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into the Atlantic, landed inWexford Bay where they came in conflict with the Danaans; but were persuaded to pass on into Northern Britain, then called Albany. They were known as the Picts, or tattooed men, and had the same odd social habits – exogamy, totemism, public coition, cannibalism, tattooing, the participation of women in battle – that obtained in Thessaly before the coming of the Achaeans, and in Classical times among the primitive tribes of the Southern Black Sea coast, the Gulf of Sirté in Libya, Majorca (populated by Bronze Age Libyans) and North-West Galicia. Their descendants still kept their non–Celtic language in Bede’s day.
    Amathaon, or Amaethon, is said to take his name from the Welsh word amaeth ,a ploughman, but it may be the other way about: that ploughmen were under the patronage of the god Amathaon. Perhaps the tribe was originally mothered by Amathaounta, a well-known Aegean Sea-goddess; another tribe of the same name, whose ancestral hero was Hercules, migrated from Crete to Amathus in Cyprus towards the end of the second millennium BC . Amathaon is credited with having taught Gwydion the wizardry for which he was afterwards famous; and this suggests that Gwydion was a late-comer to Britain, perhaps a god of the Belgic tribes that invaded Britain about 400 BC , and was given honorary sonship of Danu some centuries after the first Danaan invasion. Amathaon was maternal nephew to Math Hen (‘Old Math’), alias Math the son of Mathonwy. ‘Math’ means ‘treasure’; but since Math is also credited with having taught Gwydion his magic, ‘Math son of Mathonwy’ may be a truncated version of ‘Amathus son of Amathaounta’. Part of the tribe seems to have emigrated to Syria where it founded the city of Amathus (Hamath) on the Orontes, and another part to Palestine where it founded Amathus in the angle between the Jordan and the Jabbok. In the Table of Nations in Genesis X the Amathites are reckoned late among the Sons of Canaan, along with Hivites, Gergasites and other non-Semitic tribes. According to II Kings y XVII, 24 ,some of the Amathites were planted as a colony in Samaria, where they continued to worship their Goddess under the name of Ashima.
    Bran’s name was guessed by Gwydion from the sprigs of alder in his hand, because though ‘Bran’ and Gwern ,the word for ‘alder’ used in the poem, do not sound similar, Gwydion knew that Bran, which meant ‘Crow’ or ‘Raven’, also meant ‘alder’ – the Irish is fearn ,with the ‘f’ pronounced as ‘v’ – and that the alder was a sacred tree. The third of the four sons of King Partholan the Milesian, a legendary ruler of Ireland in the Bronze Age, had been called Fearn; there had also been young Gwern, King of Ireland, the son of Bran’s sister, Branwen (‘White Crow’). Various confirmations of Gwydion’s guess appear in the Romance of Branwen ,as will be shown later. But the name spelt out by the trees, or the letters, ranged on the side of Amathaon and Gwydion remained unguessed.

    The Bran cult seems also to have been imported from the Aegean. There are remarkable resemblances between him and the Pelasgian hero Aesculapius who, like the chieftain Coronus (‘crow’) killed by Hercules, was a king of the Thessalian crow-totem tribe of Lapiths. Aesculapius was a Crow on both sides of the family: his mother was Coronis (‘crow’), probably a title of the Goddess Athene to whom the crow was sacred. Tatian, the Church Father, in his Address to the Greeks ,suggests a mother and son relationship between Athene and Aesculapius:
    After the decapitation of the Gorgon…Athene and Aesculapius divided the blood between them, and while he saved lives by means of them, she by the same blood became a murderess and instigator of wars.
     
    Aesculapius’s father was Apollo whose famous shrine of Tempe stood in Lapith territory and to whom the crow was also sacred; and Apollo is described as the father of another Coronus, King