A Seafarer's Decoding of the Irish Symbols

by Donald McMahon

The Tablet of Paredes contains the seafaring information to sail through the Strait of Gibraltar. A seafarer’s decoding of the Tablet of Paredes follows:

  All ancient maps had east as up, so Figure 10-19a and 10-19b were rotated clockwise ninety degrees. North was also determined in Figure 10-19b by the dots inside the two U-shaped lines such that the trip would head out to sea, the Atlantic Ocean.

  Right Glyph

  The map in Figure-19b has the Strait well defined. The upper and lower U shapes are the land on either side of the Strait. The arrow indicates the due-west sailing direction. Note the cut nob on the tablet. The grid system is set up in five-degree increments in the vertical grid, longitude. Go west “straight” through the Strait of Gibraltar (thirty-six degrees north) and keep a straight course due west for several longitude degrees to be able to clear the land in either the north, the Iberian Peninsula, or the south, North Africa. Head either north or south, which clears the boat from the coasts of either Iberia or Morocco.

  Left Glyph

  The map in Figure 10-19a, shows longitude lines in five-degree increments, indicating that the edge of the map’s region is the Azores Islands. The three dots are the symbols for metal, which may be stored at the Azores. The dots could also refer to the Azores Islands. The four lines represent twenty degrees of longitude, which is the location of the Azores from the Strait of Gibraltar. The right side of Figure 10-19a indicates the land contour on the west side of the Strait. The nob, the preferred line of position, represents the Strait.

  The Tablet of Paredes, 4100 BCE, is the key map tablet for sailing through the dangerous seas around and through the Strait of Gibraltar. The Azores Islands was a key location within two days sailing from the Strait of Gibraltar. The roots of the word azore are an A, Z, and ore. Oro is Spanish for gold. The AZ phonic is common to many locations and may indicate the beginning and end of a trip.

  One of my great sailing experiences was to sail through the Strait of Gibraltar. The cruise ship went through the Strait at midnight on a perfectly clear night with forty- to forty-five mile-per-hour winds. Overhead was the Big Dipper, which pointed me to the North Star, Polaris. Facing the North Star and putting my arm at ninety degrees actually directed me due east through the middle of the Strait. I could see the lights of Gibraltar on the port side and the lights of Tangiers on the starboard side. I wondered how many ancient sailors never made it home because of the rough waters surrounding the Strait of Gibraltar. This was a quiet moment to reflect.

  The metals were so abundant on the Iberian Peninsula that additional ships needed to be built, replaced, and repaired. This trip was so dangerous that alternate trade routes evolved through France. Figure 10-20 shows the megalithic commercial trade routes.

  Figure 10-20: The megalithic trade routes

  The trade routes primarily traded in gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, and ivory. These commodities, many found in old shipwrecks, are beautifully displayed at the Underwater Archeological Museum in Cartagena, Spain (Reference 10).

  Conclusions

  From 4000 BCE, Ireland was a supplier of metals to the customers, both to the north and to the south, and needed protected harbors as part of the trading routes. This chapter explored the immediate harbors that the seafarers would sail from Ireland. The emphasis was to observe the same Irish symbols built into the stones and mounds in these adjacent locations and decode the symbols from a seafaring perspective.

  The Western European mounds studied in this book were their versions of the per ankhs, houses of life, of the Nile River dynasties. The mounds were also repositories of the stone books, or kerbstones, of 3200 BCE. Connecting Ireland to the megalithic sites was part of the trade routes at 3200 BCE.

  North: Stornoway, Scotland, and the Orkney Islands

  The ring cross of Callanish, Scotland, is shaped like the Northern Cross and becomes the shape of the Irish high-stone crosses. The cross stones have angles in ten-degree increments.

  Maeshowe Mound, Orkney Islands, is a ring-circle design, Northern Cross, with three side chambers. The passageway is horizontal to the horizon for accurate latitude determinations. This passageway has three sections: the entrance, the main hall, and the direction into the main chamber. The angles of these sections relative to the east-west axis are fifty-three, forty-seven, and thirty-two degrees. In other words, from where did I come, where am I, and where am I going in terms of latitude.

