Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
cient Druid liturgy. (The Topic of Ballymote, a collection of Irish sagas, legal
texts, and genealogies, along with a guide to the Ogham alphabet — from which
much of our present knowledge of Ogham derives — currently sits in the Irish
Academy in Dublin.) The main twenty letters of the Ogham alphabet represent
the names of twenty trees sacred to the Druids (for instance,
A-Ailim
for
Elm
and
B-Bithe
for
Birch
). The Ogham alphabet was invented, according to the
Book of Ballymote, by
Ogma
, the Celtic god of literature and eloquence. In
Gaul, he was known as
Ogmios
, ostensibly identified with the Roman hero/god
Hercules
.
In its most rudimentary form, Ogham con-
sists of four sets of strokes, which appear like
notches in the rock inscriptions, each set con-
taining five letters comprised of between one
and five strokes, yielding a total of twenty let-
ters, mentioned above. These can be seen to be
carved into the stone from right to left, or on
the edge, in Figure 1.7. In a later development
of the language, a fifth set of five symbols were
added, called
forfeda
, an Irish term for
extra let-
ters
. Ogham is read from top to bottom, left to
right.
Ogham markings on standing stones (or
gallan
) have been found as far as Spain and
Portugal, in an area once known as Celtiberia,
an area of north-central Spain occupied in the
third century BC by tribes of Celtic and Iberian
peoples. However, some of the inscriptions in
Spain date to 800 BC, quite a bit older than
the ones in Ireland. The Iberian Peninsula (oc-
cupied by Spain and Portugal in southwestern
Europe) was colonized by the Celts in 1000 BC.
It is part of conjecture that the Celts may have
found their way from Celtiberia across the Atlantic to the New World as early
as the first century BC. Evidence of this is the discovery of ogham-like carvings
in West Virginia in the United States. Readers interested in more detail on
Ogham can refer to the relatively recent, easy-to-read, and quite informative
book by Robert Graves [115], first published in 1948.
Perhaps one final comment on Druids is in order before we move on. The
archeological site in southern England, known as
Stonehenge
, could not have
been, as is often claimed, built as a temple for the Druids or Romans since
neither was in this location until long after the last stages of Stonehenge were
built. The initial stages date back to 3100 BC and were used by Neolithic man
who carved the stones with deer antlers, which ostensibly helped to (carbon-14)
date them. The final stages of Stonehenge were completed in about 1550BC.
However, there is no cryptography there to interest us.
Figure 1.7: An Ogham stone.
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