A Brief History of the Celts (2 page)

Their philosophers and men of learning were highly regarded by the Greeks; many of the Greek Alexandrian school accepted that early Greeks had borrowed from the Celtic philosophers. Even some
Romans, who could never forgive the Celts for initially defeating them and occupying Rome, begrudgingly acknowledged their learning. Their advanced calendrical computations, their astronomy and
‘speculation from the stars’, also impressed the classical world.

The early Celts were prohibited by their religious precepts from committing their learning to written form in their own language. In spite of this, there remain some 500 textual inscriptions of
varying lengths in Celtic languages dating from between the fifth and first centuries
BC
. The Celts used the alphabets of the Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans to
make these records. Moreover, many Celts adopted Greek and Latin as languages in which to achieve literary fame; Caecilius Statius, for example, the chief Roman comic dramatist of the second
century
BC
, was an Insubrean Celtic warrior, taken prisoner and brought to Rome as a slave.

The Celts produced historians, poets, playwrights and philosophers, all writing in Latin. It was not until the Christian period that the Celts felt free enough to write extensively in their own
languages and then left an amazing literary wealth with Irish taking its place as the third literary language of Europe, after Greek and Latin. Irish, according to Professor Calvert Watkins of
Harvard, contains the oldest vernacular literature of Europe for, he points out, those writing in Latin and Greek were usually writing in a language which was not a
lingua materna
, a
mother tongue, but a
lingua franca
, a common means of communication.

Thanks to the texts written by the Celts of Ireland and Wales, in particular, we know the vibrant wealth of Celtic myth and legend, the stories of the ancient gods and goddesses; by comparing
these texts to the commentaries of the classical writers we can even discover something of early Celtic philosophy.

It is humbling to know that this civilisation, with at least 3000 years of cultural continuum, has not yet perished from Europe. There are still some two-and-a-half millions who speak a Celtic
language as a mother tongue. The Celtic peoples survive in the north-west of Europe, confined now to the Irish, Manx and Scots (Goidelic Celts) and the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons (Brythonic
Celts).

It is, however, the early Celtic world that this book is concerned with, the period before the birth of Christ. In the following pages, the story of the origins and ancient history of one of the
greatest ancient peoples of Europe is revealed; with the use of fresh materials which have been recently uncovered, a new examination and understanding of a civilisation which has touched most of
Europe and, indeed, parts of the Middle East and North Africa, is presented. This is a thematic survey of the visual wealth left to us by the Celts, as well as an introduction to their colourful
early history and fascinating culture.

* * *

Within a few months of the first publication of this book something of a mini-storm broke out in which I, as the author, was involved. A group of archaeologists claimed that
‘the ancient Celts did not exist!’ The claim was dumbfounding to the world of Celtic scholarship. It had the same impact as if someone entered a university Classics department and
declared that the Ancient Greeks had never existed.

The general public became aware of the furore when archaeologist Dr Simon James published
The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?
(1999). He argued that there was no
evidence of Celtic peoples in Britain or Ireland during the Iron Age and that the idea of an insular Celtic identity was but a product of the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth century. Dr
James, however, was not the first to propound this view. It was a time when, significantly, political devolution to Wales and Scotland was high on the Government’s agenda and a resurgence of
interest in matters Celtic was underway.

Dr John Collis, then at Sheffield, had already expressed himself ‘dissatisfied’ with using the term ‘Celtic’ to describe the Iron Age period in these islands. When, in
March 1997, the renowned Celtic art specialists, Ruth and Vincent Megaw, published an academic paper in the journal
Antiquity
entitled ‘Ancient Celts and modern ethnicity’
Collis replied that their definition of a Celtic society was ‘both false and dangerous’. A few months later in the summer issue of the
British Museum Magazine
, Dr James entered
the argument in support of Dr Collis in what looked like a complete turnaround from his previous position. Up until then, Dr James appeared to have had no reservations about referring to the
existence of ‘Iron Age’ Celts (see his
Exploring the World of the Celts
, 1993, and
Britain and the Celtic Iron Age
, with Valery Rigby, 1997). His ‘new’
approach again appeared in a
British Museum Magazine
article – quoted in the London
Financial Times
weekend section (14/15 June 1997) with a gleeful announcement to the
world: ‘The Celts – it was all just a myth!’. This he followed with a fresh attack on Ruth and Vincent Megaw in the March 1998 edition of
Antiquity
.

