Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 4 on 9/9/2002.

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Seeds of the nation

James Irvine-Robertson wades into the ‘exceedingly murky’ history of the pictish peoples, direct predecessors of the men and women who united scotland as a nation

People first came to Scotland some 10,000 years ago when the first hunter-gatherers ventured into a landscape still raw from the retreat of the glaciers. To their remote Highland descendants, those early folk from prehistory became the legendary Fingalians who left the land studded with the massive stone monuments that predated the Pyramids. When the Romans arrived, the Greek geographer Ptolemy stated that Scotland held 12 tribes. Their way of life had hardly changed since the dawn of the Iron Age. War was their glory, the warrior aristocracy lauded by bards and druids. In the southern half of the land, the Romans interfaced with the tribes and named them but, in the unconquered north, they lumped the people together into Caledonians.

Scotland is the oldest continually existing nation in Europe, but it took a thousand years after the Roman withdrawal from Britain before its modern boundaries were established. In 410 AD, the country, like the rest of Britain, was parcelled out in tribal kingdoms. In the north were the Picts with their own language and civilisation. Their tongue no longer exists but they are believed to have been Celts. We have a list of their kings and they left spectacularly sculpted stones that show a considerable artistic skill but they left no writings and their culture is shrouded in mystery.

Straddling the English/Scottish border and stretching as far north as modern Edinburgh was the powerful kingdom of Northumbria. They spoke a version of Anglian: E.....

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By James Irvine Robertson

Section : Scottish History

Page number : 34