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THE ORIGINS OF THE CELTS

When the merchant-explorers of Greece first started to encounter the people they came to refer to as Keltoi, at the start of the sixth century BC, the Celtic peoples were already widely spread through Europe and still rapidly expanding. It was Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 490–c. 425 BC) who says that a merchant named Colaeus, from Samos, trading along the African coast about the year 630 BC, was driven off course in his ship by tides and winds and eventually made landfall at the Tartessus, the modern River Guadalquivir in southern Spain. In the valley of the Guadalquivir are the modern cities of Cordoba and Seville. At Tartessus, Colaeus found a tribe of the Keltoi exploiting the rich silver mines of the area.

About 600 BC merchants from Phocis, in central Greece, made a treaty with these same Keltoi to trade goods for their silver. The king of these Keltoi was named Arganthonios, which seems to derive from the Celtic word for silver, arganto. Herodotus tells us that his name became a byword for longevity among the Greeks for he reportedly died as late as 564 BC.

From where did the Greeks derive the name Keltoi? Julius Caesar gives the answer at the beginning of his De Bello Gallico (Gallic War). He refers to the Gauls as those ‘who are called Celts in their own language’. So, it appears, and logically so, that Celt was a name that the Celts called themselves. If this is so, what does the name mean?

Numerous doubtful etymologies have been put forward. One suggests an Indo-European root quel, denoting ‘raised’ or ‘elevated’. This survives in the Latin celsus and the Lithuanian kéltas, comparable to the old Irish word cléthe. Thus it would be argued that the Celts described themselves as ‘exalted’, ‘elevated’ or ‘noble’. Another suggestion is the Indo-European root kel-, to strike, surviving in the Latin -cello and the Lithuanian kalti. This seems just as unlikely as the first suggestion. Henri Hubert suggested that it might be cognate with the Sanskrit cárati, to surround, found in the old Irish imm-e-chella.

Of all the suggestions, perhaps the most acceptable so far has been that the word derived from the Indo-European root kel- meaning ‘hidden’. This survived in both old Irish as celim (I hide) and old Welsh, celaf. The Celts were ‘the hidden people’, perhaps a reference to their religious proscription against setting down their vast store of knowledge in written form in their own language. As Caesar observed in his Gallic War: ‘The Druids believe that their religion forbids them to commit their teachings to writing, although for most other purposes, such as public and private accounts, the Celts use the Greek alphabet.’ In old, and even in modern Irish, the word celt still exists for an act of ‘concealment’. The word celt is also used for a form of dress or mantle, designed to ‘conceal’ or ‘hide’ the genitalia, which is now known in English as a kilt.

The various ancient names incorporating the word celt are probably names identifying the person’s ethnic background although Professor Ellis Evans argues they are more likely to be from the root kel-, to exalt. The father of Vercingetorix, Celtillus, who held suzerainty over all the Gaulish tribes, might well have been known as ‘exalted’ but in Irish mythology, the Ulster hero Celtchair’s name is clearly shown to mean ‘mantle’ or ‘concealment’.

However, the fact that there were personal names incorporating the synonymous terms ‘Celt’ and ‘Gaul’, in whatever form the Greeks and Romans chose to present them, did lead to some confusion when the classical writers tried to link the Celts into their own cultural concepts and creation myths. Appian (Appianos of Alexandria who flourished c. AD 160) tried to explain the origin and names of the Celts by writing about two kings called Keltos and Galas who he said were the sons of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, and his wife Galatea. Of course, the character of Galatea, whose name meant ‘milk white’ (from galakt, the Greek word for milk), was used by Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid as the eponymous ancestor of the Galatae. It is argued that she actually took her place in Greek and Roman literature following the impression the Celts made on the Greeks during their invasion and sack of Delphi. Greek writers frequently remarked on the ‘milk white’ skin of the Celts.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (fl. c. first century BC) records a story of Keltos being the son of Heracles (Hercules) and Asterope, daughter of Atlas. Yet another Greek, Diodorus Siculus (c. 60–c. 30 BC) made the Celts originate with Galates, whose parents were Heracles and the daughter of a local king of Gaul.

