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Early fact and fantasy 21
the fact that the oldest Greek name for Ireland, Iernē , is similar to the phrase hiera nesos meaning ‘holy island’. A Greek sailor may well have confused the two. Several centuries later another Greek voyager is known to have ventured into Atlantic waters. About 325 BC , Pytheas of Massalia, whose account is also known only at second hand in later works, travelled extensively around the coast of Britain and may have circumnavigated that island. He was certainly aware of Ireland but has nothing to say about it. Importantly he does refer to both islands as the Brettanic Islands , a Celtic name and the earliest usage of the term ‘the British Isles’ that presumably includes Ireland. 5 The name Iernē is a Greek rendering of the Celtic *Iweriu, translated as ‘the fertile land’, becoming Ériu in Old Irish. Following the Massaliote Periplus it seems the island, inhabited by the Iverni , ‘the people of the fertile earth’, may have been Celtic-speaking by the sixth century BC . The ‘British Isles’ is a term also used somewhat later, in the second century BC , by the Greek historian Polybius. Later writers too refer to the inhabitants of Britain as Brettanoi or Prettanoi but call the Irish Hiberni or Scotti, or by some tribal name. Early in the first century AD , the little-known merchant and geographer Philemon was told by traders who had travelled to Ireland that the length of the island was a twenty-day journey, a reasonably accurate estimation if an average daily trek of 21 miles (33km) is accepted. Philemon was probably one of the sources for Ptolemy’s Geography compiled in Alexandria in the second century AD . This famous work is a list of some 8,000 places in the known world including Europe given with their longitude and latitude. Using these coordinates, a number of early maps were produced in medieval and later times (fig. 1.2). It is the first written source to include Ireland and thus has a particular importance. Place-names, including settlement, headland, island and river names, and tribal names are given with their longitude and latitude. From this information it is possible to reconstruct a map which is the oldest documentary account of this island. While Ptolemy records many Celtic place-names and tribal names in Britain, many more are recorded there in numerous Roman sources. It is in these writings that many well-known Celtic tribes first enter the historical record and, combining history and the evidence of coinage in 1882, John Rhŷs, the first Professor of Celtic in Oxford, was able to map the relative locations of some of these ancient British peoples in Roman times (fig. 1.3). 6 * * * In Britain as elsewhere a Celt was a person who spoke a Celtic tongue, so it is necessary to very briefly summarize the earliest linguistic evidence. Names of places and people are, of course, interesting as indicators of the presence of Celtic-speaking peoples but any more detailed knowledge of their language must obviously rest on a
1.3 (across) The Celtic tribes of Britain as mapped in Early Britain – Celtic Britain by John Rh ŷ s in 1882. The areas that he claimed were occupied by the invading Britons are shown in pink, the lands of the Goidels in light blue.The aboriginal Ivernians ‘or traces of them’ are depicted in dark blue.The approximate locations of over thirty Celtic tribes with their Roman names are shown.
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