In the photo: Stone of the Picts depicting people and mysterious creatures.
A group of British scientists led by Rob Lee of the University of Exeter have found that the carvings on the famous Pictish stones contain a previously unknown script. The work of scientists was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, and the researchers summarized their findings on the Discovery TV channel
At the beginning of our era, this mysterious people inhabited the territory of modern Scotland and left behind several hundred stone steles and ornaments on which images of animals (horses, dogs, salmon, wolves, eagles), crosses, knots, mirrors, combs, and also scenes hunting and battles.
reference
The Picts are one of the most ancient peoples of the British Isles. Perhaps the Celts. They fought with the Romans. In the 6th century they were converted to Christianity by the missionary Columbus. Assimilated by the Scots who entered the Kingdom of Scotland with them
Historians managed to date these works of art (VI-IX centuries), but scientists were unable to establish the true meaning of the images due to their diversity. It has been hypothesized that the mysterious carved creatures are either sacred animals of the clans, or monuments for posterity, or a kind of primitive pictographic writing. The latest version is supported by the fact that animal symbols are usually given in pairs or even in several pairs, and sometimes accompanied by an image of a mirror and a comb located at the top of the stele.
Such repetition alarmed scientists, who decided to apply modern mathematical methods to ancient symbols. Robert Lee of the British University of Exeter analyzed the images on the Neolithic Stele and the Ring and Iron Age stone monuments using Shannon's theorem, which describes the maximum achievable possibilities of encoding a generic source using separable codes.
Not art, but writing …
Together with colleagues Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman, Lee tracked the order, direction, frequency of occurrence of each petroglyph, and then compared the data obtained with those obtained before him by researchers of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts, written Latin, Old Welsh, Irish and some modern languages.
As a result, two important conclusions were drawn: firstly, the engraving on the stelae of the Pictish people has nothing to do with the writing of other peoples. However, and secondly, it has the characteristics of a written language based on the spoken language.
… moreover, advanced
In other words, the Pictish petroglyphs are not primitive pictography, but advanced symbolic writing. Lee explained in an interview with Discovery News that scientists were initially bewildered by the lack of linear sequence on the steles, typical in advanced writing, where, as in speech, symbols (words, letters) follow each other.
Promotional video:
“We know that the Picts had a spoken language that complements symbolic writing. Bede (a monk and historian who lived in 735 AD - Infox.ru) wrote that there were four languages in Britain at that time: British, Pictish, Scottish and English,”said Lee, who teaches at the university's School of Biosciences.
Paul Buissac, a specialist in signs and symbols who did not participate in the study, agrees with him: "It is more than likely that the symbols of the Picts are examples of writing in the sense that they encoded information and were based on colloquial forms."
Searching for the "pict code"
Despite Lee's discovery, it is still impossible to decipher the Pictish language. “We'll have to wait for the discovery of the Pictish equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, which helped break the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics. It may or may not happen,”Buissak admitted.
At the moment, Lee is trying to get to the bottom of the meaning of the so-called "Pictish knots" and find out what exactly this "braided" symbol encrypts.
The research results were published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
Lee's preliminary calculations are contained in the materials of the round table "The Archeology of Semiotic Behavior", which took place in the framework of the IASS Congress in September 2009 in La Coruña, Spain.
