Ogham: The Mystery of Ireland’s Oldest Writing
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What is Ogham and how does its unique line‑based script work?
Centuries before early Irish monasteries were producing manuscripts like the Book of Kells, people in Ireland had developed their own form of writing, Ome. Now at first glance, Ome scarcely looks like writing at all. There are no flowing letters, no familiar alphabet, no words that leap out to catch the modern eye. Instead it takes the form of short strokes often read from the bottom upwards, and yet these marks are among the earliest surviving traces of the Irish language. They preserve names, ancestors, claims to land. Fragments of a world that existed over fifteen hundred years ago. But while Ohm is Ireland's first known writing system, its history is much more than that. It provides a glimpse into what Irish society was like before the earliest histories were written down, and archaeologists and historians have been able to tell so much from analysing what often might be dismissed as strokes on stones.
This podcast explores what Ome is and what it tells us about Ireland in the distant past.
Hello and welcome to the Irish History Podcast. My name is Findwar. Now, my guest on today's show to explore the history of Ohm is Dr. Nora White. Nora is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Airly Irish at Minut University. She previously worked on the Ohm in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and then subsequently on the joint Minuth University and University of Glasgow Ohm Project. That has produced some incredible discoveries which we're going to talk about today. It also produced the website ohm.kelt.dias.ie where you can see the ohmstones we're talking about and where other ohmstones are located across Ireland and Britain. Now that URL is a bit of a mouthful, but I do have it linked in the show notes below.
Just before we begin, I do have a little bit of housekeeping, so I'm working on a pretty complicated episode at the moment and it needs a little bit more time, so there's going to be no show out. Next week, while I complete that episode, it will require a few trips to archives in Dublin, which is a bit time consuming. But I think it is worth taking the time to get it right. It's a great story about the German bombing of a small Irish village in the Second World War and why that happened. Now, in the meantime, if you're looking for extra content, I have a video out this week that explores the story behind the theft of the Irish Crown's. Jewels in 1907. That's a phenomenal part for history. That's a pretty strange story to say the least.
If you're looking for that, it's available ad-free on patreon.com forward slash Irish Podcast for show supporters, and it will be released on YouTube later in the week. Sound on the episode is by Kate Dunley. If we can start then, Nora, with just a description of Om for listeners who might be unfamiliar, they might have heard of the word, but not know much about it. So could you I suppose start by explaining what exactly is Om?
Well, Ohm is a writing system or a script and it's a very unusual looking script. So if we're used to the Latin alphabet and we have these different shaped letters, with Ohm they're all very similarly shaped in that they're all just straight lines or strokes and the they're distinguished by the number of strokes and the orientation of the strokes. So Ohm as a a script looks very like kind of a barcode or something like that. So it's it it looks very unusual, but it's actually an alphabet, like the Latin alphabet.
Then just maybe to kind of give people a better understanding, some of our kind of instincts about how you might read something, you know, like a a page of text on a book, we move from left to right and down the page, but ohm actually can work quite different to that or against what our instinct might be.
Yeah, Ohm is very fluid with regard to direction and it depends very much on the object. And most of our Ohm inscriptions are on stone pillars from the early period and The direction of writing in that case was almost always upwards. So upwards on the left angle usually.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Ogham and how does its unique line‑based script work?
0:07–5:32
2
Who likely created Ogham and what influences did the Latin alphabet have on it?
5:32–9:57
3
When and where do the earliest Ogham stone inscriptions appear in Ireland?
9:57–14:43
4
What kinds of information do Ogham stones record – names, kin groups, or land claims?
14:43–20:13
5
Why are many Ogham stones found on stone edges rather than faces, and were they originally carved on wood?
20:13–24:58
6
How was Ogham used in Britain and what does it reveal about Irish migration there?
24:58–29:07
7
What led to the decline of Ogham and its replacement by the Latin alphabet in the 7th‑8th centuries?
29:07–34:11
8
How is Ogham being revived today in tattoos, jewellery and modern scholarship?
34:11–36:21