  The Orkney Venus is the Orkney sextant of 3000 BCE. It is amazing the frequency of angles as multiples of ten that are carved on the Orkney Venus. The Orkney Venus is a grid map indicating angles from the Faroe Islands to Northern Scotland.

  East: Isle of Anglesey, Wales

  The great mound of Barclodiad y Gawres has a rho shaped passageway design. The passageway has many stones having spirals, zigzags, lozenges, and chevrons. There is a stone with a two-diamond location map and a five-spiral map showing the west coast of Wales and southwest England. The great Orme copper mines are located in this region of Wales.

  Southeast: Cornwall, England, and Stonehenge

  The southeast coast of England, Cornwall, is the location for the great tin mines used for making bronze during the Bronze Age. The gardens of Eden were close by, leading to the great structures constructed at Stonehenge, Avebury, Sidbury Hill, and Glastonbury. Stonehenge, probably the last of the great stone circles, was dedicated to the sun, moon, and Venus cycles. Glastonbury is the site of the spiral mound for the TOR. The Stonehenge structures surely emphasized calendars, and not navigation.

  Southeast: Brittany

  Carnac

  Carnac was named after the Karnak of Egypt, the land of measurement. Carnac has more than ten thousand Neolithic standing stones. What is clear is that the metal trade went both directions over time, north and south, from Brittany, with the major center at Carnac.

  Isle of Gravinis

  A three-tiered passage mound was built on this island around 3500 BCE. The top tier has a rose-petal shape. The bottom tier also has a rose-petal shape Features of the passage tomb are stones having spirals and curved lines like fingerprints. There is a roof sill with a lintel having the stacked Xs, or stacked diamonds, with eight diamonds. It appears that the shape of the diamonds decreases from the top to the next-to-bottom diamond, decreasing latitudes.

  Another stone has four concentric half circles, representing four locations from the northwest coast of Brittany to the south. There are various numbers of concentric arcs, possibly related to sun-shadow degrees of latitude. If so, this stone is a map from northwest Brittany to the Strait of Gibraltar.

  Locmariaquer

  This complex has an elaborate two-tiered passage mound—one oval and one rose petal—and the largest obelisk-type stone made by megalithic man: 280 tons. A fascinating stone at Locmariaquer showed a map of the North Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean to the Strait of Gibraltar and upward to the North Pole.

  Barnenez

  The multitiered Barnenez Mound was initially built around 4200 BCE and contains two sections with eleven chambers entered by separate passages. The left section of the Barnenez Mound has six passageways with a thirty-degree counterclockwise angle from the north-south axis. The right section has five passageways angled almost in the north direction, with, maybe, a three-degree offset counterclockwise from north. The Barnenez Mound was probably used for storage.

  There are chambers at the end of the passageways, having differing shapes. The heads of the passageways A and B have five stones. This indicates a pentagram—in other words, Venus. A stone in the A passageway has some important symbols: a symbol representing a map with increasing latitudes, multiple horns of Venus, a cross and triangle symbols for the Northern Cross and the Summer (navigation) Triangle, wavy zigzags for the oceans, and a feather of Maat, a symbol in Egyptian for truth, balance, and weighing.

  The eleven-passageway mound was also found on a stone at Knockmany, Ireland.

  Coustaussa

  The metal trade route from Brittany to the Me
diterranean Sea evolved to going to Toulouse and then to Narbonne. The storage location for the trade commodities was at the Great Camp in Languedoc. To locate the Great Camp, the Venus pentagram was used. This route then replaced the original Spain/Portugal route through the Strait of Gibraltar.

  A sacrificial Stone at Rennes le Chateau should be renamed the Rose Stone, for it is probably a gold slurry-refining stone with megalithic symbols representing crosses, zigzags, and rose petals.

  South: Galicia, Spain; Portugal, Tarshish, and the Straits of Gibraltar

  The Iberian Peninsula was important because of the abundance of valuable metals, gold, silver, and copper. The quest for these metals took the seafarers from the Eastern Mediterranean harbors to the harbors on the Iberian Peninsula.

  The trade routes from Ireland heading south go to the Iberian Peninsula. The trade route heading to the customers in the Eastern Mediterranean would need to sail to the mythical city of Tarshish and, then, through the Strait of Gibraltar. The seafarer would have one major concern: the safe passage through the Strait of Gibraltar.

