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According to a Irish and Scottish medieval tradition, Goídel Glas (Latinised as Gathelus) is the creator of the Goidelic languages and the eponymous ancestor of the Gaels.
The tradition can be traced to the 11th-century Lebor Gabála Érenn. A Scottish variant is due to John of Fordun (d. 1384).
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The narrative in the Lebor Gabála Érenn is a pseudo-Biblical account of the origin of the Gaels as the descendants of the Scythian prince Fénius Farsaid, one of seventy-two chieftains who built the Tower of Babel. His grandson Goídel Glas, whose mother is Scota, daughter of a Pharaoh of Egypt, creates the Irish language from the original seventy-two languages that arose at the time of the dispersal of the nations. His descendants, the Gaels, undergo a series of trials and tribulations that are clearly modelled on those with which the Israelites are tried in the Old Testament. They flourish in Egypt at the time of Moses and leave during the Exodus; they wander the world for four hundred and forty years before eventually settling in the Iberian Peninsula. There, Goídel's descendant Breogán founds a city called Brigantia, and builds a tower from the top of which his son Íth glimpses Ireland. Brigantia can probably be identified with A Coruña, north-west Galicia, known as Brigantium in Roman times;[1] A Roman lighthouse there known as the Tower of Hercules has been claimed to have been built on the site of Breogán's tower.[2]
A Scottish version of the tale of Goídel Glas and Scota was recorded by John of Fordun. This is apparently not based on the main Irish Lebor Gabála account. Fordun refers to multiple sources, and his version is taken to be an attempt to synthesise these multiple accounts into a single history.
In Fordun's version, Gaythelos, as he calls Goídel Glas, is the son of "a certain king of the countries of Greece, Neolus, or Heolaus, by name", who was exiled to Egypt and took service with the Pharaoh, marrying Pharaoh's daughter Scota. Various accounts of how Gaythelos came to be expelled from Egypt—by a revolt following the death of Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea, pursuing Moses, or in terror from the Plagues of Egypt, or after an invasion by Ethiopians—are given, but the upshot is that Gaythelos and Scota are exiled together with Greek and Egyptian nobles, and they settle in Hispania after wandering for many years. In the Iberian Peninsula they settle in the land's northwest corner, at a place called Brigancia (the city of A Coruña, that the Romans knew as Brigantium).
Contemporary sources on Goidel Glas are exposed by the writer Joaquín Trincado Mateo in the book Conócete a ti mismo[3], which coincides, in part, with the Scottish legend, but names Goidel Glas, as Aitekes, Egyptian name, which was besides, son in law of Pharaoh, had married Scota, chief of the Egyptian army and who knows the stone often seen in the annual festival of the Israelites and knew, because ever heard the word "Christ" the firstborn of the tribes pronounced sloping on the stone, which collects the shores of the Red Sea after being defeated by Moses, convinced it was the stone, is the God of Moses, in possession of the stone-fetish, makes God-Christ, and robs to Israel its doctrines, calling them the gospel and the gives to the famous stone, Christ- God, thus creating the Christian religion (that centuries later the re-founded in Rome the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus) and then aitekes, form a brigade and a pilgrim to find a new kingdom to God, traversed the whole of northern Africa and comes close to Finisterre and makes throne and founded the city of Brigantium, known until now in Galicia, Spain for 17 centuries until the apostle Santiago of Spain, arrives there to preach the word of Jesus and the stone is brought to Ireland by the original Christians.