At first, like many Celticists, I was of the opinion that if we ignored the absurdity of the statement it would go away. It did not.
The Independent
(London) asked me to write a brief
rebuttal in its 5 January 1999 issue. But then came Dr James’ new book
The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?
, after which
The Scotsman
invited Dr James and
myself to exchange a series of written arguments, subsequently published as a full page feature, ‘The Saturday Debate: The Celts: ancient culture or modern fabrication’ (27 March 1999).
In the same year, a BBC radio programme invited us to ‘slug it out’ on the airwaves, and the
Irish Democrat
asked me to write a piece – ‘Did the ancient Celts
exist?’

The reader will undoubtedly ask the question – how can so many books have been written over the last century or two about a people who had not existed? Had the world of scholarship had
some mass hallucination?

Dr James’ main argument was that the term ‘Celtic’ should be abandoned when referring to the ‘Iron Age’ in Britain and Ireland, for the reason that ‘no one in
Britain or Ireland called themselves “a Celt” before 1700’. Dr James also maintained that there were no migrations to, or invasions of, the British Isles by historically attested
Celts from the continent.

In response, we can say equally that no one called themselves Anglo-Saxons in the time when everyone accepts Anglo-Saxons existed. Furthermore, though the ‘invasion’ theory –
an explanation provided by archaeologists for bringing the Celtic languages and cultures (such as Hallstatt and La Tène) to Britain – may not have been proved, it remains true that
something did bring Celtic languages and cultures to the British Isles, and a movement of a few or many people would explain how this could have happened in the days before mass communication. A
convincing example of movement implanting language was provided by Eusebius Hieronymus (St Jerome,
c
.
AD
342-420) when he identified that the people of Galatia
(central Turkey) were speaking the same Celtic dialect as he had heard among the Treveri, at Trier, in what is now Germany. Settlers had transplanted the Celtic language there in the third century
BC
. It is also clearly the case that from the sixteenth century
AD
onwards, the English language arrived in many lands across the globe by population
movements both large and small. Yet another example is provided by the archaeological, linguistic and literary evidence of Belgic Celtic movements between Gaul and Britain for some centuries prior
to the arrival of the Romans. The main point is that, although we cannot say for sure how such languages reached the British Isles, what remains certain is that
these languages were
Celtic
. And from the inception of Celtic scholarship, the definition of ‘Celt’ is a people who speak, or were known to have spoken within modern historical times, one of the
languages classified as the Celtic branch of Indo-European.

When the British Isles emerged into recorded history, becoming known to the Mediterranean world in the sixth and fifth centuries
BC
, we have evidence that its inhabitants
spoke one or another form of a Celtic language – the insular Celtic forms today represented by their modern descendants, Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, Cornish and Breton. The
evidence comes in the form of names and words recorded in early references in the classical world and personal names recorded on British coins issued in Britain long before Romans invaded the
island – facts that Dr James appears to dismiss. It is a telling truth that no place name survives prior to the Celtic place names in the British Islands. Professor Kenneth Jackson’s
Language and History in Early Britain
(Edinburgh University Press, 1953) is the seminal guide to this topic and has been an inspiration to a generation of Celtic scholars. This 752-page
book sets out the linguistic evidence for the existence of a Celtic language in ‘Iron Age’ Britain.

Another obvious piece of evidence comes directly from the writing of Julius Caesar:
‘Qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur’
(‘In their own language they
are called Celts, in our tongue Gauls’). Clearly this contradicts the idea propounded by Dr James that these people did not call themselves Celts until the eighteenth century.

