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

Who were the mysterious peoples who ruled parts of Scotland for 500 years? What is the true origin of the Loch Ness Monster? Is there a secret code behind the Pictish carved stones? What do recent excavations at Rhynie tell us about the Picts? William and Anita are joined by Professor Gordon Noble, Director of the Northern Picts Project and co-author of Picts: Scourge of Rome, Rulers of the North, to uncover the hidden world of the Picts. Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:28William Dalrymple?

  Welcome to Empire. I'm William Drumple.

• 1:31Anita Anand?

  And I'm Anita Aron. And in today's episode, we're going to be exploring the Picts, the mysterious painted people who ruled parts of eastern Scotland for 500 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 Picts Project and co-author of The King in the North: The Pictish Realms, Gordon Noble. Welcome to Empire.

• 2:02Speaker 05

  Thanks so much for having me. Very nice to meet you.

• 2:05William Dalrymple?

  Gordon, very nice to see you. We had a lovely trip together to Burghead last summer and I've been trying to get you on the show ever since. So it's very good to see you here in your new dig at East Lowndes. Let's just start with the simple question that most people who don't live in Scotland will be asking. Who were the Picts and what era are we talking about?

• 2:24Speaker 05

  So it's a name that's first introduced by the Romans in AD 297. It's in a praise poetry to an emperor of Rome, mentioning a group called the Picts, and essentially it means the painted people. So it's a Roman nickname. And for whatever reason, that nickname seems to stick for many centuries. And as people occupy northeast Scotland, ruling over what was a really extensive kingdom for the time period, and disappear around about 900 AD.

• 2:56William Dalrymple?

  That's the authors maintained that they went into battle covered in tattoos and war paint. But Anita is going to be very excited because they were also matrilineal. Kingship passed through the female line rather than the male, which is unusual in any society, and particularly unusual in the British Isles.

• 3:16Anita Anand?

  Oh, and I never knew that. I mean, at school here in Britain, I think many people who are my age will remember the first thing you do in history is you color in sort of a paint by color Pictish person, you know, and sort of the winding tattoos on their bodies. But why didn't they tell us about the matrilineal succession? So, I mean, almost every other political system, as everybody knows who's listened to this podcast, and particularly in the British Isles, ran through the male line. Why do the Picts do something so very different?

• 3:47Speaker 05

  Well, it's a subject of great debate, that one. And in fact, Bede actually says it's only at times of stress, really, that they might actually inherit through the female line. Having said that, you know, Pictish succession does look quite complicated and it says very rarely father to son, at least until the later periods. So there does seem to be a real period of flux in terms of actually how Pictish succession was made up. But to be honest, you know, our sources are so vague, really, that we don't even know if there was always a single Pictish king, how often there were sub-kings or sub-rulers. And certainly Pictish rule seems to have been divided at certain times throughout the history of the Picts.

• 4:28Anita Anand?

  It's not categorically that it was matrilineal. It just sometimes when they felt like it might have been. Is that what you're saying?

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. That's what Bede seems to suggest. So unless we get more evidence, it'd be hard to say more about that. But certainly, it seems rare, as far as we can tell, in terms of the succession of the Pictish kings.

• 4:48Anita Anand?

  Gordon, you mentioned Bede twice, as if we're all mates.

• 4:52Anita Anand?

  You're talking about a man that we at school learn as the venerable Bede, one of Britain's earliest historians. By the way, Willie, you'll love this. I got into so much trouble once, first essay, I wrote the venereal Bede and they thought I was taking call it detention. No, I couldn't spell. Anyway, could you tell us more about the veneer? I mean, the venerable Bede. Who is the venerable Bede?

• 5:15Speaker 05

  Well, he's this great English historian who's writing about the, well, mainly the ecclesiastical history of England, or what became England. And he mentions the Picts at various times, but obviously that information is filtered through the sources that he's able to access. So as well as the kind of matrilineal aspect, he also talks about the Picts coming from Scythia, which is, you know, a modern day area of places like Ukraine. That's probably because he's able now to access classical sources that talk about, you know, tattooed warriors bothering the Roman Empire. And he's putting two and two together and suggesting that the Picts came from Scythia,

• 6:00Speaker 05

  another noted origin point for an enemy of Rome, really. So there's lots of misinformation, I guess, you know, fluctuating and being communicated through authors like Bede. So it really adds to the kind of mysterious air of the Picts in terms of we have lots of snippets about them, but that's clearly not always right in terms of what it's communicating about these people who are living north of the Roman frontier.

