230 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. - - _' i cj-i 



though the inscription is now unique, that is only because all other inscrip- 

 tions in the same character have perished. And the inscription is inverted 

 because it was uninteHigently copied by an illiterate scribe, who, though he 

 knew his letters as separate pictures, so to speak, was unable to read them. 

 He was like the scribe of the Xewton stone in Aberdeenshire, who in copying 

 by rote a model written for him — itself, probably, not over legible — succeeded 

 in creating a sphinx that is likely to wait a very long time yet before it 

 meets with its Oedipus. But we have still to consider why it is necessary to 

 call in the aid of the Greek alphabet to help out our interpretation of an 

 inscription which, however blundered in sense, is technically written with 

 care and skill. 



To answer this cpaestion fully is impossible, as the materials at our 

 disposal are very imperfecb. But we may say at the outset that the Celtic 

 trihes, and indeed the inhabitants of Northern Europe generally, were at least 

 as much open to the influence of Greek culture as of Boman, before the 

 invasions of Caesar. The Greek colonies of Marseilles imparted a knowledge 

 of the Greek alphabet to the Gauls in Southern France, and accordingly the 

 Gaulish inscriptions of that region are in Greek letters, just as those of 

 Gallia Cisalpina are in Etruscan. Caesar himself tells us of intercepted 

 letters written by Gauls in Greek characters. The Macedonian coins, which 

 (as everyone knows) are the patterns on which the Gaulish and British 

 coinage was modelled, had their legends in Greek ; and the occasional 

 intrusion of a Greek letter into a writing otherwise in Boman characters 

 need not cause us surprise. The letter G, which first appears at Bome in the 

 epitaph of Scipio Barbatus, is common enough in the Gaulish inscriptions of 

 the Continent written in Boman letters; but the Greek gamma might well 

 have had, so to speak, the start of this comparatively late Boman invention, 

 and have found its way, in advance of its rival, to a remote country like 

 Ireland, whenever writing came there. It might, indeed, have been 

 deliberately chosen, as it is obviously easier to cut than the curved G. 



Be these conjectures as they may, the possibility of a mixture of Greek 

 and Latin forms of the letters being current is much enhanced by the result 

 of an analysis of the Bunic alphabet. The letters of this alphabet are a 

 valuable testimony, first, to the forms of writing which served as a model for 

 the northern nations, and, secondly, to the nature of their writing materials. 

 Most of the Eunic letters are evidently Boman, modified by the simple 

 process of eliminating all horizontal strokes. Thus the first letter, F, has its 

 horizontal strokes made obi que, pointing upward. The reason is obvious. 

 The Biinie alphabet was primarily meant for cutting on wood, and it was 

 necessary to avoid lines that would lie in the line of the grain of tbe wood. 



