Who were the Picts, the early inhabitants of Scotland?
The Picts created two politically and militarily powerful kingdoms.
The Picts were an Iron Age people who lived in the northern and eastern parts of what is now Scotland, flourishing from approximately the fourth century A.D. to the ninth century. Originally, the Picts were tribal peoples organized into loose confederations, but they later created two politically and militarily powerful kingdoms and dominated a large part of Scotland.
“Picti is a Latin term that literally means ‘painted people,”‘ said Alex Woolf, a medieval historian at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The term is likely a reference to the prevalent Pictish custom of body painting or tattooing. “At first Picti is a pejorative term used by Romans,” Woolf told Live Science. “But when you get to the ‘Dark Ages,’ perhaps around 600 or 700, it’s clear that something has happened, and those tribes have now come to self-identify as Picti.”
Roman writers depicted the Picts as fearsome warriors — savage, barbarous, troublesome and backward. While the Celtic people south of modern-day Scotland became Romanized following the Roman conquest of much of Britain in A.D. 43, the people in Scotland remained on the periphery of the Roman Empire, frequently clashing with Roman legions but never entirely succumbing to Roman rule. The Romans, after several failed attempts to conquer the peoples of Scotland, eventually erected barriers — Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall — as ways of keeping the Picts, and their sometime allies, the Scots, out of the south.
The Picts flourished following the Roman withdrawal from Britain around A.D. 400, but by the end of the tenth century A.D., the Picts had seemingly vanished, after merging with the Scots and Gaels, who originally came from Ireland. Recent scholarship is painting a fuller, more realistic picture of the Picts than the one presented by the Romans, and is shedding light on their unique culture and society.
“The Picts are Celtic peoples,” Woolf said, “and although there would have been a lot of regional differences, they would have been broadly the same as the other Britons. When we look at the evidence for the Pictish language, which albeit is meager, it is very similar to early Welsh.”
There have been few DNA studies of Pictish people, said Woolf. “We only have a few good samples from the Pictish heartland,” he said. “So far, there’s no suggestion that the Picts are different from the other Britons, but we’ve only got a handful, probably less than a dozen ancient DNA samples that have been processed and published.”
Prior to the current scholarly consensus, the Picts were the subject of much speculation and there was limited evidence about their existence — so much so that for a long time the Picts were known as the “lost people of Europe.” Past scholars disagreed about where the Picts originated, how their society was organized and the roots of their language, among other topics. Except for largely enigmatic carved symbols that may represent a written language, the Picts left no written records. So most information comes from their adversaries, the Romans, though later sources, such as the Pictish Chronicle and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, also mention them. The former is a Pictish king list supposedly written in the tenth century, though most scholars have dismissed it as pseudo-history. The latter was written in the ninth century during the reign of Alfred the Great and is a year-by-year chronicle of events that historians claim is a mix of both history and fantasy.
The first recorded reference, by the Roman orator Eumenius, in A.D. 297, briefly mentioned the Picts in a poem dedicated to the emperor Constantius II (ruled A.D. 337 to 361). Eumenius referred to the “Picts and Hiberni [Irish],” as intractable enemies of the Romans. According to World History Encyclopedia, the Roman writer Tacitus (A.D. 56 to circa 120) also mentioned the Picts in his historical writings, though he used the term “Caledonians” rather than Picts. He described them as “red-haired” and “large-limbed,” and wrote that they were possibly of Germanic origin.
Later, the Roman soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote in the fourth century, described the Picts as being divided into two tribes called Dicalydones and Verturiones. He described the Picts during this period as warlike, “roving at large and causing great devastation.”
St. Bede the Venerable, an Anglo-Saxon monk and writer who lived in the eighth century, described the Picts in “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People.” In this work, a history of Britain from the Roman invasion in A.D. 43 to 731, Bede claimed that the Picts originally sailed from Scythia (the vast steppes of Eurasia east of the Black Sea) and landed in Ireland. The Irish denied them settlement, so the Picts moved on.
The Picts then sailed over into Britain and began to inhabit the northern parts, for the Britons possessed the southern parts. The Picts had no wives and so asked the Scots for them; they would only give them on the condition that when any question of succession should arise, they should choose a king from the female royal line rather than from the male: this custom, as is well known, has been observed among the Picts to this day.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, the 12th-century medieval chronicler who wrote the influential but highly fanciful book “The History of the Kings of Britain,” also claimed that the Picts originally came from Scythia. Echoing the work of Bede, Geoffrey described how, during the reign of Claudius, the Picts arrived in a fleet of ships commanded by their leader Rodric during the reign of a legendary British king named Marius. According to Geoffrey, Rodric landed in the north of England and began to ravage the country. Marius defeated the Picts in a battle but afterward allowed them to stay, giving them the province of Caithness, in the far northeast of Scotland.
Source: livescience.com
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Who were the Picts, the early inhabitants of Scotland?