I find that it is not stretching the imagination to suggest that when the Greek merchants first started to encounter the Celtic peoples and asked them who they were, the Celts simply replied, ‘the hidden people’ – that is, to Greek ears, Keltoi.

As there is no documentary evidence about the Celts prior to these early Greek writings, some scholars argue that it is not justifiable to speak of ‘Celts’ before the sixth century BC. Others argue that we can build a reasonable picture of Celtic life during the first millennium BC by the use of comparative Indo-European linguistics and archaeological evidence.

So, who were the Celts and where did they come from?

The first European people north of the Alps to emerge into recorded history, the Celtic peoples were distinguished from their fellow Europeans by virtue of the languages which they spoke and which we now identify by the term ‘Celtic’. (The use of this term to identify this group of languages was only adopted with the development of Celtic studies.) The Scot, George Buchanan (1506–1582), was one of the first to recognise the relationship between the surviving Celtic languages. By the time the Celtic peoples first appeared in written records, they had already diversified into speaking differing dialects, so we may usefully speak of the existence of several Celtic languages even though their speakers retained common links in terms of social structure, religion and material culture.

These Celtic languages constituted an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The Indo-European family encompasses most of the languages spoken in Europe, with a few notable exceptions such as Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, and also includes the languages of Iran and northern India. At some point in remote antiquity, there was a single parent language which we call ‘Indo-European’ for want of a better designation. This parent language, as its speakers began to migrate from where it was originally spoken, diversified into dialects. These dialects then became the ancestors of the present major European and North Indian language groups: Hellenic (Greek), Italic (Latin or now the Romance languages), Celtic, Germanic, Slavonic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan (including Sanskrit), Armenian, Anatolian, Tocharian, Hittite and so forth.

Even now there remain common forms of construction and vocabulary among all the Indo-European languages which are not found in other languages. For example, the word ‘name’ incorporates a very profound and ancient concept, and it survives with hardly any change in the Indo-European languages. ‘Name’ in English comes from the Anglo-Saxon nama; this is namn in Gothic; name in German; noma in Frisian; nomen in Latin; namn in Norse; naam in Dutch; onoma in Greek; namman in Sanskrit; aimn in Irish; anu in old Welsh but enw in modern and so forth.

Other features common to the Indo-European group include a clear, formal distinction of noun and verb, a basically inflective structure and decimal numeration. An interesting example of the relationship between the Indo-European languages can be seen in the cardinal numbers, one to ten. ‘One, two, three’ sounds very similar to the Irish aon, dó, tri, the Welsh un, dau, tri, the Greek énas, duo, treis, the Latin unus, duo, tres and the Russian odin, dva, tri. But they bear no relation to the Basque bat, bi, hirur or the Finnish yksi, kaksi, kolme, because those are not Indo-European languages.

The earliest Indo-European literatures are Hittite and classical Sanskrit. Hittite writing emerged from 1900 BC and vanished around 1400 BC, surviving on tablets written in cuneiform syllabics which were not deciphered until 1916. The classical Sanskrit of the Vedas is of later origin, usually dated around 1000–500 BC.

Where was this parent language originally spoken and when did it begin to break up? It is probable, but only probable, that the speakers of the parent tongue originated somewhere between the Baltic and the Black Sea. It also seems probable that the parent tongue was already breaking into dialects before the waves of migrants carried it westward into Europe and eastward into Asia. Although it is still a matter of argument among academics as to when this parent language might have existed, most speculation puts the date at around the fourth millennium BC.

