Who were the Picts?

Tattooed warriors
Every schoolbook history of Roman Britain makes some sort of reference to the Picts. Together with the Scots, they are usually presented as fierce, tattooed warriors who kept the Roman legions at bay north of Hadrian's Wall and frequently raided Roman Britain south of the wall.

Yet we know very little for certain about the Picts, and virtually nothing about how they saw themselves. They left behind no written records, apart from a king-list that may have had Pictish authors, and the archaeological record can fill in only a few of the gaps in our knowledge.

Firing imaginations
What they have left behind, however, has been enough to fire the imaginations of would-be historians and writers down through the centuries. Most of these visions of the Picts have borne little relation to any actual archaeological or historical evidence. Sir Walter Scott, for example, connected the Picts with the brochs of northern Scotland and portrayed them as a people of exceptionally small stature after crawling through a gallery in the Broch of Mousa in the Shetlands. John Buchan, in turn, wrote a short story about the 'troll-like' Picts of Galloway.

In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the Picts were particularly short, and scholarly research has fairly conclusively demolished the possibility of any Pictish connection with Galloway. Scotland's brochs, meanwhile, which are still often referred to as Pictish houses or castles, predate the Pictish period. They may or may not have been built by the ancestors of the Picts.

First written record
The first written reference to the Picts was by the Roman eulogist, Eumenius, in 297 AD. He referred to them as Picti, which is usually translated as the painted or tattooed ones. It was an image that stuck, being repeated by Isidore of Seville around 600 AD and finding its way into much later drawings and descriptions of the Picts. It is possible, though, that Picti was merely a Latinised version of the Picts' name for themselves.

Place name evidence
We are unlikely ever to know for sure because the only significant survival of the Pictish language today is in place names. These bear strong similarities with 'Brythonic Celtic', indicating a common linguistic and cultural heritage with the other Brythonic or 'Celtic' tribes of ancient Britain. They also give us a good indication of the centres of Pictish settlement. Place names beginning with 'Aber' (such as Aberdeen), 'Lhan' (Lhanbryde), 'Pit' (Pittodrie) and 'Fin' (Findochty), for example, are all indicative of past Pictish settlement.

Archaeological evidence
It has been left to archaeology to attempt to fill in the gaps in the written or linguistic record. But archaeological evidence for the Picts and their way of life is also scarce. Some Pictish forts and other structures have been excavated; and a number of Pictish hoards have been found, which include some beautiful and ornate silverwork of the kind that Time Team tried to recreate as part of the Wemyss programme in the 2005 series.

The Pictish artefacts that have most captured the public imagination, though, are the enigmatic and often elaborately carved stones that have come to represent Pictish culture in the public mind. The mysterious symbols carved on these stones (and often found also in Pictish silverwork and other objects) have so far defied interpretation by experts. So too have the inscriptions found on many of these stones that use a variation of the Ogham runes that are also found on other Scottish and Irish sites.

Perhaps one day new interpretations or discoveries will allow archaeologists to decipher these runes and symbols. Until then, we must be satisfied with admiring the skills that enabled a warrior society from the north-east of Scotland to produce objects of such great and lasting beauty.

What became of the Picts?
Just as the Picts appear in the written record suddenly with Eumenius's mention of them in 297 AD, so too they disappear suddenly with the last entry of their king-list, following the death of Causantin mac Cinaeda in 876. But of course the Picts didn't just suddenly appear and then disappear without trace. Just as they were probably the descendants of tribes who had lived in the north-east of Scotland for many years before the Roman world took notice of them, so too their heirs became part of the mixing of populations that eventually led to the formation of modern Scotland.

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