Lunnasting stone

The ogham inscription on the stone is thought most likely to date from the eighth or ninth century, on the strength of word-dividing dots that resemble a Norse convention, although the script itself could pre-date the Viking occupation of Shetland. In April 1876 the stone came to light at Lunnasting, reportedly having been dug out of a peat bog five feet (1.5 m) below the surface. It was found in a cottage by the Rev. J.C. Roger, who recorded the circumstances of the find, and later that year it was donated to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland.

Interpretation began in earnest in 1896, when Vincent proposed that the stone had been erected by "Irish missionary monks not earlier than A.D. 580", quoting an unnamed expert's transcription of the ogham as eattuicheatts maheadttannn hccffstff ncdtons. In 1903 Allen and Anderson published their own reading of the inscription — ttocuhetts: ahehhttmnnn: hccvvevv: nehhton — and in 1925 Diack took the view that its final two words meant "the vassal of Nehtonn", building on the recognition that the text contained the Pictish name Nechtan.

In 1968 the philologist Henri Guiter proposed that the inscription could be read as Basque — etxekoez aiekoan nahigabe ba nengoen, "the one of the house found me without will in the pain" — but the theory was not well received academically. The Vasconist scholar Larry Trask later dismissed it outright, writing that Pictish specialists rejected it out of hand and that vasconists were no more impressed, and criticised the reading for assigning arbitrary values to ogham letters, claiming full decipherment of badly weathered text, using twentieth-century rather than reconstructed early Basque, and disregarding syntax in favour of fanciful translation.

Writing in 1975, Lockwood judged that only the final word of the inscription — clearly the name Nechton — was secure, and that the rest was so resistant to interpretation that philologists had concluded Pictish was a non-Indo-European language of unknown affinities; the same conclusion had been drawn about the ogham on the Orcadian Buckquoy spindle-whorl until it was reinterpreted as Old Irish in 1995.

Forsyth offered a further reading of the Lunnasting stone in 1996 — ettecuhetts: ahehhttannn: hccvvevv: nehhtons — suggesting that Ahehhttannn, like Nechtan, was also a personal name, and proposing that the opening word [e]ttecuhetts might be an early Brittonic expression meaning "this is as far" (compare Welsh cyhyd, "as long as"), a phrase that would suit a boundary marker.