doing so is an improved sense of perspective.

There are five previous volumes in this series on ancient cosmology and language. These include The Science of the Dogon, Sacred Symbols of the Dogon, The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol, China’s Cosmological Prehistory, and Point of Origin. While there will be references in this book to concepts, facts, and ideas that may have been discussed in greater detail in these prior volumes, there is no expectation that the reader will have read them as a prerequisite to understanding what is presented here. Although this book is the fifth in that series, it represents a first deliberate attempt to uncover information about an ancient society based not on clear statements made within that culture itself, but rather by comparison of what we know about that society with facts that have been previously correlated for other cultures. In this volume our focus is on the Orkney Islands, which lie just to the north of Scotland. This is a region of the world that is distantly removed from Africa and Asia, where our previous research has largely centered. More specifically, we will be discussing the coastal village of Skara Brae, a small Neolithic farming settlement whose prehistoric lifestyle and traditions are poorly understood by modern researchers.

We begin this effort not with the kind of carefully preserved oral tradition that researchers encountered among the Dogon priests, nor with a body of inscriptions, written texts, and artwork such as are found from ancient Egypt, but rather with a single motivating question to explore (i.e., whether Egyptian influences might have been at work at Skara Brae), a somewhat sparse set of excavated ruins, a handful of enigmatic stone structures, and a limited collection of poorly understood artifacts. The truth is that researchers on the scene do not yet know who founded the village, have no working theory of where the earliest inhabitants of the island came from, consider certain stylistic elements of construction and pottery in the village to be unique, and deem the language spoken there to be of uncertain origin. Framed in these ways, we can scarcely say that the focus of our project sounds particularly promising.

Among the special tools we bring to bear on this study is an overview of symbolic systems from a broad range of ancient cultures. These are rooted in an understanding of the instructive cosmology of the modern-day Dogon tribe of Mali, in northwest Africa, which exists as a kind of crossroads for several ancient traditions. The Dogon priests retain a clear sense of their own ancient tradition and are able to explain its elements in modern terms. Our previous studies have armed us with a set of correlated terms of cosmology whose meanings we can understand and whose permutations of pronunciation and usage will become familiar to us. Also at our disposal is an Egyptian hieroglyphic dictionary, whose words will provide us with unique insights into the intended meanings of a wide range of ancient cosmological terms.

Several of our previous studies have focused on societies who managed to retain a high degree of purity of language. This is particularly true of the Dogon, who as a culture prioritize the ancient meanings of symbols, words, and ritual practices, and who hand them down carefully from generation to generation. In the case of ancient Egypt, we have inscriptions that were literally carved in stone, and so preserved the precise written forms of words as they appeared to the Egyptians many thousands of years ago. We also have explored and positively correlated an extensive set of Dogon words to matching Egyptian word forms in our previous studies, and we have thereby gained perspective on the pronunciation and meanings of a large body of ancient words.

However, this is not the case with Skara Brae, whose structures predated the onset of written language in most cultures. Here we have no excavated texts to use as a guide or to give us a frame of reference. Furthermore, in the case of Skara Brae, words of various modern Scandinavian languages have intermingled somewhat indiscriminately with ancient ones for more than 4,600 years, often obscuring any original sense of meaning. So we begin our study with no guarantees that the ancient word forms we seek to compare may have even managed to survive within the language.

One beneficial effect that works in our favor when studying these languages is a linguistic phenomenon called ultraconserved words. This term refers to the tendency of significant words of a culture to remain in a language for very long periods of time. Fortunately for our studies, later cultures often revere ancient cosmological words, so traces of the words’ original pronunciations and meanings often remain in evidence.

