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ORIGINS OF THE CELTS
The Danube has its source in the country of the Celts, near the city of PyrĆŖnĆ©, and runs through the middle of Europe, dividing it into two portions. The Celts live beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and border on the Cynesians, who dwell at the extreme west of Europe.
Herodotus, Histories (c. 444 BC)
The Celts have proved an amazingly durable group of peoples. In ancient times the Celts were contemporaries of the Romans, Iberians, Illyrians, Thracians, Dacians, Etruscans, Ligurians, Scythians, Greeks and Germans among many others. Only the Celts, Greeks and Germans are still with us. Defining the Celts through their long existence is not easy. There have been such enormous cultural, technological and social changes that the modern Celts would be completely unrecognisable to their ancient forebears. Little survives of the culture of the ancient Celts and there was even a long period ā well over a thousand years ā when the name āCeltā fell out of use completely before being revived in the eighteenth century. The strongest and most widely accepted definition is based on language, which is the one sure thread of continuity linking the ancient Celts with their modern descendants: the Celts are people who speak Celtic languages. In ancient times these peoples included the Gauls, Belgae, Celtiberians, Lusitanians and Galatians, and the ancient Britons and Irish.
The Celtic identity
The word āCeltā (Greek Keltoi, Latin Celtae) was first used by Greek authors about 2,500 years ago to describe the barbarian tribes that lived inland from the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseille). The Greeks soon expanded their use of the word to describe all the barbarian peoples of Europe north of the Alps, including some, like the Franks, who are not now considered to be Celts. The Greeks also used another name, āGalatiansā (Galatoi), interchangeably with āCeltā specifically to describe those Celtic-speaking peoples of central Europe who invaded Greece and Anatolia in the third century BC. The Romans used a similar word, āGaulā (Galli) to describe the continental Celtic-speaking peoples. The origins of all three words are unknown but all are likely to be Celtic as they appear as elements in tribal names (Gallaeci, Celtici, Celtiberi), personal names (Celtius), and even place names (Celti). Julius Caesar tells us that āCeltā was also used as a collective name by some of the Gaulish tribes. These were the original Celts encountered by the Greeks of Massalia. However, it was never the case that all of the peoples we now regard as being Celtic ever described themselves as such. Although they are now regarded as Celts, the ancient Britons never described themselves as being either Celtic or Gaulish but saw themselves as a quite separate people, as the Romans too saw them, despite recognising great similarities of language and custom. As for the ancient Irish, they did not even have a common identity for themselves until the early Middle Ages, when they adopted the name Gaidel (in modern Gaelic Gaedheal) from Guoidel (āsavagesā), the Britonsā name for the people of Ireland. The custom of describing all the Celtic-speaking peoples collectively as āCeltsā is actually quite recent, dating only to the eighteenth century. Because it was not used historically by the Celtic-speaking peoples to describe themselves collectively, some modern historians and archaeologists argue that the idea of the Celts as a people is simply a modern construct. Historians and archaeologists have imposed an artificial unity on what was really a diverse group of peoples with no sense of common identity. If the politically correct position is taken, that the only name which can justifiably be used to describe a people is the one they use themselves, then we would have to agree with the archaeologist Simon James that there is no justification for describing the ancient Britons and Irish as Celts and that the term is fairly meaningless even when applied to Iron Age continental Europe. This is a position that understandably infuriates modern Celts, most of whom hail from Britain and Ireland, as they see it as an attempt to deny their ancient roots and write the people they regard as their ancestors out of history. The view taken here is that the sceptics are being overly pedantic. There objectively was a major group of peoples in Iron Age Europe who spoke closely related languages and who shared much the same religious beliefs, art styles, fashions in dress and weapons, social structures and values. This accumulation of shared characteristics does make it meaningful to use a common name to describe these peoples, as well as those modern peoples who are descended from them.
