Funds are being sought to carry out high-tech laser scans of the 400 or so known examples of ogham stones in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, writes Dick Ahlstrom
IRELAND HAD NO colonial past, or did it? Dozens of standing stones carved with Irish inscriptions in the ancient ogham lettering system mark out territories in Wales and Scotland and suggest Ireland was a colonial power in its day.
Yet the ogham proofs of this existence are rapidly disappearing to the elements and to vandalism. The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies hopes to capture finely detailed images of the ogham lettering before the inscriptions are lost forever.
There are at least 300 ogham stones known to exist here and more than 100 stand in parts of western Wales and Scotland, according to the director of the institute's school of theoretical physics, Prof Werner Nahm.
He has joined with the director of the institute's school of celtic studies, Prof Fergus Kelly, in an effort to win funding for a research project that would produce images using three-dimensional laser scanning on every known ogham stone.
Time is pressing, although most of the stones were placed in position in the fifth and sixth centuries, with the oldest dating back to the fourth century, says Prof Nahm. "Many of the stones are under threat. They are on private land and people are unwilling to give them to museums," he says. "They are vandalised and they are exposed to the elements and are being lost over time. It is clear that many of them are in worse condition now than in the past based on writings about them."
Ogham is an ancient lettering system that uses patterns of parallel and crossed lines. "It is specifically Irish with some late use in Scotland, but even in Wales the ogham inscriptions are all in Irish", Prof Nahm says. "They started in the late fourth century. You find them in various places, on building materials and in subterranean structures."
The ogham inscriptions were not an attempted replacement for existing Latin or Irish lettering systems, but the location of ogham stones does suggest a purpose. "They were invented possibly as territorial markers but there is discussion about whether their inventors were pagan or Christians," says Prof Nahm. Crosses often appear on these stones but until more research is carried out it remains uncertain whether these were chiselled at the time the stones were placed or later due to the spread of Christianity.
"The stones contain mainly names and sometimes tribes. The tribe is often mentioned." The names are almost exclusively male and seen to define kinship, with lettering giving a name and defining him as a son of another name or the pattern "X, son of Y, grandson of Z". They also are usually in the genitive case, denoting possession,
and strongly suggestive of colonial activity given the stones are almost always in
Irish.
To help launch their initiative Kelly and Nahm organised a one-day conference last month on the scanning of ancient stone monuments. It brought together a wide range of experts from Ireland, the US and Britain. This included Alexandre Tokovinine, of Harvard University and the Peabody Museum, who has scanned hieroglyphic inscriptions on Myan monuments in South America, and Dáibhi Ó Cróinín, from NUI Galway, who has scanned medieval Irish monuments. His group found a Greek inscription on a cross-slab at the monastery of St Mura in Fahan, Co Donegal, Prof Nahm notes.
Fionnbarr Moore, of the National Monuments Service, who provided the images above, described his own research, which showed that most stones are as originally placed. "I was able to establish that many of them were probably in situ," he said. It was also possible to establish "which ones may have been carved on re-used ancient standing stones or on grave slabs made to mark simple burials of the early medieval period".
The institute's plan is to raise financial support to allow every ogham monument to be scanned using standard industrial lasers. "There is a laser beam which is directed at the monument and a camera scans the spot on the monument. You look from two
different angles to use triangulation so you have a very exact image," says Prof Nahm.
The resolution of the process is very fine and down to tenths of a square millimetre, he adds. "You have a computer which will put together the scans of overlapping areas. It is done as individual snapshots but done very, very fast and a computer integrates it all."
The method can reveal details that are invisible to the unaided eye. It is so fine that researchers should be able to say whether the crosses and ogham letters were contemporaneous. "Eventually we might even see the marks from the tools that made it," says Prof Nahm.