Writing on this point, Dr James states that while there were Celtic-speaking peoples here in the Iron Age ‘
they were not necessarily Celts
’ [my italics] but people who had
somehow been absorbed into a Celtic-speaking cultural ethos. My response to this is the reminder that Celtic is, and always has been, a linguistic term and not a biological one. To talk of
biological attributes and to try and separate and identify individual ‘racial’ groups who, at this stage, shared a common language and culture is dangerous.

If the logic of Dr James’ view were followed, it would be equally wrong to talk of any ancient group of people by linguistic definition. Thus there would be no Anglo-Saxons, no Slavs, no
Latins and certainly no Greeks. In Iron Age Britain we would have to become linguistically cumbersome in the extreme if we went down such a path. We could not even speak of Ancient Britons, because
no one called himself or herself an ‘Ancient Briton’. We would have to be specific and speak of the Cantii, Coritani, Cornovii and Trinovantes – conveniently forgetting, by the
way, that these are all Celtic names.

Dr James wrote to me: ‘I am being deliberately polemical . . . It is intended to draw attention to the real discrepancies between the ideas of your field and mine. My long-term hope is
that this will help to precipitate genuine co-operative work to seek synthesis.’

As it stands, that is a laudable aim. But Professor Barry Raftery, of University College, Dublin, Ireland’s foremost archaeological authority on the Iron Age, and Professor Barry Cunliffe,
the leading archaeological expert on Britain’s Iron Age, both in the same ‘field’ as Dr James, have dismissed the idea that the ancient Celts did not exist and see the claim as
simply ‘anti-Celtic revisionism’. The people living in both islands during the Iron Age not only spoke Celtic languages but also shared a common religious system, a mythology and
cultural expression – even a comparable law system. They were, by the only meaningful scholastic definition, Celts.

In a strong attack on my arguments in the subsequent issue of the
Irish Democrat
, Dr James, I believe, clearly demonstrated that he was indeed more concerned with modern politics than
the ancient Celtic civilisation. One of the best studies on the background to the modern resurgence of the ‘Celtic idea’ had just been published: Norman Davies’
The Isle: A
History
(Macmillan, 1999). Dr Davies had succinctly discussed why, in an effort to rubbish the rise of modern Celtic nationalism, some people might like to remove the Celts as an entity from
history.

As regards the Continental Celts, it took a little longer for the French to join the revolt, but in 2002 Professor Christian Goudineau, a Professor at the College de France, chairman of
Antiquités Nationales and president of the Scientific Council of Mont Beuvray, who had previously courted controversy as an archaeologist, decided that the Gaulish Celts had not existed
either. Julius Caesar had it all wrong when he wrote his book
Commentarii de bello Gallico
(
Commentaries on the Gaulish War
). Professor Goudineau’s views in his book
Par
Toutatis! Que reste-t-il de la Gaule?
were immediately seized on by
The Times
(appropriately on 1 April) and
The Independent
(4 May), and several other publications, who
seemed more concerned to attack René Goscinny’s famous cartoon character ‘Asterix the Gaul’ than to contribute to any serious historical discussion.

Certainly, archaeologists, especially in television documentaries, in recent years have resorted more and more to talking about the ‘Iron Age People’ in Britain, Ireland and France.
In April 2003 when the University of Leicester announced the discovery of the hoard of Celtic coins minted by the Corieltauvi long before the arrival of the Romans they decided to announce that
‘in excess of 3,000 silver and gold coins have been found, mostly made by the local Iron Age tribe – the Corieltauvi’. That is sad for it does not inform people who this
‘Iron Age tribe’ was, nor explain what language they spoke or what culture they followed. ‘Do You Speak Iron Age?’ is a joke now often heard among Celtic Studies students in
modern universities.

That the Celts will weather this mini-storm, I have no doubt, as they have weathered similar attempts to eradicate them from the historical map.