Scotland During The Roman Empire - The Dawn of Scottish History

The Dawn of Scottish History

Scotland had been inhabited for thousands of years before the Romans arrived. However, it is only towards the Graeco-Roman period that Scotland is recorded in writing.

In dating the first or early historical attested knowledge about Scotland one would have to first go through what the Greek and Roman sources have to say about the British Isles in general.The author e.g. of De Mundo who if one were to accept the typically ascribed to it author's name, would be Aristotle, knew of the two very large nēsoi Brettanikai, i.e. the British Islands, which he called Albion and Ierne referring respectively to the islands of Great Britain and Ireland; accepting Aristotle's authorship would mean that the ancient philosopher of the 4th century BCE would have already known of the British Islands. But most scholars dispute this authorship and instead ascribe De mundo to Pseudo-Aristotle, dating therefore this work to a later period. An explorer and geographer whose travels and writings seem to have influenced greatly the Greeks and the Romans on the geography of northwestern Atlantic Europe was the Greek Pytheas of Massalia who visited Britain sometime between 322 and 285 BC and may have circumnavigated the mainland; a land which, as we could deduce through later writers quoting him or using his work, he described as being triangular in shape, the most northerly point of which was named Orcas, conceivably a reference to Orkney.

The earliest written record of a formal connection between Rome and Scotland is the attendance of the "King of Orkney" who was one of 11 British kings who submitted to the Emperor Claudius at Colchester in AD 43 following the invasion of southern Britain three months earlier. The long distances and short period of time involved strongly suggest a prior connection between Rome and Orkney, although no evidence of this has been found and the contrast with later Caledonian resistance is striking. Originals of On the Ocean do not survive, but copies are known to have existed in the 1st century AD so at the least a rudimentary knowledge of the geography of north Britain would have been available to Roman military intelligence. Pomponius Mela, the Roman geographer, recorded in his De Chorographia, written circa AD 43, that there were 30 Orkney islands and seven Haemodae (possibly Shetland). There is certainly evidence of an Orcadian connection with Rome prior to 60 AD from pottery found at the broch of Gurness.

By the time of Pliny the Elder, who died in AD 79, Roman knowledge of the geography of Scotland had extended to the Hebudes (The Hebrides), Dumna (probably the Outer Hebrides), the Caledonian Forest and the Caledonii.

Ptolemy, possibly drawing on earlier sources of information as well as more contemporary accounts from the Agricolan invasion, identified 18 tribes in Scotland in his Geography, but many of the names are obscure and the geography becomes less reliable in the north and west, suggesting early Roman knowledge of these area was confined to observations from the sea.