The oldest known people who inhabited Scotland is called Pictish, which literally translates as "painted".
Little is known about this people, immortalized in the famous ballad "Heather Honey" by Robert Louis Stevenson. According to one of the versions, the Picts were descended from the Celts (their branch emerged at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC). According to another hypothesis, they were the heirs of the first waves of Proto-Indo-European migrants, who penetrated the territory of Britain in the early Bronze Age.
One of the main evidence of the presence of the Picts in Scotland is the symbols carved on hundreds of stone "monuments", as well as on bone and metal objects. About 30 such drawings are known, made between the 3rd and 10th centuries of our era. They have become a kind of calling card for the Picts.
For centuries, experts have tried to decipher strange symbols, but it seems that only now they have come close to solving the problem. In the course of the new work, scientists from the University of Aberdeen and several scientific centers in Scotland found that the drawings carved by the Picts on the stones may turn out to be a writing system, and much more ancient than one might think.
Experts explain that dating of such artifacts cannot be carried out using the classical method - radiocarbon analysis, which relies on the decay rate of organic materials. Instead, archaeologists had to make very rough estimates based on circumstantial evidence.
It was believed that most of the earliest drawings were made on stones in the 5th century AD. However, now historians have pushed this date at least 200 years back centuries. The fact is that during the excavations, archaeologists have finally discovered something that can be subjected to radiocarbon analysis.
The new expedition continued to explore the ancient fort on the east coast of Scotland. At the beginning of the 19th century, Pictish carvings were found on its walls. Now, excavations at this site have brought long-awaited organic materials to archaeologists - several wood chips and a piece of charcoal, which was found in the ancient hearth. The finds date back to the 3rd-4th centuries AD.
In another "Pictish site" in the Orkney Islands, a bovine bone and a bone pin were found. These items are no more than a hundred years older than previous finds.
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The authors of the work are confident that the drawings on the stones found in the immediate vicinity of the places where new artifacts were discovered belong to the same time. To prove this, the researchers refined the data using several techniques - Bayesian modeling and drawing style analysis.
In parallel, experts have become firmly convinced that Pictish symbols represent an early writing system.
Actually, such hypotheses were expressed earlier. It has been suggested that the Pictish system was developed around the same time as several others, such as the Ogamic script in Ireland and the runic system in Scandinavia. This was a kind of response from the Picts to the innovations of the peoples with whom they contacted.
However, in the light of new data, it turns out that the ancient inhabitants of Scotland could even get ahead of their "competitors".
Archaeologist Gordon Noble, who led the excavation, noted that some of the "laws of the genre" the Pictish could have adopted from the Romans, from whose raids they constantly fought off.
Instead of using the same Latin, the proud Scottish people in the 3rd-4th centuries could develop their own writing style, says the scientist. But the Picts, apparently, borrowed the system of designations from the Romans: stones with carved drawings were placed mainly in symbolic places, and some symbols, as it is assumed, could denote the names of the rulers.
Speaking about the importance of new data, the authors of the study emphasize that with the advent of more accurate dating and new artifacts, historians will be able to better understand the traditions and cultures of ancient peoples and the context of their development.
However, the meaning of the Pictish symbols is still unclear. The fact is that their origin is difficult to unravel, relying on other ancient forms of alphabetic scripts.
For more information on this research, see an article published in the journal Antiquity.
Yulia Vorobyova