Before Schliemann in the late 19^th Century, according to the scholars there was no historical city of Troy, there were only stories of a mythical city. Nowadays, however, there is so much archaeological, theoretical, intriguing, exciting Troy, that one can spend a spare lifetime taking it all in. This is a classic example of how history changes along with time, revealing to us more clearly what has always lain at the core of the myth of Troy. By synthesizing levels of archaeological, historical and mythical information, the picture is best informed. This fact has, for instance, enabled Egyptologists to separate history from myth - you do not hear Egyptologists claiming that Pharaoh Thutmose III was a god, because they know he was just a man, the king; but to those who wrote about him at the time when he was king, he was considered a divine being. So rich is the wealth of evidence from which Egyptologists seek to re-construct a view of Ancient Egypt, that it can be confusing when we try to take it all into account. Because we have not inherited the same richness of cultural materials and written records as in Egypt, of Bronze Age Britain (aka Albion until circa 1230 BC) we know relatively little. The Ancient Britons left us no painted tomb inscriptions, no temple reliefs, no papyrus scrolls with spells, kinglists or inventories written on them. What we know about the Celts of Britain stems mainly from observations made regarding their remains, including their buildings, their agricultural devices and tools, their weapons, armour and helmets, jewellery, coins, pottery fragments, chariots and horse-tackle, their wealth of bones and, not least, one of the most diverse bodies of legendary lore as exists in any of the world’s most ancient lands. Yet even from all this, what do we collectively understand of our Celtic ancestors’ culture? Precious little, it is sad to say.

In ancient pre-Roman Britain, the Celts lived largely as a united body of individual(istic) tribes, with the land divided up among themselves, their territories defined by the large rivers used as natural boundaries between kingdoms. The British Celts were composed of a diverse range of tribes, amounting to more than the sum of their parts. The Druids, working alongside the Arthur and his council of dragon-chiefs, brought wise rule to the people of Iron Age Britain, whose tongues were so variant that the tribes would otherwise argue with each other and wage internal wars in Britain.

Unlike the Greeks and Romans, the Celts favoured the use of wood to construct their buildings. Nor did they like to use stone for their writings, preferring to use wood all round. Their love of the forests is reflected by Tolkien’s "elven folk"; perhaps because the Celts were surrounded by rich forests in Britain and Gaul, their religion, language and lore were all bound up with the trees, especially the 12 trees which they considered most sacred. It was also most convenient for the Celts to use the wood of the forest for their buildings, at once clearing the land for agricultural and pastoral use. Because the trees of the sacred groves formed the principle elements of Druidism, James Frazer thus named his classic book 'The Golden Bough', which refers to mistletoe as the 'manna' of the druids. Mistletoe is a herbal, seasonal offshoot of the oak tree with medicinal properties which include anti-tumour actions, reducing both heart rate and high blood pressure, acting as well against arteriosclerosis and strengthening the walls of the peripheral capillaries - this explains why it was such a revered herb. The Druids lived by a 12 tree system headed by the oak. The word ‘druis’, from which druid derives, means 'oak', thus the Druids were literally Men of Oak. The Ogham language of the Druids was first inscribed in blocks of oaken wood around 2000 years ago; most of these have since worn or rotted away, while others were burnt during the later persecutions of the British Celts by the likes of St.Patrick. The Celts, and the Anglo-Saxons alike, were master craftsmen at working wood. This was no compromise by a second-rate people, nor was it a poor use of resources, nor did any backward prejudice set the Celts apart from the Romans and the Greeks. Theirs was a more simple, loving reverence for the wonders that could be worked from the gifts of the forest.

An unfortunate fact of time is that while stone-surfaced objects naturally wear slow (the Egyptians called it the 'rock of eternity'), objects made of wood tend to decay and disappear into the organic heap of the earthen ground. Many Celtic writings in wood have thus been swallowed up by the Earth, never to be examined by archaeologists, nor debated by scholars, nor even read by folklorists. St.Patrick is reported to have burned the only remaining 180 books of the Druids in the 5^th Century AD; those books were then around 400 years old, almost certainly inscribed in Ogham on blocks of wood. These lost tomes contained details concerning the heritage and history of the British Celts, their knowledge of herbs, of healing, of human nature and philosophy, all were lost. The loss of this precious material of the wise council of the Druidae of Britain - which included the natural, philosophic observations of the Avates (Avatars) and the songs of beauty of the Barddas (Bards) - having lost these keys to the culture of ancient Britain, is akin to never having found in Egypt any single papyrus, tomb inscription, or original historical record of the entire 18^th Dynasty. What then would we know of Thutmose III and the other pharaohs of that time? Would we think they were gods? And what do we know of so rare and rich a people as the Celts, who lived on the same land as we do today? Even the scholarly works on the bookshelves today talk of Celtic gods and legendary heroes of myth, who were, in fact, just people. Alright, most of those mentioned in the myths were of noble birth, often royalty, but they were people just the same.

