Who were the Picts - and Where did they Come From?

Hello everyone, HistoryWithHilbert here and today I will be joining you for the third installment in the Picts Ancient Cultural Analysis video series that I'm doing here on my channel, HistoryWithHilbert. So today I thought we would have a look at something that came up a lot in the comments section of my previous video. But anyway, the comments that I got were relating to the ethnicity of the Picts. Now some people were wondering, were they a Celtic society, were they a pre-Celtic society, or were they something different? And I thought I would cover this in a video because this has been quite a hot topic for debate in the academic world as well, with there being quite a lot of outlandish theories and everything. So I thought I would show you a few of them and perhaps give you my own judgment on it as well and the accepted theory among academics today. So first of all, to understand who the Picts were, I think it's important that have a look at Britain during the time of the Picts, after the Romans left Britain in 420 AD. The entirety of the British Isles was inhabited by Celts. So in what is now England and Wales, we have this group of Celts who are labelled the Romano-Britons because they were the direct descendants of the original Britons and of the Romans who had mixed into the population. So the Celtic peoples of post-Roman Britain are mostly referred to as Britons and what they have you know when it's possessive is called British, so that's where we also get you know British from later Great Britain, we get that there as well. So after several Roman campaigns against the Picts, they seem to have become the dominant power north of the Wall, and of course when I'm saying the Wall, I don't mean the Wall from Game of Thrones, I mean Hadrian's Wall, which was built as a dividing line to show which territory in Britain was controlled by the Romans and which was controlled by the other tribes north of the Wall. And a common misconception about this Wall is that it's the English-Scottish border, it's actually not, it's slightly further south of the English-Scottish border, but basically if it's north of the Wall then that would have been Pictish, uncivilised territory. However soon the Anglo-Saxons invade and they drive the remaining Britons into the far corners of the island, so you have Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria, although some of the southern Scottish kingdoms which were also Brythonic, so British, they survived for a time, and some examples of this are Gododdin and Strathclyde, although Gododdin would soon also be conquered by the Anglian Northumbrians who often fought against both the Picts and the Britons of Strathclyde. So as well as this there are the Gaelic Scots from the northern kingdom of Ulster in Ireland, and they invade the south west of Scotland and the Inner Hebrides, and this kingdom that they form in both the north of Ireland and the south west of Scotland and the Inner Hebrides is called the Kingdom of Dalreata. Now one thing that might help us identify the Picts is by looking into their language that they spoke and how it related to that spoken by the other peoples of their time. So however this is not very easy because hardly any of the Pictish language has actually survived through the ages, so much of what we know or what we think we know has had to be reconstructed. Now although there have been many theories respectively arguing that the Picts spoke a Germanic, Q Celtic or even a Pre-Celtic language, the most accepted theory to date is that Pictish was a Pea Celtic Brythonic language, so it would have been related to both modern Welsh and Cornish. Now if we look at a language map of Britain we can see that with the Anglo-Saxon invasion the Germanic peoples are speaking their own Germanic dialects that will eventually turn into Old English. Now the dependent Britons of Wales, Cornwall and Strathclyde all spoke related Brythonic, so Pea Celtic languages. Now across the sea in Ireland the people spoke a related but distinct set of languages, the Q Celtic languages of Old Irish, and because the founders of the Scottish Kingdom of Dalriata were Irishmen they too spoke this Q Celtic language. And Scots Gaelic today is also Q Celtic and it's the language that replaced Pictish throughout the Highlands, and it's the only Q Celtic language on mainland Britain because of the Irish Dalriatans. And the Picts then are assumed to have spoken Pea Celtic because they were likely related to the Britons living on their southern borders and they weren't the descendants of Irish immigrants, so we can pretty much rule out that they would have spoken Q Celtic because this formed in Ireland and the only reason some of the lowland Scottish spoke it was because of these Dalriatans who brought it over from Ireland. And some theories concerning the Pictish origins are very far fetched, so one of them links the Gallic Pictones tribe from the French coast to the Picts of modern-day Scotland, claiming that they simply sailed up the coast and made landfall in Britain. Now another theory suggests that the Picts came from Strathclyde, sorry Scythia, which is the region around the Black Sea. Now another explanation for what is meant by Scythia leads us on to our next source, the Venerable Bede. He writes that the Picts were a tribe living in southern Scandinavia, which in his time was often called Scythia, and that they then left their homeland and took to the sea, following