• 6:27William Dalrymple?

  Gordon, before we leave women, as I know Anita will be very keen to pursue this, one of the most famous, possibly the largest and most famous Pictish stone does have a Pictish queen or a large image of a Pictish aristocratic woman of some sort, riding side saddle with warriors around her and hunting dogs and a huge penannular brooch on her front, the Hilton of Cadbol slab now in Edinburgh. So that again is a little bit of evidence that you don't see in English sculptures of the same period, any pictures of women, but you do see it very prominently on the biggest ever Pictish slab.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  In the burial records, you know, places like London, Lynx and Fife, we have burial monuments that are full of the burials of women. So there's clearly something interesting going on there in terms of Pictish society. But it's probably things like archaeology and genetics is going to tell us more about the relationships between people in the Pictish period than our traditional historical sources, perhaps.

• 7:29William Dalrymple?

  Let's start, Gordon, with what your excavations have actually found, because particularly Rhyne is a discovery that really began to change everything. That's when I first heard about you. Where is it and what is it about that excavation that began to change, or A, how we look for Pictish symbol stones, but also the Picts in general?

• 7:47Speaker 05

  Yes, so Rhyne is fascinating and it's amazing that, you know, I didn't myself know much about this, or indeed know anything about the Picts, really, until I went to university. It's quite embarrassing how little we teach our kids in Scotland about the Picts. But anyway, I started this, what I thought was going to be a sideline project to look at Pictish society through this place called Rhyne. And it's a place that's about 40 miles west of Aberdeen, the city of Aberdeen where I'm professor at. And it's got this really interesting place name, which comes from this early Celtic word, reefer, king, and it seems to mean a place associated with a great or a sacred king.

• 8:28Speaker 05

  But we don't have any historical sources to this place, but that's not surprising. We only have a handful of Pictish places actually mentioned in our sources. And from Rhyne, there's this whole series of carved stones, so the Picts are famous for their carved stones. And probably the most impressive one is this carving called the Rhyne Man. And this was found by the farmer in 1978, plowing his field. He hit this big stone, probably broke his plow, and he turned the stone over and there was this figure carrying this axe over his shoulder with big pointy teeth. Such an arresting image. And the question was, you know, what on earth is this stone doing in this arable field

• 9:11Speaker 05

  just to the south of this very small village of Rhyne? And so we set out to find out more. And in the same year that Rhyne Man was found, they flew over the site and they recorded these crop marks on top of this glacial knoll. So this kind of naturally prominent place in landscape. And to cut a long story short, that series of enclosures that were identified from there turned out to be this really wealthy Pictish settlement, befitting of that title, you know, a place associated with a great king. So we had large timber buildings, some sort of rampart or enclosure.

• 9:48Speaker 05

  And inside, we find all the kind of material you might associate with elite places of this time. So they were importing wine amphora from the Eastern Mediterranean, glass from Western France, from drinking goblets. So the kind of thing we associate with courtly society in the early medieval period. And this material has never been found this far north or east before. So this was really exciting.

• 10:15Anita Anand?

  Hang on, hang on. Mediterranean wine. Now, wait a minute, because that wasn't in my Pictish colouring book. Eastern Med... So I mean, that would suggest that if you're finding Eastern Mediterranean wine in Aberdeenshire, the Picts were traders? I mean, is that too much of an inference in the fifth century that they were doing foreign trade?

• 10:36Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, this material seems to be coming up the west coast of Scotland and Britain more generally. It's probably associated with the metal trade in places like Cornwall. So this material's coming in as part of early Christian networks and early trading networks in this post-Roman period, in the so-called Dark Ages. And this finding its way all the way up to Rhine, which is 40 kilometres away from the coast.

• 11:02William Dalrymple?

  Brilliant.

• 11:03Speaker 05

  So it's amazing this material found its way there. And it just shows you how powerful these people were at Rhine, that they were able to tap into those trade networks. And we would never have guessed that. You know, we had these amazing carved stones from Rhine, but we had no clue that this really, really wealthy settlement was located there. And then that just turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. So we started working in the wider landscape. And there's this huge hillfort that overlooks Rhine called Tappanoth. And it's got this 17 hectare enclosure. It's a huge, huge hillfort, one of the largest known from Northern Britain. And this was always thought to be a prehistoric monument. But we excavated and dated it to the Pictish period. And it's got something

• 11:47Speaker 05

  like 800 houses inside it. So this was a huge community. And the kind of scale of society that we had no idea existed in the Pictish period. So, you know, almost overnight, we've overturned so many things about Pictish society, and really showing it's way more complex than we perhaps assumed.

