I think most of us have heard the stories that originate in the Lebor Gabala Erenn linking Scota or Scotia with Ireland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scota
It is a great story but the problem is when it used as fact.
I few years back I first heard of the claim relating to the Tara Prince and the faience beads that are claimed to originate in Egypt.
"The Tara Prince" aka Tara Boy
An excavation of the Mound of the Hostages in 1955 by Sean O'Riordain uncovered a number of items within the mound (which turned out to be a passage tomb). One was a set of faience beads now on display in the National Museum of Ireland.
They were associated with a skeleton that in pseudoarchaeology has been dubbed "The Tara Prince".
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| Copyright National Museum of Ireland |
When I read about the claim linking him back to Egypt curiosity got to the better of me and I had to see if there was any basis in it. You can see where the claim arose in O'Riordain's paper "A Burial with Faience Beads at Tara" from 1956
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0079497X00017539
O'Riordain (pg 170) states:
"The faience beads have been submitted for examination to Dr J. F. S. Stone, who has kindly supplied the following report;
'The four greenish-blue to blue faience beads from the Mound of the Hostages, Tara, are of considerable interest in view of their extreme rarity in Ireland in comparison with England. Only two other instances are known to me ; one of four segments from Dundrum Sandhills, Co. Down {Archaeologia, LXXXV, 1936, 251), and another of two segments found with a cremation at Ballyduff, Co. Wexford, sent to me by Mr P. J. Hartnett in 1952. ' The Tara beads are not made of true faience, which normally has an external coloured glaze, but of a well-known variety of the Eastern Mediterranean synthetic material in which powdered blue glass or glaze has been mixed with quartz grains and which, after moulding, has been fired. Such hard glassy faience, or variant E of the material, as has been described by A. Lucas (Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, 1948, 188), is well-known in Egypt, and has been found in the British Isles. It consists mainly of quartz grains which appear to be floating in a lake of glass, and numerous air bubbles are often present in the fabric. In the case of the Tara beads, the quartz grains are relatively large as compared with the finely powdered quartz used in the manufacture of the similar glassy faience Ballyduff specimen, and the fabric is somewhat porous. They compare very closely with the slightly smaller but similarly made necklace of six glassy faience beads found in 1938 with a cremation and plain food vessel at Long Ash Lane, Frampton, Dorset, and now in the Dorchester Museum (Antiquaries Journal, 31 (1951), 30). They compare favourably too in the large number of segments present, the maximum at Tara being 11, that from Frampton being 15. ' Although not quite so finely made as the Wiltshire examples of true faience, they nevertheless belong to the same variety having large perforations ; and though recalling the glassy faience fabric of some of the Scottish specimens they do not resemble them in having " crimped segments ". ' In the absence of any known evidence for local manufacture of this complex material in the early primitive societies of Europe, and in comparison with known examples in the British Isles, I would infer the burial to be of the Wessex Culture period and would date the beads c. 1400 B.C. by comparison with similar examples from Abydos, Egypt, and Tell Duweir in Palestine, both of that date. However, we cannot entirely exclude a possible Syrian origin, the fourth literate civilization known to have exploited the industry, and it would be wiser to refer to them as of Eastern Mediterranean origin. It remains for the future to prove the ultimate source. One thing is certain at present; spectographic analysis, or other forms of chemical analysis, would yield no results of value. Until some means is found to distinguish between powdered quartz from different sources, we must rely entirely on the morphological characters of the objects themselves.' J. F. S. STONE, 25-11-55.
(My bolding above).
I'm not sure how Stone here can on the one hand state that "I would infer the burial to be of the Wessex Culture period" ie Wessex in England and then refer to them as of Eastern Mediterranean origin.
Later in the paper O'Riordain (pg 173) concludes similarly but again ignores Stones point relating to the Wessex culture:
"There are various possibilities as to place of manufacture, an Egyptian source being still preferred. There is also a spread of dating because of early and late associations. It appears in the present state of knowledge safe to refer to an Eastern Mediterranean origin (as does Dr Stone) and to accept the 14th century B.C. as the most likely date for these segmented beads.
However like all sciences conclusions change once more evidence becomes available."
