April 1916: The Easter Rising and its Echoes in Egyptian, Indian, and Zionist Nationalist Thought, Part III: Zionism

Briscoe as Lord Mayor of Dublin

The late, great baseball catcher and folk philosopher Yogi Berra, who sadly died last year, is credited with many quotes, some of which he may actually have said. One goes like this: when Yogi was told in the 1950s that the visiting Lord Mayor of Dublin, Robert Briscoe, was Jewish, Yogi responded, "only in America."

Robert Briscoe was not only the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin (his son later held the same job): he was a veteran of the original IRA, a gun-runner in the War of Irish independence, but also a fervent Zionist and a friend of Revisionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky. When Jabotinsky visited Ireland as part of a European tour in 1938, Briscoe introduced him to Prime Minister Éamon de Valera, and reportedly advised Jabotinsky on how to fight the British.

Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog

Briscoe is just one example of the intersection of Irish nationalism and the Zionist movement. Briscoe during his Irish political career was a member of the Fianna Fáil party, after its split with Sinn Féin, but the Chief Rabbi of Ireland from 1919 to 1936, and before that Rabbi of Dublin, Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog,  supported the Irish war of independence, spoke the Irish language fluently, and was both an avid Irish republican and committed Zionist. He came to be nicknamed "the Sinn Féin rebbe." When the Free State won independence his appointment as Chief Rabbi was formalized.In 1936 he moved to Palestine, became Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Palestine, and later the first Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel. One of his sons, Chaim Herzog, became a general, Ambassador to the United Nations, and the sixth President of Israel, while a grandson, Yitzhak or Isaac Herzog, is head of the Labor party/Zionist Union and current Leader of the Opposition in the Knesset.

As World War II approached, the mainstream Zionist movement, including the Haganah, agreed to support British war aims for the duration. The Revisionists and their armed wings, Irgun or the IZL and Lehi or the Stern Gang, continued to resist British rule during the war.Thy were able to point to the Easter Rising of 1916 as a model, since the rebels fought Britain while it was at war with Germany.Avraham Stern, founder of LEHI, arranged to have P.S. O'Hegerty's The Victory of Sinn Féin translated into Hebrew. IZL and Lehi both drew inspiration from the guerilla war in Ireland between 1919 and 1921 and the tactics of Michael Collins, and LEHI underground operative Yitzhak Yezernitsky, who would eventually become Israel's seventh Prime Minister as Yitzhak Shamir, adopted the nom de guerre "Michael" after Collins. (Another underground pseudonym was "Rabbi Shamir," from which the would take his Hebrew name.)

There are other  parallels. Irish republican and Land reformer Michael Davitt, mentioned in Part II as an inspiration for Gandhi's nonviolence, famously published an investigation of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 (then in Russia but today Chisinau in Moldova), and subsequently expessed his sympathies for Zionism. Davitt is said to have been the first to apply the English word  "pale," originally used to refer to the area reserved for English settlement in Ireland, to the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Russia.

Not all parallels apply. Arthur James Balfour became a hero to the Zionists for the Balfour Declaration, but as Secretary for Ireland had been a staunch opponent of Home Rule, but as I hope these three posts have shown, the events of Easter 1916 an the war of independence that followed inspired national movements elsewhere; the list could be longer.

April 1916: The Easter Rising and its Echoes in Egyptian, Indian, and Zionist Nationalist Thought, Part II: India

Irish Stamps Honoring Gandhi

Yesterday we looked at echoes of the Easter Rising of 1916 on Egyptian nationalism.Today we'll look at influences in Indian nationalism and Zionism.

India and Ireland
It is easy to forget today that many supporters of Irish Home Rule were Protestants rather than Catholic, from rebel leader Wolfe Tone to Parliamentarian Charles Parnell. Yesterday we mentioned W.B.Yeats, Lady Gregory, and G.B Shaw, all Protestants from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Anglo-Irishmen had long been involved in the British Army (including Wellington, though he didn't identify with Irish causes (he notoriously responded to being called Irish by saying being born in a stable did not make him a horse), and the Administration of the Raj,

But not all the Irish in India were defenders of the status quo. Alfred John Webb (1834-1908), a Dublin Quaker and supporter of Irish Home Rule, in 1894 in Madras became the third non-Indian presiding officer of the Indian National Congress, which led the independence movement. Margaret Gillespie Cousins (1878-1954), a Protestant from Boyle in County Roscommon, was a supporter of Home Rule  and women's suffrage who had founded the Irish Women's Franchise League before moving to India, where she co-founded the Women's Indian Association. In 1922 she became the first female magistrate in India. She is credited with writing the tune of the Indian National Anthem Jana Gana Mana (the words are by the poet Tagore).

But the Irish in India were not the only influences of the Irish on India. Michael Davitt (1846-1906) was an Irish republican and agrarian reformer, founder of the Irish National Land League, who was an early advocate of nonviolent resistance; Gandhi would explicitly cite him as an inspiration for his own movement.

Gandhi supported the movement for Irish independence but predictably deplored the violence of the war of independence. Many Indian nationalists saw parallels between the massacre on Bloody Sunday at Croke Park in Dublin on November 21, 1920, when Black & Tans killed 14 civilians at a Gaelic football game, and the far bloodier Amritsar massacre of 1919, when hundreds were killed. Ironically, the perpetrator of Amritsar, Col. Reginald Dyer, was himself of Irish background.

This article cites a number of Gandhi's speeches and writings referring to Ireland.

As this is running late, I'll deal with Zionism in a Part III tomorrow.

April 1916: The Easter Rising and its Echoes in Egyptian, Indian, and Zionist Nationalist Thought, Part I

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

—W.B. Yeats, Easter 1916

This week marks a century since Easter Monday, 1916,  when Irish nationalists seized the control of the General Post Office in Dublin and other key sites and proclaimed the Provisional Government of an Irish Republic.  The Easter Rising, which was put down on April 29, is part of the creation myth of Ireland today, complete with its list of martyrs shot by the British. Though the Irish Republic celebrated the centenary on Easter weekend, the 24th to the 29th, this week, is the actual anniversary.

But Yeats' "terrible beauty" influenced (if not "changed utterly") events far beyond those regions "wherever green is worn." As the First World War ended, the Irish events influenced nationalist movements worldwide. I'll deal here only with the resonances in the broader Middle East. Long-established links between Egyptian and Irish nationalists were invigorated and reinforced. In India, Mahatma Gandhi, while deploring the resort to arms, often drew parallels between the Irish and Indian struggles. And in the coming years the Irish model would influence the Zionist movement, most profoundly its rightwing "Revisionist" wing. The underground operative who eventually became Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir took his Hebrew name from his nom de guerre Rabbi Shamir, but his earlier revolutionary pseudonym was "Michael," after Irish guerrilla commander Michael Collins.

Ireland and Egypt

Long before 1916, there were many critics of British colonial policies who recognized parallels  between Irish and Egyptian nationalism. Augusta, Lady Gregory, the Anglo-Irish dramatist and folklorist who was a co-founder with Yeats of the Abbey Theater, wrote her first non-fiction essay on Arabi and his Household, an 1882 defense of Col. Ahmad ‘Urabi's revolt, which had been put down by Britain's intervention in Egypt. ‘Urabi's most vocal English defender, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who also knew Gregory, was also a strong supporter of Irish Home Rule, as well. His 1907 The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt  was a staunch defense of ‘Urabi and a critique of British policy.

Another Anglo-Irish advocate of Irish Home Rule, who made the parallels between the Irish and Egyptian cases explicit, was George Bernard Shaw, who in the "Preface for Politicians" to his 1911 Irish play John Bull's Other Island wrote a defense of Irish Home Rule to which he appended a denunciation of what he called "The Denshawai Horror," referring to the 1906 "Denshawai incident" in which several Egyptian peasants were hanged by the British after defending their village against British soldiers who had been shooting the town's pigeons.

