Was Scotland Named for an Egyptian Princess? The Scota Myth Explained

Pop quiz: 

How did Scotland get its name?

For any Irish folks watching, you perhaps take pride in knowing the answer: 

Scotland was named for, well, the Scots, which originally referred to inhabitants of Ireland.

Turns out the Gaelic/Goidelic Celtic-speakers of Ireland didn’t just bring the Gaelic language (and later, whiskey) to Scotland, they also brought the country’s name.

Granted, as far as anyone can tell, the Irish term Scots, and its Old English equivalent Scottas, were both derived from the Late Latin Scoti, meaning, essentially, Irish people.

Or Gaelic-speakers in Hibernia, if you want to get technical, as Hibernia was the Classical Latin name for Ireland.

(Keep that in mind, it’s gonna become relevant again in a few minutes.)

Pssst. You can watch a video adaptation of this essay right here. Text continues below.

Now, you can find the term Scoti being used in this context all the way back in 312 CE, when the Romans included it in a list of tribes that they believed posed a threat to their Empire.

As to how the Romans came up with the name Scoti to refer to the Irish/Hiberno Gaels, that’s where the scholarship hits a brick wall.

Make that a stone wall.

Hadrian’s Wall?

The consensus seems to be that Scoti does ultimately have a Celtic origin.

(We’ll explore some modern etymological theories toward the end of this video.)

But in the absence of a single, decisive etymology of “Scots,” mythology has been left to fill in that gap.

And anyone who’s ever done even a cursory search on the subject has no doubt encountered the following illustration.

It comes from the Scotichronicon, which is easily one of the best book titles ever. Although actually it’s a collection of sixteen books, compiled/composed by Scottish historian Walter Bower between the years of 1440 and 1447 CE.

The illustration depicts Scota, the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh, fleeing Egypt in a ship alongside her husband Gaythelos a.k.a. Goídel Glas, a Greek prince who was “good looking but mentally unstable.”

I encourage you to read the first book of the Scotichronicon yourself to uncover more of these fantastic details. 

Just keep in mind that this first book, and actually the first several books of the Scotichronicon, are a retread of the Scottish priest John of Fordun’s 14th-century Chronica Gentis Scotorum or Chronicles of the Scottish People. 

Bower basically stuck Fordun’s work at the beginning of his own chronicle and then picked up the story where the earlier chronicler had left off, his goal being to create a comprehensive history of Scotland.

But perhaps history is the wrong word here. 

The Scota Legend Explained

Fordun couldn’t determine why exactly Scota and Goídel Glas ended up fleeing Egypt, so he included multiple different versions of the event in his chronicle, all of which begin in the year 1550 BCE with Scota’s father, the pharaoh, drowning in the Red Sea during his pursuit of some fella by the name of Moses.

In one version, Egyptian peasants, fearing Goídel Glas might try to fill the resulting power vacuum, “drove the king’s son-in-law…right out of the kingdom along with his followers…So all the nobles both Greek and Egyptian alike whom the voracious sea had failed to devour were cruelly driven away by peasants enrolled in a servile uprising.”

In another version, it’s not the fear of an uprising that sends Egyptian and Greek nobles packing —Scota and Goídel Glas among them—it’s the fear of divine retribution. And I quote:

“Seeing the fearful plagues and portents with which they had been inflicted through Moses, they were very much afraid, and they did not dare stay there any longer. For just as the lands of the people of Gomorrha together with the inhabitants of Sodom were once upon a time reduced to ashes on account of their sins, so they expected that the whole of Egypt would suddenly be overturned along with its inhabitants.”

Precise reason aside, Scota and Goídel Glas load up their household onto a skiff, as do the other nobles, and they escape Egypt by river. 

And during the forty years Moses wanders in the wilderness with his followers, so too do Scota and Goídel Glas wander with their followers, albeit in northwestern Africa. 

The Egyptian exiles then sail to the Iberian Peninsula, where they found what will become the Portuguese city of Porto. Indeed, they name the place in honor of their patriarch, dubbing it Portus Goídel, from which the country of Portugal allegedly takes its name.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to Scotland eventually.

