Phoenician Ireland: Charles Vallancey (1725–1812) and the Oriental Roots of Celtic Culture

Abstract

In the eighteenth century Ireland was not the centre of the world.1 It was a land dominated and exploited by England, with a rural population who were regarded as barbarians at best by the gentlemen at home in the clubs and coffee houses of England’s cities. For them, the native language of the Irish was no more than an incomprehensible squawking that needn’t be accorded any further significance. Would it not, then, be a magnificent surprise, almost a humbling of Anglophile arrogance, if the Irish turned out to be the descendants of the ancient Chaldees, Phoenicians, Scythians and Indians, the crowning jewel in a chain of heroic acts reaching back into a prehistory, which was able to supersede any other chain of historical events? Would it not be a wonder if the Land of Saints and Scholars, with its ancient monuments, poetry and songs, were the final record of a primordial European people whose wisdom united the learning of the whole ancient East? The history of the early modern period is full of examples of national idealisation, of phantasmagoric constructions that raised one’s own people to the skies.2 In Ireland’s case, in the late eighteenth century this eulogy would be sung by a man of whom one would perhaps have expected it least, namely a general in the British army, whose natural habitat was the aforementioned coffee houses. I will here present this scholar, Charles Vallancey, and his works: I will try to outline the basic elements of his decidedly idiosyncratic construction of history and in so doing set it in the wider context of the history of European antiquarianism, a field not short of eccentrics. A few examples, at least, will be given to illustrate Vallancey’s intellectual world, working habits and method; in particular I wish to show that