Another great advantage we bring to this study is a unique perspective on how the ancient traditions of Africa, Egypt, India, Tibet, and China related to one another. In our view, these cultures shared a common originating source at around 10,000 BCE and a lineage that links forward through an archaic tradition in India called the Sakti cult, whose modern-day center of observance is located in a region of southeast India called Orissa. From an Indian perspective, this cult had its origins in the northwest mountains of India, in the same general region as the Fertile Crescent, and these origins are understood to reach back in time to a period long before the advent of writing. Iconic elements of the Sakti tradition are in evidence at the archaic megalithic sanctuary of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, which is thought to be nearly twelve thousand years old. Many of these same elements are also found in ancient Turkish cosmology and among the Dravidians, and are known to be ancestral to the Vedic tradition, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In Point of Origin we argued that these same elements also link credibly forward through the Sakti cult to predynastic Egypt and later on to the Dogon in northwest Africa. Signature elements of the tradition are also found in ancient Tibet and China and seem to have been transmitted from there into North America. The process of tracing this cosmology down through the millennia has touched on many of the most common permutations of the tradition, which gives us some added perspective on which cosmological forms we might expect to find in context with which others.

Each regional culture also brings its own set of languages to bear on the symbols and concepts we explore. These include the Dogon language, whose cosmological words are essentially Egyptian; the Tamil language of the Dravidians, many of whose words also entered the Dogon language; the Turkish language; the Egyptian hieroglyphic language; and the Dongba language of the Na-Khi tribe in Tibet. We have demonstrated that various cosmological terms of China are often also recognizable variants of Dogon and Egyptian words. We have also been able to correlate key cosmological concepts of India, which are expressed in the phonetically different language of Sanskrit, to matching Dogon and Egyptian concepts.

The field of ancient studies is an arena in which absolute proof of an observation or interpretation may not always be possible. For that reason, our emphasis has been primarily on demonstrating points, not proving them. Many times these demonstrations take the form of direct side-by-side comparisons, in which two symbols, words, concepts, definitions, or images that are in some way intuitively similar to one another are set side by side so that the readers may simply perceive a match for themselves.

In the field of ancient studies, inference can also greatly increase the value of any simple fact we may uncover. A fact tells us what a thing is, while inferences can open other potentially important doors for us. For example, one discrete fact we can point to is that around 400 BCE the Buddhists documented a system of cosmology that is a match for the modern Dogon tradition, and so suggests that the Dogon system must also be at least that old. However, a powerful inference we can draw from this fact is that, in order for the two systems to still match, neither can have changed substantially over the course of nearly 2,500 years.

Some readers who may be new to ancient cosmology might see it as a complex or somewhat intimidating subject and might worry that a prior background in the subject could be required in order to understand what is presented here. Hopefully that will not be the case. Whenever issues of cosmology become pertinent in these chapters, the intention is to provide as direct an explanation as possible for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with the terms or concepts involved.

1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SKARA BRAE

Skara Brae is the name of a small prehistoric village located along the west shore of Orkney Island, or Mainland, which is the largest island in the Orkney Islands archipelago, situated just to the north of Scotland. The village is scenically set, overlooking a brilliant white beach that runs along the Bay of Skaill. Archaeological dating techniques suggest that the village was originally settled during Neolithic times, sometime after 3200 BCE, and may have been inhabited by as many as twenty families for a period of more than six hundred years, up until around 2500 BCE.¹ After that time, for reasons unknown, the village was apparently abandoned, its buildings then covered over with sand and mud, at least partly by natural forces. From the perspective of modern historians, this seemingly unintended burial turns out to have been a fortuitous circumstance, since it effectively protected and preserved the major features of the village. Thereafter, Skara Brae sat silently entombed just beneath the surface, and so it remained completely unknown to later culture for more than forty centuries.

During the winter of 1850, a series of violent storms struck the island and partially exposed a portion of the village that lay on a high dune owned by William Watt, the Laird of Skaill. Watt, who lived only a short distance from the site, recognized the unique nature and historical importance of what had been uncovered and over the next eight years made efforts to begin excavating and preserving it. Professional excavations were also later conducted at the Skara Brae site. The first of these, from 1928 through 1930, was overseen by V. Gordon Childe, a professor of British prehistory, and consultations were made with such authorities as Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who was known for his studies of ancient Egypt. A third excavation was undertaken in more recent times, more than forty years later, in 1972 and 1973. These later efforts located several additional structures not originally brought to light by Watt.²

