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Early
Scotland
The
earliest recorded evidence of man in Scotland is dated to 8,500
B.C. It is thus that a few thousand years before the birth of
Christ, Neolithic men from Spain and France, makers of fire and
herders of sheep and cattle had already made their way to Scotland.
Some archeologists suggest that these people may have built and
used the great chambered cairns which dot the Scottish countryside.
It has also been suggested that their descendants eventually merged
with the Beaker people (who probably came from northern Europe),
and this ethnic union made up the pre-Celtic stock of the northern
lands.
The
link of these early inhabitants to their Iberian ancestors can
be found in the many spiral pattern grooves cut into the rocks
and boulders of this northern land and which can also be found
in Spain, France and Ireland. The design of burial chambers located
in the Orkney islands also provide an important link to the Iberian
origin of their builders. Farming arrived in these islands around
4,000 BC (3-4,000 years after it started in Asia Minor) and as
it replaced the nomadic way of life, the Orkneys became an island
fortress with its many stone settlements. By the time Rome became
a world empire, the Orcadians were recognized by Rome as a sea
power. From recent excavations, it seems that these Orcadian people
were a slim, swarthy Caucasian race, with long, narrow heads.
The
great stone circles such as Sunhoney were probably being built
around 3,300 BC, quite possibly around the same time as the arrival
of the Beaker people from Northern and Central Europe. These newcomers
were of a different ethnic group from the Iberian stock in northern
Britain, as their skulls were much broader and round. Evidence
of contact between these new people and their continental ancestors
have been discovered in several excavations, and seem to indicate
a flourishing trade between ancient Scotland and Europe. It is
thought by many scholars that the union of these two peoples resulted
in the creation of the pre- Celtic stock eventually loosely called
Pict by the Roman and Cruithne by the Celts.
The
arrival of the Celts to Britain and Ireland brings yet another
culture to these northern parts. The Irish call themselves the
"Milesian race," based on the myth that they are descended
from Milesius, a Celtic King of Spain.
The
Celts arrived in Britain around 500 B.C. A nomadic people whose
culture spread from Eastern Europe to Iberia, they were sometimes
described as as fair headed, tall, fierce warriors by the Greeks
(Since many Celts dyed their hair with lye, some historians believe
that this is what the Greeks meant by fair-headed) althought the
Britannic Celts encountered by the Romans were usually described
as dark haired and short. As a warrior culture, it was a Celtic
army which nearly destroyed Rome in her early days and thus forever
made themselves an unforgivable enemy of the Latin empire. Because
the first historical reference to the Picts appears in 297 A.D.,
when they are mentioned as enemies of Rome in the same context
as the Hiberni (Irish), Scotii (Scots) and Saxones (Saxons), many
historians assume that the Picts were simply another Celtic tribe.
Although is quite probable that there was much Celtic stock in
some of the southern tribes in the loose federation of tribes
which eventually made up the Pictish nation, it is my opinion
that the vast majority of the Pictish peoples north of the Forth
were made up mostly from the earlier, pre-Celtic people of northern
Britain. Some historians use Ireland as an example, and Michael
Lynch eloquently states that "Whatever the Picts were, they
are likely, as were other peoples either in post-Roman western
Europe or in contemporary Ireland, to have been an amalgalm of
tribes, headed by a warrior aristocracy which was by nature mobile.
Their culture was the culture of the warrior... ." More on
this later.
The
bottom line is that so little is known, that most Pictophiles
need to make huge leaps and prodigious interpretations of the
"facts" to state their views. The explanations migrate
to this core of "facts" in a futile effort to explain
this mysterious people.
The Romans came to Scotland, often defeated the Picts in battle,
but they never conquered them or the land on which they lived.
By the third century A.D. the Roman general Agricola slaughtered
a Pictish army led by the quoted Calgacus, the Swordsman (as many
of 10,000 Picts may have been killed and 340 Romans). The Picts
who fought Agricola at Mons Grampius were described as tall and
fair headed. Agricola's legions halted near Aberargie in Perthshire,
where they built a fort. They also met a new tribe of barbarians,
who the Romans described as swarthy and looking like the Iberians
they had conquered in southern Spain. It was to retain control
of the advances made by Agricola that several forts were built
between Callander near Stirling up to Perth. Within thirty years
of their establishment, the Picts had destroyed and burned the
Roman forts, and according to Victorian legend, Rome's most famous
legion, the Ninth was sent north from Inchtuthil to perhaps relieve
Pictish pressure. Legend has it that legion was massacred and
forever lost in some unknown battle against the painted men of
the north, although history shows us that the Ninth reappears
later on in Judea.
