Yesterday the story about the Grave Creek Tablet challenged established views of European presence in the Western Hemisphere, but was a hard-to-buy piece of isolated data, despite the concrete facts of the case. Today isn't about Moundsville or even the Adena culture [necessarily] but it is about another data point which makes for me the possibility of erratic visits by long-distance passers-by more believable. Today is about old Irish writing inscribed on a cave wall in central West Virginia.
One nice thing about being in a small and simple state like West Virginia is that you can "comprehend" the extent of the strange claims which have been made there and even locate them if you wanted to make a little tour there. The map puts Mothman, the Flatwoods Monster, the Wyoming County "Irish" Ogham, and even my own UFO sighting "in their places". You can see from the map that the old cave writing is quite far from the Grave Creek Mound, which is off the top of the map. If the Ogham writing is real, it is also quite distant in time, being likely more of the 600AD era than 100BC. The "scratches" on the cave wall in Wyoming County were known to the state's amateur archaeological society at least as early as the 1940s but didn't receive any serious attention until about 40 years later. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The reason for the slowness of attention was probably that A). the state had no formally empowered archaeologist [despite Delf Norona of the Grave Creek Museum and others in the amateur archaeological society crying out for one] and B). the crude-looking ogham writing wasn't at all well understood, and, frankly looked like someone was just scratching their knife blades on rocks. Once Irish and Celtic language scholars began to figure out this weird form of writing, people began looking for it, and of all places they found some in the West Virginia hills. The key figures in this exposition were an energetic amateur, Ida Gallagher, and one of the first official state archaeologists, Robert Pyle. [Pyle is in the center photo on the right, standing with a colleague as they chalked the ogham markings at the rockface.] Of course no one wanted to believe that anyone could find a Dark Ages European language of any sort in West Virginia, let alone one as controversial and "ill-formed" as ogham.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, is ogham a language at all? And what the heck is it anyway? When I was in Ireland I saw several Oghamstones and my pictures of them are on the right. Ogham could be termed a minimalist form of writing geared to be incised on very hard surfaces such as stone. For that reason it has no curves. Letters are composed of series of straight cuts. Some forms of ogham used long and short cuts, some use straight or slanted cuts, some use cuts above or below a horizontal line. The technique is awkward and very rarely used for any message that would be long. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Pyle turned out to be a good man for the moment. When I met him, he proved to be an "empirical" sort of guy, in no awe or restriction by the archaeological establishment at all. What he wanted to do was get out in the field and discover things. Walking the woods with Robert Pyle is a real trip. Every ten feet he's bending over to pick up a fossil or an arrowhead or, once, a piece of very old Native American copper. In a way, the man's a discovery a minute. Probably the biggest thing he'll ever be involved with is the finding of an ancient Irish language on a cave wall.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[The picture associated with this part of the text has lost its ability to be clicked upon so I'll just say that the person in the upper left is Glyn Daniel and the person on the right is Robert Meyer. The relevant text of Meyer's letter is quoted at the bottom of the following paragraph.]------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------But who says he did? Glyn Daniel is the editor of the hoary journal Antiquity, and thereby the holder of the keys to the kingdom of acknowledged truth. He has not only denied all such matters as Grave Creek Tablets and Wyoming County Ogham but does so in the most uncivilized and mockery-laden ways. His "arguments" almost never consist of facts and usually feature the apparent impossibility of such nonsense and the fact that such discoveries don't fit with the current theories [as if that should be taken as a definitive prohibition]. But Daniel didn't count on a prominent establishment expert abandoning the Ship-of-Dogma and going rogue. This expert was about as expert as you can get, in fact, being one of the world's best at Celtic language forms. Catholic University's Robert Meyer looked at the information sent to him and instead of laughing, went himself to visit the cave. Upon studying the markings in situ, Meyer pronounced them not only genuine ogham of a type used around 500-600AD but a real treasure of language in their own right, being one of the longer passages of the language available to scholars. One suspects that Daniel nearly chewed glass when he heard that. Well OK, says I, I'm up for old Irish in West Virginia as much as anyone, but it would be a lot more convincing if someone would translate this thing and the translation make sense. To try to bring the story all the way home, the extremely controversial former Harvard professor andlover of all things archaeologically out-of-place, Barry Fell, came out with this interpretation: "At the time of sunrise, a ray grazes the notch on the left side [think Indiana Jones or Archaeoastronomy, folks] on Christmas Day, a feastday of the Church, the first seven of the year, the season of the blessed advent of the Savior, Lord Christ. Behold, He is born of Mary, a woman". Hmmm...I guess that I could imagine a group of Brendanesque monks "celebrating" Christmas wherever they were, and making an ogham memorial of it. But this seems to claim something more--a promise of a light signal of some kind. On December 22, 1982 four people who had been involved with the research [led by Ida Gallagher, but unfortunately for me, not including Robert Pyle] went to the cave to record the sun effect at sunrise. The Sun broke above the nearby hill at about 9AM and its rays hit the writing on the panel. It funneled through a three-sided notch and moved across the writing finally falling on the Sunburst symbol at the end of the line. Since no one had suspected this before Fell's interpretation, and since no one had noticed that three separate rock extensions formed a "notch" for the light until then, the group was understandably stunned. Ida Gallagher said that "light had just fallen on West Virginia prehistory". Nicely said, and, yes, full of wonder. But we shouldn't make this mean more than it is. It is, apparently, evidence that people from practically anywhere can make long voyages of adventure, faith, and discovery, and not take any glory away from the people they meet.{dear folks, due to an error in identification of a picture I had to re-do the illustration. This led to a bit of a nightmare, resulting ultimately in the loss of being able to click on the picture of Robert Meyer and read his letter. So, instead of re-doing the entire post, I'll just quote the letter now: "Dear Sir, I am the professor of Celtic here ever since 1953. I was privileged to visit at the site of the newly deciphered Ogham inscriptions in the rock cave in Wyoming County, West Virginia on Friday April 8, 1983. There I met Mr. Pyle and Mrs. Gallagher, also the owner of the farm where one of the inscriptions is located. I should judge the language to be that of the 6th to the 8th century of our era. It is very archaic, and what is most important it gives us longer texts than we have had at our disposal....Sincerely yours, Robert T. Meyer".} -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, as Butch Cassidy and Sundance said: who ARE these guys? We have, completely amazingly to me, some outstanding candidates. The old folklore of the Church in Ireland had the popular legend of St Brendan's voyage to the west for centuries. As time has gone on, we have a hard time believing that Brendan said Mass on the back of Jaconis The Friendly Whale [a moment of vast cryptozoological importance] but the remainder of Brendan' voyages has a lot of detail which makes sense. The places as describe in the Brendan saga sound suspiciously like places such as Streymoy and Mykines in the Faeroes Islands as well as Iceland. A prominent great floating "crystal column" could well be an Arctic iceberg. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the 1970s some intrepid modern Brendans decided to construct a smallish but sturdy boat of the era, named a "curragh", made of wooden planks covered with leather [they used tarred canvas instead of leather] to try the trip to America across the northern seas in imitation of Brendan and his intrepid monks. The maps at left show their modern voyage and the fact that they made it to the American continent. Well, maybe so did Brendan, or any of the endless number of courageous and "insanely curious" men, who just have to see what's on the other side of the hill. I've known several such people in my life, probably you do too. Those guys who went to the Moon were surely fools if they were looking for a safely-led long life. I hope that establishment archaeology cracks its wall of forbidden ideas and impossibilities, because there seem to be many insights out there waiting for an open mind.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...and an occasional itinerant Irishman is hardly going to demean the accomplishments of Native American cultures.
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