460 
The Rev. Charles Graves exhibited an ancient gold orna- 
ment, belonging to the Earl of Leitrim, of which the follow- 
ing description is given in Vallancey’s Collectanea, Vol. V., 
p- 90: 
““ Mr, Burton Conyngham has now in his possession one of 
those double cupped patera, described and engraved in the 13th 
Number of the Collectanea. The instrument is of gold, was found 
in the county of Mayo, and weighs about six guineas. On the out- 
side of one cup is an Ogham inscription; on the outside of the 
other an inscription in the Phcenician or Estrangelo character.— 
See Pl. I1I.,—where the cups are reversed to show the inscription. 
The Pheenician word is composed of the din, Lamed, Tau, Aleph, 
i.e. NIV9Y, i.e. dita or Olta, signifying an holocaust. This con- 
firms my former opinion, that these instruments were used in sacri- 
fices. The Ogham characters are UOSER, Uoser, Osir, or Usar, 
the Sun, the principal deity of the pagan Irish. The names desar, 
Aosar, frequently occur in ancient Irish MSS., which are always 
translated God.” 
Mr. Graves stated that, whilst he recognised the gold 
ornament itself as being a genuine and a very fine specimen 
of the ancient manille,* of which many are preserved in the 
Museum of the Academy, he was forced, after a careful exami- 
nation of it, to pronounce the inscription to be a forgery of com- 
paratively recent date. For this conclusion he assigned the 
following reasons : 
Faint tracings of all the characters scratched upon the sur- 
face, as if to serve as a pattern to be copied by the engraver, 
are still quite visible. ‘There can hardly be a doubt but that 
casual attrition, and the action of the atmosphere or earth for 
a thousand years or more, would have effaced such marks. 
The inscribed characters have a sharpness which is not 
to be seen in ancient work, even though executed in gold. All 
the original devices which appear on ancient gold articles 
* See Sir William Betham’s papers on Ring Money, in the Transactions 
of the Academy, yol. xvii. 