The extensive genealogical writings left to us by the Bards of ancient Britain amount to more than mythical creations, or devices used by storytellers to impress their captive audiences. The genealogies and legends of Celtic Britain were more than fanciful tales, they relate the names of our British ancestors, the stories of their blood, as The Bible relates the story of Israelite and Jewish blood. Although such stories are often loaded with cultural prejudice or bias, when we marry the lore with the archaeology, we find ourselves scratching just beneath the surface of the true story, becoming intimate with those we investigate, gaining precious insight into their motivations, politics and relationships…

In recent years there has been a good deal of scholarly and archaeological focus on the Biblical peoples. Considerable attention has also been given to Troy and to the Mediterranean world, whilst Britain still slumps in true ignorance of its ancestors. Books written about Britain are usually based on incomplete understandings, or they are entrenched in specialist academic terms, looking only at particular aspects of the story. Sometimes writers are hindered by their adopted prejudices, such as the absurdity (well-bandied among modern academics) that ancient Britain was somehow "boring" compared to the magnificence of Rome, Greece and Egypt. If you build in wood whilst I build in stone, does that make me superior, more interesting, more worthwhile, less boring than you? Many of today’s scholars on the ancient world can be heard re-iterating such rubbish about Britain, rubbish which they have clearly inherited from their own teachers and peers. Such 'scholars' do not usually stop to consider the implications of the fact that much of pre-Roman Britain was either destroyed or built over by Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, who all sought to establish their new orders in the land. There would not be much evidence left of your home if some invader came along, levelled your house and built a great cathedral upon the flattened ground. The magnificent wooden churches of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon world have long since gone, smashed and burned down, replaced by the stone-walled mediaeval structures which so many people now revere. Of course, we are still left with some of the stone circles of pre-Celtic Britain, which to most of us today rightly represent the heart and mystery of Albion, suggestive of the long-standing relationship between the people and the land itself.

Many are today surprised to learn of the ancient tradition that there exist strands of cultural and religious continuity from the ancient Sumerian, Trojan and Phoenician peoples of the Near and Middle East, down to the Kymric Arthurian kings of Iron Age Britain, land of the Celts. This continuity is no short story easily compressed into one book, it is a wide-ranging historical adventure spanning several thousand years, episodes of which have long been regarded simplistically as the stuff of myth.

Archaeological and related evidences have supplied us with deeper insight into the practical and physical lifestyles of many ancient cultures. Marrying such evidence to the stories of British folklore and myth, contrary to common misconception, there are actually strong correspondences; it is a question of knowing how to look…

King Brythos was founder and first High King of Britain, a role later entitled Arthur in the Iron Age. The first High King of Britain’s story will be re-told here, as it was recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gildas and Nennius, with reference also to the poetic works of Virgil and Homer. Then I will review the story in the light of material evidence relating to Britain around 1200 BC. Then I will ask whether the famed Hove barrow, rudely ‘excavated’ in the 1850’s, could have been the burial mound of King Brythos?

If this were to prove true, it would confirm the magnificent Bronze Age Amber Cup (left), discovered in the  Hove barrow, as being the earliest example anywhere of a British king's Arthurian Grail. Whatever the case, it is the unique, sacred cup of a prehistoric priest-king of the highest social prestige. The evidence strongly suggests this individual to have been King Brythos, progenitor of the Arthurian bloodline and founder of the kingdom of Britain.

His descended bloodline ruled sovereign in Britain, thriving until the onslaught of Roman occupation in the 1^st Century AD. The Arthurian spirit was revived in the 5^th Century AD, when an obscure leader of the Celtic peoples (about whom so much more recent speculation spins) defended Britain against the united invasion of mercenaries from Anglia and Saxony. All that is written of that 5^th Century un-named leader is that "he was no Arthur" - implying that the plural name of Arthur was a indeed a title earlier used by several British kings, as both the Irish and Welsh Celtic traditions do suggest.

