Dr Katherine Forsyth - Literacy beyond the Limes: Ogham and Pictish symbol writing

Celtic-speaking peoples of Ireland and Scotland first encountered the technology of writing through contact with the Roman world. A similar stimulus in the Germanic North led to the invention of the runic alphabet, but the result in the Celtic ‘Far West’ was two writing systems which reflect remarkable independence from their Mediterranean models. The ogham alphabet exhibits a number of distinctive characteristics: in its earliest forms it is a 3-D script, typically written across adjacent angled faces of an object. Traditionally, it is written vertically not horizontally with letters represented by bundles of identical parallel strokes, differing only in number (1-5) and relative position. The visual appearance of the graphemes reflects their sound value, with vowels in their own separate category. The perceived usefulness of the ogham script is reflected in the variety of media on which it is found (predominantly epigraphic but also to a limited extent, in manuscripts) and the wide extent of its attestations: it was in active use for over 500 years throughout Ireland and Scotland and in areas of Irish settlement and influence in western Britain. In addition to the roman and ogham alphabets, the inhabitants of early medieval Scotland used a unique pictographic writing system (‘Pictish symbols’) which has defied full understanding (Forsyth 1995). It occurs in a range of archaeological contexts which to a large extent mirror those of ogham in Ireland. The two are usefully studied alongside one another. Interdisciplinary examination of the physical and social context in which ogham and Pictish symbol inscriptions are found throws new light on the nature of literacy in the non-urbanized Celtic-speaking societies of the first millennium AD, and on the intellectual and cultural context of the invention of these unique writing systems, providing insight into their unusual form.

This talk was part of the CREWS Project conference 'Exploring the Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Systems', held in Cambridge in March 2019. For more information, visit https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/so....

The CREWS Project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758).

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