  Irish kerbstone K67 surely indicates that the seafarer sailed back and forth from Ireland and the Iberian Peninsula. The trip to Galicia would take seven days, and the trip to Dingle would take nine days.

  Most importantly, the seafarer carved stones, having the coastline of the Iberian Peninsula showing the major rivers flowing into the Atlantic Ocean.

  The northern harbor close to the Strait of Gibraltar would be close to present-day Cadiz, or the mythical city of Tarshish, the island of TR. Tarshish was known for having great ship building and for being a trading center for metals.

  Plato wrote that Atlantis is rich in copper and other metals. At the root of Atlantis is anti, the Spanish word for copper in the Americas.

  Tablet of Paredes

  The Tablet of Paredes contains the seafaring information to sail through the Strait of Gibraltar.

  The above decoding of the stones and mounds in Western European locations near to Ireland shows the similarity with the Irish stones and mounds. Stones existed from the Orkney Islands to Ireland; Wales, Brittany; and the Iberian Peninsula, which had spiral harbors for the entire coastline. Most of the decoded locations had dates of existence prior to 3200 BCE. This implies that Ireland was at the end of the rainbow.

  A gold slurry-crushing stone may have been the purpose for the “sacrificial” stone found near Coustaussa, Languedoc and the stone structure near Cadiz.

  The phonetic sounds of some of the mounds have roots like CR, NK, RK, and TR. The current location names have DN, GL, NT, EL, and R.

  The invaders of Ireland surely sailed at 3000 BCE to the close harbors from the Orkney Islands to the Strait of Gibraltar. The symbols had similar navigation information. The question is, did they go west to North America?

  • • •

  Chapter 11:

  America Decoded: Using the Irish Symbols

  After the Ice Age in North America, one large lake was formed, which included the Hudson Bay and all of the five Great Lakes. At that time, the water levels were much higher and the oceans much lower. By 5000 BCE, two major water flows resulted: going east, the Great Lakes, the Northern Rivers, and other lakes flowed to the St. Lawrence Gulf, the northern route. Going south, the rivers from the Western Great Lakes created the Mississippi River basin, ending at the Delta into the Gulf of Mexico (the southern route). The warmer climate created the melting that increased the water levels of the coastal regions.

  Seafarers came to North America and sailed either of these routes—the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi—looking for metal, gold, and copper. The seafarers would sail up and down the eastern coast of North America, depending on where they came from: the north or the south.

  Figure 11-1 shows the major North Atlantic trade route for the seafarers. No matter how the seafarers came to North America, most of them returned through Ireland or the Azores.

  Figure 11-1: Northern Atlantic trade routes for copper

  The latitude and longitude for the northern and the southern routes were as follows:

  St Lawrence Gulf:

  Latitude: 46° N or forty-one sun-shadow degrees north

  Longitude: 60° W or ninety degrees west of the Nile River prime meridian

  Mississippi Delta:

  Latitude: 32° N or thirty sun-shadow degrees north

  Longitude: 90° W or 120 degrees west of the Nile River prime meridian

  The seafarer’s decoding scheme for the Irish symbols was developed in the preceding chapters. It was seen that the origins for many of the Irish symbols were highly influenced by the Nile Dynasty symbols, eventually called Egyptian hieroglyphics. In these cultures were astronomers, mathematicians, navigators, and outstanding builders of structures and boats. The old name for the Nile River region was the Land of Measurement. The Irish symbols, such as spirals, diamonds, circles, zigzags, dots, and the mound designs, passageway designs, and connecting mound geometries, are clear indicators of a language understood by the seafarers who routinely traveled from the Eastern Mediterranean Sea to Western Europe and back in the time period from 3200 to 1000 BCE.

  Preceding chapters also developed a seafaring perspective for decoding the Irish symbols. The proof of the theory—the navigation usage of the symbols—is can they be used as a reliable predictor? As demonstrated in Chapter 9, the symbols had the same seafaring meaning in Ireland, the Orkneys, Wales, England; Carnac, Brittany; Spain; and Portugal. This was so because the trade trade routes for gold and copper initiated by the Eastern Mediterranean customers and extending to the suppliers in Ireland and in Western Europe used the same symbols.

