Picts “an
ancient people of the British
Isles”. The word appears
for the first time in 297 A.D. in Eumenius’ Panegyric. It is a
translation of the Breton Breizad “Breton” (from brezel “war”,
thus “the warriers”) and confused with brez “variegated” ; this confusion prompted Isidore
of Seville to say that their name arose from their being tattooed (which was
just a supposition). Thus the Picts were just Bretons, not some mysterious
people.
In his 2006 book The Origins of the British, revised in 2007,
STEPHEN OPPENHEIMER argued that neither Anglo-Saxons nor Celts had much impact
on the genetics of the inhabitants of the British Isles, and that British
ancestry mainly traces back to the Palaeolithic Iberian people, now represented
by Basques, instead. He also argued that the Scandinavian input has been
underestimated. He published an introduction to his book in Prospect
magazine of October 2006, and answered some of his critics in a further Prospect
magazine article in June 2007.
H. GUITER in La langue des Pictes (Bull. Soc. vascongada 24: 281-321, 1968) shows convincingly that
the inscriptions found in the British Isles do not differ any
more from Basque than a dialect. This is not to say that the Picts were
Basques, but simply that the Basques, a people of navigators, had left their
traces in this country (as they have in America). Pict is
without any relation to “Pictones” the ancient name of the inhabitants of Poitou, France.