to believe that the writers are dealing with the self-same inscriptions: Ogam Iddaiqnnn vor-renni ci Osist. Main Ette Evagainnias Maqqi Noviogruta "Lies here Vorr's " Draw near to the soul of Moluag from whom came knowledge. He was of the island of Lorn." Iddaiqnnn son of Vorenni here Osist." Ette son of Evagainnias 1 The locations of these readings are already cited. NEWTON STONE REMAINED UNDECIPHERED 25 As a consequence of such irreconcilable attempts at deciphering and translating these inscriptions, and as at the same time their supposed contents were conjectured to be of little or no historical importance or significance, this ancient inscribed monument of such unique importance for Early British History has fallen practically into oblivion.1 1 Thus it is not mentioned in the text of "The County Histories of Scotland" for Aberdeenshire, nor in "Early Britain" in The Story of the Nations series, nor in "Celtic Britain " by Rhys, nor in the modern county and district manuals for Aberdeenshire, except in Ward's popular "Aberdeen" book where the fact of its existence is noted in four lines with the remark that the inscription is "in Greek-varied and conflicting are the attempted readings." IV DECIPHERMENT AND TRANSLATION OF THE PHOENICIAN INSCRIPTIONS ON THE NEWTON STONE Disclosing Monument to be a votive Fire-Cross to the Sun-god Bel by a Phænician Hittite Brit-on and the script and language Aryan Phænician or Early Briton. WHEN I first saw this "unknown". script of the central inscription on the Newton Stone many years ago, in the plates of Dr. Stuart's classic "Sculptured Stones of Scotland," I formed the opinion that that learned archæologist was right in his surmise that the writing was possibly in "an eastern alphabet." I further recognized that it was presumably a form of the early Phoenician script, cognate with what I had been accustomed to in the Aryan Pali script of India of the third and fourth century B.C.; and I thought it might be what I had come to call " Aryan Phoenician," which it now proves to be. At that time, however, I did not feel sufficiently equipped to tackle the decipherment of this inscription in detail. But having latterly devoted my entire time for many years past to the comparative study at first hand of the ancient scripts and historical documents of the Hitt-ites, Sumerians, Akkads, Ægeans and Phoenicians, and the Aramaic, Gothic Runes and Ogams, I took up again the Newton Stone inscriptions for detailed examination some time ago. And I found that the "unknown" unknown" script therein was clearly what I term "Aryan Phoenician," that is true Phoenician, and its language Aryan Phoenician of the Early Briton or Early Gothic type. By this time, I had observed that the early inscriptions of the Phoenicians were written in Aryan language, Aryan script, and in the Aryan direction, that is towards the right DECIPHERMENT OF NEWTON STONE 27 hand. The so-called "Semitic Phoenician" writing, on the other hand, with reversed letters, and in the reversed or left-hand direction, and dating mostly to a relatively late period, was, I observed, written presumably by the ruling Aryan Phoenicians for the information of their Semitic subjects at their various settlements; and by some of these Phoenicianized Semitic subjects or allies helping themselves to and reversing the Phoenician letters. It was obviously parallel to what we find in India in the third century B.C., where the great Aryan emperor of India, Asoka, writes his Buddhist edicts in reversed letters and in reversed or "Semitic" direction, when carving them on the rocks on his northwestern frontier in districts inhabited by Semitic tribes; yet no one on this account has suggested or could suggest that Asoka was a Semite. By this time also, I had recognized that the various ancient scripts found at or near the old settlements of the Phoenicians, and arbitrarily differentiated by classifying philologists variously as Cyprian, Karian, Aramaic or Syrian, Lykian, Lydian, Korinthian, Ionian, Cretan or "Minoan," Pelasgian, Phrygian, Cappadocian, Cilician, Theban, Libyan, Celto-Iberian, Gothic Runes, etc., were all really local variations of the standard Aryan Hitto-Sumerian writing of the Aryan Phoenician mariners, those ancient pioneer spreaders of the Hitt-ite Civilization along the shores of the Mediterranean and out beyond the Pillars of Hercules to the British Isles. In tackling afresh the decipherment of the Newton Stone inscriptions, in view of the hopelessly conflicting tangle that had resulted from the mutually conflicting attempts of previous writers, which proved a hindrance rather than a help to decipherment, I wiped all the previous attempts off the board and started anew with a clean slate and open mind. The material and other sources for my scrutiny of these Newton Stone inscriptions have been a minute personal examination of these inscriptions on the spot, the comparative study of a large series of photographs of the stone by myself and others, including the published photographs and eye-copies by previous writers, and the careful lithographs by Stuart from squeeze-impressions and photographs. In constructing the accompanying eye-copy of the uniquely important central inscription, here given (Fig. 6), I scrupulously compared all available photographs from different points of view, for no one photograph can cover and focus all the details of these letters owing to the great unevenness and sinuosities of the inscribed surface of this rough boulder-stone. It will be seen that my eye-copy of this script differs in some minute but important details from those of Stuart and Lord Southesk, the most accurate of the copies previously published. In my decipherment of this central script I derived especial assistance from the Cilician, Cyprian and “Iberian” scripts and the Indian Pali of the third and fourth centuries B.C. and Gothic runes, which were closely allied in several respects; and Canon Taylor's and Prof. Petrie's classic works on the alphabet also proved helpful. So obviously Aryan Phænician was the type of the letters in this central script, when I now took it up for detailed examination, that, in dealing with the two scripts, I took up the central one in this "unknown" script first, that is in the reverse order to that adopted in all previous attempts. I found that it was Aryan Phoenician script of the kind ordinarily written with a pen and ink on skin and parchment, such, as we are told by Herodotus, was the chief medium of writing used by the early inhabitants of Asia Minor; and the perishable nature of such documents accounts for the loss of so much of the original literature of the Early Aryans both in Asia Minor and in Britain. On deciphering in a few minutes most of the letters in this Phoenician script with more or less certainty, I then proceeded to decipher the Ogam version in the light of the Phoenician. I thereupon found that the strings of personal ethnic and place-names were substantially identical in both inscriptions, thus disclosing them to be really bi-lingual versions of the same. This fortunate fact, that the inscriptions on the Newton |