Worth Remembering is a dive into the history of Stirling, Scotland and beyond. Looking at everything from legendary battles to old folktales, because every story is worth remembering.
Scottish history is usually seen as having begun at the Scottish wars of independence and the origins of the Scottish kingdom, or its name, is often not taught or really talked about.
It was a question I myself gave little thought to until I met an Egyptian man who claimed to me that an Egyptian was responsible for founding Scotland. It sounded ridiculous and absurd.
But, lo and behold, I discovered the legend of Scota, the daughter of a pharaoh, apparently responsible for our name and heritage. During medieval times, it was largely accepted as fact, and Robert the Bruce himself even believed in the myth.
The story has multiple versions and great variations between them, but in general, it is said that Scota and a man named Gaethelus sailed over to the British Isles in order to create the Gaelic people and establish the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland.
Obviously, it’s a strange story. Why would a pharaoh’s daughter leave the sunny and verdant banks of the Nile to come to our wind-swept rock? But perhaps a better question is, why would anyone even come up with such a story in the first place? Let’s untangle this legend.
Who was Scota?
That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer because, according to some sources, she was either the mother or wife of Gaethelus but never, thankfully, both.
The legends say that she was the daughter of a pharaoh named Cingris, who doesn’t show up in the historical record, and that she was apparently around during the time of Moses. She was married to Gathelus, a Greek prince, presumably as a reward for his service to the Egyptians.
And so as the twelve plagues rain down upon Egypt, Gathelus and Scota leave in order to find a new home. They settle in what is today Galicia in North-western Spain, and their descendants come to be known as the ‘Scots’ and ‘Gaels’.
Eventually, these descendants will come and settle in Britain, in both Ireland and Scotland, creating the Gaelic peoples who’ll come to be the scourge of the Romans and Saxons.
This story even claims that the couple were the origins of the Stone of Scone. Depending on the version, it was either the biblical Jacob’s pillow, carried by Scota from Egypt or the throne that Gaethelus ruled on when he and his followers were in Galicia.
The Scots would settle peacefully with the Picts, an old Celtic tribe that lived in the highlands, and became fierce warriors, who allegedly had to help out King Arthur in his efforts against the invading Saxons and continuously bail him out
Now, while the story is certainly interesting, we can almost guarantee that it is not true. Not least because of all the contradictory details in different accounts, but also because there’s no real historical record of any of these events or people.
Some legends even contain strange and absurd details, such as an Irish chronicle that suggests that Gaethelus created the Gaelic language by picking out all the best features of every other language.
It’s almost certainly a myth and so we can begin to ask the much more interesting question, which is, why create these myths and stories in the first place?
The Need for a History
Scota and Gathelus are creation myths for the Gaels, a people who largely lack a historical canon in the same way as the Egyptians and Romans or indeed the English, who had their own myth about being the descendants of Brutus, a Trojan exile.
History became yet another weapon in the centuries-long squabble between England and Scotland, or, depending on who you believe, Trojans and Egyptians.
Rather than lose face against the English, who claimed a legendary lineage tracing back thousands of years, Celtic scholars presumably chose to embrace a creation myth of their own. They can hardly be blamed for doing so, given that both myths are probably equally fabricated.
Their ancestors were unknown, their rulers were largely forgotten about, and the sheer brazenness of these myths suggest something about just how desperate the medieval Celtic scholars were for a history and shared story.
There was also certainly a need for legitimacy. After all, while the Egyptians were raising great pyramids in the valley of the Nile, the Celts had left no great monuments and were presumably living in mudflats.
They were seen as a backward people, never civilised by the Romans and regularly bullied by the proud Trojan English. They were superstitious and technologically stagnant, but a link with the Egyptians could change that.
The Egyptians had left behind a rich cultural lineage that scholars across the medieval world could study, and so medieval Celts scholars presumably felt a need to link themselves to the ancient empires they were the forerunners of every other society.
So much so that they chose to adopt a lineage of an alien people, who lived thousands of miles away and had unfamiliar customs and language. What they did know however, was the history of the Egyptians and that was seemingly enough to embrace their identity.
It’s a testament to the sheer power of the ancient Egyptians that medieval Celts chose to embrace an identity based on them rather than the collective mythology of their own people or any number of other possible origins.
And so it seemed that the Pharaoh’s influence lived on, more than two thousand years after his death and a thousand years after his kingdom fell. That is the power of history.
Featured image credit: John Fergus O’Hea via Wikimedia commons
Sources and further reading
The Egyptians in Scotland: The politics of a myth
1st year Journalism and History Student
I have no accolades but I write okay, I think.