• 12:07William Dalrymple?

  We had a series on Gaza last year, and those torpedo-shaped jars from Gaza, the sweet wine, was it one of those? Was it the ones with the kind of little thing at the bottom? Was it Gaza wine or Alexandrian wine?

• 12:19Speaker 05

  They seem to come from various locations in the Eastern Mediterranean. It's hard to tell from the tiny shards that we found exactly where it might have came from. But yeah, it was just so remarkable to find that material. And we found it within, you know, the first few days of excavating at Rhine in 2011. And I was able to phone up, you know, one of my friends who is a specialist in these imports and say, well, we've got this very strange-looking pottery, and we've got this glass with white trails. And he was like, well, you've got an import site here, and that's just, that's just amazing.

• 12:51Anita Anand?

  Amazing.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  And it was just meant to be a sideline project. I was doing prehistoric archaeology, but I've always been interested in the Picts. But I'd never really pursued that, because people were like, well, don't bother doing the archaeology of the Picts, because there's nothing to find out. And you'll just get lost in the symbols. And there lies madness, essentially.

• 13:09William Dalrymple?

  Madness, yeah. Many fine scholars have gone down that way, fast, exactly. Gordon, last summer, I drove up to see you in Burghead, which is another spectacular site. We always knew that Burghead was there with this mysterious well system down at the bottom. But you were the first person, again, that firmly dated that to the Picts. You've suddenly given the Picts a whole range of sites and a whole load of Pictish fortifications and towns, which we didn't know existed.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. So this is a slightly different kind of site. So it's a promontory fort that sticks out into the Murray Firth, this amazing kind of connected area of sea. And it's this huge fortification. And it was first identified in the modern period in the 19th century, and they did various excavations after the modern town of Burghead had been built, over round about half of the Pictish fort there, and destroyed a huge chunk of the site. And again, people are like, well, you know, don't really go to Burghead, because there's nothing to find out. But in those 19th century excavations, again, they found some amazing carvings, carvings of bulls, about 30 individual monuments with bulls

• 14:19Speaker 05

  on them. There's only six surviving today, sadly. One in the British Museum, one in Nash Museum, and others held locally.

• 14:26William Dalrymple?

  One in Elgin, isn't there? Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. And what are these carvings? What do they denote? And what we've got there is really a fortress and settlement that dates to when the Pictish kingdoms are at their height in the seventh and eighth centuries. So this is really when the over-kingdom of the Picts is established. And they're creating these huge fortresses with walls that are eight metres thick, six metres high. It's like, you know, kind of castle architecture in the Pictish period. And then a huge settlement inside with these long-distance connections being demonstrated through the material culture. So again, it's really, really overturning what we thought we knew about the Picts.

• 15:08Anita Anand?

  Do you know, there's something else that's going to overturn the peace and quiet of Burghead, I'll tell you that for a fact, because I think it's the site where Christopher Nolan filmed part of The Odyssey. So just expect lots of people in Tabards taking little visitor groups up there. I mean, it's just a crazy thought, isn't it? Sort of, you know, Bronze Age epic, being filmed in the largest Pictish fort in Scotland. I kind of find it delicious. Let's, let's talk about it. I mean, I'm, I'm just keen to get a little more meat on the bones of this very scanty history that we were always given, which was, you know, just basically nothing deeper than skin deep, you know, than the tattoos. And Willie, I mean, you've been really into the stones rather than the skin, haven't you?

• 15:52William Dalrymple?

  I am obsessed with, like many people, because despite many, many works coming out on them, and generations of scholars looking at these stones, starting with a man called Romilly Allen, who went around the Highlands with a horse and cart, photographing every one of these Pictish symbols. And I bought, I got a copy of this fantastic, fat, leather-bound volume that he did in the 19th century. And his work really has not been improved upon as a record of these beautiful, beautiful carvings. But give us an idea, because as you say, it's something that's driven generations of scholars about, because they come up with elaborate theories. And there's actually, there's very little to prove what is true, what isn't.

