Pictish symbols

A set of recurring signs carved on the stones of the Picts of northern and eastern Scotland from about AD 600: crescents crossed by V-shaped rods, double discs crossed by Z-shaped rods, mirrors and combs, serpents and a swimming beast. Nobody now knows what they meant.

Celtic symbols. Also called pictish stones, pictish symbol stones, v-rod and crescent, z-rod.

Meaning

The Picts were the descendants of Iron Age tribes who lived north of the Forth and Clyde estuaries in the first millennium AD, Historic Environment Scotland writes. They left about 300 carved stones, most of them in the north-east of Scotland, and the earliest, from about AD 600, carry a characteristic set of symbols. Some are geometric, such as the crescent and V-rod and the double disc and Z-rod; some are objects, such as the mirror and comb; some are animals, such as the serpent and a beast that HES thinks may be a water creature like a kelpie. What they meant is lost. HES suggests they may record a person’s name or rank, mark who owned the land, or show loyalty to a tribe, and says we don’t know why the Picts put the stones up at all. The society that made them, HES writes, laid the foundations of the medieval Kingdom of the Scots.

Origin and history

J. Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson, in The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland (1903), sorted the early carved stones into three classes. Class I are rough, unshaped stones incised with “a series of arbitrary symbols chiefly of geometrical but partly of animal forms and pictorial representations of objects of common use”. Class II are shaped slabs carved in relief, with a cross in the principal place and the old symbols in subordinate positions. Class III, the free-standing crosses and later monuments, have none of the symbols. HES gives the same sequence with dates: the first symbol stones about AD 600, and after about AD 700 a more overtly Christian group on which the cross dominates the traditional symbols.

Dyce, in Aberdeenshire, has one of each kind. Its older stone, a slab of pink-red granite, has the swimming beast above a double disc and Z-rod. Its cross-slab has a cross filled entirely with interlace (the Celtic knot); around it are a crescent and V-rod above a triple disc and a double disc and Z-rod below a mirror case, and down one side runs an inscription in ogham. At Aberlemno, in Angus, a prehistoric standing stone that the Picts reused carries a serpent, a double disc and Z-rod and a mirror and comb, and a cross-slab nearby has two ornate Pictish symbols beside a cross with worshipping angels. HES sees the Aberlemno stones as continuing the symbols into the Christian period.

The rules of the V-rod and Z-rod

The 1903 survey found that the symbols were not combined at random. A singly bent rod, the V, goes only with the crescent and with an arch-shaped symbol; a doubly bent rod, the Z, only with the double disc, a house-like oblong and the serpent. A crescent may lack its V-rod, and a double disc its Z-rod, but the crescent never takes the Z and the double disc never takes the V. The V always sits with its angle below the hollow of the crescent and its flowered ends rising over the curve, even where the crescent is carved upright or upside down. A rod never appears on its own. The forms barely change: the stones that look oldest are as fully developed as the latest, so, the authors wrote, there is no way to trace the symbols back to their origins, and through them to their meaning.

Were the symbols a script?

Perhaps; it is disputed. In 2010 Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman measured how predictable the sequences of Pictish symbols are, using Shannon entropy, and compared them with known writing systems and with signs that are not writing. They concluded in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A that the symbols are unlikely to be random or heraldic, that they show the characteristics of written language, and that they are probably words, as constrained as the names in a genealogical list. They did not read them, and their paper begins from the fact that the meanings are lost. The linguist Mark Liberman answered on Language Log that this kind of argument depends heavily on which statistical measure and which comparison sets are chosen, and that a set of signs made by a simple random process could fall on the side of the line said to mark written language. The purposes HES lists, memorials to warriors, boundary markers between neighbouring tribes and records of marriage alliances, are suggestions too.

Sources

Pictish symbol stone; 8th century; Early medieval; Dyce Symbol Stones, Properties in Care collections, object 33810, Historic Environment Scotland (via the Internet Archive)
History and stories: Aberlemno Sculptured Stones, Historic Environment Scotland
The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland, J. Romilly Allen and Joseph Anderson, 1903, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Internet Archive), Part I, The symbolism of the monuments, pp. xxxii–xxxiii
Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy, Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman; Proceedings of the Royal Society A (2010), doi:10.1098/rspa.2010.0041, The Royal Society (author copy, Lancaster University), Abstract; section 3
Pictish writing?, Mark Liberman, 2 April 2010, Language Log (Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania)

The same shape elsewhere

Browse symbols formed from circles, curves and waves or lines.

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research

Added October 9, 2026.

Report a problem