Professor Myles Dillon was one of several Celtic scholars who argued that the Celtic dialect, the ancestor of the Celtic languages, began to emerge from the Indo-European parent about the start of the second millennium BC. What is extraordinary are the close similarities that have survived between Irish and Vedic Sanskrit, two cultures which developed thousands of miles apart over thousands of years. When scholars seriously began to examine the Indo-European connections in the nineteenth century they were amazed at how old Irish and Sanskrit had apparently maintained close links with their Indo-European parent. This applies not only in the field of linguistics but in law and social custom, in mythology, in folk custom and in traditional musical form.

The following examples demonstrate the similarity of the language of the Vedic Laws of Manu and that of the Irish legal texts, the Laws of the Fénechus, more popularly known as the Brehon Laws:

Sanskrit	Old Irish
arya (freeman)	aire (noble)
naib (good)	noeib (holy)
badhira (deaf)	bodhar (deaf)
minda (physical defect)	menda (a stammerer)
names (respect)	nemed (respect/privilege)
raja (king)	rí (king)
vid (knowledge)	uid (knowledge)

Arya gives us the much misunderstood term Aryan; the old Irish noeib becomes the modern Irish naomh, a saint; and the Irish bodhar (deaf) was borrowed into eighteenth-century English as ‘bother’. To be ‘bothered’ is, literally, to be deafened. Finally, the word vid, used not only for knowledge but for understanding, is the root of Veda; the Vedas constitute the four most sacred books of Hinduism – the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, Atharva Veda. The same root can be seen in the name of the Celtic intellectual caste, the Druids – i.e. dru-vid which some have argued meant ‘thorough knowledge’.

Unfortunately, no complete ‘creation’ myth of the Celts has survived. When these myths came to be written down, in the insular Celtic languages of Irish and Welsh, Christianity had taken a hold and the scribes bowdlerised the stories of the gods and goddesses, thus obscuring their symbolism and significance. That the Celts did have a vibrant and rich pre-Christian mythology, including a creation myth, is seen not only in the Christianised stories but in the few allusions in the classical writers. However, most of the classical writers tend, like the Christians after them, to incorporate the Celtic myths and gods into their own cultural ethos.

The fact is that many of the surviving Irish myths, and some of the Welsh ones, show remarkable resemblances to the themes, stories and even names in the sagas of the Indian Vedas. Once again, this demonstrates the amazing conservatism of cultural tradition. By comparing these themes we find that Danu, sometimes Anu in old Irish and Dôn in Welsh and also surviving in the epigraphy of the Continental Celts, was the mother goddess. She was the ‘divine waters’ which gushed to the earth in the time of primal chaos and nurtured Bíle the sacred oak, from whom the gods and goddesses sprang. Her waters formed the course of the Danuvius (Danube).

The story associated with the Danuvius, which is arguably the first great Celtic sacred river, has similarities with myths about the Boyne, from the goddess Boann, and the Shannon, from the goddess Sionan, in Ireland. More important, it bears a close resemblance to the story of the Hindu goddess Ganga, deity of the Ganges. Both Celts and Hindus worshipped in the sacred rivers and made votive offerings there. In the Vedic myth of Danu, for she exists as a deity in Hindu mythology as well, the goddess appears in the famous Deluge story called ‘The Churning of the Ocean’.

Echoes of the Celtic creation myths survive in the Leabhar Gabhála which tells how Bith, with his wife Birren, their daughter Cesara and her husband Fintan, and their son Lara and his wife Balma, arrived in Ireland at the time of the Deluge. But there are traces of other Deluge myths, including the Welsh story of the overflowing of Llyon-Llion, the Lake of the Waves, from which Dwyvan and Dwybach alone escaped by building Nefyed Nav Nevion, the Welsh Ark. The Deluge was created by Addanc, a monster who dwelt in the lake.

What is important about the creation or origin myths of the Celts is the fact that, in the words of Caesar, ‘the Celts claim all to be descended from Dis-Pater, declaring that this is the tradition preserved by the Druids’. Certainly, later Celtic kings in Ireland claimed divine ancestry. However, Caesar uses the term applied to the Roman god of wealth and of the underworld. This has caused confusion as scholars attempt to search the Celtic pantheon for an equivalent.

