ABSTRACT
The Ogam Inscriptions The Irish language is first attested in the three hundred or so inscriptions in the Ogam script which are to be found chiefly in a belt stretching across the south of Ireland from Kerry through Cork and Waterford and, on the eastern side of the Irish Sea, in Wales and Cornwall. The Ogam script consists of groups of from one to five strokes and notches about a central spine which is usually formed by the long side of the inscribed stone. The script is based on the Latin alphabet and may well be the adaptation to writing of a counting system by means of tally-sticks. Its date and place of origin is uncertain, but some considerations are clear. Since it does not occur outside of Britain and Ireland, it is reasonable to assume that it was of insular origin. Since (apart from some late Pictish inscriptions in Scotland) it is used exclusively for the writing of Irish, and since knowledge of the script continued in Ireland until the dispersal of the native schools of learning in the seventeenth century, the script may also be assumed to have originated in Ireland. This implies that inscriptions in Ogam and in the Irish language on the island of Britain were the work of emigrants from the south of Ireland who colonized those parts in the post-Roman period. Since Latin was never a vernacular in Ireland, we must assume that knowledge of the language was acquired in Britain. Therefore the date of the invention of the script cannot be earlier than the time of the introduction of Latin into Britain. Furthermore, since the grouping of the letters in the Ogam script appears to derive from the system of classification into vocales, semivocales, mutae and Graecae in use in the Roman schools (Ahlqvist 1982: 10), this date must be set somewhat later to allow for the establishment of Latin schools in Britain. The terminus a quo for the invention of the script is therefore about the third century AD. A terminus ad quem is provided by the inscriptions themselves, which are unanimously dated by scholars to the fifth and sixth centuries, though only one of them, that commemorating Voteporix in Wales, has been thought to refer to a historically identifiable
person, a British ruler who lived in the middle of the sixth century (Jackson 1953: 625, but see Sims-Williams 1990: 226).
