The Picts/Tartarians today known as the Basques/Catalans
The Picts are the "mystery people" of the British Isles. They were something of a curiosity even to their contemporaries. The difference in their culture from those of the other races of the British Isles was observed by Gildas; and Bede mentioned that the succession to the Pictish kingship was through the female-line unlike all the other nations of the world whose succession was through the male-line. The Picts have been the subject of much speculation. Their identity has been debated by historians, however, it is generally now agreed upon by modern scholars that the Picts were the Iron Age descendants of the Bronze Age Britons. That is, the Picts were the late survival into the historical period of the indigenous prehistoric non-Indo-European inhabitants of the British Isles, that is, the British megalith-builders. For, early Pictish culture appears to directly be a continuation of the old customs, institutions, and socio-political order of the megalith-builders of Bronze Age Britain. The Picts possessed a distinctive culture, seen particularly in their exotic pottery, their artwork [such as their carved symbols on stone], their jewelry, etc. Their language, presumed to have been non-Indo-European, which the Romans said was akin to the Basque tongue, which had partially been "celticized" by this time, included an alphabet or system-of-writing that has not yet been deciphered, which was forgotten upon their extinction or rather their absorption by later British races.
The Picts, so-called by the Romans, called the "Cruithni" by the Irish Gaels, from the Q-Celtic dialect, which may be translated into the P-Celtic dialect as "Pretani", gave the British Isles their name, "Pretannia", whence the Latin "Britannia". That is, they may have? The greatest confusion in the early history of the British Isles has been the wrongful acceptance that the name Pretani or Pritani [the Picts] is the same as Brittani or Brittones [the Brigantes], who were an entirely different people, that is, the celticized descendants of either the Albanese or the Irish "Fir-De". It has long been recognized that Pretani is the Gallo-Britannic equivalent of the Old Gaelic name Cruthin, or Cruithni, representing the still older Q-Celtic name Qretani. The Gaelic equivalent enables us to identify the Cruithni with the Pretani, that is, with the people who are commonly now called the Picts. The name "Pict" ["Pictii"] is itself however found for the first time in written records in a Latin document that refers to events in Britain in Year AD 297, which thus would be the oldest surviving written mention of the Picts by that name.
The territory of the Picts, reduced to the islands and coasts of the Irish Sea, became a separate British kingdom, whose capital city was Aberffraw, on the Isle of Anglesey, off the north-west fringe of Wales, Caernarvonshire, which was the Iron Age successor-state of the old British Bronze Age kingdom, which is sometimes called the Kingdom of Aberffraw, or the Welsh Iron Age kingdom, or the Pictish "Old Kingdom", whose culture, called the Pict "A" culture, was a continuation of the proto-Pict "C" culture of the British Bronze Age. Its first king, that is, the first king of the Picts was Cruach (Croich), the son of the sister of Britain’s last Bronze Age King, Ogmios, and "a foreign prince" [perhaps the Greek epic hero Hercules, whose image is found in Pictish artwork]. Cruach established himself as Ogmios’ successor, and put together the old British government-in-exile, which became a kingdom, while trying to retake the island from the Albanese invaders. He held sway over Western Wales, South-West Scotland, Eastern Ireland, and Western France. Cruach was later deified as the sun-god in the pagan druidic pantheon. Irish legend says that the druids instituted the worship of Cruach as the founding-deity of the Pictish Nation in all Pictish territories. They erected a large image of Cruach that became an idol to which the Picts offered their "first-fruits". It stood on the plain of Mag Slecht, Co. Cavan, near the modern village of Ballymagauran, in Ulster. This great idol, called "Crom Cruach" or "Cenn Cruaic", was destroyed over a thousand years later by St. Patrick when he brought Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century AD.
The Pictish "Old Kingdom", which produced the Pictish "A" culture, flourished the first half of the Old Iron Age. The successors of Cruach, its first king, all descendants in the female-line through his sister, according to the matrilineal principle, while his male-line descendants held no special status. The succession to the British Bronze Age sacral-kingship continued as before through the female-line during the British Iron Age, however, since the male-line of Britain's Bronze Age Royal House had become extinct, the women of the royal blood, that is, the vestal-virgins, who always stayed at home, now took as their consorts during the Iron Age the tribal chiefs/kings of the various tribes of the British Isles and Gaul or sometimes of another country, and their off-spring became the sacral-kings, who were elected from among the sons of the vestal-virgins by a "college" of druids, the succession therefore passing from one family or house to another yet through a single female-stem, such that the sacral-kings no longer came from a single male-line dynasty though they all continued to share a common female-line ancestry through their mothers descending in a straight line of successive female-links from the Pictish mother-goddess, "Cailleach-Mheur", identified by the Greeks with Cleito, and by the Romans with Britannia, the mother-goddess of the British Isles. The fathers of the sacral-kings were almost always unrelated to one another, yet this did not disturb the royal line since it was their mothers who represented the royal line. The male-line ancestry of the sacral-kings was practically ignored anyway to maintain the fiction that the sacral-king was begotten of a god [Poseidon] born of a mortal-woman [Cleito]. This system of succession was regulated by custom, whereas, the succession passed from sister’s son to sister’s son, that is, from uncle to maternal nephew, or among uterine brothers [in order of birth], or among maternal cousins.
The most conspicuous Pictish archaeological monuments are their citadels. The royal citadel of the Pictish Old Kingdom was built at Aberffraw on the Isle of Anglesey off Caernarvonshire [Gwynedd], Wales, on the south side. The port-city of Gwygyr, now Cemais, on the north-west of the Isle of Anglesey was one of the "three privileged ports" [most important ports] of Britain, according to The "Triads". It occupied a position of strategic importance in the shipping-lanes of the Irish Sea connecting major trade routes between Wales and Ireland, or Wales and Scotland, or Wales and France. The name of the Pictish citadel or hill-fort "Tre’r Ceiri" in Caernarvonshire translates as "town of giants". This shows that the Picts were still called “giants” by the Welsh in medieval times. The elaborate chambered tomb of Bryn-Celli-Dhu on the Isle of Anglesey was the royal necropolis of the old Pictish kings of Aberffraw. It is one of the finest examples of a “passage grave” in the British Isles. A grandiose Iron Age temple was built out of stone off Anglesey on the near-by isle called "Holy Isle" about 1250/1000BC on the model of the earlier Bronze Age temple at Glastonbury described by Greek writers yet on a smaller scale and was not as imposing as the earlier temple, which had been destroyed by invading Indo-Europeans, circa 1500BC. It was the center of druidism for more than a thousand years, until its destruction by the Romans in AD60. It was possibly the circular temple of Apollo referred to by the classic Hecataeus. Hecataeus wrote (500BC) that there was an island [Britain] in the ocean opposite Gaul as big as Sicily where the cult of the sun-god Apollo was pre-eminent, and where there was a magnificent grove and a celebrated temple, round in form, in which there were priests daily offering prayers and chanting praises and many musicians playing their instruments accompanying choirs singing hymns and vestal-virgins attending an "eternal-flame". Hecataeus wrote that Apollo visited the island [Britain] once every nineteen years, during which period the stars, completing their revolutions, returned to their former places in the sky. On this account, the classic wrote, the Greeks called the cycle of nineteen years as the "Great Year".