Irish id is healthier understood from a maritime standpoint. 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 relief of the islanders to the particular type 'Celtic' has persevered for 3 hundred years, and is right here rejected as impossibly slender. No classical writer ever defined Ireland's population as 'Celts', and neither did the Irish so describe themselves till contemporary occasions. The islanders' sea-girt tradition has been crucially formed by way of heart jap in addition to by way of eu civilizations, by way of an Islamic background 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 prior 20 years Bob Quinn has traced archaeological, linguistic, spiritual and fiscal 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 less than the Irish tongue, Quinn marshalls proof from box archaeology, boat-types, manuscript illuminations, weaving styles, mythology, literature, artwork and artefacts to aid a difficult thesis that cites, between different contemporary stories of the Irish genome, new mitochondrial DNA research within the Atlantic area from north Iberia to west Scandinavia.

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