From the beginning of Celtic scholarship in English, mention of Egyptians in ancient Ireland was identified. But allusions to “seven Egyptian monks in Desert Uilaidh” in the Litany of the Céile Dé from the seventh century Book of Leinster and other passages in monastic manuscripts were dismissed as merely symbolic poetry. The disrespectful attitude toward Gaelic culture fostered by centuries of colonial oppression assumed that the impoverished island on the ragged edge of Europe could not possibly have had any connection with the Eastern Mediterranean.

But that view of Ireland as a remote backwater is no longer credible. Ireland was not on the uncultured fringe of civilization; instead, it was a full player in the intellectual and cultural life of Europe in late antiquity.

Archaeology has now documented frequent commerce between Ireland and the whole Mediterranean world – from prehistory forward. Over the years, more and more similarities, links, and borrowings between ancient Ireland and the East have been found in art, architecture, literature, and liturgy, hymnody, and monastic custom.

For instance: the design of the Madonna in the Book of Kells follows a classic Coptic iconographic model.

For instance: Some passages in the Antiphonary of Bangor are taken word-for-word from the Coptic Book of the Hours. Some images of Christ on Irish high crosses match those of Osiris in Egyptian pyramids.

For instance: after pioneering research in the Caucus Mountains, a 1996 report found the ancestor of the Irish High Cross in Armenia.

For instance: in 2006 the first decorated manuscript found in 200 years was found – and it was made in a fashion found nowhere else but in the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, and was protected in an Egyptian-style satchel. Moreover, it contained Egyptian papyrus in its binding.

The list goes on. Does all this amount to proof? There are no passports from the fourth through the seventh centuries. But there is no other plausible explanation, as the Harvard Celtic Colloquium concluded in 1982.