Re: Piotr: Brittonic?

> 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.

Who says it's a tribal name? It is used as a national name, but there
is no single tribe of Picti in Northern Britain

> You don't actually think that around 297 the Romans
> started calling the people of N. Briton "the painted ones" do you?

Umm...yes I do - because that's what the evidence suggests.

> 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?

Because the Southern Britons were Romanized and likely no longer
painted/tatooed themselves, while the Northern, non-Romanized Britons
would have kept up native face painting/tatooing traditions. Picti
would have been a bit of a slur towards these stubbornly barbaric
people, in the eyes of a Roman citizen.

> 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.

I'm sorry, but that just isn't supported by any actual evidence - you
only find it in medieval pseudo-histories, which cannot be trusted
very often.

- Chris Gwinn