The Picts were an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from ca AD 300–843 when the Dalriadic Scot, Kenneth, son of Alpin, took the Pictish Kingship. That the Picts had a distinct spoken language is evidenced in Bede's historical analysis of Roman records in Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (8th century).
Picts are recorded in the writings of their contemporaries - the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and the Irish but, other than a copy of their King list, they left no written record of themselves.
Researchers reporting in Royal Society Proceedings now believe that they have proved that the Pictish symbols, petroglyphs, found as stone carvings in Scotland are in fact elements of written language. A cultural interpretation of the symbols would suggest that they are of a heraldic or illustrative nature.This new approach is data based rather than interpretive.
Written Language or Heraldic Illustration?
Professor Rob Lee and his colleagues applied a mathematical process called Shannon entropy to these symbols and believe that they have demonstrated that they exhibit elements of written language.
There are short symbol scripts surviving from many cultures, but only a two-parameter decision-tree technique such as Shannon entropy is believed to distinguish between the different character sets of human communication systems when sample sizes are small, thus enabling the type of communication expressed by these small symbol corpuses to be determined.
Although the symbol scripts that the stones contain are assumed to convey information, many symbol sets are:
- short (one to three symbols)
- small (less than 1000 symbols)
- often fragmented
Until now it has been impossible to conclude whether they represent forms of written language.
Shannon entropy examines the order, direction and randomness of images. Using the technique on the Pictish symbols has established that it is unlikely that they are random or heraldic characters as was thought.
Pictish Compared With Norse, Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, Chinese
Writing comes in two basic forms, this paper suggests, lexigraphic writing that is based on speech and semasiography, which is not.
"Lexigraphic writing contains symbols that represent speech, such as words, or sounds like syllables or letters, and tends to be written in a linear or directional manner mimicking the flow of speech," Lee told Discovery News. In semasiography, symbols such as heraldic representations of person or place do not represent speech and generally do not come in a linear manner.
The data was compared with data for several other small-corpus written language samples, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish stone carvings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.
Pictish Symbols Catalogue Required
This research does not actually decipher any Pictish words. In order to answer the question of whether the symbols are words or syllables, and thus define a system from which a decipherment can be initiated, a complete visual catalogue of the stones and the symbols will need to be created and the effect of widening the symbol set investigated.
However, demonstrating that the Pictish Ancient Scottish symbols are writing, with the symbols probably corresponding to words, opens a unique line of further research for historians and linguists investigating the Picts and how they viewed themselves, the paper concludes.
Recent discoveries at the award-winning Pictland monastery excavation revealed further symbol stones: Scotland's Pictish Project Wins British Archaeology Award 2010
Sources
Lee, Johnathon, and Ziman, (2010) 'Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy' Proceedings A of the Royal Society of Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, published online before print March 31, 2010, doi: 10.1098/rspa.2010.0041
Jennifer Viegas (2010) 'New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered' Discovery News Wednesday March 31
Valerie Williamson - Dr. Val Williamson is a freelance journalist and academic specialising in historical and popular culture topics.
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