The Picts: Symbol Stones, Kingdoms and the Road to Alba

1. The name and the identity question

The word "Pict" comes from the Latin Picti, first securely attested in an anonymous panegyric of AD 297 addressed to Constantius Chlorus, which lists the "Picti and Hiberni (Irish)" as customary foes of the Britons. It is conventionally explained as "the painted ones" (from Latin pingere, "to paint"). This is plausible, and later Roman poets such as Claudian played on images of "tattooed" northern barbarians — but it is important to flag that there is no contemporary evidence that the northern peoples painted or tattooed their bodies any more than other Iron Age Britons, and some scholars suspect the name may actually derive from a native (Celtic) word later rationalised by Latin speakers as "painted." What the Picts called themselves is not known.

Crucially, "Pict" was an exonym — a label applied from outside. Roman sources treat it from the start as a collective term: the Verona List (c. 313) pairs "Picts and Caledonians," and Ammianus Marcellinus (later 4th century) reports the Picts as "divided into two peoples, the Dicalydones and Verturiones." The Caledonii and Maeatae named in earlier Roman-period sources (Card #2) are the evident ancestors of these groupings. This strongly suggests that "Pict" was a Roman umbrella term for several distinct northern British peoples, not the self-designation of a single ethnic nation.

Recent scholarship (James Fraser, Alex Woolf) argues that a shared "Pictish" identity may not have existed continuously; a plausible reconstruction is that Picti was adopted internally as an endonym only in the later 7th century, under the dominant kingdom of Fortriu (the "Verturian hegemony"), when a powerful over-king found a prestigious, less domineering label useful for a wider realm. A 2023 genetic study confirms the Picts were descendants of indigenous Iron Age Britons — not exotic migrants — decisively refuting Bede's legend of a Pictish migration from Scythia.

2. Political structure and the kingdoms (including Fortriu)

Pictland was never a single, permanently unified kingdom throughout this period. Medieval sources such as De Situ Albanie preserve a scheme of seven Pictish kingdoms or regions (Cait, Ce, Circinn, Fib, Fidach, Fotla, Fortriu), tied to a legend of seven sons of an eponymous founder, Cruithne — a schematic tradition that historians treat with caution. The reality was probably a shifting patchwork of regional kingdoms and sub-kingdoms, with one or two over-kings dominating at any time. Even in Bridei I's day there was more than one "king of the Picts": the death of Galam ("Cennalath, king of the Picts") is recorded four years before Bridei's, and an "under-king of Orkney" attended Bridei's court.

From the 7th century the kingdom of Fortriu was dominant — so much so that "king of Fortriu" and "king of the Picts" may often mean the same thing. Fortriu derives from Verturiones. The location of Fortriu is one of the most consequential recent debates in early Scottish history. From the 19th century (E. W. Robertson, W. F. Skene) until 2006, Fortriu was placed in Strathearn/Menteith in central Perthshire. In a landmark 2006 paper ("Dún Nechtain, Fortriu and the Geography of the Picts," Scottish Historical Review), Alex Woolf argued that Fortriu in fact lay north of the Mounth, on the shores of the Moray Firth. Woolf's relocation has been very widely accepted and underpins the University of Aberdeen's Northern Picts project (est. 2012), though it is not entirely without dissent, and some argue that by the 7th century "Fortriu" effectively meant Pictland as a whole.

3. The symbol stones and their classification

Over 200 stone monuments bearing Pictish symbols survive (RCAHMS 2008 records more than 200; broader counts of all "Pictish stones" reach about 350), concentrated in the north and east. The standard classification, devised by J. Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson in The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (1903), divides them into three: - Class I: unshaped boulders/slabs with incised symbols only, no cross. Traditionally dated 6th–8th centuries. - Class II: dressed, rectangular slabs carved in relief with a Christian cross on one face and Pictish symbols (plus hunting/battle/biblical scenes) on the other. 8th–9th centuries. - Class III: Christian monuments (cross-slabs, recumbent slabs, free-standing crosses) with no Pictish symbols. Later 8th–9th centuries and beyond.

Specialists now regard this scheme as dated and often misleading — many stones are incomplete, and Classes I and II overlapped in production — but it remains a useful shorthand. Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling published by Gordon Noble, Martin Goldberg and Derek Hamilton (Antiquity, 2018) pushed the origins of the symbol system back to the 3rd–4th centuries AD, making it broadly contemporary with the ogham and runic scripts developing elsewhere on the fringes of the Roman world.

