Blast from the Past

I always tell my students that we have to guess at a lot of the history of ancient cultures because history comes from the stories, written or oral, passed down through the generations. Oral traditions get lost or corrupted over time and many ancient cultures didn't have a written language. So for a lot of ancient societies, the info we have is a lot of educated guesswork.

Imagine the excitement of archaeologists and historians when an ancient written language is discovered! Doesn't happen often but, guess what? It just happened. The Picts were a conglomeration of Celtic tribes living in Ancient Scotland. We assumed all these years that they never had a written language of their own. We had hundreds of stones similar to the ones in the photo, all known as the Pictish Stones, that we believed was their artwork.

However, researchers have determined that instead of simply being artwork, the drawings on the stone represent the Pictish language. It's known as a lexigraphic language, one where the words are pictures of the words they represent rather than letters making up that word. So instead of writing out "horse" for a horse, Picts would have drawn out a picture of one.

Pretty cool stuff. Archaeologists, anthropologists and all the other "ologists" who study that kind of stuff will now try to decipher the language from the Pictish Stones. Check out the entire article at...

http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/ancient-scotland-written-language.htm