The Divine Archives

Archive/ The Vault/The Pictish Stones

The Vault · Relics & Sacred Objects

The Pictish Stones: Symbols Without a Key

In the archive

Held
About 350 carved stones and objects, mostly in north-east Scotland (Aberlemno in place; Meigle Museum; the Museum of Scotland and others)
Date evidence
c. 6th–9th century CE
Era
Era VI · The Early Medieval
In the archive
Celtic & Germanic · Patristic Christianity

In the churchyard and by the roadside at Aberlemno in Angus, Scotland, great slabs of stone stand in the open. On one, above a hunting scene, are two strange signs: a crescent crossed by a rod bent in a V, and a double disc crossed by a rod bent in a Z. On another, the back of a Christian cross-slab shows warriors fighting, sometimes read as the battle of Nechtansmere (685). The same signs appear on stones across the north and east of Scotland. They were carved by the Picts, a people who left almost no writing of their own, and nobody knows what they mean.

Reading the symbols

The same few symbols recur on stones across Pictland. Turn each card to see what is known, and what has been claimed.

  • Crescent and V-rod (the most common symbol): A crescent crossed by a rod bent in a V, often with floral ends. It appears on stones and on silver objects. Its meaning is unknown.
  • Double disc and Z-rod (two circles joined): Two discs joined by a bar and crossed by a rod bent like a Z. Common, often paired with the crescent. Unexplained.
  • The Pictish Beast (an unknown animal): A creature with a long snout, a curling crest and scrolled feet, drawn with great consistency. It has been read as a dolphin, a water-horse or a mythical beast; none is proven.
  • Mirror and comb (often at the bottom): Often added below other symbols. It has been read as marking a woman, or a status. The reading is debated.
  • Class I, II and III (Allen and Anderson, 1903): Class I: symbols on undressed stones. Class II: symbols with a carved Christian cross on dressed slabs. Class III: crosses without the symbols. The classes roughly follow the conversion of the Picts.
  • A written language? (Lee, Jonathan and Ziman, 2010): A statistical study argued that the symbols behave like a writing system. The linguist Richard Sproat and others argued that such tests cannot tell writing from other symbol systems. It remains open.

Study the object

Photographs of the stones belong to their holders and photographers.

The holding institution's own viewers

Paste any IIIF manifest into the viewer to study published images; it needs JavaScript.

The stones

  • Some 350 carved stones and objects bear the symbols, most in north-east Scotland.
  • Some thirty to fifty different symbols are recognised, depending on how variants are counted, some abstract (crescent and V-rod, double disc and Z-rod, "tuning fork", rectangle), some animals (the Pictish Beast, wolf, bull, eagle, salmon, snake), and some objects (mirror and comb).
  • They usually appear in pairs, sometimes with the mirror and comb added below.
  • In 1903 J. Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson sorted the stones into Class I (symbols on rough stones), Class II (symbols with a relief Christian cross on shaped slabs) and Class III (crosses without symbols). The classes broadly follow the Picts' conversion to Christianity from the sixth century.

What might they be?

Theories include names of people or families, marks of rank or lineage, records of marriage alliances, memorials, or boundary markers. In 2010 Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman argued from a statistical measure, Shannon entropy, that the symbol pairs behave like a written language. The computational linguist Richard Sproat and others replied that such statistics cannot distinguish writing from other symbol systems. The question is open.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Pagan or Christian? The Class I stones are often assumed to be pre-Christian, but no one knows whether the symbols had any religious meaning. On Class II stones they sit comfortably beside the cross, which suggests they meant something the Church could accept, such as names or ranks.

The Pictish Beast. The most distinctive animal, with a long snout, a crest and scrolled feet, is drawn so consistently that it must have had a fixed meaning. Suggestions include a dolphin, a water-horse (kelpie) or a mythical creature.

Ogham beside the symbols. Some Pictish stones also carry inscriptions in ogham, the Irish stroke alphabet, which are themselves largely unreadable because the Pictish language is poorly known.

Connections

Celtic & Germanic (ch14) and Patristic Christianity (ch22), for the conversion. Compare the Phaistos Disc (V56) and the Rohonc Codex (V11) for other symbol systems no one can read, and the Book of Kells (V21), from the same Insular art world.

✦ The evidence, honestly

What's well supported by the evidence

  • About 350 Pictish carved stones and objects with a shared set of some thirty to fifty symbols, mostly from the sixth to ninth centuries, and the Class I–III sequence into Christian cross-slabs.

What is not supported

  • Any decipherment of the symbols, or any proven religious meaning.

What's genuinely open

  • Whether the symbols are writing, and what they record.
  • The dating of individual Class I stones.

Sources

The stones

Are they writing?

  • R. Lee, P. Jonathan and P. Ziman, "Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy", Proceedings of the Royal Society A 466 (2010), https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2010.0041
  • R. Sproat, "A statistical comparison of written language and nonlinguistic symbol systems", Language 90.2 (2014)

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/pictish-stones.html

← The VaultBrowse the ages →