Key surviving examples include: - The Aberlemno stones (Angus): four stones dated c. AD 500–800. Aberlemno I is a Class I stone (serpent, double-disc and Z-rod, mirror and comb) probably reusing a prehistoric standing stone. The Aberlemno II churchyard cross-slab bears a famous battle scene often (but not certainly) interpreted as depicting Dun Nechtain/Nechtansmere. - The Hilton of Cadboll stone (Easter Ross), a magnificent Class II cross-slab of c. AD 800, with a celebrated hunting scene featuring a prominent woman; the original is in the National Museum of Scotland, with a replica on site. - The Dunfallandy Stone (Perth & Kinross), a fine, well-preserved Class II cross-slab, probably 8th century. - The Newton Stone (Aberdeenshire), which carries an ogham inscription alongside a second, still-undeciphered alphabetic inscription.

What the symbols mean remains unknown. There is little agreement on the total inventory, but around 30 core symbols have been suggested (Samson 1992; Forsyth 1997) — animals real and mythical (the "Pictish beast," salmon, eagle, boar) plus abstract forms like the crescent-and-V-rod, double-disc-and-Z-rod, and the "mirror and comb." They also appear on silver and bone, not just stone. Interpretations have ranged from clan/kin emblems, to a form of writing, to grave and territorial markers, to records of alliances or marriages. The current mainstream view among archaeologists (building on Ross Samson 1992 and Katherine Forsyth) is that the symbols form a structured, non-alphabetic script probably encoding personal names, with symbol pairs as the basic unit — what Forsyth called "the fundamental syntax" of the system. Noble, Goldberg and Hamilton (2018) describe them as "probably an elaborate, non-alphabetic writing system."

However, this is an interpretation, not a decipherment. A widely publicised 2010 study (Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman, Proceedings of the Royal Society A) used Shannon entropy to claim the symbols "exhibit the characteristics of written languages." This statistical argument was sharply criticised by computational linguists — most authoritatively Richard Sproat (Computational Linguistics 2010; Language 2014) — who showed the method cannot reliably distinguish writing from non-linguistic symbol systems and in fact misclassifies known non-linguistic corpora (such as Mesopotamian kudurru deity-symbols) as "linguistic." Even Noble, Goldberg and Hamilton (2018), who favour the writing interpretation, hedge carefully and cite Sproat's dissent, and observe that "current consensus suggests that the symbol system was a form of script, albeit undeciphered." The honest current position: the symbols are a rule-governed, script-like system, probably communicating identity or names, but they remain undeciphered, and their exact categorical status (true writing vs. a non-linguistic symbol system) is not settled.

4. The ogham and language questions

A minority of Pictish stones (a few dozen) carry inscriptions in ogham, the notched alphabet developed in Ireland. Ogham reached Pictland probably in the later period; the inscriptions are frustrating because, although the script can be transliterated, the resulting sequences are often unintelligible (e.g., the Brandsbutt and Dyce inscriptions).

The interpretation of these inscriptions sits at the heart of the Pictish language debate. Older scholarship — associated above all with Kenneth Jackson's influential 1955 contribution to The Problem of the Picts — held that Pictish was either a non-Indo-European language (a pre-Celtic "isolate") or that a non-Indo-European language coexisted with a Celtic one, precisely because the ogham inscriptions resisted Celtic readings. This "non-Indo-European Pictish" theory has now been largely abandoned by mainstream scholarship. The decisive intervention was Katherine Forsyth's Language in Pictland: the case against 'non-Indo-European Pictish' (1997), which argued the inscriptions are simply hard to interpret, not linguistic gibberish, and that the overwhelming weight of place-name and personal-name evidence points to Pictish being a P-Celtic (Brittonic-related) language, close kin to the ancestor of Welsh, Cornish and Breton (some scholars posit a distinct northern branch, "Pritenic," though its distinctiveness is questioned, e.g. by Guto Rhys).

Why did the older theory arise, and why was it abandoned? It arose from the genuine opacity of the ogham inscriptions and, in some cases, from a romantic-nationalist appetite for an "exotic" pre-Celtic Scotland. It was abandoned because systematic linguistic analysis of names showed clear Celtic etymologies, and because the "evidence" for a separate non-Celtic language turned out to be inconclusive inscriptions rather than positive proof. Honesty requires two caveats, though: first, a handful of place-name and personal-name elements remain unexplained and may reflect a non-Celtic substrate; and second, at least one specialist (Richard Cox) has argued some ogham inscriptions are not Celtic at all — so the language of the ogham corpus specifically is not fully resolved even if the Celtic character of Pictish overall is now the consensus.

