Provenance
Discovery: Found on the beach below the eroding Norse buildings during the 1934+ excavations.
Findspot: Birsay and Harray, Orkney, Scotland (National Grid Reference: HY 2398 2850)
Current repository: Scotland National Museums of Scotland (inv. no. X.2015.23)
Last recorded location(s): Now in the National Museums of Scotland (X.2015.23).
Support
Trove: 1797
Object type: Slab
Material: Sandstone
Dimensions: H 0.37 × W 0.24 × D 0.05 m
Condition: The ogham text is badly weathered and fragmentary.
Inscription
Text field: The ogham inscription is along the flat edge of the very irregularly shaped slab. The stem is visible for approximately 80mm and wavers, but the stone is too badly weathered to indicate how much has been lost (Forsyth 1996, 82).
Letters: The execution technique remains unknown, but the stem appears to be more finely incised than the letter strokes. The extant text may preserve evidence of an angled vowel.
Date: Sixth to twelfth century
Edition
Transcription: [---]ḄQI᛬ AḄ[---]
Critical apparatus:
- The direction of the reading is determined by the forward slope of the second letter in the extant text. 2. The inscription may preserve evidence of the double dot which marks word division and aids the segmentation of the text.
Translation
The text is incomplete and it is not possible to determine its meaning.
Commentary
The scale of the letters and the extant reading imply that this is only a short section of a larger text. However, there is no clue to determine where in the sequence this portion occurred (Forsyth 1996, 82).
It is possible that the letters AQI could be Old Irish MAQI. If so, this would be the only Scottish example of the word spelled with a single Q (Forsyth 1996, 85).
References
- Forsyth 1996, 81-85
- Padel 1972, 58-61