In fact, a little known truth concerning the name Arthur is that it stems from the ancient Welsh arddwr (pronounced the same as 'Arthur'), meaning Head Ploughman (arddu means 'to plow'). This confirms the widespread Celtic fertility, nature-oriented thinking, whereby their king was praised for his farming prowess, for tilling the soil and thereby successfully providing his people with abundant crop harvests. The associated Welsh word arddwyrain means 'to exalt' or 'to rise', expressing the religious attachments to the ancient farming culture. Arthur was believed to have a special relationship with the land, whereby his success meant that all of the people were catered for. His ritualistic annual first cutting of the land with a plough (called an ard) would have marked the beginning of the sowing season. This agricultural symbolism is entirely consistent with that found marked on the Celtic coins of King Cunobelin, whose obverse sides show golden ears of corn, referring symbolically to the harvest, to the Sun, to the Earth, and to the prosperity of life in the land. Other obverse faces on coins from the same era show horses, which were obviously used to pull the plough, among many other things. The horse was always a potent force in the life of ancient Britons. Cunobelin's son was the famed Caratacos, defender of Britain, known later by the title Arviragus; this Latinized version of Arthur stems from 'arvus', the Roman word pertaining specifically to the ploughing of fields of corn. The word arval refers to arable land, and in Ancient Rome the 'Arval Brethren' were a priestly college who offered sacrifices to the fields in order to secure a good harvest for that year. 

Cunobelin was, of course, a Pendragon king of Britain. That is rather an understatement, since he it was who founded the city of Camulodunum (Camelot, modern Colchester). This vast ditched enclosure was named after the Belgic war-god Camulos, a deity whose magical lightning sword, Caliburn, made him invincible in battle. Under Cunobelin’s reign, Britain became rich from exports of corn to foreign countries, so he built a city in the east to oversee merchant trading to the continent.

The blurry stories relating to King Arthur as defender against the Anglo-Saxons, are based on a quite different historical epoch than are the older Bardic legends of the Celts, which descended to us mainly in the form of Welsh myths. Some such Bardic tales refer to pre-Roman Iron Age times, when Britain was ruled by the Pendragon kings. They were a royal race of Celts who became concentrated among the Belgae, most powerful of all the Celtic tribes, who then occupied both southern Britain and Belgium, and later spread throughout most of western France. The Belgae were esteemed even by Romans like Julius Caesar for the royalty of their blood. The most famous among them was the ‘Arthur’, the High King, a sovereign tradition that had continued from the earliest times in Britain... 

Whilst history records these people as the Belgic Celts, legend calls them the Tuatha De Danaan, the ‘Children of Don’, nowadays farcically reduced to being called the kings and princes of the faerie realm, by men who call themselves scholars! When the two identities of this one people are assimilated and far better understood, we enter into a new experience of the Arthurian legends, and it can then be appreciated that many of their stories do reflect some reality of ancient Britain. The scope of this e-book, however, is not to resolve the enigmatic entirety of Celtic history, as is my want, but to explore the time when their culture began, to look back at the place where to which their own dreams were cast. The focus is upon the earlier Bronze Age, when the island later declared "great" was first given the name of Britain…in the times of King Brythos, saviour of the enslaved Trojan Kymry, builder of New Troy (modern London) and founder of the Arthurian kingdom of Britain. His was indeed the highest honour, as was prophesied his birthright...

Until the Hanoverian accession of Germans to the throne of Britain in 1714 - which apparently happened because Protestant London bankers were loathe to allow Catholic British Jacobite royals their rightful place in the palace, er, fair enough then, guv, if you say so - it had been widely spoken of by many for the previous 2900 years that Brythos (Brutus) was the first of the British kings. For political convenience in establishing the new Hanoverian dynasty, however, the ancestor of the Britons was scathingly reduced to the realm of idle fancy, and Brythos was virtually overnight scrubbed from our collective memory. In the same wave of suppression, Geoffrey of Monmouth was slated by academics as being an untrustworthy source. Scholars of British history have since sneered neurotically at the legends of Brythos, as though they posed to them some kind of personal insult to their intelligence; much as they also did regarding the New Testament stories of Jesus, whom they similarly attempted to reduce to myth instead of history. Instead of the learned looking carefully and rationally at the evidence, the umbilical memory of the first king of British prehistory has been deliberately severed. The collective void of ignorance we Britons have inherited from all this has systematically inhibited the nation’s sense of identity ever since, as was intended by the Hanoverians, of course.

