Not so forgotten, but poorly documented
The Picts are not a lost civilization. They were a people, or group of peoples, of northern and eastern Scotland who appear in Roman and early medieval sources for several centuries and who left stone carvings, place-names and some archaeology. What is missing is a body of writing by the Picts themselves. Almost everything we read about them was written by outsiders: Romans, Irish and Anglo-Saxon churchmen, and later Scottish chroniclers. That imbalance is why the Picts seem mysterious, and why some popular claims about them are not well supported.
Where they lived
The Picts occupied much of the land north of the Firth of Forth and the Clyde, including the north-east, the Highlands and the northern isles at various times. Their heartlands, according to most scholars, lay in the east, from Fife and Perthshire through Angus and Aberdeenshire to the Moray Firth. To their west lay the Gaelic-speaking kingdom of Dál Riata, founded by people with links to Ireland; to the south lay British-speaking kingdoms and later the Angles of Northumbria.
The name and the language
The name “Picti” first appears in a Roman text of 297 CE, and can be read in Latin as “painted ones”. It may refer to tattooing or body painting, but this is not certain, and it may be a Roman name for a people who called themselves something else. Before this, Roman writers used tribal names such as the Caledonians, one of several northern Iron Age Celtic tribes they recorded, though the label “Celtic” for Britain is itself debated.
The Pictish language is poorly known, since only short inscriptions and personal and place-names survive. Most scholars think it was a Celtic language related to the British (Brittonic) tongues, not to Gaelic, though some features remain debated. Pictish place-names with the element “pit-”, as in Pitlochry, are often linked to the Picts, although the name element may have been used by later Gaelic speakers.
Picts and Rome
Roman legions reached northern Scotland in the late first century CE, and the writer Tacitus describes a battle with the Caledonians at Mons Graupius in the 80s CE under Agricola. The location is unknown. Later Rome built frontiers further south, with Hadrian’s Wall in the 120s and the Antonine Wall in the 140s. The conflict with Rome, from those frontiers to raids on the province of Britain in the fourth century, is a story of its own, often summed up as the Picts and Romans. What matters here is that the Picts emerged as a name in the late third century, as groups beyond the frontier became larger and better organised, perhaps partly in reaction to Rome.
Kingdoms and kings
By the sixth and seventh centuries we can speak of Pictish kingdoms. Bede, writing in Northumbria in the early eighth century, mentions a Pictish king named Bridei son of Maelchon, and Adomnán’s later life of Columba describes the missionary visiting him. Later sources describe a set of Pictish provinces, and some historians see this as evidence of several regional kings, with a dominant overking at various times.
One of the most prominent was Fortriu. Older writers placed it in the north, but many scholars now locate its core in the Tay and Strathearn region of central Scotland, an idea tied to the Kingdom of Fortriu. Its kings fought the Northumbrians, the Britons and the Gaels, and in 685 the Pictish king Bridei son of Bili won a major victory at Dunnichen.
Pictish succession is often described as matrilineal, because king lists show kings whose fathers appear to be from other peoples. This idea comes from later sources and is debated; some scholars prefer to speak of a system in which royal descent could pass through women, rather than a fully matrilineal society.
Carved stones and Christianity
The Picts left a remarkable body of carved stones, with animals such as the so-called Pictish beast and with abstract symbols. The earlier symbols are not understood, which is why the Pictish symbol stones are so often discussed. Later stones show Christian crosses mixed with Pictish designs. Christianity reached the Picts through several routes: missionaries from the British south, from Ireland and from the Gaelic west, and the church of Iona. Bede describes the conversion of the southern Picts by Ninian and the northern Picts by Columba, but historians now think the process was more gradual and complex. A decision by King Nechtan around 710 to follow the Roman method of calculating Easter is recorded by Bede.
Vikings and the end of the Pictish kingdom
From the late eighth century, Viking raids hit the western and northern coasts, and in 839 a Viking army killed a Pictish king and many nobles, according to the Irish annals. In the following decades, power in the east passed to the line of Cinaed mac Ailpin (Kenneth MacAlpin), who by the 840s or 850s is generally regarded as having ruled over both Picts and Gaels, though the details of how are uncertain.
Over the next century or two, Pictish identity gave way to a Gaelic-speaking kingdom that became known as Alba. The Pictish language and customs were gradually absorbed, rather than being wiped out. Evidence that the Picts were violently destroyed, as a later legend claimed, is poor. Their descendants, in a broad sense, were part of the people who formed medieval Scotland.
Myths to avoid
Several claims about the Picts are better treated with caution. The idea that they were a non-Indo-European people with a secret language is not supported by the main scholarly view. The tale that they were wiped out by Kenneth MacAlpin in a single feast or massacre comes from late and unreliable sources. And the notion of their territory as a single united country in the Roman period is probably wrong. What the evidence supports is a series of regional groups that over time consolidated into larger kingdoms, shaped by contact and conflict with Rome, Britons, Gaels, Angles and Norse.