For a while now, I have been intending to write an article on Bob Quinn’s Atlantean theories. Quinn originally worked for RTÉ (the Irish state broadcasting service) and then became an independent film-maker. He was briefly famous for his high-profile disagreements with RTÉ on various issues and he has his place in the history of Irish culture because of a number of films (not my taste, but certainly significant). One of them, Poitín, was the first feature film ever made entirely in the Irish language.
If he had stuck to these things, I would have a generally positive view of him. Unfortunately, he is also well-known for three films produced in 1983, The Atlantean Trilogy, in which he posits various theories about links between Irish culture and North Africa, claiming that scholars have downplayed the vast influence of trading and other contacts up the Atlantic coasts of Western Europe from North Africa. This ‘thesis’ was then advanced further in two books, Atlantean, published in 1986, and The Atlantean Irish: Ireland’s Oriental and Maritime Heritage, published in 2005. These are not really two different books. The 2005 book is a revised and expanded and illustrated version of the 1986 work.
Why do I dislike Quinn’s Atlantean theory so much? I can assure you that it’s not because I am racist or xenophobic and I imagine the same is true for most of Quinn’s critics. My dislike for Quinn is for the same reasons as my disdain for Cassidy and a host of other pseudo-scholars. His ‘research’ is egotistical, narcissistic and completely devoid of merit. Being stupid is not a crime, and I am as capable of stupidity as the next person. The difference is, that I am unlikely to shoot my mouth off about a subject where I have absolutely no specialist knowledge at all. Humility is not Quinn’s strong point and his assumption that he is ahead of the curve (“What’s this! My thesis on Ireland and North Africa was not supposed to become respectable for at least another decade!”) and that the academic world will eventually catch up and come around to his way of thinking just seems deluded and intensely irritating to me.
If you are looking for a good, comprehensive review of the 2005 book, try the one by archaeologist Richard Warner (available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261780104_THE_ATLANTEAN_IRISH_IRELAND’S_ORIENTAL_AND_MARITIME_HERITAGE_by_Bob_Quinn).
In this post, I will just jot down some notes about why Quinn was so totally and abysmally wrong about all of this stuff, and how guillible and incompetent Quinn himself and many of his apologists are. I won’t do it comprehensively or systematically because that would entail having to read his book again from cover to cover and believe me, I have much better things to do with my time.
So, what is Quinn’s argument? He seems to be saying (and I agree with Florian Blaschke that it is hard to be sure what he is saying because he himself doesn’t seem to have a very clear idea) that mainstream scholarship has downplayed the influence of movements down the Atlantic coasts of Western Europe and North Africa in spreading various aspects of culture.
However, in doing so, he also threw his lot in with a largely discredited archaeological theory called Celtoscepticism but he doesn’t know enough about language to really understand it.
Because of Quinn’s complete ignorance of linguistics and his dilettante half-knowledge of Celtoscepticism, he thinks that the decision to describe the Irish language and the literature and mythology associated with it as Celtic is random and not rooted in evidence. Indeed, he implies that the decision to make Irish a part of the Indo-European world was possibly a racist decision, and that a mind unimpeded by bigotry could just as easily have categorised Irish with Arabic and Hebrew.
This is nonsense. The fact is that the languages still spoken in Ireland and Wales and other areas of the Celtic Fringe are clearly classifiable as Indo-European, because their vocabulary and grammar link them to other Indo-European languages in Europe and in Asia. And they belong to a sub-group of the Indo-European languages which linguists call Celtic, which includes these still surviving languages as well as extinct languages of Western Europe like Gaulish and Lepontic. We know this because we have inscriptions in these languages and place names, tribal names and personal names from areas where Gaulish and Lepontic were spoken and they are obviously similar. Just to give a couple of examples, the city of Lyons was originally called Lugudunum. This is the same as the Irish word for fortress, dún, with the name of a Celtic god who is still commemorated in Ireland in the name of the festival of Lughnasa (modern spelling Lúnasa), which is the Irish name for the month of August. Dumnorix, the chieftain of the Aedui who fought Caesar has a name meaning the same as the Irish domhan-rí (older spelling domhan-righ), meaning ‘world-king’. These are a couple of random examples out of thousands. Do some research on line and you will quickly realise that I’m right.
Apart from total ignorance, Quinn draws on an eclectic range of claims to bolster his idea that Irish culture is not Celtic. One that has been promoted by many Celtosceptics is that the term Celtic in this sense is quite new and that Celtic peoples had no awareness of their Celtic identity until recently. This is perfectly true but irrelevant. The first to use the term Celtic and realise that these languages were related was Buchanan in the 16th century (not Lhuyd in the 18th, as Quinn claims). Some Celtosceptics also dislike the term Celtic for political reasons, and Quinn seems to regard it as part of the toxic narrow-minded vision of Irishness which arose from the Gaelic Revival. However, why single out Celtic? The term Germanic is used by linguists and to some extent by archaeologists in relation to (for example) the Jastorf Culture. I would have thought that the term Germanic was considerably more toxic and compromised than Celtic, but for some reason the Celtosceptics (generally British archaeologists) are not as vociferous about it as they are about the use of Celtic. (I also think that one thing five of the surviving Celtic peoples have in common is being patronised or worse by the English, so attempts by English archaeologists to tell us how to define our past or our identity are both misplaced and ill-advised. There’s also some hypocrisy to Cunliffe supporting Quinn and his ‘Atlanteans’ while rejecting the term Celtic. Can you think of a more compromised term than Atlantean? Tinfoil helmets at the ready, lads!)