So there were parallels between Irish and Egyptian Nationalism even before the 1916 Rising. Another irony linking the two: a figure we have already met in his role as General Officer Commanding, British Troops in Egypt: General Sir John Maxwell. On April 28, 1916, Maxwell was named Military Governor of Ireland with plenary powers under Martial Law. After the Rising was crushed he held a series of field court martials under Martial Law, which involved trial in secret and did not permit defense counsel. Ninety were condemned to death, though after 15 had been shot by firing squads, the remaining sentences were commuted to life after public outrage in England.

The subsequent history of the Irish independence movement would also have echoes in the Egyptian and other nationalist movements. In the elections of 1918 for the British Parliament, 73 members of the Sinn Féin independence movement won election to Westminster, but refused to go to London and instead proclaimed themselves the Parliament of the Irish Republic, Dáil Éireann. By creating a self-proclaimed provisional government, Irish nationalists created a model much used in other anti-colonialist movements, including the Egyptian move to name a Wafd or delegation to the Paris Peace Talks in 1919. Though the British exiled Sa‘ad Zaghloul, his Wafd became Egypt's nationalist party. In 1919 Egypt's Revolution of 1919 broke out (called by the British an uprising). That same year the Irish war of independence began (called by the British terrorism). In 1920 Britain began talks in Egypt on semi-independence. In 1921 they negotiated a limited independence for all but the northern six counties of Ireland. In 1922 both the Kingdom of Egypt and the Irish Free State came into being.

Tomorrow, we'll look at the echoes in India and Revisionist Zionism.

My Annual Saint Patrick's Day Post on the links Between the Early Irish Church and the Coptic Church of Egypt

Happy Saint Patrick's Day in this centennial year of the Easter Rising.

Coptic Wheel Cross

Every year since 2009, I have reposted or linked to my original 2009 post on the faint but apparently real links between the Coptic Church of Egypt, where monasticism was invented, and the early Irish church.

Celtic Wheel Cross

It's the sort of thing you do when you're a specialist on Egyptian history also named Michael Collins Dunn, but it's also been a popular post. Herewith, with some added illustrations, corrections and updates,  the original text:

Happy Saint Patrick's Day everyone, an appropriate wish here since the Irish Church Patrick founded seems to have been the religious and monastic daughter of the Church of Egypt (the Coptic Church).

Coptic Ankh Cross

Ah, you're thinking: he's really reaching this time, trying to find a way to work Saint Patrick's Day into a blog on the Middle East. My name is, after all, Michael Collins Dunn, and I'm therefore rarely assumed to have Greek or Japanese ancestry, but actually it's not a reach to find a reason for a Saint Patrick's Day post on the Middle East, since Irish Christianity has ancient, if somewhat hard to document, links to Egypt, and Saint Patrick himself may have studied alongside Egyptian monks. They say everyone's Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, but I'm going to explore how Egypt and Ireland have links dating back to the earliest days of Christianity in the West. And while some of the evidence is a bit hazy, none of this is crackpot theory. I warned you that I started out as a medievalist, and still have flashbacks sometimes. Forgive me if I can't footnote every statement here.

Irish Standing Wheel Cross

Anyone who has ever seen one of the standing crosses that are a familiar feature of medieval and post-classical Irish Christian sites will know what the Celtic Cross or "wheel cross" looks like; anyone who has ever set foot in a Coptic Church will know what a Coptic Cross looks like; unfortunately the illustrations at Wikipedia's Coptic Cross site don't include a precise example, but the wheel cross is common among Egyptian Copts as well, and can be seen on many churches in Egypt today. [Illustrations added after original post.] The wheel cross is not an obvious derivation of the Christian cross, and many think it is an adaptation of the ancient Egyptian Ankh symbol, so what is it doing on those Irish standing cross towers?

Sure, iconography can repeat itself: both Indians in India and Native Americans used the swastika long before Hitler did, and so on. But the Celtic Cross/Coptic Cross similarity is not the only link. There is pretty decent evidence that Christianity in Ireland, if not immediately derived from Egypt, was closely linked to the Egyptian Church. An ancient litany in the Book of Leinster prays for "the seven holy Egyptian monks, who lie in Desert Ulaidh." The place mentioned is somewhere in Ulster, with many placing it in Antrim: perhaps suggestively, "desert" or "disert" in Irish place names meant a place where monks lived apart from the world as anchorites, modeled on the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Syria. "Ulaidh" just means Ulster.Who these seven holy Egyptian monks were is unclear, but they died in Ulster and were sufficiently venerated to be remembered in a litany.

See also my post on "The Faddan More Psalter: More Evidence of the Coptic Links to Early Irish Christianity," posted about an Irish psalmbook with a cover stiffened with Egyptian papyrus.

St. Mena ampulla, the Louvre

It is often said (I haven't got a firm cite though) that holy water (or holy oil for anointing)  bottles found in Ireland carry the twin-camel emblem associated with the Shrine of Saint Menas (Mina) west of Alexandria. (Menas was one of the major patron saints of Egypt, his shrine a major pilgrimage center, and his cult extended far beyond Egypt.) If so, I don't think the Irish were using local camels as models. While I can't find the specifics on the Irish find, these ampullae of terracotta marked with the emblem of St. Menas have been found throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. The photo shows one in the Louvre.

 There are also said to be tombstones in old Irish ogham writing that refer to the burial of so-and-so "the Egyptian." The earliest Irish forms of monasticism included anchorite communities who withdrew from the world and venerated the tradition of Saint Anthony of Egypt; the early Irish church used an Eastern rather than a Western date for Easter; some aspects of ancient Celtic liturgy resemble eastern liturgies, and there are archaeological evidences (mostly probable Egyptian pottery in Ireland and British — Cornish? — tin in Egypt) of trade between Egypt and the British Isles. "Double" monasteries — where a monastery for monks and a convent for nuns were adjacent — first appeared in Egypt, and were common in Ireland. The evidence may be circumstantial, but there's a lot of it.

In the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin there is a pilgrimage guide to the Desert of Scetis, the Egyptian desert region of Coptic monasteries today known as the Wadi Natrun. That, along with the Saint Menas holy water bottles, suggests Irish monks made pilgrimages all the way to Egypt. And obviously those seven holy Egyptian monks in Ulster made the trip the other way.

But do these connections between Egypt and Ireland, tenuous as they may seem, really connect in any way with Saint Patrick, justifying this as a Saint Patrick's Day post? I'm glad you asked.

Saint Patrick's life has been much encrusted with mythology (the snakes, the Shamrock, etc.) and all we can really say for certain is what he himself told us in his autobiographical Confession: he was born somewhere on the western coast of Roman Britain (so the Apostle of Ireland was British, but before there was such a thing as an Englishman since the Angles and Saxons were not yet present: he probably spoke old British, an ancestor of Welsh), was kidnapped and enslaved in Ireland, later escaped and joined the church, and returned as the apostle of Ireland. But very ancient biographies (though not his own autobiographical account, one of the few vernacular Latin works to survive from the period) say that he studied for the priesthood at the Abbey of Lérins off the south coast of France. This was a Mediterranean island abbey much influenced by the church of Egypt and the rule of Saint Anthony of Egypt, and according to some accounts, many Coptic monks were present there. There's no certainty that Patrick ever studied there, but then, he studied somewhere, and this is the only place claimed by the early accounts. So Patrick himself may have had direct links to the Egyptian church. (And remember that until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD — by which time Patrick was already a bishop in Ireland, himself dying in 461 by most accounts — the Coptic Church and the rest of Christendom were still in full communion.)

There may be even more to it than this. A few linguists believe that the Celtic languages, though Indo-European in their basic structure, have a "substratum" of some previous linguistic element that is not found in other Indo-European languages, only in Celtic, but some aspects of which are also found in Afro-Asiatic languages, particularly Berber and Egyptian (of which Coptic, of course, is the late form). I'm certainly not qualified to judge such linguistically abstruse theories, and know neither Irish nor Coptic, and they seem to have little to do with the question of Egyptian-Irish Christian influences. But it helps remind us that the ancient world was more united by the sea than divided by it, and that the Roman Empire stretched from the British Isles to Mesopotamia.

