Ptolemy’s Inland Cities of Ireland

in #ireland5 years ago

Ptolemy’s Map of Ireland – Part 34

~ Part 1~

Inland Cities

Having completed our voyage around the Ireland of Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography, it is now time to disembark and turn our steps towards the interior. In Book 2, Chapter 2, Section 9, Ptolemy gives a brief list of seven inland towns or settlements on the island of Ireland:

§2.2.9 The following are the inland cities:

GreekLatinEnglishLongitudeLatitude
ῬηγιαRhegiaRēgia13° 00'60° 20'
ῬαιβαRhæbaRhaiba12° 00'59° 45'
ΛαβηροςLaberusLabēros13° 00'59° 15'
ΜακολικονMacolicumMakolikon11° 30'58° 40'
ἑτερα Ῥηγιαaltera RhegiaAnother Rēgia11° 00'59° 30'
ΔουνονDunumDounon12° 30'58° 45'
ἸουερνιςHibernisIvernis11° 00'58° 10'

Source: Nobbe 66, Wilberg 103

Polis

In his description of Ireland, Ptolemy designates these seven inland settlements using the nominative plural of the Greek word πολις [polis], which generally denotes a city or citadel. But did Ireland have cities in ancient times? It is even doubtful whether Ireland had towns or villages in Ptolemy’s day, let alone cities. The ancient Greeks had separate words for each of these smaller settlements:

GreekEnglish
πολιςcity
κωμηvillage
ἀστυtown

In both Karl Müller’s and Friedrich Wilberg’s Latin editions of Ptolemy’s Geography, πολεις is translated as oppida, the nominative plural of oppidum:

Latin-English
oppidumIa town
oppidumIIa fortified wood or forest, among the Britons, Caes. B. G. 5, 21.
oppidumIIIThe barriers of the circus (ante-class.)

Interestingly, Lewis and Short note that Julius Caesar used the term oppidum to describe a fortified wood or forest among the natives of Britain:

Caesar

When the Trinobantes had been placed under protection and secured from all outrage at the hands of the troops, the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci, and the Cassi sent deputations and surrendered to Caesar. From them he learnt that the stronghold [oppidum] of Cassivellaunus was not far from thence, fenced by woods and marshes; and that he had assembled there a considerable quantity of men and cattle. Now the Britons call it a stronghold [oppidum] when they have fortified a thick-set woodland with rampart and trench, and thither it is their custom to collect, to avoid a hostile inroad. (The Gallic War 5:21)

Considering the importance of cattle in ancient Ireland, it is likely that such fortifications were used here as well as in the sister isle, and in fact we know this to be true. The word bawn, an Anglicization of the Irish badhún or baḋḃḋún, describes such a structure. But Ptolemy’s Irish settlements were presumably permanently occupied places and not temporary fortifications hastily thrown up in time of war. So what were they?

Goddard Orpen, who also cautions against a too literal interpretation of these terms, offers the following analysis:

Of course in the sense in which the word oppidum was applied in Romanised Gaul or Britain, it may be said that there can have been no towns in Ireland in Ptolemy’s time. His πόλεις must be regarded as referring to the principal duns, cashels, cathairs, or raths, inside of which the chieftains of tribes and their attendants dwelt in either dry-stone clochauns or round wicker-work huts (Orpen 126)

  • dun: (Irish: dún) a fortress, a royal residence
  • cashel (Irish: caiseal) a stone fort
  • cathair (Irish: cathair) a ringfort, a circular stone fort
  • rath (Irish: ráth) a ringfort, an earthen rampart, a circumvallation
  • clochaun (Irish: clochán) a dry-stone hut with a corbelled roof

Grianan of Aileach (Grianán Ailigh), an Irish rath, or ringfort

A Note on Ptolemy’s Diacritics

In an earlier article in this series, I quoted Amalia Gnanadesikan, the Technical Director for Language Analysis at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language, on the use of diacritics in ancient Greek. In her book The Writing Revolution, she makes the following pertinent comment on the question of smooth and rough breathing in Ptolemy’s Alexandria:

In the process of accumulating and copying texts, the Alexandrian scholars began to show concern for matters of orthography. They found that at certain points the lack of a written form of [h] made for ambiguity. They noted that the Greeks living in Italy had been more free-thinking than the Athenians. While they had gone along with the adoption of the Ionic alphabet, they continued to write [h] by cutting the hēta in half and using ├. The Alexandrians adopted the Italian Greeks’ half H, but wrote it as a superscript on the following vowel, so that, for example,

ho

was ho. Loving symmetry, they made the other half of H stand for the lack of an [h] sound before a vowel:

o

These diacritics came to be termed “rough breathing” (for [h]) and “smooth breathing” (for lack of [h]). Their use was for many centuries largely reserved for cases where ambiguity could arise without them. These marks later became and , so that ὁ was ho and ὀ plain o ... Only by the ninth century AD (well into the Byzantine period, AD 330–1453) did the use of breathing and accent diacritics become fully regular, with all vowel-initial words marked for “rough” or “smooth” breathing and all words marked for accent. (Gnanadesikan 220 ... 221)

I take these remarks to imply that Ptolemy probably only employed the diacritics for smooth and rough breathings in cases where the correct reading was not already obvious to the reader. The pitch accents—acute, grave and circumflex—were probably not used by him at all. This is the practice I have tended to follow in this series.

