Oghamstone from Silchester

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Drawing of the Silchester stone

The Silchester Ogham Stone was found in 1893 during the excavation of the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum in Silchester in Hampshire , England , over 100 km from the nearest Ogham Stones (in Cornwall , Devon and Wales ). The Oghamin script is on a 60 cm high sandstone that was found at the bottom of a well. Investigations of the well showed that it was abandoned at the latest in AD 425. The inscription is typical of Irish Oghamin scripts and reads after John Rhys (1840–1915): TEBICATOS Maqi MUCOI [...]. Translated: "From Tebicatos, son of the tribe ...". Or: "From Tebicatos, son of the descendant of ...". The ancestor's name has been lost.

The majority of Irish Ogham scripts are carved along the vertical edges of angular stones. In the case of the Silchesterstein, the inscription was written along two vertical auxiliary lines in the middle of the stone. Since the ogham stone was found far away from other ogham stones and has this curious text application, doubts have arisen as to its authenticity. However, the recent excavations seem to confirm this. Ogham stones are almost exclusively memorial stones and so the Silchest stone should also have been carved in memory of Tebicatos. The stone is in the Reading Museum in Reading, Berkshire .

The Uttoxeter Oghamstein

The Uttoxeter Oghamstone is another supposedly English Oghamstone discovered by the Victorian antiquarian and amateur archaeologist Francis Redfern in 1870 in Uttoxeter in Staffordshire , about 65 miles from the nearest Welsh Oghamstone. The Oghamin script is said to have been carved into a piece of a Roman millstone made of volcanic Eifel rock. The stone has been lost and since F. Redfern did not publish a drawing of the stone or the inscription, it is difficult to assess the authenticity of the inscription. However, it has interesting parallels with the Silchesterstein - both inscriptions were on stone objects that are remnants of Roman use, instead of being carved into natural stones, and both stones were found in wells of Roman settlements.

literature

  • McManus, Damian .: A guide to Ogham . (Maynooth Monograph; 4) Maynooth: To Sagart. 1991, ISBN 1-870684-17-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ M. Fulford, M. Handley, A. Clarke: An early date for Ogham: the Silchester Ogham Stone rehabilitated. In: Medieval Archeology 44; 2000, pp. 1-23.

Web links

Coordinates: 51 ° 22 ′  N , 1 ° 5 ′  W