• 16:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're amazing things. And it's, it's why I got interested in the Picts, you know. And I was studying art history, and my lecturer put up some slides of some of these symbol stones. And again, I grew up in North East Scotland, I'd never seen any. And I was just like, my goodness, what are these? And why aren't they better known? So the early examples are often just the symbols on large boulders or standing stones. And there are things like, you know, abstract symbols, things we call double disks and crescents, but also these amazing animal carvings. The Picts are so famous for being amazing craftspeople. So we've got things like wolves, bulls, other animals, and they're so well represented.

• 17:14William Dalrymple?

  Salmon, snakes.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so, yeah, what do they mean? And so that's been one of the big things that's trying to, trying to crack the code. And certain stones give us a few clues. So you mentioned Willie Dunfallandi. And you can see that there's people on chairs, maybe even thrones, and they're labelled with these symbols, often in pairs. So the most likely explanation is that some sort of naming system. So the symbols represent sounds or words, almost like, you know, kind of hieroglyphic or logographic kind of representation. But unless we find a Rosetta Stone, we're not really going to be able to say more. But this is where archaeology comes in. And so one of the other big mysteries is, you

• 17:59Speaker 05

  know, how old were they? What context are they in? So excavations at places like Rhine shows that Rhine man and one of the standing stones with two symbols on, a salmon and a Pictish beast, they stewed at the entranceway into what was probably this royal complex at Rhine. So you can see the, you know, the advertising at the front door, essentially, you know, that people of high status and people with influence are located at the site. And we're also finding stuff at Rhine in the ground, which resembles what you see on the stones. So you can begin to date the stones through these archaeological associations. So we found a little miniature axe that looks like the Rhine man carries. We found

• 18:41Speaker 05

  these amazing clay molds for making animal figurines, which resembled the animals you see on the stones. And you can date those archaeological layers. You can actually see that the stones date back to, you know, the third, fourth centuries, perhaps, and certainly the fifth, sixth centuries. So a bit earlier than people maybe had generally assumed.

• 19:02William Dalrymple?

  You mentioned this, this extraordinary find of Eastern Mediterranean wine in the middle of Aberdeenshire. But the symbols themselves have many echoes to very distant art networks, don't they? There are clearly Byzantine borrowings, there's images that we know are Coptic monks from Egypt. And there's even monsters and images that appear to sort of be echoes of stuff coming out of Sassanian Persia. I mean, these are very, very far away places to be influencing craftsmen sitting outside Aberdeen and Inverness and Perth.

• 19:37Anita Anand?

  Gordon, I want to talk about something shiny and exciting, the silver, because the Gollcross hoard is one of the great stories of your project. Tell us a little bit about it.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  Yes, so we don't have an awful lot of actual complete Pictish objects, or often not in context, certainly. So as archaeologists, even at places like Rhaenyra, we're generally finding what people throw away. So the bits and pieces, scrap and the like. So it's amazing to find more complete objects, but often they don't have context because they were found in the 19th century. So in the 19th century at Gollcross, an improving farmer had blown up a stone circle with dynamite to remove it from his land.

• 20:23Speaker 05

  And during that process of destruction, he'd found these silver objects. But unfortunately, only three objects were retained. One was a beautiful silver hand pin, which is a style of dress pin that ultimately goes back to Roman style, a bangle and a piece of silver chain. So we went back to the fine spots to say, well, not really thinking we'd find anything else, but we involved a local metal detectorist and National Museum of Scotland, my colleague Martin Goldberg. And we started scanning the field round about where we thought this destroyed stone circle was, which was a prehistoric monument, so earlier than the Picts. But clearly, they'd buried their silver next to this ancient monument,

• 21:08Speaker 05

  presumably to go back and get it, or maybe a gift to the gods perhaps. Then we started scanning the field and we very quickly began to find silver object after silver object. And eventually we recovered over 100 pieces of silver.

• 21:24William Dalrymple?

  Good day's work.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was not bad. Some of it was Pictish in style and some of it was Roman. So we had things like clipped Roman coins, bits of Roman weaponry and jewellery and tableware and the like. And this is an example of how Picts were getting a hold of Roman material, things like silver and glass, melting it down, reworking it and creating objects and fashion that was very much in the Pictish style, but also perhaps relating to Roman military traditions, for example. So it just shows you revisiting some of these early fine spots can really uncover so much more.

• 22:10Speaker 05

  And again, we were able then through all this new material culture to begin to actually reassess the chronology of some of these early Pictish objects and again relate them to the Pictish stones. So some of the material culture we find at places like Gollcross and Norislaw, you get, for example, symbols incised onto silver objects. So again, it shows you that the symbols on the stones were just part of a wider Pictish culture. And the symbol system had a wider currency, essentially.

