The Coptic, not originally Celtic, ring or wheel cross

Minneapolis Institute of Art

"The Irish wheel cross, the symbol of Celtic Christianity, has recently been shown to have been a Coptic invention, depicted on a Coptic burial pall of the fifth [to sixth] century, [two or] three centuries before the design first appears in Scotland and Ireland."

     William Dalrymple, "The Egyptian connection," The New York review of books 55, no. 16 (October 23, 2008):  79 (77-80), citing Walter Horn, "On the origin of the Celtic cross, in The forgotten hermitage of Skellig Michael, ed. Walter Horn, Jenny White Marshall, and Grellan D. Rourke (University of California Press, 1990), 91-92, 95.  Horn:

     Students of Celtic iconography have believed that the transformation of the ring cross with equal arms into the developed ring cross was an autochthonous Irish development.  I had no reason to question this belief until the summer of 1984 when during an incidental visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, I was startled to find a Coptic burial shroud of wool and linen that the museum's catalogue assigned to the fifth to seventh century.  The cross shown in this textile is so strikingly similar in design to Irish ring crosses of the eighth and ninth centuries that it is difficult to preclude a developmental interconnection.

     The design on the Coptic textile in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts compels us to conclude that the shape of the developed ring cross as well as the custom of carrying crosses fashioned in this manner in religious processions was influenced by new stimuli from Egypt that reached the Celtic territories of Ireland and England in the eighth century.