When the Celts first emerged from prehistoric obscurity in the fifth century BC they were already a widespread group of peoples. Celtic was the language spoken across most of western Europe, from Austria and Bohemia, across southern Germany and France, to Britain, Ireland and the Iberian Peninsula. How the Celts came to be there and where they originated is far from clear. The ancient Greek writers, such as the geographer Hecateus and the historian Herodotus, who wrote the earliest accounts of the Celtic lands, have nothing to say on the subject and, as they never developed a fully literate culture, the Celts were never able to record their own origin myths and legends and they are now irretrievably lost. In the centuries that followed, the Greeks traded with the Celts, fought with them and employed them as mercenaries and slaves, but if they ever asked them about their origins, they certainly did not think the answers worth recording. After all, what could a Celt know? They could not even speak properly ā in Greek of course ā but simply made incomprehensible bar-bar noises, from which we have inherited the habit of describing those we perceive to be uncivilised as ābarbariansā. The Greeks preferred to explain the genesis of the Celts by inventing colourful etymological myths. According to one of these myths, recorded by the historian Appian of Alexandria, Polyphemus, the infamous Sicilian Cyclops, and his wife Galatea had three sons, Celtus, Galas and Illyrius, who all emigrated from Sicily and ruled over peoples who came to be named after them, Celts, Galatians and Illyrians (the ancestors of the Albanians). Another story, recorded by Parthenius (first century BC), is that Keltine, the beautiful daughter of King Bretannos, fell in love with Hercules while he was herding the cattle of Geryon from Erythreia. Keltine hid the cattle and refused to tell Hercules where they were unless he made love to her. Hercules did not take much persuading and from their union a son was born. He was named Keltos and it was from him that the Celts descended. The Romans were not much better than the Greeks. According to Caesar, the Gauls claimed to be descended from an underworld god to whom he gives the Roman name Dis Pater (Pluto). What his Celtic name was Caesar does not say, because the idea of doing so would not have occurred to him. Romans believed that their gods were universal but that other peoples knew them by different names that would have meant nothing to his audience. The historian Tacitus confirmed this indifference when he wrote that it was only to be expected that nobody bothered to enquire into the origins of barbarous peoples.
The archaeological record shows that at the time the Greeks first became aware of their existence the Celts already possessed a sophisticated aristocratic culture characterised by advanced iron and bronze working skills and a distinctive style of decorative art. This earliest recognisable Celtic culture was the Hallstatt culture, named for an Iron Age cemetery in the Austrian Alps excavated in the nineteenth century. The graves, over 2,000 of them, contained a wealth of offerings for the dead that revealed an aristocratic warrior society with far-flung trading connections that reached as far as the Baltic and North Africa. It was through these connections that the existence of the Celts had become known to the Greeks. The Iron Age Hallstatt culture did not spring into existence fully formed: it was the product of a long cultural tradition, which can be traced back through several phases to around 1200 BC when it began to develop as a central European variant of the widespread middle Bronze Age Urnfield culture. Back beyond that, the Celts become archaeologically invisible. Yet Celts, or at least Celtic-speaking people, must already have existed for over 1,000 years by this time.
The Celtic languages
The Celtic languages are a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes Greek, Latin, Iranian, Urdu, Hindi and the modern Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. Today, Celtic has the smallest number of speakers of any of the Indo-European language groups but around 300 BC it was probably the most widespread language group in Europe, being spoken from the river Dnepr to the Atlantic Ocean. Celtic exists in two forms, which both originated in prehistoric times, p-Celtic and q-Celtic. In ancient times q-Celtic was spoken in Iberia and Ireland, spreading to Scotland and the Isle of Man in the early Middle Ages. P-Celtic, which was the more widespread, was spoken in Britain, Gaul, northern Italy, central Europe and Anatolia. The ancient forms of q-Celtic included Hispano-Celtic and Goidelic (the ancestor of modern Irish, Scottish and Manx Gaelic), while p-Celtic included Gaulish, Lepontic and Brithonic (the ancestor of modern Welsh, Breton and Cornish). The division into p- and q-Celtic is based on phonological differences, as seen, for instance, between Welsh map (āsonā) and its Gaelic equivalent mac.