Other people seem to think that believing in the existence of a Celtic linguistic and cultural group in the ancient world and including Ireland and Britain means that we believe in a Celtic Aryan race with distinct characteristics. I don’t and I never have.
Quinn also raises the question of substrates in the Insular Celtic languages, the idea that the Celtic languages contain the ghosts of other languages or another language that were once spoken in Ireland or Britain or wherever the Insular Celtic languages first developed, so for example, the VSO word order of our language is said to match Arabic or Hebrew. The fact is, we don’t know how fixed the word order of languages is and how easy it is for them to change, or what knock-on effects such a change might have on the rest of the grammar and an examination of the non-Indo-European vocabulary in Irish and Welsh doesn’t suggest any Hamito-Semitic substrate. In other words, the substrate idea is interesting but lacks any compelling evidence. If it were as strong an influence as Quinn claims, it should be immediately apparent, with hundreds of solid and obvious examples, which is not the case.
And even if there were a non-Celtic and non-Indo-European substrate in Irish, this wouldn’t mean that Irish is not a Celtic or Indo-European language, as Quinn claims. He actually says as much himself without realising. When he explains what a linguistic substrate is, he uses the example of certain substrate features from Irish in Hiberno-English, such as the use of phrases like ‘I’m after seeing him’ (tá mé tar éis é a fheiceáil). But Hiberno-English is a Germanic language with a slight Celtic influence. It isn’t a Celtic language. Ergo, a substrate doesn’t dictate the entire nature or categorisation of the language.
There are other cases where Quinn’s writing style is impenetrable and where its vagueness is deliberate, masking a lack of knowledge of the subject. For example, look at this sentence:
The human genome researches of Dr Dan Bradley of Trinity College point to Connacht as a concentrated source of ancient genetic markers, suggesting a remarkable continuity of habitation.
I am guessing what he is trying to say here. I have to guess, because what he actually wrote means nothing. “A concentrated source of ancient genetic markers?” Well, bedad! I think what he is referring to here is the fact that varieties of the R1b y-line haplogroup are found in nearly 100% of males in parts of the west of Ireland. These are not particularly ancient (compared to many other haplogroups) and ‘a concentrated source’ is a bizarre way of expressing it. The fact is that the DNA of people in the West of Ireland is remarkably homogeneous. This doesn’t usually mean that it is ancient or imply continuity. You would expect MORE variety closer to the source of a group of people, just as Africans have a much greater variety in their DNA than those of us with ancestry outside of Africa. We now know (and in his defence, Quinn could not have known this when the article was written) that there was an almost blanket replacement of the population of Ireland at the end of the Neolithic, as steppe pastoralists moved into western and northern Europe, largely replacing a people who were probably descended from Middle Eastern farmers and looked Middle Eastern. The movement of the steppe people (the Beaker People) was complicated and partly involved Iberia. But there is no doubt that it DOES NOT suggest a north African origin for the Irish people, except the Neolithic farmers who are a fraction of our genetic heritage. (And who arrived via the north coast of the Mediterranean and through Central Europe, which does NOT support Quinn’s idea of Atlantean links to North Africa.)
This general sloppiness and incompetence is found scattered throughout the book. The Irish word crios does not come from Críostaí (or criosdaí as he misspells it) and the suggestion would make any real scholar laugh out loud. (This is an oft-repeated folk-etymology about the origin of the crios, but it is obviously not true.) Neither does the word mummer come from Mohammedan, or troubadour from Arabic (though in fairness to him, that is also claimed by a small minority of academics).
However, nowhere is his inadequacy as a researcher more obvious than in his discussion of the word shamrock. He claims that he found out while looking at some door panels in the National Library in Cairo that shamrakh is the Arabic for a trefoil plant. Strangely, if you put the words Arabic, shamrock and shamrakh into the search box on a newspaper archive, you will find that there are dozens of short articles in British and Irish newspapers from the year 1878 onwards (such as the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail in 1878), usually published around St Patrick’s Day, which repeat this claim that the Arabic for a trefoil is shamrakh. They either state that this is a curious coincidence or link it to the Lost Tribes of Israel.
The question is, of course, did Quinn really find this in a library in Cairo or did he find it in a newspaper in a library in Dublin? And how can we be sure that the information about shamrakh is correct? I have been unable to find any confirmation that shamrakh means a trefoil in Arabic and Quinn certainly doesn’t give any evidence. No references to Arabic dictionaries. He asked someone. In a library. In Cairo, apparently. But didn’t feel that confirming this with an actual Arabic dictionary reference would help his case.
I should also point out that shamrock is from the Irish seamróg, the feminine diminutive of seamair, meaning clover. In other words, it means little clover, and is 100% Irish, so even if shamrakh does mean a trefoil in Arabic, it is no more than a coincidence.
Of course, DNA science has now come on leaps and bounds, so we now know that Quinn was talking rubbish and that there is no evidence for the idea of strong north African (or indeed, Iberian) genetic links. The vast majority of our genes and our culture came via Britain from mainland Europe and we can prove it. So why is this shite still being recycled and discussed by morons as if it had any validity? The answer is in the question – more specifically, in that word MORONS.
cassidyslangscam 