• 22:42Anita Anand?

  And I'm desperate to ask you this. There's a charming TV series called The Detectorists. I don't know whether it's something that all archaeologists watch religiously. It's very lovely. It's a drama. I mean, it's fabulous. But it's these two people who tirelessly go looking at farmers' ploughed fields, looking for something. And I just want to know from you, when you pick up something, an object that has not been touched by human hands for thousands of years. I mean, you sound like a cool customer when you're chatting just, but what was going on in your heart and your head at the time?

• 23:16Speaker 05

  Oh, it was absolutely incredible. It was, I think, for some reason, we chose to do it in December and it was like snowing and it wasn't a pleasant experience. But when you begin to find that sort of material culture, it's just incredible. And the same with Rhaenyra, as I say, we had no idea we were going to find all this objects from far flung places and really uncover this Pictish world. So it's hugely exciting. And even as an archaeologist, it's still amazing to me that you can take the turf off, like this site at East Lomond where we're working on just now, and you're straight down on to buildings and structures and finds from the Pictish period from 1500 years ago. That's just an incredible thing, really, isn't it? This material is still there.

• 24:00William Dalrymple?

  Literally what you're doing this morning.

• 24:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

• 24:03Anita Anand?

  Columba is also a fantastically interesting character. You may know him as Saint Columba, the Monk Columba, but not so well known beyond the British Isles. Just give us a little summary of who Columba was.

• 24:19William Dalrymple?

  So he is the man credited with converting the Picts. And he left Ireland under something of a cloud. Gordon, he was accused of murder, wasn't he?

• 24:27Speaker 05

  Well, I think so, yes. And he goes across, escapes to what is now Scotland.

• 24:32William Dalrymple?

  And he sets up this famous monastery at Iona, which is still the major place of pilgrimage, a little offshore island just off the island of Mull on the west coast of Scotland.

• 24:42Speaker 05

  Like many regions in the world, the only way we tend to know about the pagan religion is through the eyes of Roman sources and laterally Christian sources. So in Pigland, there's the life of Columba, who's credited with converting the northern Picts. And in that life, they talk about Columba going to the fortress of Berthe, who's a really powerful king in late 6th century. And this is a documented figure, so he appears in other sources. So he's a real king. And Columba goes to his fortress, which is round about Loch Ness.

• 25:17William Dalrymple?

  Above Inverness, somewhere, yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  And he talks about the court of the king. And in the court of the king is a figure called a magi, a wizard or a druid, perhaps. It's amazing because Columba and the magi begin to have battles to court the king's influence. So they're both trying to control the weather. They're both blessing or cursing wells, for example. So you get this insight into this pagan world. But how true is it really? In terms of, it's hard to know in this Christian world whether they're deliberately creating this binary opposition

• 25:59Speaker 05

  between the pagan magi and the more successful early Christian saintly figure. But it gives you some clues about things like wells and natural places seem to be important to the Picts. From the archaeological record, we know that caves are important in terms of places of death and transformation. And we also get insight into things like quartz stones, which seem to be healing stones. And we find these on archaeological sites, they're called painted pebbles. And we found a few at Burghhead last year. So these might be charm stones or healing stones. So there's clues, small snippets about what the pre-Christian religion might have been.

• 26:40Anita Anand?

  I mean, the clues are so teeny tiny tantalising. It just builds up this really mysterious picture that surrounds these painted people. There is another mysterious thing we're going to talk about after the break. You're going to love it. Don't miss it. The first sighting of the Loch Ness monster. Join us after the break.

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• 28:34Anita Anand?

  Welcome back. Now Gordon, I sort of talked about Nessie before the break. I want to talk about Nessie now. Tell us a bit more about this first sighting.

• 28:43Speaker 05

  Yes, so this is another episode in the life of Columba, where Columba is again battling with the Pictish magi over various other episodes. But at one point, he goes to Loch Ness and he tries to cross the loch, but the magi whips up the winds and a storm and creates all sorts of havoc. And at one point, they encounter this monster on the loch, which, you know, is it Nessie? Who knows?

• 29:19William Dalrymple?

  It's definitely Nessie, Gordon. It's got to be Nessie.

• 29:22Anita Anand?

  It's not Nessie. It's not a thing.

• 29:25William Dalrymple?

  Anita, you and I will have words about this after.

• 29:28Anita Anand?

