King Arthur's round table may have been found by archaeologists in Scotland

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

King Arthur's round table may have been found by archaeologists in Scotland

Archaeologists searching for King Arthur's round table have found a "circular feature" beneath the historic King's Knot in Stirling.

King Arthur's round table may have been found by archaeologists



The King's Knot in the grounds of Stirling Castle Photo: ALAMY

9:25AM
BST 26 Aug 2011

The King's Knot, a geometrical earthwork in the former royal gardens below Stirling Castle, has been shrouded in mystery for hundreds of years.

Though the Knot as it appears today dates from the 1620s, its flat-topped central mound is thought to be much older.

Writers going back more than six centuries have linked the landmark to the legend of King Arthur.

Archaeologists from Glasgow University, working with the Stirling Local History Society and Stirling Field and Archaeological Society, conducted the first ever non-invasive survey of the site in May and June in a bid to uncover some of its secrets.

Their findings were show there was indeed a round feature on the site that pre-dates the visible earthworks.

Historian John Harrison, chair of the SLHS, who initiated the project, said: "Archaeologists using remote-sensing geophysics, have located remains of a circular ditch and other earth works beneath the King's Knot.

"The finds show that the present mound was created on an older site and throws new light on a tradition that King Arthur's Round Table was located in this vicinity."

Stories have been told about the curious geometrical mound for hundreds of years -- including that it was the Round Table where King Arthur gathered his knights.

Around 1375 the Scots poet John Barbour said that "the round table" was south of Stirling Castle, and in 1478 William of Worcester told how "King Arthur kept the Round Table at Stirling Castle".

Sir David Lindsay, the 16th century Scottish writer, added to the legend in 1529 when he said that Stirling Castle was home of the "Chapell-royall, park, and Tabyll Round".

It has also been suggested the site is partly Iron Age or medieval, or was used as a Roman fort.

Extensive work on the royal gardens was carried out in the early 17th century for Charles I, when the mound is thought to have taken its current form.

The first known record of the site being called the King's Knot is from 1767, by which time it was being leased for pasture.

Locals refer to the grassy earthworks as the "cup and saucer", but aerial photographs taken in 1980 showed three concentric ditches beneath and around the King's Knot mound, suggesting an earthwork monument had preceded it.

The new survey -- funded by Historic Scotland and Stirling City Heritage Trust -- used the latest scientific techniques to showing lost structures and features up to a metre below the ground.

It also revealed a series of ditches south of the main mound, as well as remains of buildings, and more recent structures, including modern drains which appear at the northern end of the gardens.

Mr Harrison, who has studied the King's Knot for 20 years, said: "It is a mystery which the documents cannot solve, but geophysics has given us new insights.

"Of course, we cannot say that King Arthur was there, but the feature which surrounds the core of the Knot could explain the stories and beliefs that people held."

Archaeologist Stephen Digney, who coordinated the project, said: "The area around Stirling Castle holds some of the finest medieval landscapes in Europe.

"This investigation is an exciting first step in a serious effort to explore, explain and interpret them. The results so far suggest that Scotland's monarchs integrated an ancient feature into their garden, something we know happened in other countries too.

"We are looking forward to the next stage in September when we hope to refine some of the details."

Dr. Kirsty Owen, Cultural Heritage Adviser at Historic Scotland, added: "The project has the potential to add to our knowledge of the landscape context of the medieval and early modern occupation of Stirling Castle.

"The ditches identified may intriguingly be part of historically documented earlier garden features, or if prehistoric in origin could add to our scant knowledge of prehistoric activity at Stirling Castle.

"We look forward to seeing the results of the next phase of investigations."Futher work including a ground-penetrating radar survey, is now planned to take place next month to find out more.

A small display of the interim results can be seen close to the site at the Smith Museum.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... tland.html

[mgt23]

......Arthur's real roundtable was an idea. All men are equal before god. The idea of a round table and the Title of "Arthur" or "Battle leader" are older than legends claim......
Arthur didn't want you to vote for him, he wanted you to fight for an idea. A land free of male jews and the female correspondent wicked witches. A roundtable where men could meet to socialise and organise for the common good of the land and the people.

What we have now is a travesty of that roundtable idea.....and the land is in woe.

[FrankDialogue]

......Arthur's real roundtable was an idea. All men are equal before god. The idea of a round table and the Title of "Arthur" or "Battle leader" are older than legends claim......
Arthur didn't want you to vote for him, he wanted you to fight for an idea. A land free of male jews and the female correspondent wicked witches. A roundtable where men could meet to socialise and organise for the common good of the land and the people.

