On Wednesday, June 8, 2005, at 09:13 PM, ljcrain1 wrote:

> "Who were the
>> Picts?"
> ==================================================
>  Good question
     Led me here
>

> http://members.tripod.com/~Halfmoon/

The Picts


"Venit et extremis legio praetenta Britannis, Quae Scotto dat frena
truci ferronque notatas Perlegit examines Picto moriente figuras"


The above words of the Roman poet Claudian perhaps give the only
physical description of the race of people known as Picts who once
raided Roman Britain, defeated the Angle-Saxon invaders and in one of
the great mysteries of the ancient world, disappeared as a separate
people by the end of the tenth century. "This legion, which curbs the
savage Scot and studies the designs marked with iron on the face of the
dying Pict," are the Claudian words which give some insight as to the
name given by Rome to the untamed tribes north of Hadrian's Wall . The
Romans called this pre-Celtic people Pictii, or "Painted," although
Claudius' words are proof that (as claimed by many historians), the
ancient Picts actually tattooed their bodies with designs. To the
non-Roman Celtic world of Scots and Irish and the many tribes of Belgic
England and Wales they were known as "Cruithni" and for many centuries
they represented the unbridled fury of a people who refused to be
brought under the yoke of Rome or any foreign invader.

The origins of the Picts are clouded with many fables, legends and
fabrications, and there are as many theories as to who the Picts were
(Celtic, Basque, Scythians, etc.), where they came from, what they ate
or drank, and what language they spoke, as there once were Pictish
raiders defying the mighty legions of Rome. Legend tells us, perhaps
incorrectly, that Rome's mighty Ninth Legion, the famous "Hispana"
legion, which had earned its battle honors in Iberia, conquering Celtic
Spain for Caesar is never heard of again when faced against the Picts
(they actually surfaced years later in Israel). We do know that the
Picts may have spoken a non-Celtic language, (although many Celtophiles
feel the Picts spoke a Brythonic-Gaulish form of Celtic language) as
St. Columba's biographer clearly stated that the Irish saint needed a
translator to preach to the Pictish King Brude, son of Maelchon, at
Brude's court near the shores of Loch Ness. At other times the Pictish
king lived at Scone, and we know there often were two separate Pictish
kingdoms of Northern and Southern Picts. We know that they were mighty
sailors, for the Romans feared the Pictish Navy almost as much as the
wild men who came down from the Highlands to attack the villages along
the wall. We also know that as far as the 9th century they wrote in
stone a language which was not far in design fromthe Celtic "Ogham"
script but was not Celtic in context, although Prof. Richard Cox thinks
that it is Norse, which has really turned the carefully galvanized
world of Pictish academic opinions upside down. By the legacy of their
standing stones, we know that they were great artists as well. It is
also well known that the Picts were one of Western culture's rare
matrilinear societies; that is, bloodlines passed through the mother,
and Pictish kings were not succeeded by their sons, but by their
brothers or nephews or cousins as traced by the female line in
(according to the scholar Dr. Anthony Jackson) a complicated series of
intermarriages by seven royal houses.

It was this rare form of succession which in the year 845 A.D. gave the
crown of Alba and the title Rex Pictorum to a Celtic Scot, son of a
Pictish princess by the name of Kenneth, Son of Alpin. This Kenneth
MacAlpin, whose father's kingship over the Scots had been earlier taken
over by the Pictish king Oengus, who ruled as both king of Picts and
Scots, and who possibly harbored a deep ethnic hatred for the Picts,
and in the event known as "MacAlpin's Treason" murdered the members of
the remaining seven royal houses thus preserving the Scottish line for
kingship of Alba and the eventual erasure from history of the Pictish
race, culture and history.

The true mystery in Pictish studies is the extraordinary disappearance
of the culture of the tattoed nations of the North. The fact that
within three generations of MacAlpin kings, the Picts were almost held
in legendary status as a people of the past must be the real question
to be answered, and the historian is consumed by legend, lack of facts
and the nagging story of an obscure intrigue leading to genocide of a
people, its customs, culture, laws and art.

It is in the sculptured stones of Scotland, left behind by the Pictish
and proto-Pictish people of ancient Alba and present day Scotland that
we can find some information about a mighty race of people who defied
and defeated Rome and who slaughtered the invincible barbarian hordes
of Angles Germans at Nechtansmere in Angus, and hammered the invading
Vikings back home thus forever preserving a separate culture and race
in Scotland. It is in these sometimes mighty, sometimes delicate stones
that the history of ancient Scotland is now recorded. Were they
descendants of the ancient Basque people of northern Spain once known
to Rome as Pictones, who then migrated to northern Britain after they
had helped the Empire defeat the seagoing people of Biscay? Or are they
descendants of the dark tribes of ancient Stygia and the huge Eastern
steepes? No one knows - only the Stones.
============================================
There's more
cheers
pjd
6/8/05


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