While the links are tenuous, they appear to be real. Irish historians accept some level of Egyptian influence in the Christianization of Ireland, and Coptic historians love to dwell on the subject, since it lets them claim a link to the earliest high Christian art and culture of Western Europe. If Irish monasticism preserved the heritage of the ancient world and rebuilt the West after the barbarian invasions, and if the Irish church is a daughter of the Egyptian church, then the West owes more to Egypt than most would imagine.

I first heard a discussion of this in a presentation by the Coptic Church's bishop in charge of ecumenical outreach, Bishop Samweel, back in the early 1970s. I later ran across several references to it in British orientalist literature (Stanley Lane-Poole seems to have been particularly fond of it, and I think he places Desert Ulaidh near Carrickfergus), and continue to find it intriguing, if never quite clear enough to nail down precisely.

Bishop Samweel, mentioned above, met an unfortunate end by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by the way. When Anwar Sadat deposed Coptic Pope Shenouda III in 1981, Sadat named Samweel — considered one of the Coptic church's leading figures after Shenouda — head of a council of bishops to run the church while the Patriarch was in exile. Due to this appointment, Bishop Samweel was seated on the reviewing stand behind Sadat on October 6, 1981, and died in the volley of fire which killed the President.

Like much of the earliest history of any culture or country, the links between Irish and Egyptian Christianity are fairly well-delineated but their precise origins are untraceable, but tantalizing. Since this is little known to most Westerners or even to Egyptians who aren't Copts, it seemed appropriate to mention it on Saint Patrick's Day.

Erin go bragh. Misr Umm al-Dunya

When an Ottoman Sultan Sent Aid to the Irish Famine

The Great Famine that ravaged Ireland beginning with the potato blight of 1845 killed a million people and sent another million or more  into exile in America, Canada, or Australia. As a descendant of famine immigrants myself, I realized I haven't blogged about one of the less well-known aspects of what the Irish call the Great Hunger; the effort of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I (reigned 1839-1861) to send aid to Ireland. The subject of a forthcoming film, the tale is better known in Ireland and Turkey than elsewhere. The tale of a Muslim country with problems of its own sending aid to a Catholic country abandoned by its colonial overlords fascinated the Irish. As Joyce put it in Ulysses, "Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the Sassenach [Saxons, i.e. English] tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro."

Sultan Abdülmecid I

As the tale is usually told, the Sultan offered to send £10,000 sterling for Irish relief. But because Queen Victoria herself had only contributed £2,000, the British government requested that the Sultan reduce his contribution to only £1,000. (See Joyce's comment above.) But the Sultan did send up to five ships carrying food, and while the records aren't clear, Irish newspaper and other reports say Ottoman sailors landed the food at Drogheda on the River  Boyne  in 1847. (Drogheda is ironically the site of a notorious massacre by Oliver Cromwell, another Sassenach not well remembered in Ireland.)

The Irish still remember.

"Their Lonely Graves are by Suvla's Waves": Doubling Down to Make it Worse: Suvla Bay, August 6-7, 1915

The Plan

On April 25, 1915, you will recall, the British and French allies landed troops (mostly Australians and New Zealanders) at ANZAC Cove and Sud al-Bar on the Gallipoli peninsula. More than three months later they were still trapped on narrow beaches under fire from Ottoman artillery and hemmed in by Turkish infantry entrenched on rocky ridgelines. A maneuver intended to sidestep the stalemate in the trenches of the Western Front had instead replicated it, but with most of the carnage limited to the Allied side. A military situation such as this suggests to a sane strategist two options: 1) find a way to outflank the enemy, or 2) cut your losses and withdraw from an unwinnable situation.

What did Britain do?

What part of "Gallipoli 1915" did you not understand? Let's land more troops in the same impossible positions! It worked so well on the Western Front. But the August landings added a few new twists: giving command to a general who had never commanded in battle, and landing in darkness. What could possibly go wrong?

The landings were intended to assist a breakout by the ANZACs from ANZAC Cove by having the ANZACs attack from their position against the Sari Bair mountainous ridge as additional troops landed at Suvla Bay just to their north. Another attack was to be launched from Cape Helles. The map above shows the intended plan. The new troops being landed at Suvla Bay were the IX Corps consisting of two brigades  (the 30th and 31st) of the 10th (Irish) Division and all of the 11th (Northern) Division (32nd, 33rd and 34th Brigades). These were "New Army" units formed at the outbreak of the war,  The 11th was to go ashore the night of August 6 and the 10th to follow the morning of the 7th. But little went according to plan.

Stopford

The theater commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, had asked for an experienced general from the Western Front, but those considered were junior in seniority to the 10th Division  commander and could not be considered. Instead Lord Kitchener chose Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford,who had fought at Tel el-Kebir back in 1882, and risen through the ranks in mostly staff and adjutant and headquarters positions. The younger son of an Earl, Stopford, despite high rank, had never commanded a large force in battle. He had retired in 1909, but returned to active duty for the war.

In a war marked by disastrous British generalship, Stopford was unusually bad.

The Ottomans knew new landings were coming, but didn't know where. They reinforced the Asian shore and other parts of the peninsula, but as the British prepared to land 20,000 troops at Suvla, only some 1,500 Turkish troops faced them. Stopford still managed to fail.

Late on August 6, the ANZAC forces launched assaults against positions at Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair in a new attempt to break out and also provide a diversion for the troops landing at Suvla Bay. (Though the Suvla troops were English and Irish, "Suvla" would become a notorious term among the ANZACs, who considered that they were sacrificed to cover the British landings.) (The final scene of the 1981 Mel Gibson film Gallipoli portrays the ANZAC August offensive, and does so in a rather anti-British way.)

Two brigades of the 11th were to go ashore south of Nibrunesi point while the 34th Brigade was to land in Suvla Bay proper, with the Irish brigades to follow. Landings were to begin at 10 pm after Australian breakout was under way.

It began with a success, if a Pyrrhic one. Two companies of 6th Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment, drove the Ottomans off the small hill known as Lala Baba, but with the loss of a third of the men and most of the officers killed or wounded.

The 34th Brigade landing in Suvla Bay was a disaster: many had to wade ashore in neck-deep water while under Turkish fire. Stopford had decided to remain aboard HMS Jonquil, and soon went to sleep.

The Reality: Situation August 7

The landings had begun in darkness. When the moon came up, Turkish snipers began to fire. The beaches were a confused jumble of men, many landed in the wrong place, or left without orders. The Irish brigades came ashore and added to the chaos. Drinking water was in short supply. IX Corps is said to have taken 1,700 casualties in the first few hours, more than the total number of Ottoman forces opposing them. The German commander of the Ottoman troops on Gallipoli ordered two divisions to reinforce the Suvla front on the 7th. Stopford had still not come ashore. Nevertheless, he signaled Hamilton that he was going to "consolidate his position."

Sir Ian Hamilton dispatched aides to the front and then came himself. Overnight on August 8-9 he ordered an assault on the ridgeline; the Turkish reinforcements had now arrived and made mincemeat of the 32nd Brigade.

Mustafa Kemal, Gallipoli, 1915

As the British chain of command remained in chaos, Liman von Sanders replaced the local Turkish commander in the Suvla-Chunuk Bair sector with the commander of the 19th Division. This was Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk.

If  Liman von Sanders now had the right man in command, the British did not. It was not until the 14th that Hamilton communicated to Lord Kitchener the need to replace the Suvla commanders.  On the 15th Stopford was recalled and replaced with Sir Julian Byng. The 11th Division Commander was also replaced, and the 10th Division Commander resigned his command rather than serve under Stopford's temporary replacement. Meanwhile, the Australians and New Zealanders were heavily engaged in the Chunuk Bair region, receiving no relief.

The disaster at Suvla would find many echoes in later memory. Though the only Australians at Suvla proper were a bridging engineer unit, Eric Bogle's antiwar And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda refers to Suvla Bay, perhaps in the sense that Chunuk Bair was part of the campaign. The 1981 movie Gallipoli would contain a reference to the English drinking tea on the beach at Suvla while the Australians are thrown into battle.