What we have now is a travesty of that roundtable idea.....and the land is in woe.

Yes.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

I agree... keep in mind...

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If Irish Claim Nobility, Science May Approve

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: January 18, 2006

Listen more kindly to the New York Irishmen who assure you that the blood of early Irish kings flows in their veins. At least 2 percent of the time, they are telling the truth, according to a new genetic survey.


Descendants of King Niall of the Nine Hostages

The survey not only bolsters the bragging rights of some Irishmen claiming a proud heritage but also provides evidence of the existence of Niall of the Nine Hostages, an Irish high king of the fifth century A.D. regarded by some historians as more legend than real.

The survey shows that 20 percent of men in northwestern Ireland carry a distinctive genetic signature on their Y chromosomes, possibly inherited from Niall, who was said to have had numerous sons, or some other leader in a position to have had many descendants.

About one in 50 New Yorkers of European origin - including men with names like O'Connor, Flynn, Egan, Hynes, O'Reilly and Quinn - carry the genetic signature linked with Niall and northwestern Ireland, writes Daniel Bradley, the geneticist who conducted the survey with colleagues at Trinity College in Dublin. He arrived at that estimate after surveying the Y chromosomes in a genetic database that included New Yorkers.

About 400,000 city residents say they are of Irish ancestry, according to a 2004 Census Bureau survey.

"I hope this means that I inherit a castle in Ireland," the novelist Peter Quinn said by phone from the Peter McManus cafe in Chelsea. Some McManuses also have the genetic signature. ("I hang out with kings," Mr. Quinn said.)

He said his father used to tell him that all the Quinn men were bald from wearing a crown. But he added, "We spent 150 years in the Bronx, and I think we wiped out all the royal genes in the process."

The report appears in the January issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics.

Dr. Bradley said he was as surprised at finding evidence that Niall existed as he would have been to learn that King Arthur had been real. Niall of the Nine Hostages was so named because in his early reign he consolidated his power by taking hostages from opposing royal families.

He estimated that two million to three million men worldwide carry the distinctive Y chromosome signature, which he named the I.M.H., for Irish modal haplotype. A haplotype is a set of genetic mutations.

If he was indeed the patriarch, Niall of the Nine Hostages would rank among the most prolific males in history, behind Genghis Khan, ancestor of 16 million men in Asia, but ahead of Giocangga, founder of China's Manchu dynasty and forefather of some 1.6 million. This calculation, and the estimate of the I.M.H. signature's frequency in New York, were derived from a database of Y chromosome mutations.

The writer and actor Malachy McCourt said he was not surprised, since every Irish person is related to a king.

"They didn't mind who they slept with, and they had first dibs," he said. "It's so boring. It's not like the house of Windsor; every tribe had its own king."

He said Niall was "a highwayman. He was a slave trader, nothing noble about him. He was a pirate."

The link between the Niall Y chromosome and social power, which would have enabled the king to leave many descendants, "stretches back to the fifth century, which is a long time in Western European terms," Dr. Bradley said.

Asked if he himself carried the Niall signature, Dr. Bradley said he did and was "quite pleased," even though tradition holds that Niall captured and enslaved St. Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland.

Niall is said to have obtained hostages from each of the five provinces that then constituted Ireland, as well as from Scotland, the Saxons, the Britons and the Franks. He is thought to be the patriarch of the Ui Neill, meaning "the descendants of Niall," a group of dynasties that claimed the high kingship and ruled the northwest and other parts of Ireland from about A.D. 600 to 900.

But historians have tended to view the Ui Neill as a political construct, doubting their genealogical claims of descent from Niall and even whether Niall existed at all.

When the Irish took surnames, however, around A.D. 1000, some chose names associated with the Ui Neill dynasties. Dr. Bradley tested Irishmen with Ui Neill surnames and found the I.M.H. signature was much more common among them than among Irishmen as a whole.

The men with Ui Neill surnames tested by Dr. Bradley included those with the names, in anglicized form, O'Gallagher, O'Boyle, O'Doherty, O'Donnell, O'Connor, Cannon, Bradley, O'Reilly, Flynn, McKee, Campbell, Devlin, Donnelly, Egan, Gormley, Hynes, McCaul, McGovern, McLoughlin, McManus, McMenamin, Molloy, O'Kane, O'Rourke and Quinn. (The prefix "O" is sometimes dropped.)

Dr. Katherine Simms, a Celtic historian at Trinity College who advised the geneticists and was a co-author of their report, said some historians had assumed that the common ancestor of the Ui Neill was "merely a mythical divine ancestor figure, imagined in order to explain the political links that existed between the dynasties themselves in the later period."