In Old Greek, Brythos’ name is reckoned to mean ‘Divine Seed’, or ‘Child of God’. Geoffrey Ashe has claimed that Brutus means ‘Covenant Man’ (presumably based on some characteristically obscure interpretation, which he will claim is neither characteristic, nor obscure, nor will it even prove to be an interpretation). In Latin, his name relates to ‘brute’, meaning one who is unwieldy, or irrational. But this does not suit the character of our first king, whose pre-eminent rationality in his lifetime resulted in the birth and foundation of British civilization.

In the ‘Historia Brittonum’, written by the British monk Nennius, a 9^th Century chronicler, the earliest remaining reference we have to our subject is by the name of Britto. The Latin version of this, Brutus, first used by Geoffrey, may predate the founding of the Roman republic, circa 750 BC, or it may instead be a later form of the Bronze Age king’s true Trojan name, he having lived 500 years earlier, in 13^th Century BC Britain. The fact that in none of its forms was Britain ever called ‘Brutain’, suggests the Latin Brutus to have adapted from an earlier Celto-Brythonic version of his name, thus allowing his first syllable to be ‘Bri’ or ‘Bry’ (because his kingdom was called ‘Britain’, the land of the Brythons). Other recorded versions of his name are ‘Brythe’, ‘Brwth’, ‘Brute’, 'Bryttys' and 'Britto' (from various sources). The fact that the early Britons were called ‘Brythons’ suggests the form Brythe is closest to the original. It was most common among peoples of the ancient British tongue to end names in the syllable ‘-os’, according to the arguments put forward by Henri Hubert, Kenneth Jackson and other Celtic scholars, as opposed to the Latin ‘-us’ ending to names. So, a name incorporating the most likely etymological aspects arrives at ‘Bry-the-os’, which I have contracted to Brythos.

Homer, who is said to have trained among the Kymric bards, claimed that the siege of Troy (or Ilium), orchestrated by King Agamemnon of Mycenae, lasted for a full 10 years. Until recently, it was generally thought this period had ended in 1184 BC, so that it became a widely quoted fact of history. But modern scholars are deeply divided over the date of Troy’s demise. New evidence indicates that the true date lay between 1300-1250 BC.

King Priam’s Troy (archaeologically known as Troy VI(h)) was first destroyed by fire, then a short time later its walls and foundations were broken up by an earthquake, which has been dated to 1275 BC. The story of Queen Helen and passionate Prince Paris of Troy, is among the most famous legends of the ancient world. All of us have heard how the Greeks, frustrated after ten long years of bloody siege, eventually constructed the giant Wooden Horse, ostensibly as a gift of victory to the Trojans, while stowed away inside the giant structure were a troop of Greek soldiers. The Wooden Horse caused controversy amongst the Trojans - even with the Greek ships having apparently sailed away home - for there was dispute among the Trojans as to whether the horse should be brought into the city at all.

What seems to have fuelled the argument was a gold inscription on the horse’s side which read: "For their return home, the Greeks dedicate this thank-offering to Athena." Having read this, the Trojans amassed at the equine effigy outside the city walls, were met by a stray Greek soldier called Sinon, cousin of Ulysses. He claimed to have fled in terror from the Greek camp during the previous night, when it had been ordered that Sinon himself should be sacrificed as a parting offering to the Olympian gods. Sinon artfully wove his story to old King Priam, and he told the Trojans that: "whatever city contains this Horse can never be conquered". Sinon offered this as an explanation as to why Ulysses had built the horse up to a height which was greater than any of the city gates of Troy. This reverse psychology succeeded in dividing the Trojans, many of whom did not wish to anger Athena by rejecting what was sacred to her. Others were reluctant to leave such a fabulous treasure unclaimed, desiring the Wooden Horse as a spoil of war, a proud emblem of their final victory over the Greeks.