In the Vedas, the sky god was called Dyaus and is recorded as the one who stretched, or reached, forth a long hand to protect his people. This is cognate with Deus in Latin, Dia in Irish and Devos in Slavonic. It means, significantly, ‘bright one’ and presumably denotes a sun deity. In the Vedas we find Dyaus was called Dyaus-Pitir, Father Dyaus; in Greek this became Zeus, also a father god; in Latin Dia became the word for ‘god’ while in the same word, altered into Jove, we find Jovis-Pater, Father Jove. When Caesar talks of the Celtic Dis-Pater he is not talking about the god of wealth and the underworld at all but the equivalent to Jove. The Celtic Dis-Pater emerges in Irish references to Ollathair, the All-Father god. He is the sky god; Lugh is often given this role in Irish while Lleu is also found in Welsh. Significantly, the name again means ‘bright one’ as it does in Sanskrit. More importantly, the Irish god is Lugh Lamhfhada (Lugh of the Long Hand) while his Welsh counterpart is Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Llew of the Skilful Hand).

So, if we accept the classical writers, the ancient Celts believed that they were physically descended from the sky god who himself was descended from Danu, the ‘divine waters’.

But now we must come back to a more temporal point of origin for the Celtic peoples.

Archaeology combines with documentary and linguistic evidence to show that the Celtic peoples began to appear as a distinctive culture in the area of the headwaters of the Danube, the Rhine and the Rhône, that is Switzerland and south-west Germany.

The documentary evidence begins with Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 500–476 BC) and with Herodotus of Halicarnassus, whom we have already mentioned. Many later commentators, including Romanised Celts themselves, confirmed this. Herodotus mentioned that ‘the Danube traverses the whole of Europe, rising among the Celts . . .’ But he incurred the ridicule of modern scholars by adding that the Celts ‘dwell beyond the Pillars of Hercules, being neighbours of the Cynesii, who are the westernmost of all nations inhabiting Europe’. Perhaps he, or his copyists, left out the magic word ‘also’, for the Celts, when he was writing, dwelt not only at the headwaters of the Danube but at the Tartessus in southern Spain.

Place-names in Switzerland and southern Germany provide linguistic evidence; even today, rivers, mountains, woodland and some of the towns still retain their original Celtic names, including the three great rivers themselves. The Danube or Danuvius was named after the Celtic mother goddess, Danu. The Rhône, first recorded as Rhodanus, also incorporates the name of the goddess prefixed by the Celtic ro, great (there is also a Rodanus which is an affluence of the Moselle). And the Rhine was originally recorded as Rhenus, a Celtic word for a sea way found in the old Irish rian.

Dr Henri Hubert, in the 1930s, argued that the survival of so many Celtic place-names for so long after Celtic-speaking peoples had ceased to live in the area pointed to the names being of indigenous form and of long usage.

There is strong reason for believing that the names are aboriginal, or, at least, very ancient, since there are so many names of rivers and mountains among them. We know that such names are almost rare in Gaul. Many names of French rivers and mountains come from the Ligurians, if not from still further back. Now the names given to the land and its natural features are the most enduring of place-names. The first occupants of a country always pass them on to their successor.

Support for Dr Hubert’s argument comes easily to the English reader. Although the English started to settle in south-eastern Britain, that area which became England, from the fifth century AD, driving out the Celtic population, they adopted many of the original Celtic place-names: names of rivers and streams such as Aire, Avon, Axe, Dee, Darwent, Dart, Derwent, Don, Esk, Exe, Ouse, Severn, Stour, Tees, Thames, Trent, Wye; names of hills and forests such as Barr, Brent, Cannock, Chevin, Creech, Crich, Crick, Lydeard, Malvern, Mellor, Penn, Pennard; names even of towns such as London, Carlisle, Dover, Dunwich, Lympne, Penkridge, Reculver, York, and of areas such as Kent, Thanet, Wight, Craven, Elmet, Leeds.