The Irish also, like the ANZACs, would in years to come show ambivalence about whether their worst enemy at Gallipoli was the Turks or the British. Suvla is also invoked twice in the Irish rebel song The Foggy Dew, by Canon Charles O'Neill, about the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, referring to the Irish Division at Suvla and Cape Helles (Sud El-Bar):

Right proudly high over Dublin town
They hung out a flag of war.
'Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky
Than at Suvla or Sud el Bar.

And from the plains of Royal Meath
Strong men came hurrying through;
While Brittania's sons with their long-range guns
Sailed in from the foggy dew.

'Twas England bade our wild geese go
That small nations might be free.
Their lonely graves are by Suvla's waves
And the fringe of the grey North Sea.
But had they died by Pearse's side
Or fought with Valera true,
Their graves we'd keep where the Fenians sleep
'Neath the hills of the foggy dew.

Here's a version by Sinead O'Connor and The Dubliners, illustrated with scenes taken from the 1996 Liam Neeson film Michael Collins:

The Annual Saint Patrick's Day Post on Ancient Links Between the Irish Church and Egypt

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, which this year is also election day in Israel. (Zionist Union leader Yitzhak Herzog's father was actually born in Belfast, come to think of it.)

Coptic Wheel Cross

Every year since 2009, I have reposted or linked to my original 2009 post on the faint but apparently real links between the Coptic Church of Egypt, where monasticism was invented, and the early Irish church.

Celtic Wheel Cross

It's the sort of thing you do when you're a specialist on Egyptian history also named Michael Collins Dunn, but it's also been a popular post. Herewith, with some added illustrations, corrections and updates,  the original text:

Happy Saint Patrick's Day everyone, an appropriate wish here since the Irish Church Patrick founded seems to have been the religious and monastic daughter of the Church of Egypt (the Coptic Church).

Coptic Ankh Cross

Ah, you're thinking: he's really reaching this time, trying to find a way to work Saint Patrick's Day into a blog on the Middle East. My name is, after all, Michael Collins Dunn, and I'm therefore rarely assumed to have Greek or Japanese ancestry, but actually it's not a reach to find a reason for a Saint Patrick's Day post on the Middle East, since Irish Christianity has ancient, if somewhat hard to document, links to Egypt, and Saint Patrick himself may have studied alongside Egyptian monks. They say everyone's Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, but I'm going to explore how Egypt and Ireland have links dating back to the earliest days of Christianity in the West. And while some of the evidence is a bit hazy, none of this is crackpot theory. I warned you that I started out as a medievalist, and still have flashbacks sometimes. Forgive me if I can't footnote every statement here.

Irish Standing Wheel Cross

Anyone who has ever seen one of the standing crosses that are a familiar feature of medieval and post-classical Irish Christian sites will know what the Celtic Cross or "wheel cross" looks like; anyone who has ever set foot in a Coptic Church will know what a Coptic Cross looks like; unfortunately the illustrations at Wikipedia's Coptic Cross site don't include a precise example, but the wheel cross is common among Egyptian Copts as well, and can be seen on many churches in Egypt today. [Illustrations added after original post.] The wheel cross is not an obvious derivation of the Christian cross, and many think it is an adaptation of the ancient Egyptian Ankh symbol, so what is it doing on those Irish standing cross towers?

Sure, iconography can repeat itself: both Indians in India and Native Americans used the swastika long before Hitler did, and so on. But the Celtic Cross/Coptic Cross similarity is not the only link. There is pretty decent evidence that Christianity in Ireland, if not immediately derived from Egypt, was closely linked to the Egyptian Church. An ancient litany in the Book of Leinster prays for "the seven holy Egyptian monks, who lie in Desert Ulaidh." The place mentioned is somewhere in Ulster, with many placing it in Antrim: perhaps suggestively, "desert" or "disert" in Irish place names meant a place where monks lived apart from the world as anchorites, modeled on the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Syria. "Ulaidh" just means Ulster.Who these seven holy Egyptian monks were is unclear, but they died in Ulster and were sufficiently venerated to be remembered in a litany.

See also my post on "The Faddan More Psalter: More Evidence of the Coptic Links to Early Irish Christianity," posted about an Irish psalmbook with a cover stiffened with Egyptian papyrus.

St. Mena ampulla, the Louvre

It is often said (I haven't got a firm cite though) that holy water (or holy oil for anointing)  bottles found in Ireland carry the twin-camel emblem associated with the Shrine of Saint Menas (Mina) west of Alexandria. (Menas was one of the major patron saints of Egypt, his shrine a major pilgrimage center, and his cult extended far beyond Egypt.) If so, I don't think the Irish were using local camels as models. While I can't find the specifics on the Irish find, these ampullae of terracotta marked with the emblem of St. Menas have been found throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. The photo shows one in the Louvre.

 There are also said to be tombstones in old Irish ogham writing that refer to the burial of so-and-so "the Egyptian." The earliest Irish forms of monasticism included anchorite communities who withdrew from the world and venerated the tradition of Saint Anthony of Egypt; the early Irish church used an Eastern rather than a Western date for Easter; some aspects of ancient Celtic liturgy resemble eastern liturgies, and there are archaeological evidences (mostly probable Egyptian pottery in Ireland and British — Cornish? — tin in Egypt) of trade between Egypt and the British Isles. "Double" monasteries — where a monastery for monks and a convent for nuns were adjacent — first appeared in Egypt, and were common in Ireland. The evidence may be circumstantial, but there's a lot of it.

In the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin there is a pilgrimage guide to the Desert of Scetis, the Egyptian desert region of Coptic monasteries today known as the Wadi Natrun. That, along with the Saint Menas holy water bottles, suggests Irish monks made pilgrimages all the way to Egypt. And obviously those seven holy Egyptian monks in Ulster made the trip the other way.

But do these connections between Egypt and Ireland, tenuous as they may seem, really connect in any way with Saint Patrick, justifying this as a Saint Patrick's Day post? I'm glad you asked.

Saint Patrick's life has been much encrusted with mythology (the snakes, the Shamrock, etc.) and all we can really say for certain is what he himself told us in his autobiographical Confession: he was born somewhere on the western coast of Roman Britain (so the Apostle of Ireland was British, but before there was such a thing as an Englishman since the Angles and Saxons were not yet present: he probably spoke old British, an ancestor of Welsh), was kidnapped and enslaved in Ireland, later escaped and joined the church, and returned as the apostle of Ireland. But very ancient biographies (though not his own autobiographical account, one of the few vernacular Latin works to survive from the period) say that he studied for the priesthood at the Abbey of Lérins off the south coast of France. This was a Mediterranean island abbey much influenced by the church of Egypt and the rule of Saint Anthony of Egypt, and according to some accounts, many Coptic monks were present there. There's no certainty that Patrick ever studied there, but then, he studied somewhere, and this is the only place claimed by the early accounts. So Patrick himself may have had direct links to the Egyptian church. (And remember that until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD — by which time Patrick was already a bishop in Ireland, himself dying in 461 by most accounts — the Coptic Church and the rest of Christendom were still in full communion.)

There may be even more to it than this. A few linguists believe that the Celtic languages, though Indo-European in their basic structure, have a "substratum" of some previous linguistic element that is not found in other Indo-European languages, only in Celtic, but some aspects of which are also found in Afro-Asiatic languages, particularly Berber and Egyptian (of which Coptic, of course, is the late form). I'm certainly not qualified to judge such linguistically abstruse theories, and know neither Irish nor Coptic, and they seem to have little to do with the question of Egyptian-Irish Christian influences. But it helps remind us that the ancient world was more united by the sea than divided by it, and that the Roman Empire stretched from the British Isles to Mesopotamia.

While the links are tenuous, they appear to be real. Irish historians accept some level of Egyptian influence in the Christianization of Ireland, and Coptic historians love to dwell on the subject, since it lets them claim a link to the earliest high Christian art and culture of Western Europe. If Irish monasticism preserved the heritage of the ancient world and rebuilt the West after the barbarian invasions, and if the Irish church is a daughter of the Egyptian church, then the West owes more to Egypt than most would imagine.