But one elder prophet, Laocoon, priest of sea god Poseidon, protested harshly against accepting the gift, declaring ominously that it would bring the city to its knees, and he wildly cast his spear at it in anger. Some hours later, Laocoon and his sons were found murdered at the altar of Poseidon, allegedly for the old man’s insult to Athena, to whom the horse was dedicated. Either the Athenian cult of Troy killed Laocoon as an act of religious fanaticism, or it was a political assassination by Trojan dissenters wishing to clear the way for the Wooden Horse to enter their city. It is likely there were Greek spies and sympathizers within Troy, a city of hundreds of thousands in population, several of whose families had even recently married Greeks, some even during the war itself.

By clever deception, the Greeks secretly breached the city walls as the Trojans wheeled in their giant trophy horse. The people of Troy drunkenly celebrated their apparent victory late into the night, all eventually slumping into inebriate joy. Ulysses and thirty Greek warriors came out from inside the giant horse. They stealthily headed through the shadows towards the city’s main gate, overcame the guards there, and opened them for their comrades waiting silently outside…

It had all been planned very well in the devious mind of Ulysses: a fire was lit upon the burial-mound of Achilles, south of Troy, to signal the Greeks waiting out at sea that the Horse was inside the city. Then the Greeks sailed swiftly back towards Troy, to which they were guided through the night by the fire near the shore. A lamp was shone in Helen’s window within the city to give Menelaus a bearing out in the darkness towards the city gate. The ten year history of wanton destruction and depressing loss had come to a head with the needless slaying of fabulous Hector by Achilles. The Greek lord was, in turn, driven mad by his own vengeful rage. The despair of it all was poetically expressed by Homer when old King Priam mournfully wept miserable tears in the lap of his son’s killer. Even ruthless Achilles melted at the sight of the great king, who was his own father-in-law, so deep in sorrow.

King Priam had fathered twelve royal children by his famously fertile wife Queen Hecuba. They parented Paris, bringer of doom, and Hector, hero of Troy, who killed many of the Greek invaders. Among their royal offspring was Agenor, king of Tyre in Phoenicia, and Helenus, king of Epirus. Their daughter, Princess Polyxena, was married to Achilles (surely the real reason for his reluctance to take part in the war, for he had all along loved the Trojans until the death of his closest friend, Patroclus, at the hands of Hector). Another of Priam’s daughters was Creusa, wife of Prince Aeneas the Dardanid, and these were the parents of Iulus Ascanius, who may have been the grandfather of Brythos. Another line of thinking more sensibly makes Silvius Ascanius the son of Aeneas by his second wife Lavinia, in Latium, so that he was half-brother to Iulus, who then became uncle to Brythos. Dating the fall of Troy to 1275 BC, I estimate Silvius was born around 1270 BC. Geoffrey tells that Silvius was but a young man when he had a secret affair with a royal neice of Lavinia, his mother. Silvius was perhaps, 17 years old when he became  a father, dating the birth of Brythos to circa 1253 BC...

The web of royal interconnections that existed before and after the Trojan-Greek War is a dense subject for discussion. The Trojans and Greeks were not alien peoples, but were in many cases intimate cousins, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, as can be seen in the genealogical charts provided in the Appendix (full version - a cursory study of these charts is advisable to all who wish to understand the inter-relationships between the various peoples involved in this story).

The city of Troy was ruthlessly burned to the ground by the rampaging, wolf-like Greeks made ravenous by the smell of blood and the cries of fear. The calamity of bloodied Greek swords slashed through smoke and flame. It is recorded that some 88,000 Trojans escaped the swords and fires in the doomed city, and these scattered from Troy first into the surrounding landscape. The most legendary escapee was Prince Aeneas, son of Anchises and Aphrodite.

Aeneas is famed for having borne his blind old father upon his back, even as he hurried to escape the raging infernos on that bleak night of Troy's downfall. He was spotted by his enemy, King Agamemnon, who, upon seeing Aeneas, was touched by the Trojan prince’s familial loyalty. Aeneas’ son Iulus Ascanius stood at his side, his wife, Creusa, was crouched behind him, his crippled old father, Anchises the Great, hanging weakly for dear life onto his back. Aeneas also carried "the holy images from his house", marking him as priest-king, in possession of sacred, ceremonial items. The Greek king was inspired to spare this family, offering Aeneas safe passage from the city, out through the Dardan gate. So, Aeneas made his way through the burning ruins, joyful at having been spared along with his loved ones. But lost somewhere in the smoke, noise and chaos of it all, was his wife Creusa, daughter of old King Priam. Unable to go back to search for her, Aeneas then made his way into the hills, where he met up with others who escaped from the still burning city in the valley below. Proclus, in the 2^nd Century AD, wrote that Aeneas took some 88,000 Trojans with him in a fleet of 332 ships (a rather remarkable 265 people aboard each), which they built after the Greeks had departed for their homeland. The city of Troy was made uninhabitable, having been destroyed first by the fires of the Greeks, then soon after by earthquakes.

