To modern ears, the word “Celtic” evokes the traditional art, literature and music of Ireland and Scotland. But the ancient Celts were a widespread group of people from Central Europe. Find out what historians have learned about this rich and complex collection of tribes.
1. The Celts were the largest group in ancient Europe.
The ancient culture known as the Celts once extended far beyond the British Isles. With a territory stretching from Spain to the Black Sea, the Celts were geographically the largest group of people to inhabit ancient Europe.
The difficulty in tracing Celtic history is that none of these ancient peoples living in Western or Central Europe would have called themselves Celts. This name comes from the Greeks, who established their first contact with a “barbarian” people they called the Keltoi in 540 BC on the south coast of France. The ancient Celts were never a single kingdom or empire, but a collection of hundreds of tribal chiefdoms with a common culture and distinctive language.
WATCH: The Celts on HISTORY Vault
2. The Celts did not leave their own written histories.
Since the Celts themselves left no written history, we must rely on the admittedly biased accounts of their enemies in battle, the Greeks and later the Romans. Historians do not know why the Greeks called them the Keltoi, but the name stuck, and the Celts developed a reputation in Greece as savage drinkers and tough fights. Celtic warriors often fought naked and were prized as mercenaries throughout the Mediterranean.
The Romans called the Celts Galli or Gallia and frequently clashed with the Celtic tribes who invaded the Roman outposts in northern Italy. In 387 BC, a fearless Celtic warlord named Brennus sealed the barbaric reputation of the Celts by violently plundering and plundering Rome and putting most of the Roman Senate to the sword.
Centuries later, after the Roman Empire conquered several Celtic tribes from the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain) that the Romans called the Gallaeci, Julius Caesar embarked on the Gallic wars of nine years to defeat the Celts and various other tribal kingdoms in Gaul (modern France). Caesar wrote about the conquest of Gaul with a mixture of disgust and respect for his Celtic enemies.
“Ultimately, Caesar makes a clear distinction between the ‘civilized’ Mediterranean world of Rome and the great unwashed Celts in Gaul, so the Romans are right to colonize them,” says Bettina Arnold, professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. and the founding editor of e-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies.
3. The ancient Celtic burial mounds reveal a complex society.
Former Celtic settlement Chysauster Village, a late Iron Age and Roman-British village of houses with courtyard in Cornwall, England.
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The Celts were far from savages, as evidenced by the intricate ironwork and jewelry taken from ancient Celtic hill forts and burial mounds across Europe. One such mound near Hochdorf, Germany, contained the remains of a Celtic chief and a multitude of artifacts indicating a complex and layered Celtic society.
The Hochdorf Chief’s Mound dates to 530 BC, what archaeologists call the end of the Hallstatt period, when Celtic culture was concentrated in central Europe. The chef was arranged on a long bronze sofa with wheels and dressed in gold adornments, including a traditional Celtic choker called a torc. It was surrounded by ornate drinking horns and a large bronze cauldron, which still contained the remains of high-strength mead.
Arnold says the wheeled couch was replaced in later Celtic burial mounds with two-wheeled chariots that transported the honored dead to the afterlife. The drinking equipment emphasizes the essential role of the holiday as a socio-political tool for the Celts. What the Greeks and Romans described as “heavy drinking” was actually a way for the Celtic elites to strengthen their ties with their allies. And it continued into the great hereafter.
“The Celts believed in a type of the afterlife BYOB,” says Arnold. “You had to bring alcohol with you and have a big party when you got to the other side. A sign of a good leader was generosity.
4. The Celts may have been one of the first Europeans to wear trousers.
The ancient Celts were famous for their colorful woolen textiles, the precursors of the famous Scottish tartan. And, while only a few mouth-watering pieces of these textiles have survived the centuries, historians believe the Celts were one of the first Europeans to wear pants. However, they did not have buttons, so they tied their clothes with clasps called fibulae.
5. The Druids passed on stories and laws through oral tradition.
The ancient Celts were “aliterate,” says Arnold, which means that they actively chose not to write down their stories, their sacred stories, and their laws, in order to safeguard the information. Celtic religion, for example, required animal and human sacrifices to a pantheon of gods, but this esoteric knowledge was limited to Celtic priests called druids and passed down orally from generation to generation.
Druids were figures of great respect and honor in Celtic society and were among the few who could travel safely among warring tribes, says John Koch, a historical linguist specializing in early Celtic languages at the University. from Wales. Other “learned classes” of Celts, including genealogists who memorized centuries of tribal relationships, those charged with memorizing law enforcement, and “bards” who were both storytellers and popular historians.
Even though the Celtic tribes never politically unified under one kingdom, their oral traditions helped create and maintain cultural unity over great geographic distances. This explains why the Celts were more easily identified by their common language. Celtic languages are still spoken in parts of the UK and France, including Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, and Breton.
“Because all Celtic doctrines were transmitted orally, it helped preserve linguistic uniformity,” Koch says. “The Druids and Bards spoke the most prestigious version of the language and they carried it across tribal borders, so that it did not fragment into many different dialects.”
6. Celtic queen Boudicca led a bloody revolt against the Romans.
Boudicca, queen of the British Iceni tribe, a Celtic tribe who led an uprising against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire.
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The Romans conquered Britain in 43 AC under Claudius, and the Celts were slowly subjugated and Romanized. However, they did not fall without a fight. The legendary Celtic queen Boudicca led a bloody revolt against the Romans in 61 AD in which her forces destroyed the Roman stronghold of Londinium and slaughtered the inhabitants, according to Roman sources.
In Celtic culture, women could occupy the highest position in the social hierarchy. Others were druidesses who specialized in political prophecy and played important roles in Celtic military campaigns.
“It is clear that Celtic women were sometimes allowed to assume the position of supreme authority, which was markedly different from the Mediterranean world,” says Arnold. “The Greeks and Romans found this extremely strange.”
READ MORE: Who Was Boudica?
7. The Celts were eventually defeated by the Romans, Slavs and Huns.
After the Roman conquest of most of the Celtic lands, Celtic culture was further trampled on by Germanic tribes, Slavs, and Huns during the migration period of around 300-600 AC. the 1700s, when Welsh linguist and scholar Edward Lhuyd recognized the similarities between languages like Welsh, Irish, Cornish, and now extinct Gallic, and referred to them as “Celtic.”
READ MORE: How Far Did Ancient Rome Extend?
8. The adoption of a Celtic identity is relatively recent and linked to opposition to British rule.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw a full-fledged Celtic revival in the British Isles, driven by political anger at British rule in places like Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Musicians, artists and authors like William Butler Yeats proudly adopted a pre-Christian Celtic identity. But because the Celts were much more than an Irish or Scottish phenomenon, historians remain divided over the correctness of modern claims to Celtic heritage.
“” Celtic “is a descriptive term – a” heuristic device “in academic jargon – a shorthand for something that we can see archaeologically, and that we can see in the registration of the place name, and we can see it in linguistic evidence, ”says Arnold. “While this has no real meaning in terms of identity, it is still useful as a descriptor.”
READ MORE: Who Were the Celts?
