Looked at closely, the traditional ornaments on parchment and stone that have come down to us from the early Christian period in Northern Europe, as well as the knotwork of the Mediterranean, disclose an underlying unity: organized on grids; based on dots connected by lines in diamond-arrangements, as in knot design; or by lines in diagonal-cross arrangements, as in Celtic square-spiral or maze patterns.

The main constructions use age-old motifs that were indigenous to Eurasian cultures as far back as the Beaker and Axe peoples, at least, as demonstrated by Marija Gimbutas.

The structural unity of primitive ornament was outlined in the last century by J. Romilly Allen who revealed the syntax and the grammar of the form language of primitive patterns. While Romilly Allen drew largely from Beaker pottery design, Gimbutas has drawn evidence that the same pattern system was used extensively in Old European civilization. It is likely that when this system appears in pottery of the fifth millennium BCE,  it had already been fully developed as a syntax of symbolic geometry, a precursor to script.