Scota and the Egypt connection

From various writings of ancient chroniclers we deduce that the nation of the Scots is of ancient stock, taking its first beginning from the Greeks and those of the Egyptians

Walter Bower, Scotichronicon

Egyptian tycoon Mohamed al Fayed, owner of Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, London is also the bereaved father of Dodi, Princess Diana's companion in their fatal 1997 car crash. I have visited this amazing department store on several occasions during trips to Ireland and Scotland via London with my wife, and can attest to the fact that though I cannot stand being in department stores, this one is so rich in colours and smells from the exotic food and coffees from around the world that it was worth it just to wait for her as she shopped. Mr. Fayed, being a very prominent UK resident as well as being the chief bane of the inquest enquiry surrounding Diana's death (he believes MI6 killed her under orders from Prince Philip) has listed his ten favorite books on the Manchester Guardian’s website. One of them is The Scotichronicon: A History Book for Scots, described simply as Scotland’s debt to Egypt revealed at last. What did he say there? That Scotland owes a debt to Egypt? As I was to discover, this enigmatic statement's meaning would take me very deep into a historical quandary of literally Biblical proportions. As a Scot I am of course interested in the history of our ancient land but what I am going to share with you here might solve the riddle of why a country once called Caledonia and Alba should end up being called the land of Scots, or Scotland. As I mentioned in the introduction to this section of Earth Pilgrims I am a passport holder of Ireland and the UK, of which Scotland is a part so it is in my interest to know what energetic patterns exist behind the two countries so centrally important to my life. Is it a total coincidence that ancient Egypt has fascinated me all my life and in particular its veneration above all else of the star called Sirius?

Being an expert in taking people on adventure journeys that would also allow them the opportunity of being involved in my research, I was always on the look out for interesting places that would connect with my work. In Scotland I had led people to Orkney, to the Ring of Brodgar which is the largest monolithic stone circle in Scotland. There in midsummer, where you could read a newspaper at midnight, I had found another clue to megalithic culture in the UK. There could be no doubt that the 'primitive' peoples of Britain had very sophisticated knowledge of stellar positions, especially of course solar knowledge.

Before the Da Vinci Code fever had even started I was a regular visitor to the movie's climax location at Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh in the 90's. I had also held seminars in and around a structure older than the pyramids, at Newgrange north of Dublin in Ireland. Reckoned to be 6000 years old, its central chamber is filled with a golden light at the Winter solstice (if the dense Irish clouds have broken!) and thus displays its chief function as a solar calendar in stone. Nearby Newgrange is a place central to both Ireland and Scotland's history. Though many Scottish kings found their last resting place in Iona, a community we now know was developed by an Irish monk's faith and royal lineage (Columba could have been a king of Ireland) the burial mounds at Tara have always been central to royalty in Ireland. Yes, royalty. What we will discover is that the entire system of kingship in Ireland, stretching back many millenia, is intimately related to the pharaohs of Egypt. Right down to the clothes, the language and the form of the ceremonies themselves...

I had written about the probable connection between ancient Egyptian religion and Christianity in my book Christ and the Templars but for many people in modern Japan this is not a top priority subject. They often mistakenly reduce everything concerning Christ to a rather peculiar religion that has almost no historical relationship with Japan. However that is to miss an important point. If indeed Egypt and the modern world share connections that are profoundly spiritual in nature (let us remember always that religion is basically a formalization of concepts and rules of behaviour that sprang from real and direct spiritual experiences) then as Earth Pilgrims we really need to know what they knew now, in our darkest hour. And may I respectfully and playfully suggest to the reader at this point that if you do not see that darkness currently encroaching all around you, then perhaps the rose tinted glasses you are wearing need replacing. We need to know what those people knew and how they communicated that knowledge over time and space. In short history has to start having real and effective meaning if it is to be of any use to us at all in our future pilgrimage as a species.

Scotland is a key player in world affairs since it has indisputably produced amongst other things, the majority of invention to physically power the industrial revolution and thus your modern lifestyle as well as philosophically produce the key concepts of freedom and democracy through Scottish masonic influence on the founding fathers of the US. So if there is a connection between ancient Egypt, Ireland and Scotland it is in our interests to know about it. That is true even if it means facing the assault of established historians who will claim that every small country likes to invent myths linking it to a famous ancient culture. If these following nuggets of information are mere myths, then we have a coincidence of improbabilities that is statistically frightening in its implications in my humble opinion. Let's see.

