Picts “an ancient people of
the British Isles”. The word appears
for the first time in 297 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.
GUITER (Bull. Soc. vascongada, 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.
