The images of warriors, horses, and other figures that were formerly mistaken for rock art are actually written texts from the Iron Age.
Recently, a new writing system from Scotland’s early Pict civilisation was discovered.
Numerous Pictish Stones have stylized rock carvings on them.
Deciphering the writing would offer a special window into early Scottish history.
The Picts, an Iron Age culture who inhabited Scotland from 300 to 843, left behind strange, carved stones that recent study has revealed to contain their written language.
It was originally believed that the highly stylized rock carvings on the so-called Pictish Stones were examples of rock art or had some connection to heraldry. Instead, the new research, which was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, comes to the conclusion that the engravings reflect the long-lost Pictish language, a group of Celtic tribes that formerly inhabited eastern and northern Scotland.
According to Bede, a monk and historian who passed away in 735, there were four languages spoken in Britain at the time: British, Pictish, Scottish, and English. Because of this, lead author Rob Lee told Discovery News, “we know that the Picts had a spoken language to complement the writing of the symbols.”
According to Lee, a professor in the University of Exeter School of Biosciences, “there is every indication that Pictish was also a complex spoken language. We know that the three other languages were — and are — complex spoken languages.”
He examined the engravings on the few hundred known Pictish Stones along with colleagues Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman. To analyse each engraving’s direction, order, unpredictability, and other properties, the researchers utilised a mathematical technique called Shannon entropy.
The obtained data was compared to that for several written languages, including written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish, and Old Welsh, as well as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese writings, and written Latin. Even though the Pictish Stone carvings did not resemble any of them, they showed signs of writing that was based on spoken language.
Writing may be divided into two categories, according to Lee: semasiography, which is not dependent on speech, and lexigraphic writing, which is based on speech.
The author explained that lexicographic writing “contains symbols that represent components of speech, such as words, or sounds like syllables or letters, and tends to be written in a linear or directed fashion emulating the flow of speech.” The cartoon symbols used to demonstrate how to assemble flat-pack furniture are examples of symbols used in semasiography that do not reflect speech and typically do not follow a linear progression.
The Pictish language has not yet been fully decoded by Lee and his team, but some of the symbols offer fascinating hints. For instance, one sign has the appearance of a dog’s head, while others have the appearance of horses, trumpets, mirrors, combs, stags, swords, and crosses.
The later Pictish Stones also have designs, such as Celtic knots, that are comparable to those in the Book of Kells and other early creations from the area. What Lee and his team believe to be the written Pictish language is framed by these more adornment-like motifs.
At this time, Lee stated, “it is unclear whether the images, like the knots, comprise any part of the transmission.” The image of horsemen and horn blowers adjacent to hunting hounds on the stone known as the Hilton of Cadboll, for example, is one of the semasiographic symbols he thinks the stones also contain. Another stone depicts what looks to be a scene from a war.
One of the foremost authorities on signs and symbols in the world, Paul Bouissac of the University of Toronto, concurred with Discovery News that “it is more than plausible that the Pictish symbols are examples of a script, in the sense that they encoded some information, which also had a spoken form.”
However, “deciphering this putative script does not amount to what is known about a writing system,” Bouissac continued.
He said, “We will have to wait until we find what would be the Pictish equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, which allowed us to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphic code. This could or might not ever occur.