It
was Hadrian who decided that northern Scotland was not worth more
legions, and so he pulled back the Empire to the Tyne and the
Solway. There he built the famous wall which bears his name, seventy
miles from sea to sea. Perhaps because of constant warfare and
attacks against the wall, that Antoninus Pius advanced the frontier
again to the thin Scottish neck between the Forth and Clyde. Thirty
nine miles long and boasting twenty forts, it may have separated
Pictish tribes on either sides of the wall. The wall was manned
by the Second, Sixth and Twentieth Legions during its forty years.
The Picts never ceased attacking it, and in fact the Romans lost
it and regained it twice before finally giving it up by the end
of the second century and retreating to Hadrian's Wall. We lean
from the words of Cassius Dio that the northern tribes "crossed
the wall, did a great deal of damage and killed a general and
his troops."
In
208 A.D., the governor of Britain was forced to appeal to the
Emperor for help against the barbarians, and Septimus Severus
decided to come to Britain together with his sons. The old soldier
took a Roman fleet loaded with 40,000 centurions into the Firth
of Forth, landed a vengeful Roman army ashore, and although he
defeated every Pictish army he met and beheaded every Pictish
chief who failed to surrender, he failed to conquer the land which
he called Caledonia and he too was soon dead. However, the lesson
grimly taught by the Roman and the decimation caused in the Pictish
countryside must have been of such consequences that for nearly
a century peace was kept in the land; the Romans manned Hadrian's
Wall and the northern tattoed tribes stayed in their grim, brooding
hills north of it.
The
fourth century erupts in warfare again and in 305 A.D. the Romans
fought against "Caledones and other Picts." The northern
tribes are now called "Picts" by their enemies, and
in the south, Scots, Saxons and Franks also add to the woes of
Rome by raiding southern Britain. In 343 A.D. Constans starts
a campaign against the Picts and probably entered into a truce
with them. In 360 Ammanius Marcellus states that the "Picts
were now two peoples - the Dicalydones and Verturiones."
That same year, the truce is broken and the Picts, allied with
the Scots of Ireland pour through the wall into northern England
and are repulsed back. They kept hammering at the wall, and may
have in fact joined in a multi- tribal alliance against Rome.
In 382-3, allied with the Scots they again invade England, and
this time the damage done to the wall and its forts is never repaired
although the invaders are driven back by Magnus Maximus. The end
of the century brings yet another Pictish invasion, this time
met by the great Roman general Stilicho himself, who also manages
to send the great Irish hero Niall of the Nine Hostages, scampering
back to Ireland.
By
409 the Roman hold on Britain was slipping away, and Britons were
told to defend themselves. About this time the Celtic Gaelic tribe
of Scots begins settling in the southwest of Scotland, creating
the kingdom of Dalriada in Argyll (Oir Ghaedhil or Eastern Gaels).
Out of the need to protect themselves from the barbaric Pictish
and Scottish hordes, a new kingdom is created by the Britons of
Strathclyde, who spoke a Celtic tongue much like their cousins
in Wales. By 450 the Picts are pouring into the south again, and
the monk Gildas calls them the "foul hordes of Scots and
Picts, like dark throngs of worms who wriggle out of narrow fissures
in the rock when the sun is high and the weather grows warm."
This is the last time we hear of the Picts and Scots fighting
as allies, and if we take Gildas literally, the Scots return to
Ireland around this time. In 461, St. Patrick dies, but Christianity
is well spread in Ireland.
The
Land of the Picts
By
studying the Roman accounts of the Pictish Wars as well as later
accounts, it appears that the Pictish lands were essentially north
of the Forth-Clyde line, north of the Antonine Wall. Roman pacification,
and Celtic and Saxon migration from the south would have erased
any Pictish claims to people or lands south of the wall. In the
west, Pictish presence in Argyll must have disappeared quickly
after the arrival of the Scots of Dalriada around 500 A.D., although
as evidenced by the standing stone near the entrance to Inveraray
castle in Campbell country, they were there at one point in their
history. In the north, Pictish influences reached as far north
as the islands went and stones have been found in nearly all of
them. This land was defended many times after the departure of
Rome's legions. The Picts fought invasions by the Scots in the
west, the Britons and Angles in the south and the Vikings in the
north. They sometimes lost great battles and huge chunks of land,
only to regain it in the vicious warfare of the Dark Ages. In
the 7th century the Scots pushed their frontier far north, and
a victorious Celtic army came within a half-day march of the Pictish
capital of Inverness in the north before it was crushed. In the
south, the Angles marched their Teutonic armies north and held
Pictish lands for thirty years before they were butchered and
sent fleeing south by a united Pictish army.
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to Scottish History
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