  Yeah, we'll fall out about this. It's not Nessie. Okay, but something. And the story goes that something is conjured up in the chaos. Columba, what, he raises his hands and what sort of calms the storms? He has, I mean, it's all miracle versus miracle at this time, isn't it?

• 29:42Speaker 05

  It is. It is. Yeah. So it's probably quite fascinating to think about what early Christian religion looked like. And, you know, what these magi were doing wasn't actually that dissimilar in many ways. So it's really, really fascinating to get a glimpse into that world. But obviously, these stories are kind of fantastical, really. But is this really interesting mention of this monster in Loch Ness?

• 30:06William Dalrymple?

  Gordon, I'm very disappointed to see you take Anita's rationalist view of these things.

• 30:12Anita Anand?

  Do you mean the sane view? Yes, I know. It's odd.

• 30:16Speaker 05

  Well, I'm an archaeologist, rather than a historian.

• 30:18Anita Anand?

  Well, I mean, you know, also, you don't listen to fairies. But the thing is, okay, you know, what it tells us is that, you know, whoever wants to win hearts and minds has to also win the imagination. And this is a real battle of the imagination between, you know, the Pictish world and then this new faith that Columba is bringing. It isn't about salvation. It's about, I can do the bigger miracle. And because healing the sick and talking to animals, you know, Dr. Dolittle-ing it, all of this is part of the Columba mythology, isn't it?

• 30:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. So it's great to get these insights into these figures. Again, how, you know, how much weight can we put on these sources? I think it's certainly, you know, very possible that, you know, Berthe, this powerful king, did have some sort of magical Druid-like figure in his court. You know, this would have been largely a pre-Christian context. And on some Pictish stones, you actually see these really interesting figures, like the Rainy Man, who seemed to be part human, part, you know, animal. So, you know, are these, you know, kind of shamanic figures? Are they actually magi we see on some of these stones? So it's really, again, interesting

• 31:34Speaker 05

  to think about how the imagery you see on the Pictish stones might be grounded in, you know, everyday belief. And some of that is almost certainly kind of of a pre-Christian character. So the Rainy Man, for example, is carrying this axe that is very, very similar to the axe found in the famous son who shit burial, buried next to the king, who many people assume is Redwald. And it's an axe type that's associated with slaughter of animals. And this is the kind of thing that early pagan sacral kings might be associated with. So again, we have these historical sources, but hopefully, the archaeological record will begin to tell us more and more about

• 32:16Speaker 05

  these early Christian figures, but also maybe these pre-Christian magi or Druids within Pictish society.

• 32:23William Dalrymple?

  Now, Gordon, one thing that's very important to explain to people perhaps is that when the Picts are converted to Christianity, we begin to see signs of Christianity in Pictish art. They don't drop the symbols, the symbols, these mysterious figures, the V rods and the crescents and the Z rods and the double discs and the famous swimming elephant symbol, which if you haven't seen it, go and Google it now. It's one of the most beautiful of all the Pictish symbols. These continue on into early Christian art. So you get this weird conjunction of different worlds. Take us there for a minute.

• 32:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. So we often think of, you know, this conversion point, and then everyone's Christian. It's all, you know, a complete transformation within society. But as you say, we see things like the Pictish symbols continue on to these monuments. We see some of these mask-wearing or animal head figures appear on Christian cross labs. So it may well be that some of these monuments are, you know, kind of broaching to faiths, really. You know, they're putting weight on both religions, I guess. So yeah, you get this continuation of the symbol tradition.

• 33:30William Dalrymple?

  And you see some of these Pictish animals appearing in the early Celtic manuscripts. So one of the figures in the Book of Duro, the evangelist symbol of the Lion and the Saint Mark, is very similar to a Pictish animal. And this has led lately to a wonderful new academic battle between Scotland and Ireland. Because my old teacher of history of art at Cambridge, Isabel Henderson, 20 years ago, put forward this idea that the closest thing you get to the Book of Kells is nothing in Ireland. It's actually the Nigg Stone, one of the Christian Pictish stones in a place called Nigg in the Black Isle, north of Inverness. And this has heated up lately

• 34:14William Dalrymple?

  because we've had a new book published this year that has angered the Irish and put their backs right out. Because the Book of Kells is usually said to be the ultimate symbol of Irish civilisation. But it's now being seriously mooted that not only are many of the evangelist symbols and so on that you see in the Insular manuscripts, the Celtic-style Gospel books from this period, very like Pictish animals, but there's now actually a very well documented scholarly argument that the Book of Kells itself may have been produced in Pictland.

