The Other Passage Tomb at Tara

[walhiska]

I was looking back on some of the notes I took in a Celtic Civilisation class that I did in undergraduate, and I was thinking about how Tara in particular is such an interesting site, not because there's a single coherent vision behind it as a sacred landscape, but because it was sacralised over a vast swathe of time, by many different generations and cultures. I think it's positive, as well, that Irish people are generally very aware of how it isn't a "Celtic" place but simply Irish, with monuments testfying to continuous activity stretching from the Neolithic to the Iron Age - as such, anything Celtic at Tara is a late element - ancient but comparatively recent. 

The oldest visible archaeological feature is Dumha na nGiall; I always see it translated as the Mound of the Hostages, but dumha is essentially a barrow tomb; the people who lived in Ireland during Middle Neolithic wouldn't have used a Gaelic term, of course (we don't know what language they spoke, not even which family it belonged to - these structures pre-date our estimates for when Proto-Celtic began to develop on the continent), but that's the name that the later groups who lived around Tara gave to it, and the superstructure definitely looks like a barrow / cairn. 

Incidentally ... growing up, we always called them giant's graves, and I notice that in Icelandic they use the word Jötundys, while in Danish it's Jættestue: all with that same meaning. I do like that a lot.

I'd quite like to see the illumination of the chamber, which occurs at Samhain and Imbolc (Hallowe'en and Saint Brigid's Day, the 1st of February), I think it would be just as interesting as the more famous Newgrange illumination at the Brú na Boinne complex.* I haven't been around Tara since I was a kid, and if I got to go now, independently, after having studied the area, I'd love to have a proper wander and see Ráth Medb (Maeve's Henge?) too, which is just as ancient, but on currently private farmland. 

Obviously I'd like to revisit the Boyne valley too, my trip there a few years ago was one of the best days of my life. I'm not into the mystic side, but the sensation of such deep time is always really refreshing, and sort of spiritual whether you like it or not! I guess I'm just thinking about ancient Ireland because it's Lúnasa today, and I'm in - lowland! - Scotland, well away from all that environment. Although the Christian sites here are interesting too, of course.

* How funny is it that we call a site from 3200 BC 'New'grange?

Comments

[agirlahaunt]

"the people who lived in Ireland during Middle Neolithic wouldn't have used a Gaelic term, of course (we don't know what language they spoke, not even which family it belonged to - these structures pre-date our estimates for when Proto-Celtic began to develop on the continent)," -- oh my god, this is so interesting! I had always assumed they spoke proto-celtic... are there any theories? also, do you have recommended reading for this subject? dhdhdhd

x

[walhiska]

hi Lear :) It's super interesting, right? There's a lot of scholarship still to be done on this era, but the linguistic side is very difficult to figure out. We know very little about the languages of Europe before the Indo-European expansion in the Bronze Age, and about the pre-European languages of northern Europe ... almost nothing.

Linguists start talking about Celtic languages (including the Goidelic branch) from about 1000 BC, and these sites were still being used at that time, but! we don't know how quickly or how uniformly these languages spread to Ireland because the British and Irish Isles are fairly peripheral compared to main areas of focus for Iron Age Celtic studies.

There are plenty of Irish words that don't seem to be Celtic / Indo-European in origin (list), which to me suggests a long period of contact and co-existence between the Celtic languages on the continent and their pre-existing non-Indo-European neighbours (in the case of the words that are also found in Gaulish and Basque), and also that this was particularly the case in ancient Ireland (in the case of the words whose origins we don't know at all).

But it all gets really speculative. The Vasconic substrate hypothesis is (justly) not accepted by anyone any more, and neither is the idea of a para-Semitic / Phoencian substrate in the insular Celtic languages - but even if something more sensible was proposed it's just borderline impossible to prove anything because without anything ressembling written evidence (for the pre-Celtic languages), and with less attestation for Insular Celtic languages themselves than for other Indo-European languages or even the Continental Celtic languages, you'd still be on very shaky ground. Even the Italo-Celtic theories (which have a lot of merit and are roughly contemporary with the original builders of Brú na Bóinne), rely on evidence from south-central Europe.

Given how decentralised all palaeo-European societies were, it seems very obvious that there must have been a huge amount of linguistic diversity, with possibly hundreds of different languages, but basically all that's left is a handful of placenames. I don't read German, but I thought that Hans Krahe's Unsere ältesten Flussnamen might be interesting to you (it's from the 60s and there are some problems with his work re. prefixes but still cool). I'll make a post with a list of reading on this :)