I first heard a discussion of this in a presentation by the Coptic Church's bishop in charge of ecumenical outreach, Bishop Samweel, back in the early 1970s. I later ran across several references to it in British orientalist literature (Stanley Lane-Poole seems to have been particularly fond of it, and I think he places Desert Ulaidh near Carrickfergus), and continue to find it intriguing, if never quite clear enough to nail down precisely.

Bishop Samweel, mentioned above, met an unfortunate end by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by the way. When Anwar Sadat deposed Coptic Pope Shenouda III in 1981, Sadat named Samweel — considered one of the Coptic church's leading figures after Shenouda — head of a council of bishops to run the church while the Patriarch was in exile. Due to this appointment, Bishop Samweel was seated on the reviewing stand behind Sadat on October 6, 1981, and died in the volley of fire which killed the President.

Like much of the earliest history of any culture or country, the links between Irish and Egyptian Christianity are fairly well-delineated but their precise origins are untraceable, but tantalizing. Since this is little known to most Westerners or even to Egyptians who aren't Copts, it seemed appropriate to mention it on Saint Patrick's Day.

Erin go bragh. Misr Umm al-Dunya

More Questions About UNDOF Captures in Golan

The seizure recently of over 40 Fijian troops in the UN Disengagement Observer Force on Golan (UNDOF) continues to reverberate. Jabhat al-Nusra, which is holding them,at first said they were being held for their own protection, but subsequently threatened to put them on trial if it conditions were not met.

The UN has denied reports that the Fijians were ordered to surrender their arms by the UN.Filipino peacekeepers who were at one point surrounded refused to surrender and were freed with the help of Irish UNDOF forces.

Meanwhile, The Irish Independent has reported that Israeli forces helped prevent the capture of the Irish contingent:

Senior sources said that there would "almost certainly" have been UN casualties or deaths if it wasn't for the help given by the Israeli military, which has posts on high ground overlooking the UN observer bases in Quneitra. The Israeli assistance was described as "decisive" in the success of the mission.

The Israelis were able to guide the Irish-led rescue troops and help it avoid concentrations of the more heavily armed al-Nusra force. There are also unconfirmed reports that the Israelis directed fire at the Islamists to stop them from attacking the Filipino and Irish soldiers.

enior sources said that there would "almost certainly" have been UN casualties or deaths if it wasn't for the help given by the Israeli military, which has posts on high ground overlooking the UN observer bases in Quneitra. The Israeli assistance was described as "decisive" in the success of the mission.
The Israelis were able to guide the Irish-led rescue troops and help it avoid concentrations of the more heavily armed al-Nusra force. There are also unconfirmed reports that the Israelis directed fire at the Islamists to stop them from attacking the Filipino and Irish soldiers.
- See more at:

The Traditional Annual Saint Patrick's Day Post on the Links Between the Coptic and Early Irish Churches

Happy Saint Patrick's Day. And for Jewish readers, belated greetings for Purim, which I should have posted on Friday.

Coptic Wheel Cross

Every year since 2009, I have reposted or linked to my original 2009 post on the faint but apparently real links between the Coptic Church of Egypt, where monasticism was invented, and the early Irish church.

Celtic Wheel Cross

It's the sort of thing you do when you're a specialist on Egyptian history also named Michael Collins Dunn, but it's also been a popular post. Herewith, with some added illustrations, the original text:

Happy Saint Patrick's Day everyone, an appropriate wish here since the Irish Church Patrick founded seems to have been the religious and monastic daughter of the Church of Egypt (the Coptic Church).

Coptic Ankh Cross

Ah, you're thinking: he's really reaching this time, trying to find a way to work Saint Patrick's Day into a blog on the Middle East. My name is, after all, Michael Collins Dunn, and I'm therefore rarely assumed to have Greek or Japanese ancestry, but actually it's not a reach to find a reason for a Saint Patrick's Day post on the Middle East, since Irish Christianity has ancient, if somewhat hard to document, links to Egypt, and Saint Patrick himself may have studied alongside Egyptian monks. They say everyone's Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, but I'm going to explore how Egypt and Ireland have links dating back to the earliest days of Christianity in the West. And while some of the evidence is a bit hazy, none of this is crackpot theory. I warned you that I started out as a medievalist, and still have flashbacks sometimes. Forgive me if I can't footnote every statement here.

Irish Standing Wheel Cross

Anyone who has ever seen one of the standing crosses that are a familiar feature of medieval and post-classical Irish Christian sites will know what the Celtic Cross or "wheel cross" looks like; anyone who has ever set foot in a Coptic Church will know what a Coptic Cross looks like; unfortunately the illustrations at Wikipedia's Coptic Cross site don't include a precise example, but the wheel cross is common among Egyptian Copts as well, and can be seen on many churches in Egypt today. [Illustrations added after original post.] The wheel cross is not an obvious derivation of the Christian cross, and many think it is an adaptation of the ancient Egyptian Ankh symbol, so what is it doing on those Irish standing cross towers?

Sure, iconography can repeat itself: both Indians in India and Native Americans used the swastika long before Hitler did, and so on. But the Celtic Cross/Coptic Cross similarity is not the only link. There is pretty decent evidence that Christianity in Ireland, if not immediately derived from Egypt, was closely linked to the Egyptian Church. An ancient litany in the Book of Leinster prays for "the seven holy Egyptian monks, who lie in Desert Ulaidh." The place mentioned is somewhere in Ulster, with many placing it in Antrim: perhaps suggestively, "desert" or "disert" in Irish place names meant a place where monks lived apart from the world as anchorites, modeled on the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Syria. "Ulaidh" just means Ulster.Who these seven holy Egyptian monks were is unclear, but they died in Ulster and were sufficiently venerated to be remembered in a litany.

It is often said (I haven't got a firm cite though) that holy water bottles found in Ireland carry the twin-camel emblem associated with the Shrine of Saint Menas west of Alexandria. (Menas was one of the major patron saints of Egypt, his shrine a major pilgrimage center, and his cult extended far beyond Egypt.) If so, I don't think the Irish were using local camels as models. There are also said to be tombstones in old Irish ogham writing that refer to the burial of so-and-so "the Egyptian." The earliest Irish forms of monasticism included anchorite communities who withdrew from the world and venerated the tradition of Saint Anthony of Egypt; the early Irish church used an Eastern rather than a Western date for Easter; some aspects of ancient Celtic liturgy resemble eastern liturgies, and there are archaeological evidences (mostly probable Egyptian pottery in Ireland and British — Cornish? — tin in Egypt) of trade between Egypt and the British Isles. "Double" monasteries — where a monastery for monks and a convent for nuns were adjacent — first appeared in Egypt, and were common in Ireland. The evidence may be circumstantial, but there's a lot of it.

I've also heard (but can't Google up the reference just now) that somewhere in the Irish monastic literature there is a pilgrimage guide to the Desert of Scetis, the Egyptian desert region of Coptic monasteries today known as the Wadi Natrun. That, along with the Saint Menas holy water bottles, suggests Irish monks made pilgrimages all the way to Egypt. And obviously those seven holy Egyptian monks in Ulster made the trip the other way.

But do these connections between Egypt and Ireland, tenuous as they may seem, really connect in any way with Saint Patrick, justifying this as a Saint Patrick's Day post? I'm glad you asked.

Saint Patrick's life has been much encrusted with mythology (the snakes, the Shamrock, etc.) and all we can really say for certain is what he himself told us in his autobiographical Confession: he was born somewhere on the western coast of Roman Britain (so the Apostle of Ireland was British, but before there was such a thing as an Englishman since the Angles and Saxons were not yet present: he probably spoke old British, an ancestor of Welsh), was kidnapped and enslaved in Ireland, later escaped and joined the church, and returned as the apostle of Ireland. But very ancient biographies (though not his own autobiographical account, one of the few vernacular Latin works to survive from the period) say that he studied for the priesthood at the Abbey of Lérins off the south coast of France. This was a Mediterranean island abbey much influenced by the church of Egypt and the rule of Saint Anthony of Egypt, and according to some accounts, many Coptic monks were present there. There's no certainty that Patrick ever studied there, but then, he studied somewhere, and this is the only place claimed by the early accounts. So Patrick himself may have had direct links to the Egyptian church. (And remember that until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD — by which time Patrick was already a bishop in Ireland, himself dying in 461 by most accounts — the Coptic Church and the rest of Christendom were still in full communion.)

