58 



Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



exceptional by some peculiarity of indication. K"ow the iphin is ex- 

 ceptionally only the equivalent of p, and if it be here taken as the 

 turning point, and if the reading, resiling from that point, be con- 

 ducted back again from the other end, we arrive at the expression of 



In the upper figure we discern a vertical stem-line, associated with certain 



horizontal digits, three of which are carried continuously across it, and two of which 



are, at the point of crossing, discontinuous. Five 



digits crossing a stem-line contain, in Ogham, 



the five vowels and five stem-crossing conso- 

 nants, and include all the elements of the name 



Maria; but, without some indication of the point 



at which the commencement of each letter is 



to he sought, there would be nothing to limit 



the sequence of combinations, or to prevent any 



reading being extracted, which could be made 



up of all these ten phonetic elements— obviously 



a range of selection too wide for any certain sig- 

 nificance. In extracting the word Maria from 



the Romanesque group, we have to recur again 



and again — as is constantly the case in treating 



sigla — to one limb of a particular letter, as an 



element in the composition of the others. In 



this case it is the M which serves to complete 



the other elements of the R and A. Assuming 



the Ogham group to be a reflection of the mo- 

 nogram, we are led to adopt the first digit, as 



corresponding to M. The second will stand for 



A; but the remainder will be insufficient to 



make up R. What, then, is to be done ? Let 

 us act on the hint given by the monogram — 

 return from the discontinuous digit, and com- 

 mence anew from the left. Here spelling for- 

 ward, the R will exhaust the group ; the return 

 back, giving I, will exhaust it a second time ; 

 and reading forward once more, the first discon- 

 tinuous digit will complete the legend in A. 

 But here are two discontinuous digits. The 

 obvious suggestion to account for that arrange- 

 ment is, that the monogram is meant to read 

 from either end. Examples are not wanting of 

 disguised Ogham names reading outward to- 

 wards either end from the centre ; and this 

 would seem but a variety of the same trick of construction. 



• iif^---.,,!'!! 



The group commencing 

 the Romanesque epigraph on the Newton stone appears to be an analogous example. 

 But, it may be said, these are very large results to infer from what looks like a 

 mere piece of square pattern-work, because it is found associated with a Roman- 

 esque monogram, in which the letters M, A, and R are grotesquely indicated. If 

 something analogous to the digit-figure were not found associated with other forms of 

 the Marian monogram, this would be so ; and no more could be claimed for the read- 

 ing above suggested, than such credit or discredit as might properly attach to 

 a problematical conjecture. But the carving of Tyvoria is, in all its main character- 

 istics, found again associated with a form of the name Maria, at Kinard East, in 

 the same neighbourhood. The associated name is, in this latter instance, written 

 Marianus. It is one of the few Ogham texts which its paper-cast (No. xxv.) docs 

 not invalidate. An accurate woodcut of the inscription has been published by Bishop 



