Hi Chris, you wrote:
> The Picts weren't a single tribe - they were a people made up of
> several different tribes. Secondly, we have examples of Picti being
> used to describe other non-Celtic tatooed people - for example, the
> Picti Geloni and Picti Agathyrsi mentioned by Vergil (they are
> Scythians - Ammianus also speaks of these two tribes dying
> themselves
> blue).
Yes, but the key difference here is that in the case of the Scythians
'picti' is used as an adjective, where as in the case of the Picts it is
a tribal name, such as the "savage tribes of Scotti and Picti" not Picti
Scotti or Picti Britoni or Picti Caledoni. It is a tribal name, not some
kind of nickname. You don't actually think that around 297 the Romans
started calling the people of N. Briton "the painted ones" do you?
Chris, this just doesn't work. And why this particular people in N.
Britain that are all of the sudden called by this name and not other
British peoples?
As far as the Picts not being a single tribe, originally they were, but
over time as they had
expanded south from the Orkneys and Shetland they absorbed other N.
British peoples and later Picts was more of a collective designation.
From Nennius, Bede and Gildas we read that the Picts had come from the
continent overseas and settled in the Orkneys,
(and their staging point as Broch dwellers in the Orkneys is confirmed by
archaeology, oral tradition, the Norse (who referred to it as 'Pict
land') and the place name pit) and they didn't have their own women with
them so they obviously intermarried with native women, as did the later
Norse in the Orkneys and Man, and as the Spaniards did in the Americas.
They later expanded south from the far north, which explains why they
aren't mentioned by the Romans until 297.
-Michael
> - Chris Gwinn
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