Thomas Carte: Japhetic settlers in the western islands

TL;DRAbstract

Goguet – politically correct by the standards of today – affirmed the Mesopotamian and Egyptian origins of urban civilisation, rejected the stereotype of oriental despotism and held that Egyptians and Phoenicians had rescued the primitive Greeks from savagery. But he was too completely a Parisian, of the Palais and the Ile de la Cité, to gaze long towards the plains where Europe disappeared in Asia, and we should not look to him for the history of the shepherd peoples sweeping out of the steppe. That we turn for this to a work by an Anglo-British author follows from the circumstance that the archipelago off the north-western coasts of the main European peninsula had a cultural frontier of its own, where manorial ploughmen met with highland and Gaelic cattle-drivers and chose to consider them barbarians for reasons not only literary. The written sources available to English agrarian and monastic culture, however, obliged the latter to provide classical and scriptural accounts of the pas

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