5. Bridei I, Columba and early contact with Christianity

This card touches Christianity only lightly — a separate card covers Iona and the coming of Christianity in depth.

The best-documented early Pictish king is Bridei son of Maelchon (Bridei I), who reigned c. 554–584 and is described as one of the most powerful kings in northern Britain. He features in Adomnán of Iona's Vita Columbae (Life of Columba, written c. 697), which recounts St Columba travelling up the Great Glen to Bridei's fortress near the River Ness, sparring with the king's druid/magus Broichan, and impressing the court with miracles. Bridei's stronghold is traditionally identified with Craig Phadrig near Inverness, though excavation has cast doubt on this and the exact site is uncertain.

Two cautions are essential for accuracy. First, Adomnán's Life is hagiography written a century after the events, not a neutral record; it does not actually state whether Bridei was already Christian or was converted by Columba. Bede (writing c. 731) credits Columba with converting the northern Picts, but this reflects belief a century later. Archaeology at Portmahomack shows a monastic community possibly from the mid-6th century, hinting that Christianity may already have been present. So Columba's "conversion of the Picts" is better understood as the beginning of a long, uneven process than a single dramatic event.

6. The Battle of Dun Nechtain (Nechtansmere), 685

On 20 May 685, a Pictish army led by Bridei son of Bili (Bridei III), king of Fortriu, destroyed a Northumbrian army under King Ecgfrith, who was killed in the fighting. In the preceding decades Northumbria had extended overlordship north of the Forth; after the Picts had earlier been subjugated (notably at the "Battle of Two Rivers," 671), Bridei rebelled, and Ecgfrith invaded against the advice of his counsellors (including Cuthbert). The Picts feigned retreat and drew the Northumbrians into an ambush by a lake in the mountains.

The battle is recorded by Bede, the Irish annals (as Dún Nechtain), and Welsh sources (as Gueith Linn Garan, "Battle of Crane Lake"). Its significance is genuinely large: it halted and permanently weakened Northumbrian (Anglian) expansion into what became Scotland, and Bede himself lamented that thereafter the kingdom's "bounds" were narrower and its hopes ebbed. The battle's location is disputed: traditionally placed at Dunnichen in Angus, it has been relocated by Alex Woolf (2006), consistent with his repositioning of Fortriu, to Dunachton near Loch Insh in Badenoch, further north. The Aberlemno II cross-slab's battle scene is popularly linked to the battle, but this identification is not certain.

7. Kingship and the succession debate

Perhaps the most persistent popular claim about the Picts is that they practised matrilineal succession — kingship passing through the female line, so that a king was succeeded by his sister's son rather than his own son. This claim rests chiefly on a passage in Bede, who wrote that the Picts, when a matter was in doubt, chose their king "from the female royal line rather than the male," and on the observation that the Pictish king-lists show almost no father-to-son succession while several kings had identifiably non-Pictish fathers (Britons, Angles, Gaels).

This should be presented as a genuine live debate, not a settled fact in either direction. Until the 1980s matriliny was near-orthodoxy (F. T. Wainwright, Marjorie Anderson, Isabel Henderson). It was then challenged — by Alfred Smyth (1984) and, influentially, by Alex Woolf ("Pictish matriliny reconsidered," 1998) and Alasdair Ross (1999) — who argued that succession was broadly patrilineal or at least dynastic in the ordinary early-medieval way, and that apparent matriliny was limited to exceptional cases (such as the sons of Der-Ilei). Even Bede's wording ("in cases of doubt") implies matriliny was a fallback, not the norm. A 2023 study of mitochondrial DNA from the Lundin Links cemetery found the individuals "had no direct maternal ancestors" — more consistent with women marrying into the community (female exogamy) than with a matrilineal/matrilocal system — which the authors say challenges "older ideas that the Picts were a matrilineal society," though it cannot settle royal succession practice specifically. The fair summary: the evidence is thin and ambiguous; strong matriliny is now doubted, but the debate is not closed.

8. The fading of Pictish identity toward Alba

The full "birth of the Kingdom of Scotland" and Cináed mac Ailpín's reign are the subject of Card #6; here we only set up the transition.

