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

PICTS AS ABORIGINES OF ALBION 11g

Jn Ireland, in an Irish epic tale of the first century A.D., Picts are located in Western Ulster. But in the earlier period of the Irish legends the Picts are clearly, I think, the same primitive people who are called ‘‘ The tribe of Fidga,’? of the plain of “ Fidga,” a locality not yet located. These “ Fidga” are repeatedly mentioned as opposing the Sunworshippers (i.e. the Aryan overlords), and derived their origin from Britain (Albion); they used poison weapons, and were defended by. two double-headed Serpents,* showing that they were, like the Picts and Vans, devotees of the Serpent-cult. This Trish form of their name is in series with the Welsh name for the Picts, namely “ Fficht ;’ and they appear to have been of the same primitive race as the Van or Fen (or early Fein).]

This racial position for the Picts as the primitive pre-Aryan aborigines of Britain and Ireland in the Stone Age, thus confirms and substantiates, but from totally different sources, the theory of their non-Aryan nature advanced by Rhys. This philologist believed that the Picts were the nonAryan aborigines of Britain, merely because of a few non-Aryan words occurring in ancient inscriptions in Scotland, which he surmised might be Pictish,‘ though this surmise was not generally accepted.? Nor did he find traces of such Pictish words in England or Wales, besides “The Sea of Icht,’ although he believed he found one solitary word in Ireland.¢

In physical type, the Picts, according to general tradition, were dark “ Iberian,” small-statured and even pygmy,’ more or less naked, with their skins “ tinged with Caledonian or Pictish woad.’"* They have been allied to the semi-Iberian Basques,* whose language was radically non-Aryan, on

» Tain bo Cualnge, J. Dunn, ror4, xvii, 375-

* Tuath Fidga.

* Book of Leinster, 15a, and R.H.L. 631 and 641.

* hind Lects. 1889; P.S.A.S. 1892, 305, etc.; Welsh People,t902, 13, etc.

*H.A.B., 4098., etc.

* This was inferred by him on the theory that the “ Cruthni ” designated Picts (Welsh People 1902, 13). But on the other hand he holds the opposite view that “‘ Cruthni’”” was a Celtic spelling of “‘ Priten” or “ Briton, ’’ which name, he thinks, means “ Cloth clad,” to distinguish the Aryan Britons or “ Pritens ” from the non-Aryan aborigines or Picts, which mutually destroys his argument.

* MacRitchie M.F.P., etc. He cites a fifteenth-century account of carly pygmy Picts in Orkney, Monthly Rev., Jan. 1901, T41.

® Wharton, on Milton. * R.R.E., 375.