Early Britain—Roman BritainConybeare, John William Edward
History
Early Britain—Roman Britain
Conybeare, John William Edward
Great Britain -- History -- Roman period, 55 B.C.-449 A.D.
[Footnote 2: Published by the Royal Academy of Berlin. Vol. VII.
contains the Romano-British Inscriptions.]
[Footnote 3: His later books only survive in the epitome of
Xiphilinus, a Byzantine writer of the 13th century.]
[Footnote 4: See p. 171.]
[Footnote 5: See p. 256.]
[Footnote 6: In the British (?) village near Glastonbury the bases of
shed antlers are found hafted for mallets.]
[Footnote 7: This name is simply given for archaeological convenience,
to indicate that these aborigines were non-Aryan, and perhaps of
Turanian affinity.]
[Footnote 8: Skeat, however, traces "ogre" (the Spanish "ogro") to the
Latin _Orcus_.]
[Footnote 9: The latest excavations (1902) prove Stonehenge to be
a Neolithic erection. No metal was found, but quantities of flint
implements, broken in the arduous task of dressing the great Sarsen
monoliths. The process seems to have been that still used for granite,
viz. to cut parallel channels on the rough surface, and then break and
rub down the ridges between. This was done by the use of conical lumps
of Sarsen stone, weighing from 20 to 60 lbs., several of which were
discovered bearing traces of usage, both in pounding and rubbing. The
monoliths examined were found to be thus tooled accurately down to the
very bottom, 8 or 9 feet below ground. At Avebury the stones are not
dressed.]
[Footnote 10: _Sarsen_ is the same word as _Saracen_, which in
mediaeval English simply means _foreign_ (though originally derived
from the Arabic _sharq_ = Eastern). Whence the stones came is still
disputed. They _may_ have been boulders deposited in the district by
the ice-drift of the Glacial Epoch.]
[Footnote 11: Professor Rhys assigns 600 B.C. as the approximate date
of the first Gadhelic arrivals, and 200 B.C. as that of the first
Brythonic.]
[Footnote 12: Whether or no this word is (as some authorities hold)
derived from the Welsh _Prutinach_ (=Picts) rather than from the
Brythons, it must have reached Aristotle through Brythonic channels,
for the Gadhelic form is _Cruitanach_.]
[Footnote 13: A certain amount of British folk-lore was brought
back to Greece, according to Plutarch ('De defect. orac.' 2), by
the geographer Demetrias of Tarsus about this time. He refers to the
cavern of sleeping heroes, so familiar in our mediaeval legends.]
[Footnote 14: The word is said to be derived from the root _kâsh_,
"shine." Some authorities, however, maintain that it came into
Sanscrit from the Greek.]
[Footnote 15: 'Hist.' III. 112.]
[Footnote 16: See p. 48.]
[Footnote 17: For a full notice of Pytheas see Elton, 'Origins of
English History,' pp. 13-75. See also Tozer's 'Ancient Geography,'
chap. viii.]
[Footnote 18: Posidonius of Rhodes, the tutor of Cicero, visited
Britain about 100 B.C., and wrote a History of his travels in fifty
volumes, only known to us by extracts in Strabo (iii. 217, iv. 287,
vii. 293), Diodorus Siculus (v. 28, 30), Athenaeus, and others. See
Bake's 'Posidonius' (Leyden, 1810).]
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