Decoding the Pictish Symbols

The Picts, the most powerful nation in northern Britain for some 500 years, mysteriously disappeared from contemporary records in the ninth century. All that remains of the language they spoke are a few fragments in the names of places or people. Their most enduring memorial is a unique system of symbols, carved on stone monuments, engraved on objects of silver and bronze, and scratched on the walls of caves—symbols whose interpretation has been elusive as that of Egyptian hieroglyphs befor...