There may be even more to it than this. A few linguists believe that the Celtic languages, though Indo-European in their basic structure, have a "substratum" of some previous linguistic element that is not found in other Indo-European languages, only in Celtic, but some aspects of which are also found in Afro-Asiatic languages, particularly Berber and Egyptian (of which Coptic, of course, is the late form). I'm certainly not qualified to judge such linguistically abstruse theories, and know neither Irish nor Coptic, and they seem to have little to do with the question of Egyptian-Irish Christian influences. But it helps remind us that the ancient world was more united by the sea than divided by it, and that the Roman Empire stretched from the British Isles to Mesopotamia.

While the links are tenuous, they appear to be real. Irish historians accept some level of Egyptian influence in the Christianization of Ireland, and Coptic historians love to dwell on the subject, since it lets them claim a link to the earliest high Christian art and culture of Western Europe. If Irish monasticism preserved the heritage of the ancient world and rebuilt the West after the barbarian invasions, and if the Irish church is a daughter of the Egyptian church, then the West owes more to Egypt than most would imagine.

I first heard a discussion of this in a presentation by the Coptic Church's bishop in charge of ecumenical outreach, Bishop Samweel, back in the early 1970s. I later ran across several references to it in British orientalist literature (Stanley Lane-Poole seems to have been particularly fond of it, and I think he places Desert Ulaidh near Carrickfergus), and continue to find it intriguing, if never quite clear enough to nail down precisely.

Bishop Samweel, mentioned above, met an unfortunate end by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by the way. When Anwar Sadat deposed Coptic Pope Shenouda III in 1981, Sadat named Samweel — considered one of the Coptic church's leading figures after Shenouda — head of a council of bishops to run the church while the Patriarch was in exile. Due to this appointment, Bishop Samweel was seated on the reviewing stand behind Sadat on October 6, 1981, and died in the volley of fire which killed the President.

Like much of the earliest history of any culture or country, the links between Irish and Egyptian Christianity are fairly well-delineated but their precise origins are untraceable, but tantalizing. Since this is little known to most Westerners or even to Egyptians who aren't Copts, it seemed appropriate to mention it on Saint Patrick's Day.

Erin go bragh. Misr Umm al-Dunya

UPDATE: For other developments since 2009, see also "The Faddan More Psalter: More Evidence of the Coptic Links to Early Irish Christianity," posted last year about an Irish psalmbook with a cover stiffened with Egyptian papyrus.

Greening of the Pyramids and Sphinx

 I did my Saint Patrick's Day post on Friday, but couldn't resist passing this along. Via Zeinobia's Egyptian Chronicles blog, the Irish Embassy in Cairo arranged this on Thursday evening:

The Annual Saint Patrick's Day Post on the Links Between Ireland and Egypt

Coptic Wheel Cross

Sunday is Saint Patrick's Day, and traditionally each year I repeat my 2009 post on the tenuous but genuine evidence of links between the early Christian church of Ireland the early Coptic church.

Coptic Ankh Cross

There were certainly links of some sort; there is an Irish pilgrimage book describing visiting the desert of Scetis (Wadi Natrun); there is a reference to three Egyptian monks burief in Ulster; a bottle for holy water or oil found in Ireland shows the twin camels of the pilgrim shrine of Saint Menas near Alexandria, and perhaps most obviously both Copts and Celts used the wheeled cross emblem. In the years since my original post, the Faddan More Psalter, dug up in an Irish bog, has a lining of Egyptian papyrus

Irish Standing Wheel Cross

Even Saint Patrick himself reportedly studied for the priesthood at the Abbey of Lérins off the southern coast of France, an abbey following the rule of St. Anthony of Egypt and perhaps including Egyptian monks. The Christian Mediterranean was much more unified in those days of late antiquity, and before the Coptic Church and the Western churches divided after the Council of Chalcedon.

Celtic Wheel Cross

(The Irish dating for Easter was also different from that in Western Europe, and nearer the eastern tradition.)

For more details see the original 2009 post.

The Faddan More Psalter: More Evidence of the Coptic Links to Early Irish Christianity

Okay, we've been stuck in the last couple of centuries most of the week, so let's talk a bit about the eighth century AD, shall we?

Every Saint Patrick's day, I repeat a post I wrote in 2009 on the connections between the early Coptic Church and the early Christian church in Ireland. There are many tantalizing links, from the use of the "wheel cross" in both churches to Egyptian monks buried in Ireland, and Saint Patrick himself may have studied with Egyptian monks at Lerins off the coast of France. Now (hat tip to the Coptic Literature and Manuscripts page), we find in this report on "The Faddan More Psalter" from County Tipperary, dated to the 8th century, and referring to the book itself and its materials:

It was carried in a larger leather book cover, stiffened with papyrus, that had been manufactured for some other book, and this object itself evokes the humid heat of the Nile Delta, where warble flies buzzed around the ears of Coptic cattle. Emphasising the extraordinary character of the book’s very survival is the fact that in many cases, it was the inky letters themselves on the pages that preserved the vellum, whereas the rest of the pages were destroyed. Finally, the book and its cover were thrust down into a bog pool, together with a pig-skin bag and covered with a piece of white-haired calf hide.

Leaving aside how archaeologists determined what religion the "Coptic cattle" were, the key element here seems to be that this Irish psalter has a leather book cover stiffened with papyrus. Papyrus is not, of course, growing on the banks of the Shannon or the Liffey, to the best of my knowledge.

So it's one more piece of circumstantial evidence of the links between the two churches. Actually I think this the same artifact referred to in this 2010 post,  but it's now on public display. There may be many ways to explain the papyrus, but there's sufficient other evidence of links between the two countries, probably much earlier than the 8th century.

Translating James Joyce Into Arabic . . .

. . . isn't easy. But then I think you knew that. This Egypt Independent article notes that Joyce's style has been emulated (especially stream-of-consciousness), by Naguib Mahfouz among others. But translation is more of a challenge. Some of the stories from Dubliners have been translated, but two efforts to translate Ulysses have gone unfinished. (Did they get to Molly Bloom's soliloquy and give up?)

It's funny: they don't even mention Finnegan's Wake. I wonder why?

The Annual Saint Patrick's Day Post on Early Irish Links to Egypt

Tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day, when traditionally since 2009 I repeat my posting on the faint (but real) traces of early links between the Coptic Church of Egypt and the early Irish Christian Church. The original post, unchanged except for fixing typos, is below. One update appeared in 2010 when an Egyptian papyrus was dug up in an Irish bog, further strengthening the evidence.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day everyone, an appropriate wish here since the Irish Church Patrick founded seems to have been the religious and monastic daughter of the Church of Egypt (the Coptic Church).

Ah, you're thinking: he's really reaching this time, trying to find a way to work Saint Patrick's Day into a blog on the Middle East. My name is, after all, Michael Collins Dunn, and I'm therefore rarely assumed to have Greek or Japanese ancestry, but actually it's not a reach to find a reason for a Saint Patrick's Day post on the Middle East, since Irish Christianity has ancient, if somewhat hard to document, links to Egypt, and Saint Patrick himself may have studied alongside Egyptian monks. They say everyone's Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, but I'm going to explore how Egypt and Ireland have links dating back to the earliest days of Christianity in the West. And while some of the evidence is a bit hazy, none of this is crackpot theory. I warned you that I started out as a medievalist, and still have flashbacks sometimes. Forgive me if I can't footnote every statement here.

