Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ANCIENT BRITAIN IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT DISCOVERIES IN ARCIIAEOLGY, NUMISMATICS, ETC. CHAPTER I. ANCIENT BRITAIN. The name of Britain—The Veneti—The Phoenicians—The Greeks—Greek types of Coins found in Britain—Voyage of Pytheas—Landing of the Norsemen—Torfaeus —Archaeological remains—Religion—Svastica—Customs—Runic inscriptions—Name of the Sun-God—Tribal names—Place names—Name of London—Venet—Venicontes —Venetian glass—Virgil proves, and Bedc admits, that the Picts came from Scythia— Norsemen not Germans—The latter theory advanced by the Romans as a claim of dominion—Opinions of antiquarians—Tacitus identifies the lestians and Britons— Pliny classes together the Massagetac, Histians, Brittones, and Frisians—The Persians call the Scythians, Sacae—Tribes found in Britain by the Romans—Baug money— Progress of the Norsemen from Caledonia to South Britain—The Roman Conquest— Counts of the Saxon Shore—The subsequent Gothic revolt. BRITAIN has been usually regarded as a corruption of Bratanac, or Baratanac, the Phoenician term for " Isles of Tin," or "Tin Isles," which the Greeks translated into the equivalent Cassiterides.' Anac is advanced as a Syriac term for tin; bedil, commonly translated tin, being regarded to mean lead.' Another verbal theory is based on the story that before the conquest of Britain under Claudius, whilst Germanicus for two years was encamped near the sea shore, east of the Rhine, the sufferings of his troops, from their being obliged to drink brackish water, were alleviated by means of a plant, pointed out to them by the native Frisians, and called " Britannica." Says Pliny, "the name surprises me, though possibly it may have been so-called because the shores of Britannia are not far distant." (Nat. Hist., xxv, 6.) Lipsius, in a note to Tacitus, ...