Although Skara Brae overlooks the sea in the present day, some researchers believe that the site may have originally been set farther back from the sea, perhaps next to a freshwater lagoon separated from the beach by dunes. From their perspective, encroaching sea levels would have changed the apparent location of the village over time by bringing the sea’s edge somewhat closer to it.³

Because the village of Skara Brae was built before the advent of written historical records, there is little that can be said with certainty about its inhabitants, what their daily life was like, or from where they may have originally come. Based on surviving evidence, it can be inferred that they were skilled farmers who made good use of the fertile land and hospitable climate of the Orkney Islands. Orkney Island is situated as far north in latitude as Hudson’s Bay, but because of warm ocean currents that circulate along the coast, the weather on Orkney Island is more temperate, and so more hospitable to farming.

Orkney Island is believed to have been inhabited since around 3700 BCE, and the earliest settlements are thought to have taken the form of single-family farms, consisting of only one or two buildings. Several archaic family farm sites have been excavated in the region. The settlement at Skara Brae demonstrates that by around 3100 BCE, people there had begun to establish small farming communities. Well-preserved features of Skara Brae offer us some direct insight into what the daily life of its residents may have been like. Significantly, no weapons or fortifications have been uncovered among the artifacts at Skara Brae, which suggests that the life there must have been a peaceful one. All indications are that the site represented a simple farming village.

The careful stonework that was revealed in the excavated Skara Brae structures gives clear testimony to the stone-working skills of the inhabitants of the village. Stone was plentiful on the island and was of a type that could be easily broken or cut into regular pieces suitable for use in construction. These stones lent themselves to drywall construction, where flat rocks are simply stacked and offset with one another without mortar to form walls. The earliest stone walls at Skara Brae were freestanding, but later ones were insulated and supported on one side by earthen mounds formed essentially from compost heaps comprised of waste that was left over from various daily activities. Materials found in these mounds provide archaeologists with important clues about how the villagers lived.

Trees were scarce on the island, and any wood that was available for construction consisted mostly of driftwood that washed up on the shores of the island. However, artifacts show that the people of Skara Brae made effective use of the various materials they did have at hand, such as stone, bone, and clay, to establish and sustain a comparatively high quality of life in the village.

Each of the original houses at Skara Brae was built on essentially the same basic plan, one whose central focus was a square room with rounded corners, with rectangular alcoves on each side that were used for storage. In the middle of the floor of the house was a flat, square stone hearth. Toward the front of the house, the plan often included a small, round, beehive-shaped cell, described by researchers as a unique architectural feature and interpreted by some to have been a latrine. The houses also featured two bed platforms set along the walls on either side of the hearth. These were situated behind a standing slab of stone that absorbed heat from the fire, prevented the fire’s light from shining directly in the eyes of a sleeping person, and made the bed platform warmer. It is presumed that soft materials such as bracken, heather, and animal skins were placed in these partitioned platforms to make them into comfortable sleeping surfaces.⁴

Skara Brae was actually built twice during the course of its lifetime, in many cases with new structures raised directly over the top of prior ones, perhaps due to lack of available space. Therefore, most of what remains today is representative of the later, rebuilt village. The only original structures visible today are those that were not covered over by newer ones.

Food appears to have been in ample supply at Skara Brae. In addition to the farming of grains like barley, the people there raised cattle and sheep. They also gathered eggs from seafowl and hunted deer for meat. It is presumed that they fished, although no obvious fishing equipment or accessories such as hooks have been found during the excavations. It is surmised by some researchers that the square watertight boxes that are often found on the floors of Skara Brae houses were designed to hold limpets, to be used as fish bait.⁵

In ancient times, Orkney Island was known in Scandinavia by the name Orkneyar or Orknejar. Another ancient name for the island is given as Argat.⁶ The island is known to have been host to at least two distinct cultural groups who are mentioned in Scandinavian sagas. The first was a group of likely indigenous pygmies of strange habits, referred to as the Peti. In ancient times, the islands were called terra Petorum, or land of the Peti.