The Indo-European languages were not originally indigenous to Europe. The earliest known languages of Europe were all completely unrelated to the Indo-European languages. Some, such as Minoan, Etruscan and Iberian, are known from inscriptions; the existence of others can be inferred from place names or words in later languages. Probably the only survivor of these early languages is Euskara, the language of the Basques: Indo-European languages had displaced all the others by the early first millennium AD. The modern Indo-European languages are all descended from a common ancestor that is known to linguists as Proto-Indo-European. Though other homelands have been proposed, notably Anatolia, most linguists believe that the original Indo-European speakers were a nomadic pastoralist people who lived on the steppes of western Central Asia around 4000 BC. The language was subsequently spread by migrations into India, the Middle East and Europe, where it began to diversify into its modern daughter languages as different groups settled down and lost contact with one another. As it is known that Indo-European languages were being spoken in Europe soon after 2000 BC, linguists argue that these migrations must have taken place some time in the third or fourth millennium BC. Many attempts have been made to identify a specific archaeological culture with the early Indo-Europeans. The best candidate is the Yamnaya culture, which flourished c. 3500ā2500 BC on the steppes north of the Caspian Sea. The Yamnaya people were the earliest to combine pastoralism (sheep, cattle and horses) with wheeled vehicles. This mobility allowed them to adopt a migratory lifestyle, moving their flocks and herds long distances across the steppes in search of fresh pastures. By 2500 BC groups of Yamnaya people had spread east of the Urals onto the Asian steppes and west across the Ukrainian steppes into south-east Europe, which is compatible with the linguistic evidence for the arrival of Indo-European speakers in Europe. Recently discovered mummies from the Tarim Basin in Chinese Turkestan show that tall, fair-skinned, lighthaired people who tattooed their skin and wore tartan were living on the steppes 4,000 years ago. Though their appearance fits closely with descriptions of the ancient Celts, these people were not Celts but Tocharians, a now extinct Indo-European-speaking nomad people. Through contacts with these people the early Chinese learned of bronze, wheeled vehicles and domesticated horses.
Exactly when and where the Celtic languages developed from Proto-Indo-European is a matter of dispute. Most linguists believe that the Celtic languages probably emerged in approximately the area of central Europe that the Hallstatt culture developed in and that they were subsequently spread to western Europe by migrants who displaced or, more likely, assimilated the indigenous population. The spread of ornamental metalwork styles, such as the Hallstatt style, is seen as material evidence of these migrations. Critics of this view argue that the evidence of prehistoric Celtic migrations is far from conclusive. Ornamental metalwork styles, religious beliefs and burial customs could just as easily have been spread as a result of trade and social contacts as by migrating peoples. It was once believed, for example, that widespread cultural changes that marked the beginning of the Iron Age in Britain were the result of Celtic immigration. Now it is known, from excavations of sites that span the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, such as Runnymede Bridge on the river Thames, that these changes were entirely indigenous developments. It may or may not be significant in this respect that the ancient Britons regarded themselves as the aboriginal population of Britain. There is also a growing appreciation of the way that ethnic groups expand as much by recruitment and assimilation as by biological reproduction. This is supported by an increasing body of evidence for a high degree of genetic continuity in European populations between the end of the Ice Age and the Migration Period at the beginning of the Middle Ages. This seems to rule out the possibility of large-scale prehistoric Celtic migrations to Britain and Ireland, for example (though not smaller-scale folk movements, which certainly did take place). Archaeologists, especially in Britain, are now gripped by a doctrine of immobilism that virtually denies any important role to migrations as agents of cultural change. But if there were no migrations of Celtic-speaking peoples, how did Gaul, Spain, Britain and Ireland become Celtic-speaking?
The archaeologist Colin Renfrew has proposed an alternative theory that explains the spread of Celtic languages without recourse to migrations. Renfrew proposes that the original Indo-European homeland was not in Central Asia but in Anatolia, which before the arrival of the Turks in the Middle Ages was an Indo-European-speaking area. Proto-Indo-European was introduced to south-east Europe from Anatolia by the first farmers who arrived there around 7000 BC, and was subsequently spread, along with the farming way of life, to most of Europe by 4000 BC. Proto-Indo-Europeanās European daughter languages, including the Celtic languages, then developed across much the same areas that they were spoken in at the beginning of historical times. In other words, Gaulish could have developed from Proto-Indo-European in Gaul, Brithonic in Britain, Hispano-Celtic in Iberia and so on. Although it has an elegant simplicity, and fits the archaeological evidence, Renfrewās theory is not acceptable to linguists on the grounds that they believe that Proto-Indo-European could not have been spoken as early as 7000 BC. The question of prehistoric Celtic migrations therefore remains open. However, while there can be little doubt that the culture of the Celts spread more widely than their DNA, we should be wary of ruling out prehistoric Celtic migrations when their propensity to migrate in historical times is so well attested.
