page_title: Scotland during the Roman Empire
section_title: The dawn of Scottish history
hierarchical_section_title: Scotland during the Roman Empire / The dawn of Scottish history
caption_attribution_description: English: A Greek-language map of Hibernia (Ireland) and Albion (Great Britain) derived from Ptolemy's Geography, probably in the early 14th century at Constantinople (Istanbul), held by the Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos prior to its theft and purchase by the British Museum. The map reflects Ptolemy's mistaken placement of Scotland at a right angle to the rest of Britain, apparently derived from his reliance on seafarer's logs.
context_page_description: Scotland during the Roman Empire refers to the protohistorical period during which the Roman Empire interacted with the area that is now Scotland, which was known to them as "Caledonia". Roman legions arrived around AD 71, having conquered the Celtic tribes of "Britain" over the preceding three decades. Aiming to annex all of the island of "Albion", Romans under Q. Petilius Cerialis and Gn. Julius Agricola invaded the Caledonians in the 70s and 80s.
  An account by Agricola's son-in-law Tacitus mentions a Roman victory at "Mons Graupius" which became the namesake of the Grampians but has been questioned by modern scholarship. The Romans then seem to have repeated an earlier Greek circumnavigation of the island and received submission from local tribes, establishing their border of actual control first along the Gask Ridge before withdrawing to a line south of the Solway Firth. This line was fortified as Hadrian's Wall. Several Roman commanders attempted to fully conquer lands north of this line, including a brief expansion that was fortified as the Antonine Wall.
context_section_description: Scotland had been inhabited for thousands of years before the Romans arrived. However, it is only during the Greco-Roman period that Scotland is recorded in writing.
  The work On the Cosmos by Aristotle or Pseudo-Aristotle mentions two "very large" islands called Albion (Great Britain) and Ierne (Ireland). The Greek explorer and geographer Pytheas visited Britain sometime between 322 and 285 BC and may have circumnavigated the mainland, which he describes as being triangular in shape. In his work On the Ocean, he refers to the most northerly point as Orcas (Orkney).
  The earliest written record of a formal connection between Rome and Scotland is the attendance of the "King of Orkney" who was one of 11 British kings who submitted to the Emperor Claudius at Colchester in AD 43 following the invasion of southern Britain three months earlier. The long distances and short period of time involved strongly suggest a prior connection between Rome and Orkney, although no evidence of this has been found and the contrast with later Caledonian resistance is striking.
  Originals of On the Ocean do not survive, but copies are known to have existed in the 1st century so at the least a rudimentary knowledge of the geography of north Britain would have been available to Roman military intelligence. Pomponius Mela, the Roman geographer, recorded in his De Chorographia, written around AD 43, that there were 30 Orkney islands and seven Haemodae (possibly Shetland). There is certainly evidence of an Orcadian connection with Rome prior to AD 60 from pottery found at the  Broch of Gurness.
  By the time of Pliny the Elder (d. AD 79), Roman knowledge of the geography of Scotland had extended to the Hebudes (The Hebrides), Dumna (probably the Outer Hebrides), the Caledonian Forest, and the Caledonians.
  Ptolemy, possibly drawing on earlier sources of information as well as more contemporary accounts from the Agricolan invasion, identified 18 tribes in Scotland in his Geography, but many of the names are obscure. His information becomes much less reliable in the north and west, suggesting early Roman knowledge of these area was confined to observations from the sea. Famously, his coördinates place most of Scotland north of Hadrian's Wall bent at a right angle, stretching due eastward from the rest of Britain.
caption: An early Greek map from Ptolemy's description of the British Isles (c. 1300), showing his rotation of Scotland to the right.
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