• 34:56Anita Anand?

  The Book of Kells is so supremely important to the Irish sense of itself, if you like. And just for those of you who may not know, sometimes it's known as the Book of Columba. And it's this beautiful illustrated manuscript, the Celtic Gospel, if you like. It's an absolutely exquisite and priceless thing. And for, you know, the Irish to be challenged that theirs wasn't first and theirs wasn't the most important, I would put it to you, Gordon, that's quite a lot. I mean, if you're going to suggest that actually the Picts were responsible for it, you're going to start a fight, aren't you?

• 35:30Speaker 05

  Well, maybe a fight, but probably a very gentle academic debate is the case in this case.

• 35:38William Dalrymple?

  I've tried bringing this up in Dublin, and it wasn't that gentle.

• 35:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe. It depends on the context. No, this is a wonderful book by Victoria Whitworth, who's looked at, you know, the Book of Kells. And one element of that study is looking at the possible origin points for this amazing manuscript. And, you know, one of the perplexing aspects of the Picts is, you know, why do we have so few surviving sources or illuminated books, for example? And, you know, back in the day when we had no or very little archaeology, there wasn't really a strong case to say, you know, that the Picts were particular innovators in some of these wonderful works of art. But that's, again, you know, hugely transformed

• 36:24Speaker 05

  in recent years. So major excavations at Port Mahomack, which is on the Tarburt Peninsula, north of Inverness, has identified this monastery of the Picts, where we, again, we have carved stones which resemble some of the beautiful illuminated pages in the Book of Kells on the sculpture. So this is why Isabel Henderson suggested, well, there could be a link here. And the excavations uncovered amazing evidence for vellum production. So they were producing books there at Port Mahomack. And huge amounts of sculpture and other material culture, which is rich in imagery. You know, the Picts were amazing at carving and making objects with

• 37:05Speaker 05

  animals and people on them. They're some of the best artists, really, in Western Europe in this time period. So it really begins to add weight to, well, major works of art, like the Book of Kells, could conceivably have been made in Pictland.

• 37:20Anita Anand?

  You brave man, conceivably. Are you frit, Gordon? Are you frit for saying it? Claim it, man. Claim it if you want to start a proper fight.

• 37:30Speaker 05

  No, I mean, it's really, really interesting. It's probably not resolvable unless, you know, we can trace the origins of the vellum of the Book of Kells.

• 37:38William Dalrymple?

  You could probably do that, couldn't you now? Yeah. I bet the Irish won't let you take a sample, though. They're too worried.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  Well, I think you can do it, you know, non-invasively these days. So, yeah, that would be one way to begin to settle the debate.

• 37:51William Dalrymple?

  Oh, I'd love that. I would love that. Trinity, we'd have to do one of those sort of colonial reclamation projects and demand that the Irish give back what is truly, truly the work of the Scots and the Picts.

• 38:05Anita Anand?

  Can I just say, all I can see in my mind's eye is like a West Side Story jets and sharks with, you know, sort of the Irish and the Scottish academics fronting up to each other and hitting each other with pencils. It's delicious. But what it does tell us, I mean, apart from this controversy, you know, you were talking, I just want to go back to something that is still in my head, which is this international influence on the world of the Picts. I mean, we talked about wine, of course we did. But we, you know, we should also talk about the art and the influence of, you know, sort of iconography and imagery. I mean, tell us a little bit about what you've seen and where you think those influences, how far away, how far they've travelled to come into that Pictish art language, if I can put it that way.

• 38:50Speaker 05

  I think, as Willie was saying, there was lots of assumptions about Pictish art. And back in the 20th century, there was this famous book, The Problem of the Picts. And some of the work on art history then was very much suggesting the Picts were late to the game, they were copying sources further south. Now, all this new dating in places like Rhine and places like Dunlop, another location with symbol stones, were able to show that the Picts were major innovators in things like animal imagery. And so they themselves are clearly a major contributor to these insular art styles, so this Irish, English, Scottish, Pictish art styles. So they weren't late to the game at all.

• 39:34Speaker 05

  Clearly, they were major innovators, which again, gives ammunition to this idea that works like the Book of Kells could be produced in Piceland. But yeah, they've got all sorts of influences. They've got Roman influences, they've got Anglo-Saxon influences, and latterly Scandinavian influences. You begin to see influences on Pictish art in the 9th century with the adoption of Scandinavian imagery and art styles as well.