Bronze Age Europe
Hierarchical, aristocratic societies, like those of the earliest historical Celts, began to develop in northern Europe during the Bronze Age (c. 2500 BCā750 BC), the period in which the use of metal tools and weapons first became common. The earliest use of metals in Europe dates back to as long ago as around 6000 BC. At first only those metals, such as gold and copper, were used which occur naturally in their native form (i.e. as pure metal, not as ore). The technique of extracting metal from copper ore by smelting was first used in Europe in the Balkans c. 4500 BC. The technique may have been invented quite independently in Poland, southern Spain and south-west Ireland, where copper smelting began a few centuries later. Copper and gold are both too soft to make useful tools and they were used mainly to make personal ornaments. Metal tools only began to replace stone tools in everyday use with the invention of bronze, a hard alloy made by adding small amounts of arsenic or tin to copper during the smelting process. Bronze was first made in the Middle East in the fourth millennium BC but it seems to have been invented independently in central Europe c. 2400 BC. Within a thousand years, bronze metallurgy had spread throughout Europe. This new technology must have seemed almost magical to Bronze Age Europeans, a precious gift from the gods. Enormous quantities of weapons, tools and other artefacts were given back to the gods, deposited as thank offerings in pits or bogs by a grateful people.
The adoption of bronze led to a great increase in long-distance trade within Europe. While most places have supplies of stone suitable for tool making, copper ore is much less widespread and cassiterite (tin ore) is quite rare. Formerly self-sufficient communities had to trade if they wished to obtain supplies of metals. The increase in trade created ideal circumstances for the easy exchange of ideas. Metals, if they were not traded as ingots, were traded as finished artefacts, so knowledge of new types of tools or new decorative styles spread quickly, promoting considerable uniformity of material culture across much of Europe. By around 1000 BC the many different cultures of early Bronze Age times had been replaced in most of central and western continental Europe by the Urnfield complex of cultures, which is named for its distinctive burial practices. Bodies were cremated and the ashes placed in pottery funerary urns for burial in huge flat grave cemeteries containing hundreds or even thousands of graves. One of the largest Urnfield cemeteries, at Kelheim in southern Germany, contained over 10,000 graves. Urnfields first appeared c. 1350 BC in Hungary, spreading from there into Poland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Italy and Spain. The spread of the Urnfield cultures across western Europe is seen by some as evidence of Celtic migrations from their hypothetical central European homeland, but it has proved impossible to assign the Urnfield cultures to any particular ethnic group. These cultures represent an ethnically and linguistically varied group of peoples, which probably numbered early Celtic-speaking peoples among them. The European Bronze Age began to come to an end around 1200 BC with the introduction of ironworking to Greece from Anatolia, where it had been invented about 300 years earlier. Iron keeps an edge better than bronze, and it was much less costly because iron ore is very common indeed, especially bog iron ore, easily extractable rusty deposits found in bogs, which were widely exploited in ancient and medieval times. From Greece ironworking spread north through the Balkans and west along the Mediterranean trade routes to reach central Europe and Spain by around 750 BC. By 500 BC ironworking was practised throughout Europe.
While the early farming societies of the Neolithic Age had been relatively egalitarian, that is lacking in great disparities of wealth and status, Bronze Age societies developed dominant social elites. These developments are most clear in changing burial practices. Burial in the megalithic tombs of the Neolithic was communal, but in the Bronze Age burials reflected the status of the individual. Members of the social elite were interred with rich offerings of jewellery, weapons and armour, while the common folk were buried with few or ...