But first, Ireland. 

Because as the story goes, Goídel Glas’s dying wish is that his sons, the eldest among them named Hiber, settle on a beautiful island he had seen north of the Iberian Peninsula. 

Hiber ends up landing in what is now Ulster, and names the area in honor of his mother Scota. But because of his association with the island, the whole of the island becomes known as Hibernia. 

Meanwhile, the people who settle there take on the names of both their patriarch and matriarch. Hence, they become known as the Goidels, or Gaels, as well as the Scoti, or Scots. 

And when those same people start settling in northern Britain, the names come with them. The people become known as the Scots, and their language, Scots Gaelic.

So there you have it, one boatload of people from Egypt gave us names for Portugal, Ireland, and Scotland.

Or did it?

Demystifying the Scota/Scotia Myth(s)

As I alluded to earlier, none of this is settled history—or etymology.

Indeed, it belongs solely to the realm of myth and legend.

The story first appears in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, or Book of the Taking of Ireland, better known as the Book of Invasions, specifically the redaction (i.e., version) of the Book of Invasions recorded in the 12th-century Book of Leinster.

Although in this earliest iteration of the tale, or at least the earliest iteration to feature Scota, (more on that in a minute), the Egyptian princess isn’t married to Goídel (a.k.a. Gaedel) Glas; she’s his mother. 

And Goídel’s grandfather is given as the Scythian king and Tower of Babel-builder, Fénius Farsaid, namesake of the legendary Irish warrior band the Fenians, i.e. the Fianna.

Pulling from the seventy-two languages that arise after the fall of the Tower of Babel, Goídel creates the Goidelic a.k.a. Gaelic language, hence the name.

Goídel also comes face-to-face with Moses who cures him of a snakebite with some prayer and a touch of his staff. And in an addendum to the tale, a green ring then appears on Goídel’s skin in that spot, hence the epithet Glas, meaning “green.”

In later versions of the Book of Invasions, meanwhile, Scota is reimagined as Scotia, wife of one of Goídel Glas’s descendants, Míl Espáine, who rules over ancient Iberia. 

Míl Espáine is the namesake of the country of Spain, naturally, as well as the Milesians, who are the last of Ireland’s mythical invaders, replacing the Tuatha Dé Danann, i.e., the Irish gods, as the island’s rulers. 

Thus, to this very day, you can go to Munster and visit Scotia’s Grave. 

Or at least you can visit a site with that name.

Because as Ireland’s National Monuments Service has noted:

“Following a site inspection in 1999 it was concluded that the evidence was not sufficient to warrant accepting this as an archaeological monument.”

Separating Irish Mythology From Irish History: The Origin of the Scota Story

No, Scota/Scotia was not a historical person.

Which explains her conspicuous absence from the oldest extant version of Ireland’s Invasions story, found in the 9th-century Welsh work Historia Brittonum, or History of the Britons.

There is, however, mention of a Goídel Glas-like character:

A Scythian noble who is exiled from Egypt during the time of Moses and who travels with his household to Northern Africa, then Iberia, where he stays for (checks notes) two thousand years, then he travels to Ireland, before finally reaching Scotland—specifically Dál Riata, a Gaelic kingdom that encompassed Scotland’s western seaboard as well as a chunk of northeastern Ireland.

Here’s the thing though:

This character…is never named in the text.

Because clearly the name came later.

The Gaels and their Goidelic language weren’t named for Goídel Glas; it was the other way around.

And the same is true for Scota.

Medieval scribes invented it to provide an origin for the name Scots.

As Irish Studies professor Joseph Lennon explained in his 2004 book Irish Orientalism:

“[M]any Irish legend makers created ancestors in order to account for the various names of a people (for example, Gaedel Glass for the Gaels and Scota for the Scots) through the practice known as eponymy.”

The Fenians being named for Fénius Farsaid and Spain being named for Míl Espáine and Hibernia being named for Hiber and Portugal being named for Goídel are all examples of this practice in action.

