Irish id is healthier understood from a maritime point of view. For 8 millennia the island has been a haven for explorers, settlers, colonists, navigators, pirates and investors, soaking up items and peoples from all issues of the compass. The aid of the islanders to the unique class 'Celtic' has endured for 3 hundred years, and is the following rejected as impossibly slender. No classical writer ever defined Ireland's population as 'Celts', and neither did the Irish so describe themselves till fresh instances. The islanders' sea-girt tradition has been crucially formed through heart jap in addition to via eu civilizations, via an Islamic history in addition to a Christian one. The Irish language itself has old roots prolonged over hundreds of thousands of years' buying and selling up and down the Atlantic seaways.

Over the previous 20 years Bob Quinn has traced archaeological, linguistic, spiritual and monetary connections from Egypt to Arann, from Morocco to Newgrange, from Cairo and Compostela to Carraroe. Taking Conamara sean-nos making a song and its Arabic equivalents, and a North African linguistic stratum lower than the Irish tongue, Quinn marshalls facts from box archaeology, boat-types, manuscript illuminations, weaving styles, mythology, literature, artwork and artefacts to help a demanding thesis that cites, between different fresh experiences of the Irish genome, new mitochondrial DNA research within the Atlantic quarter from north Iberia to west Scandinavia.

The Atlantean Irish is a sumptuously illustrated, intriguing, intervention in Irish cultural historical past. Forcefully debated, and entirely persuasive, it opens up a prior past Europe, linking Orient to Occident. What begun as a private quest-narrative turns into a category-dissolving highbrow experience of common importance. it's a booklet whose time has arrived.