Chapter One - “Iran” in Irish Nationalist Antiquarian Imaginations: The Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century

Summary

Irish antiquarians in the late eighteenth century did not invent the idea of Ireland's oriental past. As far back as the ‘Middle Ages,’ Irish scholars had presumed various oriental origins of the ancient Gaelic population of Ireland. In the Middle Ages, Scythia was the prevalent choice as the originary home of the Gaels, with Phoenicia later becoming the main alternative to this model. The supposition of Eastern origins of some of the earliest population settlements in Ireland can be traced back to sources antedating the initial twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquests in Ireland. A case in point is the elev-enth-century Lebor Gabála Érenn (variously translated as The Book of the Taking of Ireland or as The Book of Invasions), which with some alterations in its different surviving versions largely relied on earlier works by “Irish learned men, the filid, whose duty it was to preserve the genealogies and uphold the honour of their kings.” Among other (also legendary) oriental ancestors of early populations of Ireland, one recension of Lebor Gabála Érenn designated Fénius Farsaid (also appearing as Fenius Farsa)—purportedly a historical Scythian prince—as the ancestor of the Gaels, who reportedly arrived in Ireland following earlier smaller-scale settlements on the island by other population groups and subsequently constituted the major population branch of ancient Ireland. Farsaid's lineage was traced back through his supposed father Baath to Japheth, one of Noah's sons. In the seventeenth century, the oriental pedigree of the ancient Irish continued to be traced to Scythians, notwithstanding the designation of Scythians in ancient Greek and Roman sources as uncivilized and savage, albeit brave. The presumed pedigree of Farsaid and the Scythian designation of the early Gaels, which traced their route from Scythia to Ireland by way of the Iberian Peninsula (more specifically “Spain”), was an early version of what became the “Milesian” model of Gaelic ancestry that continued to be reproduced in different forms well into the twentieth century. The Gaels in this ancestral lineage of the ancient Irish were descendants of Scythian followers of Miledh/Milesius (Míl Espáine) and, hence, designated ‘Milesians,’ with Miledh/Milesius considered a descendant of Fénius Farsaid.

Whereas the ‘medieval’ Scythian theory relegated the ancient population of Ireland to a state of general “pagan” savagery prior to the introduction of Christianity to the island after the fifth century, by the seventeenth century some Irish antiquarians were hailing Ireland's ancient pre-Christian oriental past as a civilizational Golden Age.