How Ancient Celts Wrote
We call the ancient, pre-civilized People cave men. Some did
live in caves, but most did not. They lived in simple, easy to make
houses that were constructed from locally available materials, sometimes
stone, usually wood. History rarely admits that any of these People
could read or write, but they could. Nearly every village or community
had a leader who was schooled in at least one writing system. For People
we call Celts, this writing system is called Ogam.
The Celts did not call themselves Celts. This name comes from the Greek
and Roman governments that exploited the ancient European societies.
Who we call Celts called themselves The People.
As with most ancient writings, early ogam was written without vowels.
THS SNTNC MKS N SNC T S
To us, the last sentence is gibberish, but when vowels are added it makes perfect sense and reads:
This sentense makes no sense to us.
The ancient readers would automaticly add the necessary vowels to make the sentence readable and understandable. There were fewer words in the vocabulary of the ancient People so there was less problem than you might think when it came to deciphering a message. The concept of the message was usually understood even if some words ended up being misspelled. The dictionary was not invented until much later.
About twenty five hundred years ago, writing began to change. With the increase of technology and complexity of society, the problems with potential errors in translation became critical. Vowels and dipthongs (combinations of vowels) were added to the script. In some cases, they simply added little marks on the letter to tell the reader to put a vowel before or after the marked letter. To add to the complexity of writing, special characters and abbreviations were often employed. Because so few examples exist, the scientists (called epigraphers) often have a difficult time understanding ancient messages.
Most messages found are very short and are found on grave markers. Because the subject is obvious, these have become relatively easy to translate. The longer inscriptions are found in caves and are far more complex.
It has been recently discovered that some Celtic inscriptions exist in the United States. History will have to be rewritten to include the fact that Celtic seafarers crossed the Atlantic many years before the Vikings and Columbus. The home of the ancient animation has at least one translatable inscription in Celtic ogam. There may be more.
