298 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



XLVII. — On Irish Ogam Inscriptions. A Letter addressed by 

 John Rhys, M. A., late Fellow of Merton College, Oxford., to 

 "William Stokes, M.D., F.R.S., &c, President of the Academy, 

 dated "Rhyl, Oct. 28, 1874." 



[Read January 11, 1875.] 



As to the "best means of furthering the study of Irish epigraphy, I 

 fancy that the Academy cannot do better than encourage Dr. S. 

 Ferguson to take casts of all known Ogmic inscriptions in the country, 

 and assist him to reproduce them by means of photography or other- 

 wise, in such a way as to make them easily accessible to philologists. 

 I have already seen a few specimens of Dr. Ferguson's work, and they 

 seem to be most satisfactory. 



As matters now stand, an outsider can hardly venture to give an 

 opinion on Irish Ogams collectively. Although I copied, last winter, 

 when spending a few days in Cambridge, all the inscriptions of that 

 kind which I could find mentioned in the Academy's Proceedings, my 

 knowlege of them is still exceedingly incomplete and fragmentary ; 

 and it is with great diffidence I offer the following conjectures, hoping 

 that they may lead Irish scholars to the discovery of some canons of 

 criticism which may enable one to classify your Ogams chronologically. 

 Until that is done, their philological value must remain much less than 

 it should be : — 



I. Some, perhaps most, of our British Ogams are of the fifth and 

 sixth century ; and if Dr. Ferguson's recent examination of the 

 Loughor altar should prove confirmatory of my guessings of the 

 inscription on it, we might say that we have at least one instance 

 dating before the departure of the Romans from Britain. One or two 

 of our Ogams may possibly have been cut in the eighth or ninth cen- 

 tury, but I cannot speak with anything like confidence of them. They 

 are on the Llanarth and Caldy Island stones. 



II. As to your Ogams, I would regard those written like ours as 

 older than those which are to be read inversely, or contain abbrevia- 

 tions and intentional puzzles. 



III. Now the proximate date of some of these inverted Ogams 

 may be ascertained. Take, for instance, that which has been read 

 Cominett moqi Conuri : it is accompanied by a Latin inscription in 

 characters which may be reasonably assigned to the eighth or ninth 

 century ; or that of Colman Bocht with Bocht in Ogam, and Colman 

 in Hiberno-Saxon characters of apparently a somewhat later date than 

 the Camp stone bilingual. Another inverted Ogam, described by Dr. 

 Ferguson, reads, according to him, Feqreq moqoi Glunleggeit ; if indeed, 

 Fechrech mocJioi Glunleggett is not a preferable reading. The Colman 

 Bocht Ogam claims kinship with the eight manuscript Ogams in the 

 Priscian Codex at St. Gall, of the ninth century, in its long lines 



