Celtic History

Subtopic

Ogham and Inscribed Stones

The Ogham script of early medieval Ireland, the inscribed stones on which it was carved, and the early Celtic inscriptions of Britain and the continent.

The earliest written evidence for the Celtic languages of the British Isles is preserved not in manuscripts but in stone, in the remarkable series of inscribed monuments that span the centuries from the Roman period to the early Middle Ages. The most distinctive of these is the Ogham script, a unique alphabet developed in southern Ireland in the early centuries CE, that consists of a series of strokes cut along the edge of a stone, and that is found on several hundred stones scattered across Ireland and the western parts of Britain. To study Ogham and inscribed stones is to examine the very beginnings of the written record of the Celtic languages, and to recognize the importance of these monuments for our understanding of the linguistic, cultural, and religious life of the early Celtic world. The Ogham tradition is the natural counterpart to the medieval Celtic literary tradition that developed in the manuscript period, and it is an essential part of the broader story of the Celtic language family as a whole, both of which are part of Celtic languages and oral tradition.

The inscribed stones of the Celtic world are not limited to Ogham. There is also a substantial corpus of Latin and Celtic inscriptions on stone in the Roman and post-Roman periods, including dedications to Celtic and Roman deities, funerary inscriptions, milestones, and a wide range of other public and private texts. These inscriptions, both in the British Isles and on the continent, are an essential supplement to the Ogham tradition, and they provide important evidence for the pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar of the early Celtic languages.

The Ogham Script

The Ogham script distinctive writing systems ever developed, and it is unique to the Celtic-speaking world. The script consists of a series of strokes and notches cut along, or sometimes across, the edge of a stone, with each group of strokes representing a letter of the early Irish alphabet. The traditional Ogham alphabet has twenty-five letters, divided into four groups of five, each named after a tree or shrub of the early Irish alphabetical tree.

The first group of Ogham letters, the Aicme Beithe (the birch group), represents the vowels and several of the more common consonants, and includes the letters B (beith, birch), L (luis, rowan), F (fearn, alder), S (sail, willow), and N (nion, ash). The second group, the Aicme hÚatha (the h-ash group), includes the letters H (hÚath, white hawthorn), D (dair, oak), T (tinne, holly), C (coll, hazel), and Q (ceirt, apple). The third group, the Aicme Mhuine (the vine group), includes M (muin, vine), G (gort, ivy), NG (ngetal, reed), Z/ST (straif, blackthorn), and R (ruis, elder). The fourth group, the Aicme Peithe (the birch-bush group), includes A (ail, fir), O (onn, furze), U (úr, heather), E (eadhadh, aspen), and I (iogh, yew). A fifth letter, P (peith, the birch-bush itself), was added later to represent the p sound that had been borrowed into Irish from Latin.

The Ogham letters were traditionally read from the bottom of the stone upward, with the first letter cut across or at the base of the stone and the last letter at the top. The strokes were usually cut on the left edge of the stone, with the script running from the bottom of the inscribed edge to the top, but they could also be cut on the right edge, on both edges, or across the face of the stone. The direction of the reading and the edge on which the strokes were cut are matters of considerable scholarly interest, and they have been used to develop theories about the origins and development of the script.

The Origins of Ogham

The origins of the Ogham script are still debated, but the consensus view is that Ogham was devised in southern Ireland in the first few centuries CE, possibly as early as the first century CE, in response to the presence of the Latin script in Ireland. The traditional view, expressed by the medieval Irish text In Lebor Ogam, attributed the invention of Ogham to the legendary Ogma, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and connected it to the native Irish tradition of finger-counting, but this account is mythological rather than historical.

The Latin connection is supported by the structure of the Ogham alphabet, which closely mirrors the Latin alphabet in its organization, and by the use of Ogham primarily for memorial inscriptions of the kind that the Romans used in their own epigraphic tradition. The theory that Ogham was developed as a cryptographic or secret script, possibly by Christian communities seeking a way to record their religious texts that would be unintelligible to Roman administrators, is no longer widely accepted, but the possibility that Ogham was used in certain ritual or ceremonial contexts is still debated.

