The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps

22 PHCENICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS

attracted modern notice,‘ innumerable attempts were made to decipher and translate them, with the most conflicting and fantastically varied results.

As the traditional key to the Ogam script has been preserved in the Book of Ballymote and in several bi-lingual OgamRoman inscriptions, and as it was surmised that the Ogam was presumably contemporary with and was a bi-lingual version of the “unknown” script, it was hoped that the Ogam version might afford a clue to the reading of that main script. But this expectation was admittedly not realized by the more authoritative experts.

Even respecting the Ogam inscription no two of the essaying translators were agreed in their readings. The disagreement between the various attempted interpretations of the Ogam version was owing to the unusual absence of divisions or spaces between most of its series of strokes, owing to their overcrowding through want of space; for different numerical groupings of these Ogam letter-strokes yield totally different letters. Indeed the prime authority on Ogam script, Mr. Brash, in publishing his final careful study of that version,* deliberately refrains from giving any translation of it, saying ‘“‘ I have no translation to give of it ’*; because the letters, as tentatively read by him without any clues to the names therein, made up no words or sentences which seemed to him intelligible or to yield any sense.

The attempts at deciphering and translating the main or central inscription in the unknown script were even much more widely diverse. Some writers surmised that this unknown script was Celtic and the language Gaelic or Pictish, or Erse or Irish; others thought it was Hebrew or Greek or Latin, others Anglo-Saxon or Coptic or Palmyrene, and one suggested that it was “‘ possibly Phoenician,’ that is the Semitic Phcenician, and attempted to read it back-

1An early engraving of the Stone and its inscriptions appeared in Pinkerton’s Inguiry inio the History of Scotland, 1814; and another by Prof. Stuart in 1821 in Archaeologia Scotica (ii, 134) ; and a more careful

lithographic copy in Plate I of SSS. above cited. 2 B.O.1., 359-362. 3 Ibid. 362.