ANCIENT IRISH CIVILISATION
Plan of Tara, as it exists at the present day.
Constructed to illustrate Dr. Joyce’s Social Histories of Ancient Ireland.
From the two Plans given by Petrie in his Essay on Tara.
THE STORY
OF
ANCIENT IRISH CIVILISATION
BY
P. W. JOYCE, LL.D., M.R.I.A.
One of the Commissioners for the Publication of the Ancient Laws of Ireland
President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, Ireland
LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.
DUBLIN: M. H. GILL & SON, LTD.
1907
Printed by Ponsonby & Gibbs, University Press, Dublin.
PREFACE.
This little book has been written and published with the main object ofspreading as widely as possible among our people, young and old, aknowledge of the civilisation and general social condition of Ireland fromthe fifth or sixth to the twelfth century, when it was wholly governed bynative rulers. The publication comes at an appropriate time, when there isan awakening of interest in the Irish language, and in Irish lore of everykind, unparalleled in our history.
But the book has a further mission. There are many English and manyAnglo-Irish people who think, merely from ignorance, that Ireland was abarbarous and half-savage country before the English came among the peopleand civilised them. This book, so far as it finds its way among the twoclasses above mentioned, will, I fancy, open their eyes. They will learnfrom it that the old Irish, so far from being barbarous,[Pg vi] were a bright,intellectual, and cultured people; that they had professions, trades, andindustries pervading the whole population, with clearly defined ranks andgrades of society, all working under an elaborate system of native laws;and that in the steadying and civilising arts and pursuits of everydaylife they were as well advanced, as orderly, and as regular as any otherEuropean people of the same period. They will find too that, as regardseducation, scholarship, and general mental culture, the Irish of thoseearly ages were in advance of all other countries of Europe; that theyhelped most materially to spread Christianity, and to revive learning, allover the Continent; and that to Irish missionaries and scholars, theAnglo-Saxons of the Heptarchy were indebted for the greater part of theirChristianity, and for the preservation and restoration of learning when itwas threatened with extinction all over England by the ravages of theDanes.
But there were, and are, Englishmen better informed about our country.More than three hundred years ago the great English poet,[Pg vii] Edmund Spenser,lived for some time in Ireland, and made himself well acquainted with itshistory. He knew what it was in past ages; so that in one of his poems hespeaks of the time
“When Irela BU KİTABI OKUMAK İÇİN ÜYE OLUN VEYA GİRİŞ YAPIN!
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