the coastline and then crossing the English Channel. Now they then hogged the British coast until they reached the north of Ireland and while they're there, they ask the Irish for land, but the Irish say no thank you, although they do give them something else. And now for some reason the Picts didn't bring any of their women with them, which I've heard is quite an issue for a population trying to create descendants in a new land. Now Bede tells us that the Irish gave the Picts some of their women and told them to go to Scotland, which they then do, and with their new Irish women they learn to speak the Celtic tongues and populate their lands. Now this also gave the Irish Dalriatans a handy claim over Pictland. Okay so this does seem very far-fetched and I'll tell you why it seems far-fetched, because Bede definitely has an agenda and a motive. And it's important to remember here that in Bede's time his people, the Northumbrians, who were a Germanic Anglian people, were actually at war with the Picts and because the Dalriatans were also the enemies of the Picts, they would appear as comrades in the struggle against them, so Bede would be trying to smear the Picts and give the Dalriatans a claim over Pictland. Because remember, you don't win by winning a war, you win by writing that you won the war. Now a more accepted theory about the origins of the Picts is that they were descendants of a pre-Celtic element of society. Now the term Celtic is a surprisingly controversial one, something you learn the hard way when one encounters a Celtic supremacist online. My preferred definition of Celtic is more linguistic and cultural rather than ethnical, so let's imagine pre-Celtic Britain for a moment. Let's go back in time. Although not much is known about these people, or the culture, or the languages they spoke, it's very likely that everyone throughout the British Isles would be speaking similar languages, perhaps even dialects of the same language, making it easier to understand one another. Now one idea of what this might have resembled or sounded like can possibly be found in the Basque language, because I believe that Basque is in fact not an Indo-European language, and it might be the case with Basque that this was a form of a pre-Celtic, pre-Indo-European language in Europe, and that other languages they were all replaced by Indo-European speakers, so you know German, Dutch, Frisian, English, Irish, you name it, they were all Indo-European, but this Basque wasn't, and then that's why it seems so weird to us with X's and things all over the place. So the pre-Celtic languages of Britain might have sounded something like Basque, possibly, although don't quote me on that because I'm not a professional linguist, but that's what I've read. However, on the continent, Celtic ideas and languages were rapidly spreading during this period, and that's why we have, you know, Celtic languages and a different culture today, and these were often being introduced by a few key figures, and then they spread the ideas and the culture among the pre-Celtic population rather than actually replacing the earlier population with a large Now these peoples or ideas also come to Britain. Now this diagram really, really oversimplifies things, but this topic really deserves a few dedicated videos, and this diagram is basically only here to show you the general overview and the basics of what happened. Now, for instance, one of the places where this diagram really oversimplifies things is that there are actually waves, they believe, of Celtic cultural influx coming in, one which was the Guadelic, Guadelic, I'm going to go with that, which is also another reason why Q and P Celtic were different because this Guadelic branch went to Ireland, I believe, and then the Brythonic branch went to Britain, which is why you have these two different sets of languages. Anyway, I'm not going to get into that in this one. So the Celtic culture and languages, they spread throughout Britain, and then they go on to Ireland as well, although we aren't entirely sure which island went first into sort of the Celtic language and culture, and how linked the two were in language and culture, that's also a mystery. It's been suggested that this large shift either did not occur until later, or occurred far more weakly with the Picts, who remained pre-Celtic in certain areas of their culture, and possibly even language, although later on their language did switch to a Celtic one, and this could explain why the Picts are often seen as the odd ones out in Britain. All right everyone, this has been my video covering who were the Picts and where did they come from. Please let me know in the comment section below if you enjoyed watching this video, if you've enjoyed this third installment of the ancient cultural analysis, the Picts. So I'll be joining you again with a few more videos on the Picts, but I think I'm going to wrap it up fairly soon and then get on to some other topics. I've also got to finish my little three-part series on Cyrus the Great, so we'll see how that climaxes, and then also other history videos as well. So leave a like, give a comment if you want to give me some more information, or want to ask any questions. I'd be more than happy to answer them when I get the time to. I'll leave sources in the description below as always, and I will see you again next week. All right guys, thank you very much for watching. This has been History with Hilbert, with more Picts. See you next week,