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The
Picts
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 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. 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 from the Celtic
"Ogham" script but was not Celtic in context. 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.
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