Anyone who has ever seen one of the standing crosses that are a familiar feature of medieval and post-classical Irish Christian sites will know what the Celtic Cross or "wheel cross" looks like; anyone who has ever set foot in a Coptic Church will know what a Coptic Cross looks like; unfortunately the illustrations at Wikipedia's Coptic Cross site don't include a precise example, but the wheel cross is common among Egyptian Copts as well, and can be seen on many churches in Egypt today. The wheel cross is not an obvious derivation of the Christian cross, and many think it is an adaptation of the ancient Egyptian Ankh symbol, so what is it doing on those Irish standing cross towers?

Sure, iconography can repeat itself: both Indians in India and Native Americans used the swastika long before Hitler did, and so on. But the Celtic Cross/Coptic Cross similarity is not the only link. There is pretty decent evidence that Christianity in Ireland, if not immediately derived from Egypt, was closely linked to the Egyptian Church. An ancient litany in the Book of Leinster prays for "the seven holy Egyptian monks, who lie in Desert Ulaidh." The place mentioned is somewhere in Ulster, with many placing it in Antrim: perhaps suggestively, "desert" or "disert" in Irish place names meant a place where monks lived apart from the world as anchorites, modeled on the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Syria. "Ulaidh" just means Ulster.Who these seven holy Egyptian monks were is unclear, but they died in Ulster and were sufficiently venerated to be remembered in a litany. [2012 Update: See also here.]

It is often said (I haven't got a firm cite though) that holy water bottles found in Ireland carry the twin-camel emblem associated with the Shrine of Saint Menas west of Alexandria. (Menas was one of the major patron saints of Egypt, his shrine a major pilgrimage center, and his cult extended far beyond Egypt.) If so, I don't think the Irish were using local camels as models. There are also said to be tombstones in old Irish ogham writing that refer to the burial of so-and-so "the Egyptian." The earliest Irish forms of monasticism included anchorite communities who withdrew from the world and venerated the tradition of Saint Anthony of Egypt; the early Irish church used an Eastern rather than a Western date for Easter; some aspects of ancient Celtic liturgy resemble eastern liturgies, and there are archaeological evidences (mostly probable Egyptian pottery in Ireland and British — Cornish? — tin in Egypt) of trade between Egypt and the British Isles. "Double" monasteries — where a monastery for monks and a convent for nuns were adjacent — first appeared in Egypt, and were common in Ireland. The evidence may be circumstantial, but there's a lot of it.

I've also heard (but can't Google up the reference just now) that somewhere in the Irish monastic literature there is a pilgrimage guide to the Desert of Scetis, the Egyptian desert region of Coptic monasteries today known as the Wadi Natrun. That, along with the Saint Menas holy water bottles, suggests Irish monks made pilgrimages all the way to Egypt. And obviously those seven holy Egyptian monks in Ulster made the trip the other way.

But do these connections between Egypt and Ireland, tenuous as they may seem, really connect in any way with Saint Patrick, justifying this as a Saint Patrick's Day post? I'm glad you asked.

Saint Patrick's life has been much encrusted with mythology (the snakes, the Shamrock, etc.) and all we can really say for certain is what he himself told us in his autobiographical Confession: he was born somewhere on the western coast of Roman Britain (so the Apostle of Ireland was British, but before there was such a thing as an Englishman since the Angles and Saxons were not yet present: he probably spoke old British, an ancestor of Welsh), was kidnapped and enslaved in Ireland, later escaped and joined the church, and returned as the apostle of Ireland. But very ancient biographies (though not his own autobiographical account, one of the few vernacular Latin works to survive from the period) say that he studied for the priesthood at the Abbey of Lérins off the south coast of France. This was a Mediterranean island abbey much influenced by the church of Egypt and the rule of Saint Anthony of Egypt, and according to some accounts, many Coptic monks were present there. There's no certainty that Patrick ever studied there, but then, he studied somewhere, and this is the only place claimed by the early accounts. So Patrick himself may have had direct links to the Egyptian church. (And remember that until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD — by which time Patrick was already a bishop in Ireland, himself dying in 461 by most accounts — the Coptic Church and the rest of Christendom were still in full communion.)

There may be even more to it than this. A few linguists believe that the Celtic languages, though Indo-European in their basic structure, have a "substratum" of some previous linguistic element that is not found in other Indo-European languages, only in Celtic, but some aspects of which are also found in Afro-Asiatic languages, particularly Berber and Egyptian (of which Coptic, of course, is the late form). I'm certainly not qualified to judge such linguistically abstruse theories, and know neither Irish nor Coptic, and they seem to have little to do with the question of Egyptian-Irish Christian influences. But it helps remind us that the ancient world was more united by the sea than divided by it, and that the Roman Empire stretched from the British Isles to Mesopotamia.

While the links are tenuous, they appear to be real. Irish historians accept some level of Egyptian influence in the Christianization of Ireland, and Coptic historians love to dwell on the subject, since it lets them claim a link to the earliest high Christian art and culture of Western Europe. If Irish monasticism preserved the heritage of the ancient world and rebuilt the West after the barbarian invasions, and if the Irish church is a daughter of the Egyptian church, then tbe West owes more to Egypt than most would imagine.

I first heard a discussion of this in a presentation by the Coptic Church's bishop in charge of ecumenical outreach, Bishop Samweel, back in the early 1970s. I later ran across several references to it in British orientalist literature (Stanley Lane-Poole seems to have been particularly fond of it, and I think he places Desert Ulaidh near Carrickfergus), and continue to find it intriguing, if never quite clear enough to nail down precisely.

Bishop Samweel, mentioned above, met an unfortunate end by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by the way. When Anwar Sadat deposed Coptic Pope Shenouda III in 1981, Sadat named Samweel — considered one of the Coptic church's leading figures after Shenouda — head of a council of bishops to run the church while the Patriarch was in exile. Due to this appointment, Bishop Samweel was seated on the reviewing stand behind Sadat on October 6, 1981, and died in the volley of fire which killed the President.

Like much of the earliest history of any culture or country, the links between Irish and Egyptian Christianity are fairly well-delineated but their precise origins are untraceable, but tantalizing. Since this is little known to most Westerners or even to Egyptians who aren't Copts, it seemed appropriate to mention it on Saint Patrick's Day.

Erin go bragh. Misr Umm al-Dunya.

Saint Patrick's Day Rerun: Ireland and Egypt

You know, with a name like Michael Collins Dunn, I have to appease the ghost of my Irish great-grandmother, at right, by noting Saint Patrick's Day. I'm told she often talked of the Little People, of whom the leprechauns are only a subset, and I don't want them pestering me. Way back in 2009 when this blog was young and spry, I did a lengthy post about the hazy but nonetheless real connections between Egypt and Ireland in the early Christian period, full of Egyptian monks buried in Ireland, Irish guides to pilgrimage in the Wadi Natrun, the curious artistic links (especially the nearly identical Coptic and Celtic wheel crosses), Egyptian glass in Ireland and British tin in Egypt, and Patrick's own apparent familiarity with Egyptian monks. That post is here, and I'd ask longtime readers to read it again, and those who haven't seen it before to do so now. Also note this later post on an Egyotian papyrus found in an Irish bog. Maybe my affinities with Egypt aren't just sentimental; perhaps they're genetic.

And again this year to you all, whether you're raising a Guiness or a Stella or something non-alcoholic, Misr umm al-Dunya and Éirinn go Brách.

Egyptian Papyrus found in Irish Bog

Longtime readers may recall my post of Saint Patrick's Day 2009 on the "Irish-Egyptian connection," the faint traces of early links between Coptic and Irish Christianity. Well, the traces may not be so faint any longer: a psalter dug up in an Irish bog, though written on vellum, has an Egyptian leather cover with a papyrus lining. It dates from the eighth century.

I won't say "I told you so." Oh, wait, I guess I just did.

[Correction: for most of the day this said "dug up in an Irish blog." Freudian slip: an Irish bog.]