The large number of Celtic place-names still surviving in Switzerland and south-west Germany are therefore an indication that when the Celtic peoples appear in historical record they were already well settled in this area.

The third source of evidence for the origin of the Celts is archaeological. In terms of artefacts, patterns of settlement and land use and so forth, archaeologists have identified two distinct periods of Celtic culture emerging in this region; one is called Hallstatt and the other La Tène.

According to archaeological evidence, the Celtic peoples descend from a mixture of the Bronze Age Tumulus culture (c. 1550–1250 BC) and the Urnfield culture (c. 1200 BC). Drs Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes, in the 1940s, first described these cultures as ‘proto-Celtic’. Dr John X.W.P. Corcoran, in his essay ‘The Origin of the Celts’, agreed that the Urnfield culture may, indeed, be identified with the early Celts as there was little to distinguish these people from their descendants of the Hallstatt culture, other than the latter’s use of iron.

Archaeologists now date the Hallstatt culture from 1200 BC to 475 BC. Previously, they dated it from 750 BC but new finds have made them revise their dating. The fully developed Celtic culture was identified as an iron-using economy and named after one of the first sites to be distinguished at Lake Hallstatt in the Salzkammergut in Upper Austria. The culture was identified by a mainly geometric-based art which evolved from its Urnfield antecedents. Examples were found in a series of graves of ‘princes’, who were laid out on four-wheeled wagons with splendidly decorated yokes and harnesses. The graves were in spacious chambers beneath a mound or barrow. The wagons and chariots demonstrated the use of an advanced technology, which implied an equally sophisticated knowledge of road construction.

These people knew about iron-smelting and the use of other metal. Iron tools and weapons rendered the Celts superior to their neighbours and were doubtless the basis of their sudden eruption throughout Europe at the beginning of the first millennium BC. The archaeological evidence also shows that the Celtic peoples from this area were developing a trade with the Mediterranean world; artefacts from Greece, Etruria and Carthage have been found in these tombs. Roman civilisation had not begun when many of these ‘princes’ were laid to rest in their splendid tombs.

The Hallstatt period eventually ended in the emergence of a new culture, which archaeologists call La Tène after discoveries made in the shallows at the north-eastern end of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. This appears to have been a place of Celtic worship where countless artefacts were cast into the water as votive offerings. The La Tène period, from the fifth century to the first century BC, saw the emergence of new decorative art forms, and of fast two-wheeled chariots and other transport innovations. Living standards now seemed exceptionally high throughout the Celtic world. The Celts were first and foremost skilled farmers, both agricultural and pastoral, whose economy was based on their produce and livestock. The development of irrigation systems along the Po valley, where they had settled, demonstrated considerable engineering ability. This is also seen in their road-building and transport systems. They mined salt, a highly important product. They expanded to exploiting the natural resources of their land, including gold, silver, tin, lead and iron. Their craftsmen were second to none, manufacturing high quality tools and weapons, household goods and ornaments for personal adornment. They built their structures mainly in wood, which has not lasted – although where they chose to build in stone, mainly in Ireland and Britain, there is evidence that they were no inferior craftsmen.

They were also open to trade, their goods providing them with strong purchasing power for those luxury goods that the Mediterranean climate of Greece and Italy produced more easily than the harsher climates of the north. Celtic society was more wealthy and stable than the classical writers would allow.

The Celts were divided into tribes ruled by kings; over-kings had power over several tribes. To speak of ‘tribes’ can give a wrong picture to our modern minds. These Celtic tribes could be as small as 20,000 strong or as large as 250,000. Caesar records that the Helvetii on their migration into Gaul numbered 263,000. Often these tribes formed great coalitions, like the Belgae and the Brigantes.

Celtic tribal rulers introduced the idea of coinage slightly in advance of Rome, albeit based on their contacts with Greece, at the end of the fourth century BC. The coins were cast in gold, silver or bronze in moulds of clay which had been prepared to give pieces of exactly equal weight. These pieces were then hammered between two stamps with amazing designs that were probably of mythological or religious significance.

