Information AboutAttacotti |
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Modern commentators have tended to locate the Attacotti on the northern frontier of Roman Britain, in the context of Scottish and Pictish raids, though there is no ancient authority for this; Ammianus merely reports simultaneous barbarian pressure on various fronts. Throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries Scottish antiquaries persistently placed the Attacotti in Dumbartonshire (now Dunbartonshire ), prompting Edward Gibbon to muse on the possibility of a ‘race of cannibals’ in the neighbourhood of Glasgow . This entirely spurious tradition was based upon ''De Situ Britanniae'', a work attributed to Richard Of Cirencester but eventually exposed as a forgery perpetrated by Charles Bertram in 1757. Scottish clan and family lineages drawn from the Attacotti are equally inauthentic. IRISH ORIGIN THEORY The word ''Attacotti'' and its variants ''Atecotti'', ''A''(''t'')''ticotti'', ''Ategutti'' in Latin texts most probably respresent Roman attempts at rendering the Old Irish ''aithechthúatha'', not a specific tribal name, but a collective description for lower-status population groups throughout Ireland, usually translated into English as ‘rent-paying tribes’, ‘vassal communities’ or ‘tributary peoples.’ The appearance of hostile ‘Attacotti’ in Roman sources in the 360s corresponds chronologically with various tribal and dynastic migrations from southern Ireland and subsequent Irish settlement in Western Britain in the fourth century, in some instances possibly with Roman sanction. Later Irish and Welsh traditions concerning these population movements preserved the names of certain tributary Irish groups, which seem to have been displaced by the expansion of the Eóganachta, the group of Septs which came to dominate Munster in the later 4th century. PRE-CELTIC ORIGIN THEORY Some older scholarship has speculated that Attacotti were an aboriginal, Pre-Indo-European substratum of the population of northern Britain. This thesis has generated much conjecture concerning this ‘race’, for the most part at the level of Pseudohistory . Nevertheless, numerous monument-stones discovered in Caithness and elsewhere in northern Scotland feature Ogham inscriptions that do not match any known Indo-European Languages . Scholars have speculated that these inscriptions predate even the Pictish occupation of the region. REFERENCES
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