For St. Patrick's Day, An Oldie but a Goodie: the Ties Between the Irish and Coptic Traditions

A year ago on Saint Patrick's Day, I discoursed at some length about the hints and clues of ancient links between the early Irish church, including possibly Patrick himself, and the Coptic church of Egypt: the presence of Irish pilgrims in Egypt, of Coptic monks in Ulster, of liturgical and monastic similarities, etc.

Since the blog was less than two months old at the time a lot of my current readers probably weren't following me yet, and most of you probably don't have so much time on your hands as to have read the whole archive, I thought I'd refer you back to it. If you haven't seen it before, enjoy; if you have, I haven't much to add to it but I still think it's little known (and not conclusive), but heck, it's Saint Patrick's Day and my name is Michael Collins Dunn. What can I say?

As I said back then, Misr Umm al-Dunya and Erin go Bragh.

Slainte to you all.

Saint Patrick's Day Special: Patrick and the Irish-Egyptian Connection

Happy Saint Patrick's Day everyone, an appropriate wish here since the Irish Church Patrick founded seems to have been the religious and monastic daughter of the Church of Egypt (the Coptic Church).

Ah, you're thinking: he's really reaching this time, trying to find a way to work Saint Patrick's Day into a blog on the Middle East. My name is, after all, Michael Collins Dunn, and I'm therefore rarely assumed to have Greek or Japanese ancestry, but actually it's not a reach to find a reason for a Saint Patrick's Day post on the Middle East, since Irish Christianity has ancient, if somewhat hard to document, links to Egypt, and Saint Patrick himself may have studied alongside Egyptian monks. They say everyone's Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, but I'm going to explore how Egypt and Ireland have links dating back to the earliest days of Christianity in the West. And while some of the evidence is a bit hazy, none of this is crackpot theory. I warned you that I started out as a medievalist, and still have flashbacks sometimes. Forgive me if I can't footnote every statement here.

Anyone who has ever seen one of the standing crosses that are a familiar feature of medieval and post-classical Irish Christian sites will know what the Celtic Cross or "wheel cross" looks like; anyone who has ever set foot in a Coptic Church will know what a Coptic Cross looks like; unfortunately the illustrations at Wikipedia's Coptic Cross site don't include a precise example, but the wheel cross is common among Egyptian Copts as well, and can be seen on many churches in Egypt today. The wheel cross is not an obvious derivation of the Christian cross, and many think it is an adaptation of the ancient Egyptian Ankh symbol, so what is it doing on those Irish standing cross towers?

Sure, iconography can repeat itself: both Indians in India and Native Americans used the swastika long before Hitler did, and so on. But the Celtic Cross/Coptic Cross similarity is not the only link. There is pretty decent evidence that Christianity in Ireland, if not immediately derived from Egypt, was closely linked to the Egyptian Church. An ancient litany in the Book of Leinster prays for "the seven holy Egyptian monks, who lie in Desert Ulaidh." The place mentioned is somewhere in Ulster, with many placing it in Antrim: perhaps suggestively, "desert" or "disert" in Irish place names meant a place where monks lived apart from the world as anchorites, modeled on the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Syria. "Ulaidh" just means Ulster.Who these seven holy Egyptian monks were is unclear, but they died in Ulster and were sufficiently venerated to be remembered in a litany.

It is often said (I haven't got a firm cite though) that holy water bottles found in Ireland carry the twin-camel emblem associated with the Shrine of Saint Menas west of Alexandria. (Menas was one of the major patron saints of Egypt, his shrine a major pilgrimage center, and his cult extended far beyond Egypt.) If so, I don't think the Irish were using local camels as models. There are also said to be tombstones in old Irish ogham writing that refer to the burial of so-and-so "the Egyptian." The earliest Irish forms of monasticism included anchorite communities who withdrew from the world and venerated the tradition of Saint Anthony of Egypt; the early Irish church used an Eastern rather than a Western date for Easter; some aspects of ancient Celtic liturgy resemble eastern liturgies, and there are archaeological evidences (mostly probable Egyptian pottery in Ireland and British — Cornish? — tin in Egypt) of trade between Egypt and the British Isles. "Double" monasteries — where a monastery for monks and a convent for nuns were adjacent — first appeared in Egypt, and were common in Ireland. The evidence may be circumstantial, but there's a lot of it.

I've also heard (but can't Google up the reference just now) that somewhere in the Irish monastic literature there is a pilgrimage guide to the Desert of Scetis, the Egyptian desert region of Coptic monasteries today known as the Wadi Natrun. That, along with the Saint Menas holy water bottles, suggests Irish monks made pilgrimages all the way to Egypt. And obviously those seven holy Egyptian monks in Ulster made the trip the other way.

But do these connections between Egypt and Ireland, tenuous as they may seem, really connect in any way with Saint Patrick, justifying this as a Saint Patrick's Day post? I'm glad you asked.

Saint Patrick's life has been much encrusted with mythology (the snakes, the Shamrock, etc.) and all we can really say for certain is what he himself told us in his autobiographical Confession: he was born somewhere on the western coast of Roman Britain (so the Apostle of Ireland was British, but before there was such a thing as an Englishman since the Angles and Saxons were not yet present: he probably spoke old British, an ancestor of Welsh), was kidnapped and enslaved in Ireland, later escaped and joined the church, and returned as the apostle of Ireland. But very ancient biographies (though not his own autobiographical account, one of the few vernacular Latin works to survive from the period) say that he studied for the priesthood at the Abbey of Lérins off the south coast of France. This was a Mediterranean island abbey much influenced by the church of Egypt and the rule of Saint Anthony of Egypt, and according to some accounts, many Coptic monks were present there. There's no certainty that Patrick ever studied there, but then, he studied somewhere, and this is the only place claimed by the early accounts. So Patrick himself may have had direct links to the Egyptian church. (And remember that until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD — by which time Patrick was already a bishop in Ireland, himself dying in 461 by most accounts — the Coptic Church and the rest of Christendom were still in full communion.)

There may be even more to it than this. A few linguists believe that the Celtic languages, though Indo-European in their basic structure, have a "substratum" of some previous linguistic element that is not found in other Indo-European languages, only in Celtic, but some aspects of which are also found in Afro-Asiatic languages, particularly Berber and Egyptian (of which Coptic, of course, is the late form). I'm certainly not qualified to judge such linguistically abstruse theories, and know neither Irish nor Coptic, and they seem to have little to do with the question of Egyptian-Irish Christian influences. But it helps remind us that the ancient world was more united by the sea than divided by it, and that the Roman Empire stretched from the British Isles to Mesopotamia.

While the links are tenuous, they appear to be real. Irish historians accept some level of Egyptian influence in the Christianization of Ireland, and Coptic historians love to dwell on the subject, since it lets them claim a link to the earliest high Christian art and culture of Western Europe. If Irish monasticism preserved the heritage of the ancient world and rebuilt the West after the barbarian invasions, and if the Irish church is a daughter of the Egyptian church, then tbe West owes more to Egypt than most would imagine.

I first heard a discussion of this in a presentation by the Coptic Church's bishop in charge of ecumenical outreach, Bishop Samweel, back in the early 1970s. I later ran across several references to it in British orientalist literature (Stanley Lane-Poole seems to have been particularly fond of it, and I think he places Desert Ulaidh near Carrickfergus), and continue to find it intriguing, if never quite clear enough to nail down precisely.

Bishop Samweel, mentioned above, met an unfortunate end by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by the way. When Anwar Sadat deposed Coptic Pope Shenouda III in 1981, Sadat named Samweel — considered one of the Coptic church's leading figures after Shenouda — head of a council of bishops to run the church while the Patriarch was in exile. Due to this appointment, Bishop Samweel was seated on the reviewing stand behind Sadat on October 6, 1981, and died in the volley of fire which killed the President.

Like much of the earliest history of any culture or country, the links between Irish and Egyptian Christianity are fairly well-delineated but their precise origins are untraceable, but tantalizing. Since this is little known to most Westerners or even to Egyptians who aren't Copts, it seemed appropriate to mention it on Saint Patrick's Day.

Erin go bragh. Misr Umm al-Dunya.