The homeless survivors of Troy, who escaped Greek captivity, spread out into several other lands, in what is called the Trojan diaspora, or dispersal. Aeneas’ fleet sailed for some time before landing on the western shore of Italy, which was then called Latium, ruled by the old King Latinus. Aeneas sought sovereignty over the people of Latium, on the grounds of ancestral inheritance, but he was opposed by Turnus, king of the Rutulians, whose people also occupied that land. When Aeneas arrived, Turnus was due soon to marry the king’s daughter Lavinia, and thus secure a peaceful settlement for his Rutulian people in the kingdom of Latium. However, Aeneas was also set upon having the hand of Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, and with that also, he desired the kingship of the realm. After wars were fought between the Trojans and Rutulians, a duel between the two heroes was arranged in order to decide the eventual fate of their respective peoples. The winner of this battle was to secure Lavinia's hand, and with that, the kingship of the land.

Virgil - a Celtic Bard who was close friend to the Roman Emperor Augustus - in The Aenid, wrote a masterful account of the contest between the proud leaders Aeneas and Turnus. As a literary piece, it is the height of dramatic tension. At the appointed time, when the Rutulian Turnus was ordained to meet his foe in a duel, that would hold sway over the fate of nations, it was suddenly feared in the Rutulian court that Turnus could not possibly defeat Aeneas in combat. So, Turnus decided instead to launch a surprise attack on the unready Trojan army. Despite this element, the army of Turnus proved ineffective, and his men were swiftly out-manoeuvred by the Trojans. Having lost this battle then, Turnus was compelled by the Trojans to play out his fateful encounter with Aeneas. Virgil’s harrowing account of this duel reports a long, sad struggle that ended in the death of Turnus. By his death, Aeneas and his Trojans were exalted in the land of Latium, and soon after they sowed there the seeds both of Britain and of Rome...

Upon his marriage to Princess Lavinia, Aeneas became the first king of Italy - a name apparently derived from the reversal of the first four letters of ‘Latium’. Some 500 years later, in circa 750 BC, this kingdom was to become the Republic of Rome, which became one of the most powerful civilizations in history. When he died, King Aeneas was succeeded by his son Iulus Ascanius (possible grandfather of Brythos), who had escaped the burning city of Troy with him. Iulus was ancestor of the Roman aristocratic line of Julius, from which, some 1200 years later, Julius Caesar was born. Iulus Ascanius founded Alba Longa by the river Tiber, near modern Rome, naming the city after his father Aeneas’ favourite white pig.

Some traditions say Iulus fathered Silvius,  but it makes more sense that Silvius is the otherwise un-named son of Aeneas and Lavinia, thus making Silvius the half-brother of Iulus. Silvius had a love-tryst with a niece of Queen Lavinia, the wife of Aeneas. When King Ascanius heard the princess was pregnant, he consulted his soothsayers as to the sex of the child in her womb. He received a prophecy that the baby boy would "cause the death of both his father and mother; and that after he had wandered in exile through many lands, the boy would eventually rise to the highest honour." This prediction was bitter news to Iulus, for it appeared this unborn child was to be responsible for the death of Silvius, his intended heir to the kingship of Latium. Iulus Ascanius’ rage at this point is portrayed in the monk Nennius’ account, who says Iulus immediately killed the sage who delivered this prophecy to him, in order to silence him....

Brythos, king of the Brythons, came into the world one fateful day around 1250 BC in the new city of Lavinium, in the ancient land of Latium, on the Italian west coast. Upon his birth, the Alban prince fulfilled the first part of the prophecy his grandfather had commissioned months earlier; it had foretold that the boy would deliver his mother to death. The un-named princess of Latium, lover of Silvius, after only a brief moment of motherhood, died from the agony of delivering her only child into the world. It was prophesied the boy would also cause the death of his father, Silvius, and that he would after that be exiled from his homeland. In exile, so went the prophecy, Brythos would achieve greatness, earning him the "highest honour" among mortal men. He was to become a king. According to the story, of all this Iulus Ascanius, son of Aeneas, was forewarned .

