386. The Picts: Scotland’s Tattooed Warriors (Ep 4)

I'm Anita Arnim, and in today's episode we're going to be exploring the pictures. The mysterious painted people who rules of Eastern Scotland for five hundred years. And with us today we have somebody who's done more than anybody in recent years to recover the Pictish world from complete obscurity. He's Professor of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen. He's director of the Northern Pictures. Project and co author of The King in the North, The Pictish Realms. Gordon Noble. Welcome to Empire. Thanks so much for having me. Very nice to meet you. Gordon, very nice to see you. Uh we had a lovely trip together to Berghead last summer and uh I've been trying to get you on the show ever since. So it's uh very good to see you here in your in your new dig at uh East Lowman. Let's just start with the simple question that most people who don't live in Scotland will be asking. Who were the pigs uh and what era?

Are we talking about? So it's a name that's first introduced by the Romans in AD two nine seven. It's uh in a praise poetry to an emperor of Rome who mentioning a group called the the Picts and essentially means the painted people. So it's a Roman nickname. And for whatever reason that nickname seems to stick for many centuries and there's people occupy North East Scotland, ruling over what was a really extensive kingdom for the time period. Um and

disappear around about nine hundred AD. Tlas the authors maintained it that they went into battle covered in tattoos and war paint. But Anita's gonna be very excited because they were also matrilineal. Uh kingship passed through the female line. rather than the male, which is unusual. uh in any society and particularly unusually in the British Isles.

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