Irish bog Psalter had Egyptian papyrus in binding

THE IRISH BOG PSALTER had Egyptian papyrus in its binding:

Manuscript dug from bog rates among our top 10 biggest finds

By JEROME REILLY (Independent.ie)

Sunday September 05 2010

The Faddan More Psalter, a remarkable 1,200-year-old manuscript found in a north Tipperary bog four years ago, has provided astonishing evidence of links between the early Christian Church in Ireland and the Middle Eastern Coptic Church.

As a painstaking conservation process came to its conclusion, tiny fragments of papyrus were discovered in the lining of the Egyptian-style leather binding of the manuscript, which was unearthed by Eddie Fogarty in a mechanical digger in the townland of Faddan More, not far from Birr, in July 2006.

The discovery of Egyptian papyrus represents the first tangible connection between early Irish Christianity and the Middle-Eastern Coptic Church and has confounded some of the accepted theories about the history of early Christianity in Ireland.

Four years ago the find was heralded by Dr Pat Wallace, director of Ireland's National Museum, as "the most important day in the history of the museum since 1868 when the Ardagh Chalice came in".

The four-year conservation process has strengthened that view.

"It was a miraculous thing that the manuscript survived at all. It was found by Mr Fogarty who was cutting turf.

"It was also remarkable that Mr Fogarty and the family he was working for, the Leonards of Riverstown, were familiar with the work of the National Museum and knew exactly what to do to protect a manuscript found in wet bog.

"They immediately covered it with wet turf and this was absolutely vital in preserving the manuscript. If they hadn't done that it would have been obliterated in a few hours in the sunshine," Dr Wallace told the Sunday Independent.

[...]

I wonder if the Egyptian connection could help explain the origins of the Irish Old Testament pseudepigrapha.

Background here and follow the links.

UPDATE (8 September): Christian Askeland comments on the story at Evangelical Textual Criticism. This is the first I've heard of linguistic connections between Celtic and Coptic. On the face of it, that sounds pretty unlikely to me. Coptic is an Afro-Asiatic language and Celtic an Indo-European one.