Human communication by sound found a natural progression to symbols of some kind to represent those sounds. Our alphabet is one such representation. Admittedly, in English we have played with those symbols and sounds during the history of the development of the language, and caused all sorts of problems to foreigners. One wonders, therefore, not at the fact that early representations of sounds existed long before our presently accepted alphabet, but at what those sounds were like. Ogam was one of those representations.
This system dated from around the fourth century AD and has been found on ancient Irish and British artifacts. It consisted of a set of strokes, scratches or notches, and was used by Druids. Over 500 Ogam inscriptions have been found, and because of the use of Latin in the same historical period we know how to translate the system, although not what it sounded like. In the fifth century the Druids were in decline, and as Christianity, and hence Latin, became more dominant, Ogam died out.
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