Did anyone ever determine just who the heck the picts were? Germanic? Celtic? Neither? And where they went?
It is thought they came from the north. Many Scots are descendents of Scandanavians.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-truth-about-the-picts-886098.html
Neither. When the Romans first occupied Britain, the Picts were speaking a language that was indecipherable to the them. The Romans guessed they were Iberians. The Romans never tried to occupy Scotland, and the Picts eventually picked up the Gaelic language from the “Scots” who got there from Ireland during late Roman times.
As always, I’m impressed by FR’s level of discussion on something that’s really kind of arcane, nice job, all.
The Picts were a Celtic people, probably P-Celtic (like the Welsh and Cornish for example), and this is based on the surviving snippets of their language.
The Scoti were a tribe in Ireland that colonized from Ireland in the early Middle Ages.
The Romans invaded Scotland a couple of times, but wrapping up the conquest wound up taking a back seat to some much more pressing issue elsewhere in the Roman Empire, so it never got finished. The full extent of Roman presence in highland Scotland is not yet known — that’s a guess based on the discovery of a Roman settlement found in NE Ireland — but there was never any “Eagle of the Ninth” loss of a Roman legion in Scotland. That’s a fun book for kids and younger teens, BTW, that whole series was a fave back then for yours truly, though I never re-read it.
The extent of the threat from the Caledonians can be summed up by the fact that the Romans manned a 70+ mile long Hadrian’s Wall with a minimum complement of legionaries and relied on imported auxiliaries (such as Sarmatian cavalry) to provide a deterrent, like a security guard does in a shopping mall.
The Picts are generally believed to have been Celts, related to the Brythons of the southern island conquered by the Romans.
The Picts are generally believed to have been Celts, related to the Brythons of the southern island conquered by the Romans.
“Who were the Picts”
That’s a great question. Some think they were Celts, maybe, maybe not. The Celts were from central europe and spoke an Indo-European language. (The Iberians weren’t Celts ) Early missionaries considered their language very different. Venerable Bede called the Picts, “Scythian” which some think means Scandinavian. What if they were exactly what he called them Scythians which were a horse culture from the Eurasian steppes and Black Sea. The Picts had horses and horse culture. I can’t help but notice how similar images of Pictish horses are to Scythian. How they got there is anybodies guess but it’s not to much of a stretch to see them as mercenary horse soldiers stranded in a strange land who got the urge to settle down.