Stone with ancient writing system unearthed in garden
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c14kywyk0vro
Automated Summary
A small stone with an early form of Celtic script, known as Ogham, has been discovered in a garden in Coventry. The stone, dating back possibly to the 4th Century, has lines inscribed on three of its sides. It is an unusual find for the Midlands and thought to be carved between the 4th and 6th Century AD. The stone was partially translated revealing a name: Mael Dumcail. Its origin and purpose are still unclear, theories suggest it could have been a keepsake or used by Irish tradesmen. The stone is due to go on display at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry. The discovery provides an insight into the Irish language before the use of the Latin insular script.
One of my favourite Time Team episodes ever was when they found an Ogham carving on a stone when digging up a golf course on the Isle of Man.
The whole episode is a corker!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW3UQEDQ0zQ
If you watch this episode, bear in mind that Ogham was badly mistranslated. (And even when they're giving the mistranslation, they point at the wrong words.)
A followup can be read here:
https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2008/05/throng-of-fifty-wa...
Thanks very much for this recommendation!
Related, there’s a Unicode block for Ogham.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block)
> Ogham was highly unusual among world writing systems, consisting solely of parallel lines in groups of one to five.
I guess that makes it easier to carve into stone (or wood, for less durable writing).
Tom Scott has a nice video on Ogham: https://youtu.be/2yWWFLI5kFU?si=EQccsJo6zHcyB1RB
This is a great find- Ogham’s been in the news a bit this week, mostly thanks to Eurovision (!)
It surprisingly similar to Morse code.
How so?
(Genuinely curious)
In Morse more frequent characters are represented by shorter codes. You can also see here that A is only one dash.
.-. - ..-. --
Tldr; it is probably a grave marker for someone named Mael Dumcail written in Ogham
Not a bad guess, but I didn't spot that in the article.
The name was mentioned in an image description. Most of these are grave markers, the small size is strange but probably superfluous.
[dead]
It's binary.
It's joke, lay off the downvotes. Yeesh
I wonder how many "ancient" stones are the result of bored kids, 20 years before someone else digs up the stone.
My uninformed suspicion is that this is not a language or a script but a timekeeping or calendar system of some kind.
You are correct, in that your suspicion is uninformed.
Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language, and later the Old Irish language.
I don't know why you would feel the need to publicly cast aspersions on actual experts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham
"I don't know why you would feel the need to publicly cast aspersions on actual experts"
You new here? /s
But but you're doing the fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam! /s
The article says it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham
>The vast majority of the inscriptions consist of personal names.