A more recent theory, proposed especially by the linguist and runologist R. A. S. Macalister in his monumental Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum and developed by other scholars, is that Ogham developed out of an older system of tally marks or symbolic marks used in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age for the purposes of counting, recording, or marking property. The theory connects Ogham to the older Atlantic tradition of stone carving and to the system of symbols used in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age for the marking of boundaries, graves, and other significant features of the landscape.

The Distribution of the Ogham Stones

The great majority of the known Ogham stones are found in Ireland, particularly in the southern and western counties of Kerry, Cork, Waterford, Tipperary, Wexford, and Wicklow. The county of Kerry alone has more than seventy known Ogham stones, and the Dingle Peninsula and the Iveragh Peninsula are particularly rich. Outside Ireland, Ogham stones have been found in Wales (particularly in Pembrokeshire and Glamorgan), in Cornwall, in Devon, in the Isle of Man, in Scotland (particularly in Argyll and the Hebrides), and in Silchester and other sites in southern England.

The distribution of the Ogham stones is closely tied to the early medieval distribution of the Irish language and to the Irish and Gaelic cultural presence in the western parts of Britain. The Welsh and Cornish Ogham stones in particular are often associated with Irish settlers in the early medieval period, and the Pictish and Scottish Ogham stones reflect the Irish influence on the development of Christianity in northern Britain. The Ogham stone from Silchester in Hampshire, one of the most surprising of the British examples, is usually interpreted as a memorial to an Irish individual who died or lived in the area, possibly a member of the Irish diaspora in early medieval Britain.

The total number of known Ogham stones is approximately four hundred, although new discoveries are made regularly. The largest single collection is in the University College Cork collection, which includes many of the most important Irish examples.

The Content of the Ogham Inscriptions

The vast majority of the Ogham inscriptions are memorial in character, and they record the names of the dead, the names of their fathers or other relatives, and occasionally their family affiliations or other identifying information. The most common formula is the MAQI (son of) or MAQ (son of) formula, in which the name of the deceased is followed by the word for son and the name of the father, often in the genitive case. A typical Ogham inscription might read NETTA-LAMINACCA MAQI MUCOI DOVINIA (of Nettalaminacca, son of Dovinios the tribesman), or DOVETI MAQI CALETI (of Dovetos, son of Caletos), or simply MAQI followed by the name of the father.

The names preserved in the Ogham inscriptions are of extraordinary interest for the study of early Irish onomastics, and they provide a substantial body of evidence for the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of the early Irish language. The names are typically bipartite Celtic names of the kind common in the early medieval Celtic world, and they often contain recognizable Celtic elements such as dovo- (dark), netto- (warrior), caleto- (hard), cuna- (hound), ialo- (clear), and vindo- (white). The Ogham names also include a substantial number of Latin and Greek loans, reflecting the early medieval contact between the Irish and the Mediterranean world.

A small but important group of Ogham inscriptions are not memorial in character, and they include inscriptions that appear to be in the older Ogham cipher, a system in which the letters of the Latin alphabet are represented by their corresponding Ogham letters. The scholarly or academic Ogham, as this is sometimes called, is found on a small number of stones in Ireland and Wales, and it includes the Brehon Law and chronicle references preserved in the medieval Irish tradition. The connection between the older Ogham and the later literary Ogham is debated, but the existence of a scholarly Ogham tradition is well established.

The Inscribed Stones of Roman and Post-Roman Britain

In addition to the Ogham tradition, the Celtic-speaking regions of Roman and post-Roman Britain produced a substantial body of inscribed stones in the Latin alphabet. The Latin inscriptions of Roman Britain include dedications to the Deae Matres and the local deities of the Celtic-Roman religious tradition, military inscriptions, milestones, and the elaborate funerary monuments of the Romano-British aristocracy. The Togidubnus inscription from Chichester, the Cunobelinus coin legends, the Caratacus references in Tacitus, and the inscribed milestones of the Roman road system are typical examples.

The most important of the Roman-period Celtic inscriptions in Britain is the Vindolanda tablets, a remarkable series of writing tablets found at the Roman fort of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, dating from the first and second centuries CE. The tablets are written almost entirely in Latin, but they preserve a small but significant body of Celtic personal names in the onomastic tradition, including names of Brigantes and other northern British tribes, and they are one of the few documentary sources that can be used to triangulate the linguistic character of the late Roman period in northern Britain. The tablets are an essential supplement to the Ogham tradition, since the small Brittonic onomastic element they contain documents the Brythonic counterpart to the Goidelic language of the Ogham inscriptions, even if they do not contain Brythonic sentences as such.