This is not an area that I am an expert in but I don't see how the conclusion fits the evidence here. The more likely conclusion being that the idea / method of manufacture travelled to Northern Europe rather the beads themselves.
In pseudoarchaeology the possible Eastern Mediterranean / Egyptian origin has been built upon that the person who was buried at Tara had to have brought the beads on his person with him from the Eastern Mediterranean / Egypt. When I read this I thought the far more likely possibility was that either the beads were traded via trade routes to Ireland or that the method of manufacture similarly followed these trade routes and they were manufactured locally.
More recent research and evidence has shown this to be the more likely conclusion.
A paper written by Alison Sheridan
et al has this to say
The burial was redated with more advanced methods to
"Alex Bayliss for the present publication and the symposium that gave rise to it, has concluded that ‘Tara Boy’ is most likely to have been buried between 1700 and 1600 cal. BC (at 68.2% probability according to her model 14; cf. the 95.4% probability range of 1740–1535 cal. BC"
About the faience beads and their origins it states
"Faience beads are known from several find-spots in Ireland, with a strong easterly bias (Fig. 7, and see Williams et al. 1991–2, fig. 6). Overall, around 32 beads (including seventeen of segmented form) from sixteen find-spots are known, with the earliest example being a two-segment bead associated with cremated remains and a Vase Food Vessel from Ballyduff, Co. Wexford. The Ballyduff bones have been dated to 3550±50 BP (GrA14604, 2030–1750 cal. BC: Brindley 2007, 93). Brindley (2007, 313–15) has argued for two episodes of faience use in Ireland, with Ballyduff belonging to the first and dating from c. 1920–1800 BC, and the Tara beads belonging to a second—mostly associated with the use of Cordoned Urns—between c. 1720 and c. 1520 BC. Whether there had actually been two episodes is debatable, but the key observation to be made about the Tara beads is that, as with the other beads in the necklace, there is a strong link with contemporary practice in Wessex, where around half of all the 365+ Early Bronze Age faience beads from Britain and Ireland have been found, and an even higher percentage of the beads of segmented form (Sheridan and Shortland 2004,
figs. 21.4 and 21.7). There are grounds, however, for claiming that the Tara beads had not been made in Wessex but were probably made locally. The first of these is the fact that the segmentation has been effected by scoring rather than by the method used in Wessex, where a tube of faience was rolled against a former, like a butter pat in shape, to create segments and grooves of regular shape and depth (ibid., fig. 21.6). The second is that, unlike many of the Wessex beads, the Tara ones do not contain high levels of tin; and the possibility that arsenical copper had been used as a glaze colourant also sets them apart from British beads. It is therefore likely that the faience beads were made and added to the necklace in Ireland, but arguably as a way of enhancing the similarities with the composite necklaces that were fashionable in contemporary Wessex."
This is supported by the place of origin for the rest of the finds in the paper and can be read below.
about O'Riordains conclusion the paper states
"It should be added that Ó Ríordáin’s (1955, 173) claim that the beads had been imported from the eastern Mediterranean around 1400 BC can safely be discounted, given our present understanding of the dating and spread of faience use (Sheridan and Shortland 2004)."
https://www.academia.edu/7798892/Tara_Boy_local_hero_or_international_man_of_mystery
Newton & Renfrew also looked at the spectrographic analysis carried out by the above Stone and also Thomas in their paper "British Faience Beads Reconsidered" (1970).
