Rediscovering the Picts:

The Picts have long been regarded as enigmatic savages who fought
off Rome's legions before mysteriously disappearing from history, wild
tribesmen who refused to sacrifice their freedom in exchange for the
benefits of civilisation. But far from the primitive warriors of
popular imagination, they actually built a highly sophisticated culture
in northern Scotland in the latter half of the first millennium AD,
which surpassed their Anglo-Saxon rivals in many respects.

A
study of one the most important archaeological discoveries in Scotland
for 30 years, a Pictish monastery at Portmahomack on the Tarbat
peninsula in Easter Ross, has found that they were capable of great
art, learning and the use of complex architectural principles.

The
monastery – an enclosure centred on a church thought to have housed
about 150 monks and workers – was similar to St Columba's religious
centre at Iona and there is evidence they would have made gospel books
similar to the Book of Kells and religious artefacts such as chalices
to supply numerous "daughter monasteries".

And, in a discovery
described as "astonishing, mind-blowing" by architectural historians,
it appears that the people who built the monastery did so using the
proportions of "the Golden Section", or "Divine Proportion" as it
became known during the Renaissance hundreds of years later. This ratio
of dimensions, 1.618 to one, appears in nature, such as in the spiral
of seashells, and the faces of people considered beautiful, such as
Marilyn Monroe. It can be seen in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the
Alhambra palace of Granada in Spain, the Acropolis in Athens and the
Egyptian Pyramids, but was thought to have been too advanced for the
Picts.

"The Picts have always been an attractive lost people,
they are one of the most interesting lost peoples of Europe," said
Martin Carver, a professor of archaeology at York University who has
worked on the site since the mid-1990s, and recently written a book
detailing the findings. "The big question is what happened to them and
did they ever really make a kingdom of their own."

The answer
to the latter question seems an emphatic yes, based on the findings at
Portmahomack, which is remote today but would have once been a key
point on sea routes in the North Sea. "They would have been dreaming of
a New Rome and a new world connected by water rather than Roman roads,"
said Professor Carver. "They were the most extraordinary artists. They
could draw a wolf, a salmon, an eagle on a piece of stone with a single
line and produce a beautiful naturalistic drawing. Nothing as good as
this is found between Portmahomack and Rome. Even the Anglo-Saxons
didn't do stone-carving as well as the Picts did. Not until the
post-Renaissance were people able to get across the character of
animals just like that."

In addition to stone carving, the
archaeologists found evidence that vellum, chalices and other religious
artefacts were being made at the site on a considerable scale. Vellum,
a form of paper made from animal skin, would have been used to make
highly decorative gospel books. The cemetery, containing graves of
middle-aged and elderly men almost exclusively, and a piece of stone
bearing a tantalisingly incomplete inscription provided other key clues
as to the Christian nature of the site.

"The most important
piece had a Latin inscription. That's as common as muck in the
Mediterranean, but extremely rare in Scotland," said Professor Carver,
who previously led research into the Anglo-Saxon burial mound at Sutton
Hoo, Suffolk. "It says 'This is the cross of Christ in memory of
Reo...' and the rest is broken away. Unfortunately the key bit, the
name of the person, is missing. It means there's someone around there
who knows how to write in the eighth century. That itself is a
revelation."

[...]

A detailed study was made of the horse-shoe shaped building,
searching for the unit of measurement used by the Picts. Professor
Carver said a "Tarbat foot" of 12-and-a-half inches seemed to have been
the standard measure used to make hall and other parts of the
monastery. He also found the ratios of lengths of different walls and
bays inside the window conformed to the architectural principle called
the Golden Section. "The Golden Section, together with its inverse, the
Golden Number, 1.618, has been valued by artists for millennia ... and
it is a true delight to observe it among their architects," he said.
"It shows the importance of symbol and worship in everything done in
the service of the Christian God.

"There is something rather
intriguing in the learnt character of them. This is a building put up
to house metal workers. It's the idea they were all possessed of the
same kind of knowledge and all trying to serve it."

Jean
Gowans, who recently retired as chairman of the Architectural Heritage
Society of Scotland, said the idea the Picts had been using the Golden
Section was "wonderful, astonishing".

"It really is absolutely
fascinating. It's mind-blowing stuff," she said. "This is staggering to
hear, but I'm not totally surprised. I think they were pretty
sophisticated, when you think of all the Pictish stones and the
wonderful carvings that they made, a lot more sophisticated than
perhaps they are given credit for in public perception."