The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps

1i8 PHGNICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS

{In Iberia (and the Picts, we shall sce, were of the Iberian physical type) the Vett-ones inhabited in the Roman period the valley of the great Guadalquivir.1 Pictavia was the ancient name for Piccardy,? a division of Gaul stretching from Iberia northwards to Brittany, and it was inhabited by the Pict-ones ; and its chief capital still bears the Pictish name of Poitiers which significantly is in the province of ‘* Vienne,” obviously a variant of Van or “ Bian.”

In Britain, south of the Tweed, the old place-names bearing the prefix “ Pit’ and “ Pet’ have not survived so freely as those of “ Wan ”’ and“ Venta.” The ancient village of ‘‘ Pitchley * in Northampton in the Wan’s Dyke area was still called in Domesday Book “ Picts-lei’’ and “ Pihtes-lea,’’® that is, the “lea of the Picts” ; and it contains, as we shall see, prehistoric human remains, presumably of the Pictish period. In Surrey are the villages of Pett, Petworth, the ‘‘ Peti-orde ’’ of Domesday —and Pettaugh. Glastonbury in Somerset, with its prehistoric lake-dwellings, was called “‘ Ynys Vitr-ain ” or “ Isle of Vitrland,” thus preserving the Gothic form of the Pictish eponym. “ Petf-uaria ’’ was the chief town between York and the Wash, in Ptolemy’s day ;it was in the Fens presumably of the lakedwelling Vans or Fens, and to its north is a “‘ Picton ”’ in the valley of the Tees.

In Scotland, which was called “‘ Pictavia”” in medieval Latin histories and the Pict Chronicles, the prefix “* Pit’ and “* Pet” is common in old village names, and presumably preserves the title of the aboriginal Picts for these villages of the natives, to distinguish them from the settlements of the ruling Aryan race in the adjoining villages called “‘Catti’’ and “Barat.” For numerous series of these ancient village Pit names in sharp contrast with the ‘‘Catti’’ and ‘‘ Barat’ villages studding the Don Valley of Old Pictland around the Newton Stone, see Map, p. 19. One of these ‘‘Pit’’ names, it is noteworthy, is ‘* Pit-blain,”” that is ‘‘ The Blue Pit or Pict,’ in which the word for “blue” is the identical British Gothic word ‘blain,”” used in the Eddas for ‘‘ The Blue Leg”’ tribe of dwarfs. And the ‘* Peni-land’’ Hills to the south of the Forth preserve the same “ Pict” title as the “ Pentland” Firth does to the north, and in Shetland, in addition to the saga references to Picts, there are several places named Petti.4

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1 The ancient Baetis river of Baetica. S. 3, i, 6.

2 “ Piccard-ach ’’ was an ancient name for the Southern Picts in Scotland, S.C.P. 74-76.

2A. W. Brown, Archeolog. Jour. 3-13, cited W.P.A., 180.

* Petti-dale and Pett-water on border of Tingwall parish, and Petti-garth Fell, and at Fetlar is ‘‘ The Finn’s Dyke" (Finni-girt Dyke).