The La Tène period was one in which the Celtic peoples achieved their greatest expansion. From their original homeland, speakers of Celtic languages moved across the Alps into the Po valley by the seventh century BC, defeating the armies of the Etruscan empire and pushing them back south of the Apennines. Later, the Celtic Senones, a tribe whose name seems to mean ‘the veterans’, would cross the Apennines and defeat the Roman legions, occupying Rome for seven months before settling on the eastern seaboard of Italy then called Picenum.

Celtic-speaking peoples were already in the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), settling there from about the ninth century BC. They had reached Ireland and Britain soon after, if not before. They were settled from what is now modern Belgium (still bearing the name of the Belgae) south through modern France which was known as the land of the Galli (Gaul). About the seventh or sixth centuries BC, Celtic-speaking tribes moved relentlessly eastwards along the Danube valley establishing themselves in what are now the Czech and Slovak states – Bohemia was named after the Celtic tribe the Boii; they settled in Illyria (through the Balkans) and reached as far as the Black Sea. For some time they were the ruling class of Thrace. They moved into the Greek states but did not stop, carrying on eastwards into Asia Minor. The state they established on the central plain of what is now Turkey, Galatia, provided the ancient world with clear evidence of how a Celtic state was governed. Individual bands of Celtic mercenaries and their families went to serve the rulers of, and to settle in, Syria of the Selucid kings, Israel of Herod the Great, Egypt of the Ptolemy pharaohs and Carthage until its defeat by Rome.

They had covered a vast territory. Ephoros of Cyme (c. 405–330 BC) described the Celts as occupying an area the size of the Indian sub-continent – a fact which his fellow Greek Strabo (64 BC–after AD 24), from Amasia, in Pontus, questioned. However, Professor David Rankin has pointed out that Ephoros was not far wrong.

The second and first centuries BC saw the start of the inexorable recession of their borders in the face of the growth of the Roman empire and the Germanic and Slavic migrations. Inevitably, the conquerors then wrote the history books and, lacking balance from a strong native literature prior to the Christian era, the Celts have been painted as war like, flamboyant, given to an excess in alcohol and food and hardly more than high-spirited children needing the more civilising hand of Rome and the Germanic heirs of the Roman imperial ethic. As is always the way of conquerors, the peoples they seek to conquer are denigrated and painted in the worst possible light.

Of the classical writers, whose words many seem to accept without question, only the Greeks, with the exception of those Greeks in Roman employment, tended to be unbiased commentators on the Celtic world. The Romans and their allies usually had their own agenda. Julius Caesar, for example, whose work is often quoted as a great authority to be accepted without argument, was, after all, a Roman soldier with political ambition; a general who had set out to bring the entire Celtic world crushed under the heel of the Roman empire for his own political aggrandisement.

Many scholars seem to regard Caesar as if he was an expert who had spent his life studying the language and sociology of the peoples he was fighting against. Those same scholars would probably be the first to quibble at the suggestion that Lieutenant General Frederick, Lord Chelmsford be deemed an expert on Zulu culture because he campaigned against them in 1879. Yet time apparently alters all things. Caesar, with his prejudices, his attempts at justification and his downright inaccuracies, becomes an inviolable authority. Virgil says in his Eclogues that ‘time bears away all things, even the mind’. Certainly there seems an unwillingness to question the words of classical commentators on the Celts, simply because they were written 2000 years ago and more. Time has borne the mind away so far as open-minded discussion of source and bias is concerned.

Since Rome’s conquest of the Celtic world, the picture that has been conjured is that of wandering hordes of Celtic warriors, brightly clothed or without any clothes at all, raiding the ‘civilised’ centres of Rome and Greece without provocation, drunken, ruthless, bloodthirsty, searching for plunder. It is an image that is no longer acceptable, as the following pages will demonstrate.