The Picts did not disappear in a battle, a massacre or a conquest. Over the 9th century, under sustained Viking pressure and through dynastic mergers with Gaelic Dál Riata, the Pictish and Gaelic realms fused, and Gaelic language and culture became increasingly dominant. The change is visible in the sources' vocabulary: kings continued to be styled "king of the Picts" into the later 9th century, but during the reign of Constantín mac Áeda (Constantine II, 900–943) — and first for his predecessor Domnall mac Causantín (Donald II, d. 900), who is called rí Alban — outsiders began calling the realm Alba rather than Pictland. Whether this marked a genuinely new kingdom or simply a new (Gaelic) name for the old one is uncertain, since we do not even know the Pictish name for their own land.

The Pictish language was gradually displaced by Gaelic (a process of "Gaelicisation" possibly already underway generations earlier), the production of symbol stones ceased, and by roughly the 11th century the inhabitants of Alba regarded themselves as Gaelic-speaking Scots. Pictish identity was, as Alex Woolf's From Pictland to Alba puts it, largely forgotten — later to be revived in myth and legend. This card ends here, at the threshold where "Pict" gives way to "Alba"; Card #6 takes up the story of the kingdom that became Scotland.

9. The Picts after the Picts: written out, then reinvented

Pictish identity did not simply fade; it was actively edited out. Dauvit Broun has shown that the Scottish case put to the papal court in 1301 — Baldred Bisset's "Pleading" and its drafts, the "Objections" — began by treating the Picts as incomers with whom the Scots had shared the country, then rewrote them into a tidy sequence of conquests in which the Scots, led by the eponymous Scota, overthrew the Picts. Even the St Andrews foundation legend, in which a Pictish king Hungus won a victory with St Andrew's help, was adjusted: the procurators made the victorious army one of "Scots and Picts". Broun argues that the motive was to give the Scots a clean, primordial claim to Scotland. The texts of 1296–1320 (Bisset's pleading, a verse history written between 1296 and 1306, and the Declaration of Arbroath) are the earliest surviving works to present Scotland, rather than Ireland, as the Scots' homeland, and in them the Picts were an inconvenience.

Yet the Picts never quite disappeared from the record. The Declaration of Arbroath's boast of 113 kings in unbroken line is, Broun shows, a total that can only be reached by counting Pictish kings as Scots. From John of Fordun (c. 1370s–80s) to Hector Boece and George Buchanan, official Scottish history ran through the Gaelic kings of Dál Riata from a mythical Fergus in 330 BC, and the Picts were assumed to have been wiped out under Kenneth MacAlpin.

Colin Kidd traces what happened next. The Jacobite priest Thomas Innes, in his Critical Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants (1729), used comparisons of king-lists to show that Boece's sources were late forgeries and that the forty mythical Dalriadic kings could not stand. He then substituted a royalist Pictish monarchy reaching back to a legendary King Cruithne. Later in the century, Lowland writers turned the old misidentification of the Picts as Germanic "Goths" into a pedigree for Scots. John Pinkerton (1758–1826) made the Picts — the "Piks" — the Gothic ancestors of Lowlanders and their Scots tongue the "elder daughter of the Gothic". This was openly racialist: he described Highland Celts as small, dark and lazy. Sir Walter Scott parodied the quarrel in The Antiquary (1816), where Jonathan Oldbuck insists on calling the Picts "Pikar" or "Peughtar". George Chalmers and Joseph Ritson, by contrast, argued that the Picts were Celtic.

In the 1920s and 1930s the Picts became a totem of the literary renaissance. Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar and Hugh MacDiarmid ran a short-lived nationalist periodical, the Pictish Review (1927–28), which set an "authentic" Pictish past against tartanry and the Burns cult. Neil Gunn's novel Sun Circle (1933) imagined a pagan Pictish community facing Christianity and the Vikings. Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Marxist-diffusionist reading cast the peasantry of Sunset Song as the descendants of a peaceful pre-Celtic Pictish stock. From the 1970s, across the North Channel, Ian Adamson's Cruthin: The Ancient Kindred (1974) cast Ulster Protestants as descendants of Pictish "Cruthin" who were natives of Ulster before the Gaels, an idea taken up by the Ulster Defence Association.

Kidd's conclusion is that, in almost every case, a supposed suppressed Pictish truth was used to unmask what the writer saw as a false myth of Gaelic or Irish origins. In none of these cases was it a genuine recovery of the historical Picts, whom modern archaeology and genetics now show to have been descended from local Iron Age Britons.