Loading ...The just incase ambulance.I’d worry more about those barbarian caliphate they’re inviting in than the Scots. Scots don’t seem to have those same problems.
Ah, Mel Gibson. Your fiction hath wrought a never-ending fog.
The Scots never painted themselves blue to fight Rome or England. There were no Scots when the Romans sought to head north, and the people who may have used blue paint were the Picts, long gone by the time the English were fought.
When Rome marched north the area now known as Scotland was controlled by the Picts. 10% of Scottish males today carry a recently discovered Pictish genetic marker. This is because as and after the Romans left, Gaels from northern Ireland and the islands moved in on the Picts. These people became the Scots.
Why do some people think the Picts painted themselves blue? Julius Caesar, who never went beyond the southeast of England remarked that, “All the Britons, without exception, stain themselves with woad, which produces a blueish tint; and this gives them a wild look in battle.” Couple that with the fact that the Romans who came later called the northern people “Picts”, meaning painted or tattooed, and you get a mighty conflation. We don’t know if the Picts actually did paint themselves. The Romans considered tattoos the act of barbarians and could simply have used the term derogatively. “Pict” or “Picti” may have been a Latinization of what those people called themselves. We just don’t know. We know they fought naked. The Romans commented on that, so if they painted themselves, you’d think that too would have been recorded.
IF they did, and IF the people of the north used woad as Caesar said the people he saw in the south did, then it would have been blue. And applying war paint to intimidate your enemy was quite common around the world. We don’t know how much of the tattooed or painted Pict is real and how much was simply stereotyping, but we do know the Scots didn’t do it. Except in 1995.