The Picts appear to have come to Scotland from the country of the ancient Pictones, whose name survives in Poitiers (Poictiers) and the province of Poitou in France. These Pictones were anciently rivals of the Veneti, the chief sea-traders in Western and Northern Europe during the pre-Roman period. We gather from Cæsar that the Pictones espoused the cause of the Romans when the Veneti and their allies revolted. They and their near neighbours, the Santoni, supplied Cæsar with ships.[100] These were apparently skiffs which were much lighter and smaller than the imposing vessels of the Veneti. As the big vessels of the Armada were no match for the smaller English vessels, so were the Veneti ships no match for the skiffs of the Pictones.
[100] _De Bello Gallico_, Book III, Chapter II.
The Picts who settled in Orkney appear to have dominated the eastern and western Scottish sea-routes. It is possible that they traded with Scandinavia and imported Baltic amber. Tacitus states that the Baltic people, who engaged in the amber trade, spoke a dialect similar to that of Britain, worshipped the mother-goddess, and regarded the boar as the symbol of their deity.[101] Orkney, as has been noted, is derived from the old Celtic word for boar. The boar-people of Orkney who came under the sway of the Picts may have been related to the amber traders.
[101] _Manners of the Germans_, Chapter XLV. The boar was the son of a sow-goddess. Demeter had originally a sow form.
The Scottish broch-people, associated in tradition with the Picts, were notorious for their piratic habits. In those ancient days, however, piracy was a common occupation. The later Vikings, who seized the naval base of Orkney for the same reason we may conclude as did the Picts, occupied the brochs. Viking means "pirate", as York Powell has shown. In _Egil's Saga_ (Chapter XXXII) the hero Bjorn "was sometimes in Viking but sometimes on trading voyages".[102]
[102] _Scandinavian Britain_ (London, 1908), pp. 61-3.
It may be that the term _pictus_ was confused with the racial name Pecti, because the Picts had adopted the sailor-like habit of tattoing their skins--a habit which probably had a religious significance. Claudian, the fourth-century Roman poet, refers to "the fading steel-wrought figures on the dying Pict". Like the sea-faring Scots of northern Ireland who harried the Welsh coast between the second and fifth centuries of our era, the Picts of Scotland had skiffs (scaphæ) with sails and twenty oars a side. Vessels, masts, ropes, and sails were painted a neutral tint, and the crews were attired in the same colour. Thus "camouflaged", the Picts and Scots were able to harry the coasts of Romanized Britain. They appear to have turned Hadrian's wall from the sea. The Pictish sea-faring tribes, the Keiths or Cats and the Mæatæ, have left their names in Caithness, Inchkeith, Dalkeith, &c., and in the Isle of May, &c.[103]