In the summer of 1617 the town of Perth greeted James VI with a proclamation which averred that ‘the ancient nation of the Scots’ had descended from ‘victorious Greeks and learned Egyptians’. In one sense of course the people of Perth were uttering a very old commonplace indeed. From the high middle ages, if not earlier, Scots claimed to have found their origins in ancient Egypt. From Egypt their primordial ancestors had journeyed to the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, settling in Iberia, and from thence they journeyed still further to Ireland, ultimately to establish themselves in what became the Scottish kingdom. The Egyptian migration had been led by the painfully eponymous ‘Gathelus’ along with a number of his associates – all Greek military heroes and mercenaries who had married into good Egyptian families (Gathelus himself marrying no less than the Pharaoh's daughter, the equally eponymous ‘Scota’). These traditions had long served Scotland well, counteracting the analogous English mythologies which asserted the suzerainty of the southern crown.

But if the story itself (and the ‘victorious Greeks’) had been around for a very long time, Egyptian learning was considerably more recent. During the Renaissance Scotsmen looked beyond this medieval assertion of dynastic dignity and historico-legal autonomy to search out the cultural meanings of the experience. The outstanding figure in this undertaking was the Aberdeen University principal. Hector Boece, whose enormously influential Scotorum historiae (Paris, 1527) can only be described as one of the major cultural events within sixteenth-century Scotland. Scotland, Boece declared, had once possessed the ancient Egyptian wisdom, the wisdom of the hieroglyphs.