OA s02e01 How an Ogham Stone Gets Its Date
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[00:00:00] pretty much every book you pick up will tell you that the Oghams stones are fifth to seventh century. That's a fair reading of the evidence, and the people who worked it out did careful work with very little to go on. Underneath it, though, sits a scaffolding, and once you see the scaffolding, you can tell the difference between a date that somebody measured that's accurate and defined, and a date that somebody reasoned their way towards.
Now, why does this matter? Because the prevailing wisdom is that the Ogham was a Christian invention, and when you look at the archeological evidence, it doesn't necessarily hold up as definitive as some people would like you to believe. ~I'm Lora O'Brien. I am 30 years doing and teaching the Irish tradition.~
~I have it all behind me and ahead of me. ~I'm Lora O'Brien. I've got 30 years under my belt with the Irish tradition, and I have eight books written so far and a master's in Irish history, which is where I learned how a date gets [00:01:00] built. The Ogham Academy has run since 2022 on the historical baseline first before we get into spirituality, mythology, magic, divination, cultural inspiration, any of those wonderful things that are also associated with the Ogham Now, Professor David Stifter wrote the standard short reference on Ogham, the A-E-L-A-W guide and here's what he says about dating the ogham. Direct quote, "Since it is not possible to assign dates to rock unless in geological dimensions, the dating of ogham inscriptions depends on circumstantial information, such as accompanying archeological finds, which are few, or linguistic and paleographic arguments, which can be circular."
End quote. Now, circular there is his word, not mine, just to be very clear. [00:02:00] But think about what you'd need to actually date a carving in stone. You would need something datable sitting beside it. That is contextual dating. And rock won't give you a date because there's no carbon in the stroke cut into the stone, so you can't date it the same way you would date leather or wood or peat or anything like that.
Every date that you've ever read came another way, and there are three main ways which are used to date the ogham. First is archeology. We would dig properly around a stone that's still standing where it was raised, and the ground can give you a range depending on what else is in the ground. ~Now, there's one major issue there first before we go anywhere else before we go anywhere else because~
~Blah, blah, blah ~Many of the stones, or I would even go so far as to say most of the Ogham stones that we have, do not remain in situ. They do not remain in the [00:03:00] same position as they were first erected or, ~or~ placed
But it does work if you do happen to have one that is still in the same position since its original locating in that ground and if the archaeological dig is actually done around it. There is a stone from Silchester in England which came out of a late Roman villa which is dated to the fourth or early fifth century, and that makes it one of the earliest dated ogham stones that we have,
And it's one of the very few in England. But those archeological finds are few. And Lora White, who runs the Ogham in 3D project, or ran it, I'm not sure if she still does. But she says that there's been little or no modern excavation where a stone is likely to be standing in its original spot.
It's quite rare. We have so much archeology in [00:04:00] Ireland, and very little of it is actually excavated So what that means is the road that would give us hard dates, verifiable dates, is the one that pretty much nobody has walked. Now, the second way is the historical record, because if a name on a stone belongs to a man that happens to be in the annals, you can tie the two together and take a date off it.
For example, there's a Mac Cérreáin on a stone from Painestown in County Meath and a Mac Cérreáin in the annals of Ulster who dies in 446 AD, Common Era. Probably the same man, though nobody can say for certain, and the ending of the last word of that inscription has already fallen off, which doesn't suit a man who died in 446.
You would expect his stone to be a little bit fresher. [00:05:00] Stifter says names like that can be very rarely matched, and those matches are exactly what you'd use to calibrate everything else if you could match them, but it's very difficult to match them. Now, the third thing that we'd be looking at is the language, and nearly every date for the Ogham that you'll read rests on linguistic development.
The Irish language on the stones changes fast, relatively speaking. I mean, it's still over a couple of hundred years, right? But it changes fast, relatively speaking, and the changes run in a very known order. We have endings dropping, sounds merging, a name getting shorter from one stone to the next, and that gives you a sequence or a timeline.
~And a sequence A sequence or a timeline, but ~a sequence is not a calendar. Just because we know that it moves from point A to point B to point C, we don't necessarily [00:06:00] know where point A, point B, and point C are on a fixed date.
To map it onto the years, you need the fixed points, and the fixed points are the digging that nobody has done in the archaeology and the contextual dating, and the name matches that hardly ever work out and hardly ever match up. So that's that circular argument where the language dates the stones, and the stones help date the language.
Now, put all of that in a field with a stone in it. A lot of our Ogham script that remains sits on monuments that were old before anybody cut a letter into them. Nora White lists prehistoric standing stones, stone pairs, stone rows, and a stone circle. And in brackets in her own list, the Ogham inscriptions were later added to prehistoric monuments, and that's before we get into the [00:07:00] medieval souterrains, churches, all that kind of stuff.
For example, the tallest Ogham stone that we have stands over Ballycrovane Harbor in West Cork. It's really beautiful, really impressive, gorgeous location, absolutely mythic example of a standing stone. It is probably a prehistoric pillar, and the writing on it is a likely later addition according to all scholastic wisdom But let's follow that.