  These seafarers also went west from Ireland in the pursuit of gold and copper. The Irish symbols, having a navigation orientation, if used by these seafarers, should be observed in the harbors and gardens of Eden in North America, the otherworld. So, in this chapter, we will summarize at a high, but simple, level the two major trade routes in North America and show that the symbols on the stones and the mound designs had the same meaning.

  The seafarers arrived around 3500 BCE but were highly active from 2500 to 1000 BCE. It should be noted that the southern route to North America for gold and copper occurred earlier than the northern route to North America because of the favorable currents. However, both routes resulted in return trips coming to Ireland because of the Gulf Stream currents and prevailing winds.

  The purpose of Chapter 11 is to locate the key harbors for the northern and southern trade routes in North America and to look for the Irish symbols carved into stones and into the designs of mounds. The selected harbors in this chapter will feature the copper trade routes.

  The key fact to remember is this: five hundred thousand tons of copper were mined in the Isle Royale/Keweenaw Peninsula of Northern Michigan from 2200 BE to 1000 BCE. The television’s America Unearthed series has recently featured this fact. In addition, the America Unearthed series had one session on finding copper in a shipwreck in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea in 1400 BCE that had the same chemistry as that from the Isle Royale. The question is, how did this occur? Reference 54 hints that the travel to North America was as early as 3000 BCE.

  The penultimate trip can now be formulated: the Isle of Meroe, to the island of Ireland, to the Isle Royale in Northern Michigan sometime between 3000 and 2200 BCE, and then the return to the Nile River. The motivation for this trip was copper, knowing that gold was also found around copper mines.

  The quest for copper was immense, leading to the names of the ages, the Copper Age and the early, middle, and late Bronze Ages. The need for copper expanded from the Nubian Desert, to Cyprus, to Cadiz, Spain, and then to Ireland and Wales. This copper quest did not stop in Ireland. It followed the sun to the Americas.

  Let’s continue the trip from the island of Meroe in Nubia, to the emerald island of Ireland, and then to the Isle Royale, Northern Michigan, the location of the purest copper in the world.

  A Seafarer’s Perspective />
  Where am I? Nile River

  Where am I going? North America to Isle Royale and return

  Why am I going? Copper and gold

  How will I get there? Boat

  How long will it take? Two years outbound, one year return

  Will I, or someone, return? Yes.

  Based on the kerbstone SW2, Figure 8-15a, from Knowth Mound, the seafarer sailing west would leave from the northwest corner of Ireland, the Donegal harbors close to the megalithic location for Carrowmore.

  The seafarers would look for harbors at the intersection of freshwater and oceans, would need to count and measure angles, would establish circles oriented to the solstices, would build mounds with celestial orientations in their design and layout, would use pyramidal design structures, and would make etchings looking like the immediate land contours. The southern trade routes up the Mississippi had few stones, so mounds and wood circles were the primary design materials. The northern trade routes had abundant stones available for recording devices.

  Figure 11-2a is a map of Northeastern American and Canada.

  Figure 11-2b: Map showing the water currents around the St. Lawrence Gulf (Reference 21)

  The northern trade route would start at the St. Lawrence River Gulf, Newfoundland. The entrance from the north would be south of Labrador. The southern entrance into the Gulf of St. Lawrence would be around Nova Scotia. However, over time the safer harbor at St. John, New Brunswick, was used south of the St. Lawrence Gulf.

  Harbors Close to the St. Lawrence Gulf

  A rock, commonly named the Devil’s Head glyph, was found in central Maine having a zigzag symbol and a safe harbor symbol, Figure 11-3a

  Figure 11-3a: Devil’s Head glyph found in central Maine

  Figure 11-3b: Dragon glyph found on the Kennebec River, Embden, Maine (Reference 16)

  Figure 11-3a shows on the bottom left, the entry point into the Bay at St. John, and on the right, the entrance into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The right side and the top-right corner is the land edge into the St. Lawrence River. The zigzag lines represent a count of seven, which probably indicates the days of sailing to reach a major inlet on the St. Lawrence River as one sails westward. Note the similarity to the Egyptian glyph for a protected harbor.