In my research I always try to find out who has done the most work in any particular field of my interest and then I contact that person directly. It is an astonishingly simple way to get really in depth information. In Japan people go through very long and laborious systems of introduction when they want to meet someone well known and this method often fails to deliver when the person is not Japanese. What I mean is that there is no sense of obligation involved for non-Japanese and thus the individual in question might very well not 'play ball' even if you end up meeting. One of my strange talents is to know how to connect with people at any level of society. No doubt this is the result of being a traveler all my life and also being a Scot who abhors hierarchies of any form. That is why my role model is Jesus. He destroyed all hierarchies in his teachings. He bowed to no man. He bowed to all men. I have therefore no sense of either superiority or inferiority which is the sense that Japanese hierarchy is built on. It works in Japan. No blame.

So I wanted to find a well researched expert in the alleged link between ancient Egypt and Ireland. Ralph Ellis was the name I came up with and sure enough though he is an airline pilot by profession, his extensive knowledge of ancient languages, including hieroglyphic Egyptian is most impressive. Unlike trained historians and archaeologists who must stay within very fixed and often narrow tunnels of enquiry dictated by their university or organization, the independent researcher is often just interested in finding out the truth. So I contacted him by email and we began a short correspondence and soon realised what a small world we live in. Both he and I had recently been communicating with Simcha Jacobovici, the director of the Jesus tomb documentary. Previous to Ralph Ellis I had come across one other man, Ahmed Osman whose book 'Out of Egypt' had deeply shocked many. His strong contention was, like that of Ellis, that not only was Christianity born in Egypt but that the Israelites were themselves from Egyptian stock. And even Sigmund Freud had spent many years studying the life of Moses and had concluded that Moses was himself an Egyptian and very possibly the famous Akhenaten himself under an assumed new name after the Exodus. What? If there is even a 20% chance that is true then the entire history of the Jews and the Christians is a whole new 'ball of wax'. But Ellis went a step further in connecting the Egyptians, whose Jewish progeny became the Christians who moved across Europe via the Roman Church to Britain, with another route to Europe via Ireland. So I read his thesis on Scota entitled, Scota, Egyptian Queen of Scots.

Using the famed historian Manetho's text as his main guide, Ellis establishes that Scota was really Ankhesenamun, daughter of Akhenaton and Nefertiti and wife of Tutankhamen. He also finds that far from being a Greek king, Gaythelos her husband with whom she fled Egypt was a pharaoh himself. His name was Aye in Egyptian. Little is known of Aye, although Ellis speculates that he was the father of Tutankhamen and married Ankhesenamun after his son's death. Aye ruled only briefly before religious struggle brought him into conflict with the Egyptian people and he and his court were forced into exile.

Having established the origins of Scota/Ankhesenamun and Gaythelos/Aye, Ellis tracks them as they flee. He contends that the couple took enough ships to bring 1,000 of their followers and plentiful supplies out of Egypt and across the Mediterranean. He finds that they landed first in Spain, where they lived for several generations and so their son Hiber ended up giving his name there to Iberia. Four generations after they first settled, the descendents of Scota made their way to Ireland. Here in his explanation Ellis refers to Irish stories, but supplements this ancient 'myth' with facts. He points to the number of gold torcs – necklaces worn by pharaohs - that have been found in the country. He shows us tombs that were surely built with Egyptian knowledge. He even finds us a mummified head that demonstrates that Scota's people took their method of embalming their dead with them from Egypt halfway across the world. It defies the favourite word of established historians when such evidence is found, coincidence.

