Ogham in the context of "Gaelic Ireland"

The Irish (Irish: Na Gaeil or Na hÉireannaigh) are an ethnic group and nation native to the island of Ireland, who share a common ancestry, history and culture. There have been humans in Ireland for about 33,000 years, and it has been continually inhabited for more than 10,000 years (see Prehistoric Ireland). For most of Ireland's recorded history, the Irish have been primarily a Gaelic people (see Gaelic Ireland). From the 9th century, small numbers of Vikings settled in Ireland, becoming the Norse-Gaels. Anglo-Normans also conquered parts of Ireland in the 12th century, while England's 16th/17th century conquest and colonisation of Ireland brought many English and Lowland Scots to parts of the island, especially the north. Today, Ireland is made up of the Republic of Ireland (officially called Ireland) and Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom). The people of Northern Ireland hold various national identities including Irish, British or some combination thereof.

The Irish have their own unique customs, language, music, dance, sports, cuisine and mythology. Although Irish (Gaeilge) was their main language in the past, today most Irish people speak English as their first language. Historically, the Irish nation was made up of kin groups or clans, and the Irish also had their own religion, law code, alphabet and style of dress.

The history of the Irish language begins with the period from the arrival of speakers of Celtic languages in Ireland to Ireland's earliest known form of Irish, Primitive Irish, which is found in Ogham inscriptions dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD. After the conversion to Christianity in the 5th century, Old Irish begins to appear as glosses and other marginalia in manuscripts written in Latin, beginning in the 6th century. It evolved in the 10th century to Middle Irish. Early Modern Irish represented a transition between Middle and Modern Irish. Its literary form, Classical Gaelic, was used by writers in both Ireland and Scotland until the 18th century, in the course of which slowly but surely writers began writing in the vernacular dialects, Ulster Irish, Connacht Irish, Munster Irish and Scottish Gaelic. As the number of hereditary poets and scribes dwindled under British rule in the early 19th century, Irish became a mostly spoken tongue with little written literature appearing in the language until the Gaelic Revival of the late 19th century. The number of speakers was also declining in this period with monoglot and bilingual speakers of Irish increasingly adopting only English: while Irish never died out, by the time of the Revival it was largely confined to the less Anglicised regions of the island, which were often also the more rural and remote areas. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Irish has continued to survive in Gaeltacht regions and among a minority in other regions. It has once again come to be considered an important part of the island's culture and heritage, with efforts being made to preserve and promote it.

Birch bark manuscripts are documents written on pieces of the outer layer of birch bark, which was commonly used for writing before the mass production of paper. Evidence of birch bark for writing goes back many centuries and appears in various cultures. The oldest such manuscripts are the numerous Gandhāran Buddhist texts from approximately the 1st century CE, from what is now Afghanistan. They contain among the earliest known versions of significant Buddhist scriptures, including a Dhammapada, discourses of Buddha that include the Rhinoceros Sutra, Avadanas and Abhidharma texts.

Sanskrit birch bark manuscripts written with Brahmi script have been dated to the first few centuries CE. Several early Sanskrit writers, such as Kālidāsa (c. 4th century CE), Sushruta (c. 3rd century CE), and Varāhamihira (6th century CE) mention its use for manuscripts. The bark of Betula utilis (Himalayan Birch) is still used today in India and Nepal for writing sacred mantras. Russian texts discovered in Veliky Novgorod have been dated to approximately the 11th to 15th centuries CE. Most of those documents are letters written by various people in a local dialect, Old Novgorodian. The Irish language's native writing system Ogham, sometimes called the "tree alphabet", was traditionally attributed to the god Ogma who wrote a proscription on birch to Lugh, warning him; the text of this proscription can be found in the Book of Ballymote. The first letter of Ogham is beith; beithe means "birch".

Roughly 400 inscriptions in the ogham alphabet are known from stone monuments scattered around the Irish Sea, the bulk of them dating to the fifth and sixth centuries. The language of these inscriptions is predominantly Primitive Irish, but a few examples are fragments of the Pictish language. Ogham itself is an Early Medieval form of alphabet or cipher, sometimes also known as the "Celtic Tree Alphabet".

A number of different numbering schemes are used. The most common is after R. A. S. Macalister's Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum (CIIC). This covers the inscriptions which were known by the 1940s. Another numbering scheme is given by the Celtic Inscribed Stones Project (CISP) and is based on the location of the stones; for example CIIC 1 = CISP INCHA/1. Macalister's (1945) numbers run from 1 to 507, including also Latin and Runic inscriptions, with three additional added in 1949. Sabine Ziegler (1994) lists 344 Gaelic ogham inscriptions known to Macalister (Ireland and Isle of Man), and seven additional inscriptions discovered later.

The prehistory of Ireland included a protohistorical period, when the literate cultures of Greece and Rome began to take notice of it, and a further proto-literate period of ogham epigraphy, before the early historical period began in the 5th century. Attempts have been made to reconstruct the political developments of this period by reference to early medieval Irish genealogical texts.

Early Irish literature, is commonly dated from the 4th or 6th to the 15th century, a period during which modern literature in Irish began to emerge. It stands as one of the oldest vernacular literature in Western Europe, with its roots extending back to late antiquity, as evident from inscriptions utilizing both Irish and Latin found on Ogham stones dating as early as the 4th century. The early Irish literary tradition flourished through the Medieval Irish period, and its literary output showcases a blend of indigenous storytelling, myth, and historical narratives. Notably, this period saw the development of a full-scale vernacular written literature expressed in a diverse range of literary genres.

According to Professor Elva Johnston, "the Irish were apparently the first western European people to develop a full-scale vernacular written literature expressed in a range of literary genres." A significant aspect of early Irish literature is the influence of loan words from other Indo-European languages, including but not limited to Latin and Greek. This linguistic exchange is evidenced in texts like Sanas Cormaic, a glossary dating from the 9th century that illustrates the assimilation of foreign words into the Irish language. Two of the earliest examples of literature from an Irish perspective are Saint Patrick's Confessio and Letter to Coroticus, written in Latin some time in the 5th century, and preserved in the Book of Armagh.