But Dr. Bradley's findings, she said, "appear to confirm that the Ui Neill really did come from a common ancestor," and perhaps that the mythical narrative of Niall's birth and ascent to kingship "had a genetic basis."

The earliest Irish genealogies, if true, must have been recorded in oral form for several generations, since writing did not become common in Ireland until 600. Dr. Daibhi O'Croinin of the National University of Ireland in Galway said he was confident that "extensive genealogical material" could have been memorized and put into writing later, but "whether Niall of the Nine Hostages ever existed is itself a moot point."

Another Celtic expert, Dr. Catherine McKenna of Harvard University, said in an e-mail message that "historians will be skeptical about the notion that all of the Ui Neill descend from the ancestor who seems to be implied by the genetic evidence, or that this ancestor was Niall Noigiallach (Niall of the Nine Hostages) himself."

She said the number of Niall's supposed sons grew from 4 to 14 as new dynasties achieved power and claimed descent from Niall. "The evidence for the Ui Neill as a political construct is strong enough that historians wouldn't readily believe in the historical reality of Niall himself," she said.

Still, the new genetic evidence may convince historians that there was a common ancestor for at least one of the major branches of the Ui Neill, such as the Cenel nEogain, which lived in an area of northwest Ireland where the I.M.H. is most common.

"In fact," Dr. McKenna said, "I find the evidence, from that point of view, really fascinating."

Michelle O'Donnell contributed reporting for this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/scien ... d=all&_r=0


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Niall Nóigiallach - Niall of the Nine Hostages
 
Niall Nóigiallach is a very famous man (Nóigiallach is Gaelic for "having Nine Hostages"). He was an Irish King who lived from about 350 to 405 AD. The "nine hostages" refers to hostages that he kept from each of the places that owed him allegiance.

Niall was fond of raiding the coast of Roman Britain and on one of those raids he captured a man named Maewyn Succat, who became a slave in Ireland. Succat eventually escaped, returned to Britain, and became a Christian missionary. He then went back to Ireland to convert the Irish heathens to Christianity. We know Maewyn Succat by his Christian name, Patrick, or Saint Patrick.

The reason Niall Nóigiallach is famous is because he is associated with the List of High Kings of Ireland, one of the oldest well-established genealogies in all of Europe. Anybody who connects to the lineage can trace ancestors back to about 100 AD.

Niall is also famous for another reason. DNA studies indicate that one in twelve Irish men carry a Y chromosome haplotype that traces back to Niall. The haplotype is also common in Scotland and England, and on the continent. This makes Niall one of only a handful of men who have millions of direct male descendants. (Genghis Khan was another [Genghis Khan a Prolific Lover, DNA Data Implies].)

Families that trace their ancestry back to Niall of the Nine Hostages include: (O')Neill, (O')Gallagher, (O')Boyle, (O')Doherty, O'Donnell, Connor, Cannon, Bradley, O'Reilly, Flynn, (Mc)Kee, Campbell, Devlin, Donnelly, Egan, Gormley, Hynes, McCaul, McGovern, McLoughlin (CSR's family) , McManus, McMenamin, Molloy, O'Kane, O'Rourke and Quinn.

My mother's maiden name is Doherty. We are descendants of the O'Dochartaigh's of Donegal in the north-west part Ireland. Donegal is in the Republic of Ireland not in the part of Ulster that became what is now called "Northern Ireland", which is part of the United Kingdom. Donegal is near where the most intense spot on the DNA map is located.

My mother was hoping to establish the direct connection between her ancestors and the ancient lineage leading to Niall but it hasn't been possible. That was a big disappointment because I thought it would be fun to have a known ancestor from 400 AD.

Recently I discovered that my ancestors connect to the Niall lineage through English and through Scottish lines that are completely unrelated to the Doherty's. This shows, once again, that most people in England, Scotland, and Ireland are related if you go back far enough. The fact that so many lineages connect to the Niall lineage is not as significant as you might think. It's mostly because that ancient lineage is so well known.

In my case, the connections come through Isabel de Clare, grandmother of Robert the Bruce of Scotland, and through Isabel Mar, the wife of Robert the Bruce. Niall Nóigiallach is one of my ancestors. (mine too --CSR)

If your ancestors are from the British Isles, chances are pretty high that we are related if we go back 60 generations. We all have about a trillion potential ancestors back then but that's five orders of magnitude more than all the people who lived in the British Isles at that time.

http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2008/10/ni ... tages.html