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Ogham
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)The oldest form of Goidelic writing used by the Celts and found in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Devon, and the Isle of Man. The majority of examples have been found in Kerry and Cork counties of Ireland. The oldest of these inscriptions were composed of notches carved onto the edge of an upright stone.
The system would seem to be founded on the Latin alphabet. Some stones have bilingual inscriptions, which have helped in their translation. The main key, however, was found in a treatise on Oghamic writing contained in the fourteenthcentury Book of Ballymote.
Ogham
a phonetic writing system used by the Celts and Picts of the British Isles (see Figure 1). It is known from fourth-century inscriptions in Old Irish (Ireland, Scotland, Western Brittany, and the Isle of Man) and in Pictish (inscriptions from Scotland, the Shetland Islands, and the Orkney Islands, which have not yet been deciphered). Ogham was displaced from regular usage by the Latin alphabet but survived in Ireland as a cryptographic device until the 17th century.
The core of an ogham inscription was a line (which could also be the edge or corner of a stone slab or a wooden object) on which dots were marked, with groups of dots representing the vowel sounds; groups of lines leading to one or both sides of the vertical line indicated consonants. A letter consists of a combination of one to five identical lines or dots. Additional letters of a more complex shape were introduced into the ogham system at a later date. The origin of ogham is unknown.
REFERENCES
Ferguson, S. Ogham Inscriptions in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Edinburgh, 1887.Macalister, R. A. S. Studies in Irish Epigraphy, vols. 1–3. London, 1897–1907.
Vendryes, J. “L’Écriture ogamique et ses origines.” Etudes celtiques, 1939, vol. 4.
A. B. DOLGOPOL’SKII