They say (pg 199)
"When Stone and Thomas considered the subject in great detail in their important and valuable paper ‘it was confidently expected, in view of earlier work, that clear trends in the composition of faience beads would be found which could be correlated with both source and date of manufacture’ (1956, 75). The hope was that spectrographic analyses of the British beads would allow a division into groups corre- lating with analysis of Egyptian and Mycenaean beads. In this way both a source and a date of manufacture might be ascribed to the British finds. This hope was not fulfilled and they were ‘therefore, somewhat reluctantly forced to the conclusion that the spectrographic technique does not confirm the promise of earlier in- vestigations’"
They reexamined the finding and found that (pg 201)
"the Scottish beads contained greater quantities of the elements examined than did the Wessex beads, and those contained more than did the Egyptian beads""
It goes through various elements that are present in one but not in another for example (pg 201)
"Here we are mainly concerned with the differences between the Scottish and the Wessex beads, and all of these contain some tin (except Wessex bead No. 7 which does however contain tin in Table IV) and it is convenient to plot the Mg/Sn ratio against Al, as is shown in FIG. I. All the Scottish beads have a Mg/Sn ratio of 1-0 or more, whereas the beads found in England generally have ratios of less than 1.0, and the beads from the two geographical groups thus fall into two areas on the diagram which meet at the point Mg/Sn = 1.0; A1 = 4. Many of the Mediterranean beads contain no tin, and they have therefore been ignored in this visual presentation; only five of the Egyptian beads fall in either of these two areas of the diagram, and there is thus clear initial support for an hypothesis that the British beads did not come from Mediterranean sources. It is even easier to discriminate between the Scottish beads and any Mediterranean ones by adding the values (after transposition to our scale) for Mg + A1 + Sn + Ti, because none of the twelve Scottish samples (11 faience and I slag) has a value less than 10 (average = 12.7) and none of the 40 samples from any other region (except England) has a value larger than 9 (average = 6.8). The hypothesis thus gains support when titanium is added to the picture."
It looks at the archaeological implications and states (pg 202)
"This separation of the Scottish, English and Mediterranean beads into groups, established above, does not of itself prove the local manufacture of the beads. But while the theory that all the beads were imported from the Mediterranean could still be upheld, it would require some very special pleading. Such pleading might be possible were there abundant evidence of Mycenaean or Egyptian influence on Bronze Age Britain, or even of evidence that beads with these compositions are to be found in the Mediterranean area."
Scotia the Egyptian Princess
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| Scota and Gaythelos Scotichronicon, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Image Wiki. |
I'm no Egyptologist but I do know one and that is Andrea Sinclair. She has written a piece of the possibility of there being an Egyptian Princess named Scotia.
The main conclusion is as follows:
Egyptian Princesses were divine and were never married off to foreigners.
"But did you keep the word 'princess` in the back of your mind while reading this?
Because what is essential to these romantic concoctions, is the misleading use of the word to describe these women, which immediately delegates them to inferior status in the reader’s mind. You know, as unmarried young women in a 19th century oil painting languishing around a palace on pillows shaking a sistrum, eating dates and waiting for a prince, only useful as tools for forming canny political alliances.
The ancient Egyptians simply did not work that way.
Egyptian princesses were considerably more important than that, queens even more so, they all held roles of high ritual importance. Try inserting queen of Egypt into every context where princess is used to sell this tosh and see how that changes the tone a lot.... great queen Meritaten - great queen Ankhesenamen.
Neither woman was an object to be fobbed off as reward for military prowess on some stranger from Scythia or Greece or even Tyre. Meritaten and Ankhesenamen were chief queens and one of them was quite likely king of Egypt between 1335-1332 BCE.
The only way you actually quit those jobs in Egypt was by dying.
When a king died, if living, his chief wife became the dowager queen, a role as ritually important as chief queen. You were responsible for running the country if the heir was underage, a semi-divine entity, a conduit for the goddesses, Hathor's earthly representative. You couldn’t just run off to Spain with some guy in your dad’s army, a vassal governor, or your grandfather (urk)."
You can read about the flawed chronology and the flawed archaeology here.
https://artisticlicenseorwhyitrustnoone.blogspot.com/2019/09/scota-egyptian-princess-who-wasnt_24.html
The Barbary Ape
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| Barbary ape skull from Navan Fort (after Lynn 2003, p. 49) / irisharchaeology.ie |
Sometimes the Barbary Ape found at Navan Fort is added into the mix. The ape skull has been dated to 390-320 BC.
http://irisharchaeology.ie/2014/05/a-barbary-ape-skull-from-navan-fort-co-armagh/
Edit:
Another interesting part of the story is that of Scotia's Grave south of Tralee.
Rather than Scotia's Glen this actually translates as Glen of Wispy Flax or something similar. "Scoithín: A little wisp of hemp or flax ; a small lock of hair. (Dineen - Foclóir GB - 1904). (Thanks to Jim Hynes of the facebook group Irish Placename Research for that).
For more on a visit I took to Scotia's Glen see
here. Sadly there was no evidence for the hieroglyphics that are sometimes said to be carved there!
