Scientists rewrite history of Pictish written script
THE idea that the Picts were “late to the game” in developing written communication have finally been debunked, thanks to new Scottish research.
New carbon-dating of Pictish carvings from sites in the Northern Isles, Aberdeenshire, and The Mearns, show the Picts’ still-undeciphered symbol-script, which has divided historical opinion for more than a century, can be traced back as far back as the third century AD – much earlier than previously thought.
Archaeologists from Aberdeen University and experts from the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow radiocarbon-dated stones from a promontory fort at Dunnicaer seastack, south of Stonehaven, the “Craw Stane” at Rhynie in Aberdeenshire – a Pictish symbol stone depicting a salmon and an unknown animal – and sediment layers and bone artifacts from sites in Orkney and Shetland.
The results give, for the first time, an “outline chronology” for the Pictish symbol system based on scientific rather than art-historical techniques.
They support the idea that the symbols are a script, likely to be a naming system communicating the identities of Picts, and that this was developed in the same era as other writing systems across Europe like the “ogham” script of early Ireland and the runic system of Scandinavia.
Dr Gordon Noble, head of archaeology at Aberdeen University, who led excavations as part of the research, said: “Establishing an outline chronology through a combination of direct dating, modelling and examining associated dates from archaeological excavation is helping us rewrite the history of these symbolic traditions of Northern Europe and to understand more clearly the context of their development and use.
“In the last few decades there has been a growing consensus that the symbols on these stones are an early form of language and our recent excavations, and the dating of objects found close to the location of the stones, provides for the first time a much more secure chronology.”
Dr Martin Golderg of National Museums Scotland, which was also involved in the project, said: “Our new dating work suggests that the development of these Pictish symbols was much more closely aligned to the broader northern phenomenon of developing vernacular scripts, such as the runic system of Scandinavia and north Germany, than had been previously thought.
“The general assumption has been that the Picts were late to the game in terms of monumental communication, but this new chronology shows that they were actually innovators in the same way as their contemporaries.”