It need hardly be repeated that Ptolemy lived in an age before the development of what we today might call the lowercase Greek letters:

Another invention of Byzantine times was the small letters, or minuscules. Ancient Greek was written entirely in what we now consider capital letters. All in all, ancient Greek inscriptions are rather difficult for modern readers, used as we are to visual cues such word spacing, punctuation, and capitalization. (Gnanadesikan 221)

In ancient Greek, an initial rho, Ρ, always took a rough breathing:

13. Every initial ρ has the rough breathing:_ ῥήτωρ orator_ (Lat. rhetor). Medial ρρ is written ῤῥ in some texts: Πυῤῥος Pyrrhus.

14. The sign for the rough breathing is derived from Η, which in the Old Attic alphabet (2 a) was used to denote h. Thus, ΗΟ the. After Η was used to denote η, one half (ⱶ) was used for h (about 300 B.C.), and, later, the other half (˧) for the smooth breathing. From ⱶ and ˧ come the forms and . (Smyth 10)

This explains why Ptolemy’s Ῥηγια is sometimes transcribed into Roman script as Regia (Müller) and sometimes as Rhegia (Wilberg). The former, as we shall see, is probably closer to the original Celtic name, so the introduction of the rough breathing here is simply the result of Ptolemy or one of his transcribers applying Smyth’s general rule.

Variant Readings

Ptolemy’s geography of Ireland is preserved in about fifty manuscript sources and early printed editions, all dating from about 1300-1600. These differ widely in their spelling of Irish toponyms and tribal names, and in the coordinates they assign to the various landmarks. The following table records the variant readings noted by Karl Müller and Friedrich Wilberg (ignoring variant accents) in §2:2:9:

CityVariant NameVariant LongitudeVariant Latitude
ῬηγιαῬιγια, Γιγια, Ῥαγια-63°
ῬαιβαῬεβα11° 30'-
Λαβηρος---
Μακολικον---
ἑτερα Ῥηγια--58° 30'
ΔουνονΔεουνον11° 30', 14° 30'58° 30'
ἸουερνιςἸερνις, Ἰουρνις11° 00', 14° 00'58° 30'

Ptolemy’s Inland Settlements of Ireland

Popular Identifications

The following table lists the most popular identifications of these settlements that have been proposed over the centuries:

PtolemyModern
RēgiaOn Lough Ree, Navan Fort, Rathcroghan, Clogher, Grianan of Aileach, Athenry
RhaibaRheban Castle, On Lough Ree, Hill of Uisneach, Rathcroghan, Carnfree
LabērosHill of Tara, Rathconrath, Killare Castle, Hill of Uisneach, Near Kells, Near Glendalough, Near Port Laoise
MakolikonMalc, Male on Shannon (near Cloondara?), Meelick, Mallow, Cashel, Clonmel, Mooghaun
Another RēgiaSt Patrick’s Purgatory, Feerwore Rath, Limerick
DounonDown, Downpatrick, Dunamase, Dinn Righ, Knockaulin, Near Mallow, Waterford
IvernisDún Ciaráin, Limerick, Near Kinsale, Cork, Temair Érann, Caherdaniel

Inland Cities (Vat Gr 191)


References

  • Julius Caesar, The Gallic War, With an English translation by Henry John Edwards, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA (1958)
  • Robert Darcy & William Flynn, Ptolemy’s Map of Ireland: A Modern Decoding, Irish Geography, Volume 41, Number 1, pp 49-69, Geographical Society of Ireland, Taylor and Francis, Routledge, Abingdon (2008)
  • Patrick S Dinneen, An Irish-English Dictionary, New Edition, Irish Texts Society, Dublin (1927)
  • Amalia E Gnanadesikan, The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet, Blackwell Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester (2009)
  • Charlton T Lewis, Charles Short, A New Latin Dictionary, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York (1891)
  • Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Eighth Edition, American Book Company, New York (1901)
  • Emmanuel Miller, _Périple de Marcien d’Héraclée, Epitome d’Artémidore, Isidore de Charax, etc., ou, Supplément aux Dernières Éditions des Petits Géographes : D’après un Manuscrit Grec de la Bibliothèque Royale _, L’Imprimerie Royale, Paris (1839)
  • Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Müller (editor & translator), Klaudiou Ptolemaiou Geographike Hyphegesis (Claudii Ptolemæi Geographia), Volume 1, Alfredo Firmin Didot, Paris (1883)
  • Karl Friedrich August Nobbe, Claudii Ptolemaei Geographia, Volume 2, Karl Tauchnitz, Leipzig (1845)
  • Thomas F O’Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin (1946, 1984)
  • Goddard H Orpen, Ptolemy’s Map of Ireland, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Volume 4 (Fifth Series), Volume 24 (Consecutive Series), pp 115-128, Dublin (1894)
  • Claudius Ptolemaeus, Geography, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat Gr 191, fol 127-172 (Ireland: 138v–139r)
  • Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges, American Book Company, New York (1920)
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Wilberg, Claudii Ptolemaei Geographiae, Libri Octo: Graece et Latine ad Codicum Manu Scriptorum Fidem Edidit Frid. Guil. Wilberg, Essendiae Sumptibus et Typis G.D. Baedeker, Essen (1838)

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Very good historical post dear...❤️You

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