Back in 1955, archaeologist Dr. Sean O'Riordan of Trinity College, Dublin, made an interesting discovery during an excavation of the Mound of Hostages at Tara, site of ancient kingship of Ireland. Bronze Age skeletal remains were found at Tara of what has been argued to be a young prince, still wearing a rare necklace of faience beads, made from a paste of minerals and plant extracts that had been fired. The skeleton was carbon dated to around 1350 BC. In 1956, J. F. Stone and L. C. Thomas reported that the faience beads were Egyptian! In fact, when they were compared with Egyptian faience beads, they were found to be not only of identical manufacture but also of matching design. The famous boy-king Tutankhamun was entombed around the same time as the Tara skeleton and the priceless golden collar around his mummy’s neck was inlayed with matching conical, blue-green faience beads. Lorraine Evans in her compelling book, ‘Kingdom of the Ark’, reveals archaeological connections between Egypt and Ireland. Evans argues that the connections between the two distant lands were plausible and there is archaeological evidence to support the theory.

Even further back in 1937 in North Ferriby, Yorkshire, the remains of an ancient boat were discovered. While thought to be a Viking longship at first, continued excavation produced additional ships, wrecked in a storm. Further investigation showed that the boats were much older than Viking ships and were of a type found in the Mediterranean. It was concluded that these boats originated from 2000 years before the Viking age and were radiocarbon dated to around 1400 to 1350 BC. Evans then makes connections to argue that these boats could originate from Egypt, as the timeframe fits the dating of the faience beads. Let us not forget that fully intact ships were also discovered under the sand near the great pyramid so there is very little doubt that the Egyptians were seafaring. If you can build a pyramid that lasts thousands of years you can surely build ships! There is therefore physical proof in England that ancient Egyptians could easily have sailed to Ireland more than one thousand years before Christ.

This archaeological evidence, when combined with the Tara jewelry discoveries creates the distinct possibility that the Irish people, who were later to develop writing skills long before the rest of Europe, are descended from the highly literate and scientifically advanced Egyptians. Let us not forget that Ireland has produced more nobel laureates in literature than any other country and had people writing books when the dark ages kept the people of the European continent ignorant, just the way the Church wanted them. Sean Connery’s great movie ‘The Rose’ looks at this theme in great detail.

There was one other coincidence that has always fascinated me. Though a Celt through my Irish background I have unfortunately been unable to speak our original language, Gaelic. Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Cornish and Welsh Gaelic are all interrelated but bear absolutely no relationship to European languages whatsoever. Though many believe the Celts originated in India, this idea of Egypt being their source, at least in Ireland demands a linguistic connection. When I was studying Gaelic by myself I discovered that the language group closest to it in nature is called the North African language group. Now where is Egypt?

Even old maps of Europe name Ireland as Scotia and thus in later days when the Scotia people came to Caledonia (Scotland in the old naming) they renamed it in honour of themselves and thus the place of my birth came to be known as Scotland. Therefore a long way back in my DNA chain there was a man or a woman whose own people had once sat in temples in Egypt perhaps, temples where the heliacal rising of the brightest star in our sky, Sirius, would be the most significant religious ceremony of their entire belief system. I do not find enough evidence in Ellis's theory however to suggest that Jesus himself was a pharaoh but the idea is most certainly intriguing when you know that all of the great history and beliefs of Israel was born in Egypt. Perhaps this helps us to understand how and why two relatively tiny countries, Spain and Scotland were later to have such an enormous influence on world history. They were both of them heavily influenced through Scota and her descendants, by the great civilization of Egypt. Why did they escape Egypt? As we all now know the Amarna regime of pharaoh Ahkenaten overthrew the entire old belief system to become essentially the first monotheism i.e. there is only one God. And his name was ATON. This made him so unpopular with the money making priests of the extant multigods system that he was literally erased from Egyptian history and disappeared entirely from the country? Where did he go?

Is it again a coincidence that Judaism was also an early monotheistic religion, as was its later close relative Christianity? And who but Moses could have established that through his incredible leadership of the Israelites, who were in fact Egyptian royalty? Or is this all just a pile of steaming coincidence as any established historian will tell you with utter confidence? As for me, my lifelong quest to understand the living significance of one star, Sirius, has taken me on a wild ride through a history that is only just beginning to be known. Now you know and as Japanese you might be interested to know that a member of your government diet has written a detailed book about the origins of Shinto being in Assyria and how it was always a Sirian worship religion. And how did it get to Assyria? From nearby Egypt perhaps?