The pillar is prehistoric. We're told Ogham is early medieval, so the writing must have gone on later. Are we seeing this circular argument again? Every step stands as long as the middle step is settled, which is that Ogham is early medieval, that there is a particular date that Ogham does not go before, that it is a Christian invention, not here during pre-Christian times [00:08:00] in Ireland.
But we've kind of just watched the middle step get built out of one Roman villa, one shaky entry in the annals, and a sequence with almost no pins in it. Those first three paths that we looked at for dating the Ogham. So we are in a position where the date of the script decides the date of the carving, but there's no test that you can run on the stone that says otherwise.
It might well be later, as in it might have been carved into the stone later than the prehistoric period when the stone was erected. But calling that a finding or definitive or, ~you know,~ a categorical dating of the Ogham is where any of this goes wrong because the presumption was what did the work and then got quoted back as the result.
And that's bias, however you look at it. David Stifter, when he's writing, is pretty straight about the origin too. [00:09:00] No reliable historical evidence exists about the invention of the Ogham. And he sets out why most scholars won't go back further than the year 400. It's because there's no archeological evidence to take them there, and 400 is roughly when Christianity lands in Ireland.
So he says the connection between the two is suggestive. Ogham may have been a native answer to Latin literacy.
And look, that may be exactly right, possibly. Again, there's no way to definitively say, but many people do definitively say. And I will just take a little step to the left here and point out that many things in Irish history, have been presumed in the past to have been copied by people on this island that have turned out to be sourced from this island. The presumption has been in the past, through the [00:10:00] Protestant ascendancy, the colonizer view, even the patriarchal mentality. The view has been that there was nothing other than barbarian savagery on the island until the coming of Christianity, and then later the coming of the Normans and the English, et cetera, et cetera So that's a whole pattern that you can look at and say, "Hmm, is that what's happening here?"
But look, again, it might be exactly right that the Ogham only came with Christianity. But everybody who's been around archeology for a hot minute also would tell you that an absence of archeological evidence is not a conclusion. It just means that we haven't found anything. And time and time and time again- We will have an archeological finding which throws the known rules out [00:11:00] the door.
For example, the occupation of humanity on this island is one of those things. It's gone from 8 to 9,000 years, but, ~um,~ if you Google the Alice and Gwendoline Cave for the first pushback with Marion Dowd, and you can look at the Castle Pook Cave, the reindeer bone in the Castle Pook Cave for that second pushback, which would put humans occupying Ireland during a time when we were supposed to have an Ice Age, and this was only last year.
So archaeology, or rather the lack of archaeological evidence, doesn't mean that a thing never existed. Okay? You can't take an absence as a proof in archaeology
So while there's no [00:12:00] archeological evidence to take the Ogham back further than the year 400
I'm also pretty sure that there's no older Ogham that the universities are keeping quiet about. I don't think it's a big conspiracy theory or anything. But while we're sitting on, ~you know,~ either side of a theoretical fence here, let's look at what the fence is made of. A reluctance to go back further is a caution, and those are the right instincts for a scholar, and I'd far rather that they erred that way, on the side of caution.
But a caution repeated often enough hardens into a fact on a plaque. ~You know,~ if something gets repeated and repeated and repeated, it is known, right? Now, my own position as a draoi is that I would love to see evidence either way. I would love to settle this completely, [00:13:00] but I just haven't seen that evidence so far.
So my position would be one of open-mindedness. I would have no reason to think that the Ogham was invented with Christianity Certainly no stronger reason to think that than I would to believe that the carving on a prehistoric monument is from the same time period as the prehistoric monument was erected.
I do believe that the Ogham has carried spiritual and magical weight from its origin with the stones. Stifter believes that linguistically, you could look at that timeline and start it in the first or the second century just as easily as the third or the fourth century. That there's no reason why it wouldn't go back to pre-Christianity if we're just looking at that linguistics.
And, ~you know,~ that's a timeline, again, with [00:14:00] nothing to really pin it down except one of the top Old Irish linguistics experts saying that there's no evidence that has to start it in, ~you know,~ the 400s
With all of this, it's really important that you don't start from what you want to be true
You don't try and just reason backwards. You don't cherry-pick evidence. You don't make a presumption and then build your whole house on it As a historian, I have been trained and I hope continue to practice every single day where I'm looking at the evidence and always open-minded for new evidence to be presented, but looking at the evidence and seeing what makes the most sense within the context that we have
So examine yourself for this bias. Hold the thin evidence that [00:15:00] we have loosely and the good evidence firmly, and say which one you're looking at and which one you're doing every time you open your mouth about it, even if it's only, ~you know,~ talking to yourself. So if you want to see the Ogham and the grounding under all of this, we have a free Ogham 101 guide.
You can get it at ogham.academy/guide, G-U-I-D-E. And I will see you in the next episode. Slán.