Young Prince Brythos was raised and nurtured in Latium by his father Silvius. The name of Silvius suggests he was a priest of Artemisian Diana, goddess of the Moon, watcher of the woods, who was associated with silver. When he was aged 15 years, Brythos went out with his father Silvius on a stag-hunting expedition, his father being a keen mentor. Brythos took aim at a running stag with his hunting-bow and let fly the fateful arrow. In the meantime, bursting out of the woods upon his horse, in hot pursuit of the stag, Silvius passed suddenly across the arrow’s path, and it lodged into him. His wound was fatal, and there in the Latin forest died the son/grandson of King Aeneas, Dardanid of Troy. Even in his many battles to come, Brythos is said never again to have used a bow...

Upon hearing the news of how the ‘unlucky shot’ of Brythos had killed his father, aged King Iulus Ascanius must have seen his way forward with painful clarity. His judgment had been ordained years earlier. Any anger he felt towards young Brythos was tempered by an uneasy submission to the inevitable. Iulus was holding faith with the will of the gods with his reluctant expulsion of the boy-prince from Latium; the gods seemed to have plans for young Brythos, plans which lay in some distant land. Hence it was, King Ascanius, who knew Brythos was wise in magic ways, gifted his grandson/nephew with a sacred cup, inherited from Aeneas, called the Augur Gero.…

Since Brythos also departed from Latium with an armed company of 3000 warriors, it is clear Iulus sought to shield his young relative from harm; he did not send the young Trojan prince out into the wild lands without a formidable force to back him up. By exiling his grandson in this manner, Iulus Ascanius initiated a chain of events which would change the entire course of world history. For young Brythos was himself the seed that flowered into one of the most influential and  illustrious nations on Earth -  the British people.

Cast out from his Latin homeland as a teenager, Brythos took his 3000 Trojan-Latin warriors to northwest Greece (now Albania) in search of his destiny. The young prince having been accompanied by such a large force, suggests his predicted exile was used as a triumphant opportunity for the Trojans to spread yet further abroad, to establish a new kingdom, as the gods had promised Brythos would do…

After Agamemnon, the Greeks were ruled first by his brother Menelaus of Sparta, then by his son Orestes at Mycenae. Orestes had a son named Penthilus, about whom little is known, and he may well be the same as Geoffrey of Monmouth's King Pandrasus; it may instead be that Pandrasus was the son of Pyrrhus (aka Neoptolemus, son of Achilles), since times certainly became increasingly feudal just before the Dorian invasion, which followed soon after the rule of Orestes, presumably due to a weakening of the Greeks through their internal conflicts. I believe that it was Brythos who played the most active part in the weakening of the Greeks, as we shall see...

After the fall of Troy, Pyrrhus enslaved his Trojan step-uncle, Helenus (related by the marriage of Achilles to the Trojan princess Polyxena). In revenge of the death of his father, Pyrrhus dragged the captured Trojan King Helenus off in chains. Furthermore, he ordered many thousands of captives taken during the sack of Troy, mostly women and children, should remain forevermore in Greek bondage. Pyrrhus seized sovereignty over the kingdom of his now enslaved step-uncle Helenus, renaming it ‘Epirus’ (modern Ipiro, in western Greece) after his own name...

King Pandrasus was mature of age when young Brythos first arrived in the northern kingdom of Epirus. He settled there among those descended from the Trojan captives, who had lived under the Greek suzerainty for some 35-40 years. Brythos found himself quite at home among the descendants of Helenus in the land of Epirus, a people whose shame it was to be ‘enslaved’, or bonded in a form of second class citizenship. Their enslavement was an act of vengeance, and they lived now in constant prayer for a hero to rise among them, to free the Trojans from their bond of servitude to the Greek sovereign. Brythos soon gained fame among the former people of Troy for his "military skill and prowess", being esteemed more than any other young man by both Greeks and Trojans alike. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth: "Among the wise he was himself wise, and among the valiant he too was valiant." The assertion of his rare intelligence confirms that Brythos was well-educated during childhood. This idea sits well with the parallel story of the spread of the first phonetic, written language in the western world, in which Brythos seems to have been well-versed, which became what is known as the Celtic tongue…

