Customer Reviews

The Age of the Picts (History)

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Terrific new entry into the nebulous world of Pictish studies. Without a challenge, it has the BEST chronology of Pictish events and clearly the most clearly researched list of Pictish kings (which can be confusing at times in most books).

The author's theory as to the Britannic origin of the Scottish peoples in relation to the Picts is interesting and highly provocative.

Brilliant new entry into this debated bit of ancient Britannic history!

In this wonderful book, Professor W. A. Cummins collects all of the information known (as of 1995) about the Picts, the people of ancient Scotland. In the first eight chapters, the author examines what is known about the Picts, taking each subject one at a time to produce a clear and concise analysis of the data. The remaining ten chapters examine the Picts through a historical prism, showing how they interacted with neighboring peoples, and what those interactions tell us about the Picts. The crème de la crème, though, are the three appendices. The first two deal with the lists of Pictish kings, while the third analyzes the 30 Pictish "kings" who all have the name Brude.

This is a wonderful book, and an excellent resource! The author does speculate, drawing inferences carvings and so forth, but he does leap out into transoceanic empires and so forth that are presently so popular in some books. Instead, this book is a wonderfully readable book, which covers its subject in a scholarly manner. I highly recommend this book!

I must add, though, that the author clearly states, "Their language was sufficiently different from Scottish (Gaelic) and British (Welsh) to be considered a quite distinct language." What this language was, he does not speculate, but he does show how it dropped by some of the Picts in favor of British, and by the rest in favor of Scottish. Get this book!

The author does a fine job in the first 6 chapters considering the paucity of information on this somewhat mysterious people. In chapter 7 he briefly discusses their origins. This was where I found the book wanting. There appears to be no definitive answers or agreement among scholars of the various disciplines. Was Tacitus right about their Germanic origin? Are they a pre-Brittonic people, or Celtic? Can archaeology and DNA testing ever provide us with some certitudes?

Note, John King in his book "Kingdoms Of The Celts," stated that the Picts clearly were not Celts.The remainder of the book is about the Picts often hostile relations with their numerous neighbors. The photographs and maps were somewhat helpful. This book posed as many questions as it answered. For that it was worth the price.