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Lyall Watson – Lightning Bird

[In the Western Transvaal, Africa], a digger.. ploughing through 28 feet of overburden… discovered [the remains of prehistoric diamond workings].  Someone it seems in prehistoric times wanted diamonds very badly and they may have left their signatures cut with these abrasive gems in the hard diabase and dolerite nearby.

Prominent among engravings are comb-like symbols that bear a startling resemblance to a script called Ogam.

The earliest dated reference to this alphabet is in a collection of ancient Celtic lore and poetry called ‘The Book of Leinster’ from AD 1150.  But the characters figure prominently on stones in Ireland Britain and Brittany that may go as far back as 5,000 years.

Ogam is a simple system of short lines drawn out from a longer straight stem line.  It occurs in sets of from one to five lines lying either above below or running diagonally through the longer stem.  To the casual eye it looks like a lattice or old fashioned ladder and could be purely arbitrary, but a closer look reveals sequences and patterns which cannot be accidental.

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Perhaps the most startling discovery of all is a slate tablet that forms part of the professional gear of … Credo Mutwo a Zulu Diviner.  This was apparently handed down to him as an heirloom of his trade and it carries a pattern which makes sense even to an untutored eye.  In one column are pictographic symbols that have been identified as Egyptian hieroglyphics.  In the second are simple apparently early Arabic letters.  In the third is the characteristic scalariform of the entire ogam alphabet.

If this is genuine, it has an importance to the study of African prehistory as great as the Rossetta stone.  At the very least, it shows that someone carried the Arabic key to Ogam at a time when hieroglyphics were still a lingua franca.