Of course, there was another force at work here in addition to eponymy, one that can help explain why an ostensibly Gaelic tale would have its main characters intermingling with Biblical figures: Christianization.

Remember, the folks who first recorded the myths of the Scots/Gaels were Christian scribes, and thus they did their best to fold the gods, heroes, and monsters of these myths into a Christian framework. 

Thus, the Tuatha Dé Danann are dubbed fallen angels.

And the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill is given a lineage that can be traced back to Adam in the Garden of Eden.

The original, pre-Christian versions of the Gaelic myths, passed down orally for generations, would not have included such details. Because until the arrival of Palladius and then Patrick in Ireland, such Christian concepts would not have been known to the majority of Gaels.

To be sure, this playbook was applied not just to the Gaels but to every culture.

For example, in his 12th-century Historia Scholastica, French theologian Peter Comestor contended that at the same time Scota and Goídel fled Egypt, a one Cecrop fled as well and hopped over to Greece where he’d found a little city called Athens. 

What’s more, a rambunctious fella by the name of Dionysian Bacchus would also flee from Egypt to Greece at this time, bringing with him the knowledge of the wine-making process.

Even within the Bible, we can see authors making an effort to weave cultural narratives together. 

For example, in the Gospel of Mark, widely considered to be the earliest of the synoptic Gospels (give “Marcan priority” a google if you’re interested), Jesus of Nazareth is said to be from, well, Nazareth. There is no mention of Bethlehem.

It’s likely that later writers looked at this and saw a missed opportunity to fulfill a prophecy laid out in the Book of Micah, which said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Thus, they concocted the census story and got their boy born in Bethlehem.

All this to say:

Scotland…wasn’t named for an Egyptian princess.

It’s an awesome story, yes. And I love a good story. Hence, this blog (and YouTube channel). 

But after seeing so many posts and videos and even comments on my own videos conflating mythology with history, I felt compelled to provide some clarification.

So, how did Scotland get its name?

The Etymology of Scotland: Modern Theories

In her 2013 paper “The Celts: Questions of Nomenclature and Identity,” linguist Kim McCone argued that the name came from the Irish scoth, meaning “flower” or “pick,” reasoning that members of Ireland’s upper class were once known as skotās, meaning “flowers,” or skotī meaning the “pick” of the population.

Then there’s Celtic scholar Philip Freeman’s 2001 theory that the name is derived from the Indo-European root *skot, noting that in Ancient Greek skotos meant “gloom” or “darkness.” So maybe some Gaelic raiders adopted the name to sound scary (or had it thrust upon them).

Kind of the opposite of what McCone was going for.

Swedish writer Jacob Truedson Demitz, meanwhile ,argued in 1996 that our modern “Scot” came from an Old Norse word for a tax, “skot.” Specifically this was a reference to a ceremony wherein placing a clump of earth on someone’s lap would symbolize the transfer of land to a new owner.

I mean…sure.

Then there are the older explanations, like military historian Charles Oman’s from 1910, which held that Scot was derived from the Gaelic scuit meaning “a man cut off,” a reference to the Scots being an outcast group of raiders, separate from the Gaels.

And finally there was Glaswegian author Aonghas MacCoinnich’s 1867 assertion that the name originated with the Gaelic sgaoth, meaning “swarm.”

If none of these proposed etymologies sound as cool as having Scotland being named after an exiled, seafaring Egyptian princess who would become the progenitor of all Gaelic-speaking peoples, and who was part of a family that would also bestow names upon the countries of Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, then we’re probably on the right track.

Or at the very least, by sticking to mundane but plausible etymologies, we’re staying on the right side of Occam’s razor. 

As a parting bit of wisdom, I will leave you with the following quotation from one of the world’s greatest archaeologists:

“We cannot afford to take mythology at face value.”

---

Want to learn about the darker side of Irish mythology? Check out…

Samhain in Your Pocket

---

Neon Druid: An Anthology of Urban Celtic Fantasy

---

More the listenin’ type?

The IrishMyths StoryTime podcast is now live! Listen on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.