A son of Priam, King Agenor of Tyre, a city of Phoenicia, is widely attributed with the birth of the phonetic language around 1250 BC. His son, Cadmus, is accredited with having spread the knowledge of this written language into areas of Western Europe. Cadmus (aka Caduces) became king of the city of Thebes, in which he erected the Cadmeian temple, where modern archaeologists have discovered 30 Phoenician lapis lazuli scroll-cases. It is reckoned these were used to hold the earliest scrolls which had the Phoenician script written upon them. The archaeologists also discovered in the temple a stone tablet with Linear B inscriptions, the symbol-based language of the Minoans. The first king of Thebes, a seven-gated citadel in the Greek Boetian mainland (modern Thivai), was a Syrian called Eetion, father of Andromache, wife of the Trojan hero Hector...

Both Agenor and Hector were sons of Priam, King of Troy. The city of Thebes is said to have been destroyed by Achilles because it was occupied by Trojans, although this sounds far more like the behaviour of his enraged son Pyrrhus. The fact that Agenor was a son of Priam, ties the development of the early Phoenician script to the occupants of Troy, and it is thus probable that Cadmus would have made every effort to educate the Trojan people who spread abroad after the fall of the great city.

The familial thread running through the patchwork story of the earliest writers leads us directly to Brythos, via his Trojan ancestry. The settlers of Latium from Troy were almost certainly privy to knowledge of the Phoenician script, as also were the Trojans who lived reluctantly in the Greek land of Epirus. His close blood connection to King Cadmus probably gave Brythos a most privileged access (directly or indirectly) to the earliest writings in the new phonetic script. Brythos was thus among the first European students of the phonetic language, and this education granted him with both rare intelligence and eloquence for the time in which he lived…

For some years, the Trojans continued to march into battle as the vanguard of the Greek army, taming all who dared oppose them. The Trojans, as subservient citizens of Greece, were expected to fight for them in wars. Despite their ‘enslavement’, it seems that the Trojans came to command a certain amount of respect among their masters due to their many successes in battle. Because of his noted cunning on the battlefield, and also because of the good discipline of his 3000 private troops from Latium, Brythos soon became a popular general among his new people. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Brythos gave the spoils of their many battles - gold, silver and equipment - to the Trojan warriors, thus winning their loyalty and admiration.

The descendants of Troy living in Epirus soon requested Brythos to become their leader, because of his royal-born blood. Despite his youth, the Trojans firmly believed that he could free them from the subjection of Greece and King Pandrasus. There were now 7000 Trojan soldiers (3000 of Brythos, plus 4000 of Epirus), and many more women and children, all amounting to a population estimated at around 33,000 people (7000 mature males, 7000 mature females, 14000 children, 5000 elderly) .

According to the story, the ruler of the region of ‘Sparatinum’, Assaracus, was born of a noble Greek father and an unknown Trojan mother. She had probably thus descended from the earlier Trojan King Assaracus, son of Tros, great-grandfather of Aeneas, hence the repetition of that esteemed royal name some six generations later. Himself a half-Greek nobleman, Assaracus favoured in his heart the cause of his enslaved Trojan kinfolk. Although he was currently the lord of Sparatinum, a region of Epirus, the right of Assaracus to this position of nobility had recently become a matter of dispute among the ruling Greek authorities. His half-brother, a full-blooded Greek, was attempting to seize lordship over the three castles of Sparatinum for himself, claiming to have more right, by virtue of his pure Greek blood, than the illegitimate son of a Trojan concubine. With the Greeks more likely to support the cause of one of their own, Assaracus was looking at a highly insecure future. He decided it was better to fight for what he had now rather than to risk the loss of everything by doing nothing. Empathizing with the underdogs, whose struggle was for freedom, Assaracus sensed it was time to act, since he might soon be unable to help the Trojans at all. His unprompted offer to grant Brythos the use of his three castles in Sparatinum was key in spurring the Trojan leader to initiate an immediate rebellion against Greece. Brythos called together his nobles and began to plan for war...

The Trojans immediately built up food-stocks and set about re-fortifying the castles of Assaracus, who himself went into the woodlands to hide and wait with the bulk of the army, guarding the women and children. Brythos penned the following letter (adapted from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version), which was then sent to the King of the Greeks: