DARK MIST RISING: AVALON UNVEILED

This is the "Maglocunos Stone", boasting fifth century names in both Latin and Ogham, the preferred written script of the Picts. Yes, it bears directly on this post. And, no: I'm not going to tell you how. For that, you need to pick up a copy of "The Annals of Anavere". We have even less of the Pictish language than we do of Scythian. And, of that, very little has been translated. Nevertheless, I went “hunting” for Pictish horse names. I didn’t find much. I did find a Pictish kings list. I located a couple of glossaries of Pictish male and female names. And, of course, there are the scattered Pictish words I’ve “collected” over my last zillion years of research. It’s not a lot. But here’s what I’ve got. Pictish has never been officially “diagnosed” as either a Celtic tongue – one of the languages dangling from a branch of the Proto-Indo-European language tree – or something else. (Scholars are divided on this issue, so I’m not going to weigh in very

Carved stone Scythian horse-headed pestle. We don’t have much Scythian “to our name”. Meaning: there isn’t much of the language left to us moderns. There is enough, however, to discern something that masquerades as their possible word for “horse”. My Scythian glossary says that  ippa  means “mare” or “horse” in that ancient language. Hippocrates – whose name would also seem to indicate “horse” – says in his  Diseases  that  hippaka , or  ippaka , is the name of a mare’s milk cheese manufactured by the Scyths. Unfortunately, none of the names for the powerful goddesses or warrior-chieftains recorded in that glossary include the word  ippa . Even so, I’m not sure these words – and the other Amazon horse names, like  Hippolyte ,  Melanippe , and  Ainippe , don’t derive from the language of the Greeks who reported them. Greek boasts several words for horse, including: §    Foráda , “mare” §    Á λoyo, “horse” §    Ίππος , “horse” This last,  Ίππος , translates into E

"Amazon Breaking a Savage Horse", 1843, bronze, by Jean-Jacques Feuchére. On display at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts on the Stanford University campus in Stanford, California.  By I, BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4270411 No culture in history has been more bound up with one animal than that of the Amazons. Fabled warrior women of the steppes, they are known to have fought from horseback and to have employed weapons, such as the long spear and bow-and-arrow, that enabled them to capitalize on their skill as cavalrywomen and minimize any physical shortcomings. As women then and now generally possess less upper body strength and a shorter reach than men, it would have availed them nothing to have fought on foot or hand-to-hand. So, it seems that the Amazons played to their strengths. Horses were and are an intrinsic part of steppe culture. Steppe nomads still ride horseback as part of daily life, and

        A ninth century, mounted Pictish warrior either drinks from or blows upon an eagle-headed horn. From a carved Pictish stone at Invergowrie, Scotland, now in the Museum of Scotland. {{PD-US} }   Amazons, Scythians, and Picts: all names out of legend.  Ancient Greeks such as Homer and Herodotus reported Amazons dying on the beaches of Troy, harboring Heracles, and, most astonishing of all, fighting Greeks with spears and arrows.  The patriarchal Greeks were mystified and horrified by these fighting women.  Some of them, like Alexander the Great, who is said to have hunted lions with the Amazon “queen”, Thalestris, were enthralled with them.  Others, like Achilles, were dismayed to find themselves in combat with women who considered themselves on a par with, and even superior to, men.  The ongoing Greek fascination with Amazons transmitted itself onto the ferocious figures depicted on their pottery, many pieces of which survive to this day. Out of the Amazon culture was sa