If I’d been asked, until recently, what an etymologist does I might have hazarded a guess that it is someone who studies butterflies rather than someone who investigates the derivation of words. I have Marchell Abrahams to thank for clearing that up.
‘Clearing that up’ leads me to her remarkable book ‘The Great Migrations to Britain of 1527 B.C. and 485 B.C.’ This details a history, understood to be true by the British people until a revision of British history occurred post-1714 with introduction of the Hanovarian Kings.
Why such a revision should have been deemed necessary is already well covered and uncovered by Wilson and Blackett.
The history that Marchell reveals is much earlier than Hanovarian machinations and has, as a pivot point, Troy and its place in the great migrations when Albyne and, later, Brutus led their people across half the known world to settle in the land now known as Britain.
Worth noting that until Troy was discovered it was a relatively simple matter to dismiss Troy as legend and, thus, accepted British history can also be discarded.
With painstaking care and a forensic approach to her discipline, Marchell notes correspondences in language, in alphabet and in the layers of meaning within a word.
She follows the routes taken by these expeditions from Sumer to, eventually, Britain and when in Britain applies the same due diligence to the matters at hand.
Marchell presents the evidence, her conclusions in respect to who these wandering people were and where they came from are startling.
The history that we are told is a twin fable to ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ – a story where the shimmering garment is revealed as – nothing.
Marchell, to quote in respect to her book, said this:
“ …. at the very least I have restored the rags and shreds and tatters of our history to something approaching a recognisable garment.”
Beautifully expressed as is the book.
As fate would have it, I came across a clear presentation the other day which put the Trojan War into a context which resonates with Marchell’s far reaching conclusions. That video is presented here.