14 



latter a giandsoii of that king by his son Niul married to Sco- 

 ta, daughter of Pharaoh Cingris, as our bards call him, instead 

 of Cinchres, Idng of Egypt, mider whose .reign they tell us Moses 

 and our Gadelus were cotemporaries and great friends ; and from 

 this Gadelus our learned bards gravely assure us that the Irish 

 derive their name ofGadelians, who, they tell us, were also called 

 Scots, from his wife the Egyptian princess Scota, This disco- 

 \ery, I have said, was necessarily reserved to our Christian bards, 

 as their heathenish predecessors most certainly could have no 

 notion of the plain of Senaar, of Pharaoh, or of Moses; objects not 

 to be known but from the Holy Scriptures, or some writings 

 derived from them, such as those of Josephus, Philo, &c. never 

 known to the Irish bards before their Christianity.' 



If the Clanna Blileag, or Cine Scuit, as those writers assert, 

 were indebted to the Scythian king for letters and language, or 

 to the Egyptians or Cantabrians of Spain, as others affirm, we 

 should have the characters and language of one of those three 

 nations ; but it requires no great skill in languages to prove that 

 there is no affinity between the Gailic and the Scythian, Coptic 

 or Cantabric letters or languages.-^- 



Mr. Ledwich observes that neither Bede, Nennius nor Giral- 

 dus Cambrensis mention the name of Milesius, and that Lord 

 Littleton remarks it as extraordinary, that if the Scots were a 

 people of Scythian extraction, who came into Ireland from any 

 part of Spain in such very early times, the name which denoted their 

 original country, should have been lost or forgotten during so 



27. ' The ancient Gothic and Coptic are immediately derived from the Ionic Greek.' Origin 

 and Progress of Writing, by F. Astle, Esq. p. 54.. 



' Tlie ancient Spaniards, before tlieir intercourse with the Romans, used letters nearly 

 Greek. Don Nassarri, principal librarian to the king of Spain, has given us this alphabet, con^ 

 sisting of twenty-four letters, taken from coins and other ancient monuments.' Astle, p. 8(5. 