• 40:04William Dalrymple?

  You introduced at the beginning this lovely idea of this eastern Mediterranean wine coming all the way to Aberdeenshire. But there's also eastern Mediterranean monks depicted on Pictish stones. Very specifically, one of the most frequently depicted images that we know for sure is the monks Paul and Antony. And Saint Antony was the founder of Christian Nazism. He lived in a monastery near the Red Sea. And I've been to Saint Paul's monastery, also on the Red Sea, which was where his friend Saint Paul lived. And there is a little scene of two monks breaking a host, which is exactly the same as one of the stones at Saint Vigen's in Persia, one of the great Pictish museums. If you're coming to Scotland this summer, or if you've lived here already, there are two wonderful Pictish museums, Saint Vigen's and Meagle.

• 40:49William Dalrymple?

  And you can just lose yourself in these Pictish stones for a whole day in either of those. But they have these incredibly wide sources, these monks from Egypt in the middle, again, of Persia. It does my head in just thinking of it.

• 41:02Anita Anand?

  While your head is done in, on the Scandinavian influence that Gordon, you were talking about, I mean, that has to be with the travels and adventures of the Vikings. And we should say that this beautiful fight that I have in my head between Scottish and Irish academics over the Book of Kells, the Book of Kells may not even have survived because of the Vikings. I mean, we should sort of tell the story of the near destruction of Iona. So, I mean, what happened? We're talking about around 795 to 810 AD? That's, I mean, those are the dates that we're talking about?

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, so famously, there's various attacks on Iona by the Vikings. And that would have been in the Kingdom of Dariada, which is this kingdom of Scots Gaelic speakers. But that seems to be partly controlled by Piceland at various points in the 8th and 9th century. Probably less well known is that the Vikings were also being major problems for Pictish kings as well. So some of the Danelaw armies, for example, descend upon Piceland and they overwinter in Piceland in the 9th century. They kill various Pictish kings. And this is probably the roots of, or one of the roots of the demise of the Pictish

• 42:19Speaker 05

  kingdoms, which disappear from view round about 890s, 900 AD. And major sites like Burghhead, so far, all our radiocarbon dating adds up to this major destruction and abandonment of this huge settlement, this northern Pictish powerhouse in the same time period, in the kind of 880s, 890s, 900s. And at Burghhead, we've got material that's coming from the Danelaw that we found in our excavations.

• 42:51William Dalrymple?

  Danelaw being the bit of northern England that the Vikings had seized, bits of Yorkshire and Tyneside and so on.

• 42:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. So again, it's amazing to begin to find in our Pictish sites, material that talk about these connections and this major period of strife in this time, in which all these Pictish kings are going into battle and being killed by Vikings. And very close to Burghhead is this amazing monument called the Sueno Stone. So it's named after a Scandinavian king, but it's a Pictish monument.

• 43:25William Dalrymple?

  It's a wonderful, wonderful stone, huge, tall thing.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  That's right, about six meters high. And on the back is this incredible battle scene, which may well be a battle between the Picts and the Vikings. And it's almost like a capstone to this Pictish period.

• 43:41William Dalrymple?

  And there's a broch, isn't there? There's one of these tall, tall towers.

• 43:45Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, there's lots of debate about some of the imagery there. But I think it's, Professor Jane Geddis, for example, has recently interpreted it as a major battle between the Picts and the Vikings.

• 43:59William Dalrymple?

  Love it.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  And we've also been able to date the stone through archaeological association to round about 900 AD. So it matches the end date of Burghhead. So is it actually showing the demise of Burghhead perhaps?

• 44:14William Dalrymple?

  Gordon, you've been absolutely fantastic. And my visit last summer to Burghhead with you was one of the highlights, as I've been looking out from this fantastic promontory with the sun setting and your diggers finding extraordinary finds just behind me on the hill. That was one of the most wonderful days. We're going to be going back to the Vikings in the next episode. We've got the wonderful Eleanor Baraklaff, our favourite Viking expert, returning to the series to take us on two episodes into what the Vikings did in the first, and then what the Vikings thought, and their mythology and religion. Wonderful, wonderful stuff in the second to wrap up.

• 44:56Anita Anand?

  And you know what? If you don't want to wait and you want to listen to Eleanor right this second, all you have to do to access all our exclusive bonus episodes, join Empire Club, follow the link in the episode description. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.

• 45:13William Dalrymple?

  And goodbye from me, and with many thanks to Gordon, William Durhample.