The inscribed stones of post-Roman and early medieval Britain include a substantial body of Celtic and Latin inscriptions in the Celtic-Latin bilingualism of the early Christian period. The Brittonic inscriptions of the Old Welsh and Old Cornish periods, dating from the sixth through the ninth centuries, are particularly important, since they provide the earliest evidence for the Brythonic languages in the historical record. The Old Welsh inscriptions on the Llantwit Major cross, the Margam cross, the Carew cross, and the Nevern cross, the Old Cornish inscription on the Castle Dore stone, the Tristan stone, and the Gwithian stones, and the Old Breton inscriptions of the Brittany mainland are all important early evidence.

The Inscribed Stones of the Continent

The inscribed stones of the continental Celtic world are, in general, much more numerous than those of the insular Celtic world, and they provide the bulk of the evidence for the continental Celtic languages. The Gaulish inscriptions, which are most numerous in the Rhineland, the Rhône Valley, the Garonne Valley, and the central plateau of France, include a substantial body of funerary, dedicatory, and magical texts. The most famous of the Gaulish texts is the Larzac tablet, a lead curse tablet from the second century CE found in southern France, which contains a substantial Gaulish text in the Latin alphabet and gives a vivid picture of the Gaulish language in the late Roman period.

The Celtiberian inscriptions of north-central Spain, dating from the second and first centuries BCE, are also a substantial body of evidence for the continental Celtic languages. The Celtiberian inscriptions, which are most numerous in the upper Tagus and upper Ebro regions, are written in a modified form of the Iberian script, and they include some of the longest Celtic texts from the ancient world. The Botorrita plates, in particular, include a long Celtiberian text on a bronze plaque that provides important evidence for the early Celtic vocabulary and grammar of the Iberian Peninsula.

The Lepontic inscriptions of northern Italy and Switzerland, dating from the sixth century BCE, are the oldest attested Celtic inscriptions, and they provide important evidence for the earliest stages of the Celtic languages. The Lepontic inscriptions, which are written in a modified form of the Etruscan script, are mostly short personal names and dedications, but they are of great value for the reconstruction of proto-Celtic and for the understanding of the earliest Celtic onomastic and religious practices.

The Importance of the Inscribed Stones for Celtic Linguistics

The inscribed stones of the Celtic world are of fundamental importance for the study of the Celtic languages. The Ogham inscriptions, in particular, provide the earliest evidence for the pronunciation of Early Irish, and the names preserved in the inscriptions are the basis for the reconstruction of the phonology of the Primitive Irish period. The Ogham evidence is supplemented by the contemporary Old Irish glosses of the seventh and eighth centuries, but the Ogham inscriptions themselves remain the most important source for the Primitive Irish phonological system.

The continental Celtic inscriptions, in turn, provide the basis for the reconstruction of the continental Celtic languages and for the relationship between the continental and insular branches of the family. The Lepontic inscriptions are the most important source for the reconstruction of proto-Celtic, the Gaulish inscriptions are the most extensive body of evidence for Gaulish, and the Celtiberian inscriptions are the most important source for the q and p sound changes that distinguish the Goidelic and Brythonic branches.

The inscribed stones of the Celtic world are also important for the broader study of Celtic culture and religion. The dedications to Celtic and Roman-Celtic deities, the funerary formulas, the magical texts, and the onomastic evidence all provide important insights into the religious, social, and cultural life of the early Celtic world. The Larzac tablet in particular provides a remarkable insight into the cursing and magical practices of the late Roman Gaul.

Articles in this section

How to Read Ogham, the Celtic Alphabet The structure of the Ogham script, the four aicme or letter groups, the direction of reading, the strokes and notches that make up each letter, and the basics of decoding a stone inscription. Is Ogham an Alphabet or a Secret Code? The structure of the Ogham script, the various theories of its origin, the arguments for and against the cryptographic theory, and the relationship between Ogham and the Latin alphabet. Where Ogham Stones Have Been Found The distribution of Ogham stones across Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and the surprising outliers at Silchester and other sites in southern England.