The Rise of the Celts

Henri Hubert

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136202704
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

Originally published between 1920-70, The History of Civilization was a landmark in early twentieth century publishing. It was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of decisive historical discovery. The aim of the general editor, C.K. Ogden, was to summarize the most up to date findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. This reprinted material is available as a set or in the following groupings:
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PART ONE

WHAT THE CELTS WERE

CHAPTER I

THE NAME AND THE RACE

WHAT, then, were the Celts? We must first have some idea of what they were if we are to find out where they were. Every group of men living together forms a physical, social, and moral unit. Its members know one another and are known to others by their physical type, and, still more, by their manner of life, their language, certain sides of their civilization, their name, if they have a common name implying that they belong to the group, or some other symbol. Let us see how these various indications will help us in our study of the Celts.

I
THE NAME OF THE CELTS

The ancient Greek writers who have left information about the Celts used the name Kελτoί, Latin Celtœ, as a general racial designation applying to large peoples living a long way off. At the beginning of the third century before Christ, a new name, that of Galatians, Γαλάται, appears for the first time in the historian Hieronymos of Cardia,¹ who wrote of their invasion of Macedonia and Greece and their settlement in Asia Minor. It appeared in the epitaph of young Cydias, who was killed at Delphi in 279.² It is probable that the name of Galli came into use among the Italians, as a rival to the old name of Celts, about the same time or a little before. The words Galatians and Galli were likewise used as general terms, and were not the names of small groups which became generalized.

These various designations were used concurrently. The ancients tried to give them special application,¹ and modern historians have attempted to assign them to different groups of Celtic tribes.² The tribes did, indeed, form groups of different kinds, but we must give up any attempt to divide them into Celts and Galatians.³

These names came from the Celts themselves. The proper name Celtillos, the name of the Celtici (a Celtic people), and the personal names found in Spain—Celtigum, Celtus, Celticus ⁴—lead one to think that the root-word was, indeed, Celtic. As for the word Galli its equivalent is found in the Irish texts. There were in Ireland tribes of Gaileoin or Galians. In the Táin Bó Chuailgné (the Cattle-lifting of Cooley), in which a contingent of them forms part of the army of Connacht, they are distinguished from the other Irish by their military habits and strict discipline; they have the air of foreigners—almost of foreign mercenaries.⁵ They were Gauls settled in Ireland. At the beginning of a poem describing the marriage of Cuchulainn, the Tochmarc Emire (the wooing of Emer), the hero, Forgall Monach, Emer's father, comes to the court of Conchobar, King of Ulster, disguised as an ambassador of the King of the Gauls, with gifts, which are objects of gold and wine of Gaul (fin Gall).⁶ In these two cases we have, not tribal names, but general names, although they do not apply to born Irishmen or to the whole of the Celtic countries.

We need not, therefore, make too much of Cæsar's definition at the beginning of the Commentaries: Qui ipsorum lingua Celtaœ nostra Galli appellantur— “Who are called Celts in their own language, and Gauls in ours.”⁷ At the very most, the passage might mean that Cæsar considered that there were two different pronunciations of the same word.

The number and the doubtfulness of the etymologies suggested leads us in the same direction.¹ It is not surprising that these names are hard to explain and that their etymological meaning has gone. All that matters from this point of view is that they are not too alien to the Celtic languages in appearance. Probably we are dealing with three forms of one same name, heard at different times and in different places by different ears, and written down by people with different ways of spelling. The initial guttural was transcribed by a surd in the Western Mediterranean area, and (perhaps under the influence of the Tartessians, who sailed to the Celtic countries before the Greeks) by a sonant in Greece. It is equally probable that the same word had two forms, one with a dental at the end and one without.

The fact that there was something that could be called by a name, whether the name was Celts or Gauls, was forced upon the ancients, no doubt by the bearers of the name themselves. But did these general names apply to the Celtic peoples as a whole, or only to some of them?

Did they apply to the Celts of Ireland? When the ancient writers, in describing the races of the West, started to speak of the Celts instead of the Ligurians, they imagined, in the place of the great Ligurian region (Ligystike), a great Celtic region (Keltike), which covered the whole West, including the islands. The islands disappeared into the region as a whole. The Celts were the great people of the West. Did the islanders really call themselves Celts? That is another question, and one that was probably not asked. It is extremely doubtful whether the inhabitants of Ireland ever gave themselves a name of the kind.¹ Moreover, the Irish seem to have exhausted the resources of their ethnographical sense when they described themselves in reference to themselves and distinguished the elements of which they were composed. The Celts of Britain behaved differently; indeed, it is just possible that the Galians of Ireland were recruited among them.²

The names of Celt and Gaul are properly the names of the Celtic peoples of the Continent.

It is, too, on the eastern limit of the Celts that the evidence found regarding the use of these racial names and the resulting distinctions are of value and usefully supplement linguistic and other indications. In the East there were isolated peoples, thrown out in advance of the main body, which were called Celtic—the Cotini and Osi in Silesia, the Scordisci, the Iapodes. On the other hand, a certain number of Belgic peoples styled themselves Germanic; yet the Belgæ were called Gauls and Gala...