A Brief History of the Celts (20 page)

The ability of the ancient Celts to travel great distances has been underestimated, in spite of the knowledge of their movements through Europe. Henri Hubert has demonstrated that the various
Celtic societies in the ancient world not only shared a sense of common origin but were in communication. He cites two instances from the Second Punic War. When the Romans found that Hannibal
proposed to march from the southern Iberian peninsula, through southern Gaul, across the Alps and into Cisalpine Gaul, they sent ambassadors to prevent the Celtic tribes supporting Carthage, but
found that all these tribes shared a sense of unity against Rome. Shortly afterwards, the Greek Senate of Massilia (Marseilles) asked their Celtic neighbours to contact the Celts dwelling in
Galatia (the central plain of Turkey) and ask them not to act with hostility towards Lampsacos. Hubert argued:

For that ancient world to be in communication to the extent which these references imply, it would have been essential that the Celts had an efficient transport system, via
roads and shipping.

CELTIC ARTISTS AND CRAFTSMEN

P
olybius makes an extraordinary statement when he writes about the Celts of the Po valley: ‘Their lives were very simple, and they had no
knowledge whatsoever of any art or science.’ Here we see the ‘superior’ Roman attitude dominating. I say ‘Roman’ advisedly, although Polybius (
c.
200–after 118
BC
) was a Greek, born at Megalopolis in Arcadia. He became a tutor to the children of Publius Scipio in Rome and was an unashamed Romanophile. In his
work charting the rise of the Roman empire he is unquestioning in the belief that Rome was the greatest nation on earth and its constitution ‘perfection’. Polybius waxes lyrical about
his pursuit of ‘truth’ and how he was writing a
pragmatike historia
, a factual history. However, it is hard to imagine that a man of his learning really believed his own
comments on the state of Celtic art and craftsmanship. His audience were the upper-class Romans, who were able to read Greek, and he was writing at a time when the Romans were in the middle of a
colonisation programme of the Celts of northern Italy having conquered them in a series of bloody wars.

Archaeology has given the lie to Polybius and the Roman propagandists, revealing the brilliance of early Celtic art and craftsmanship. Indeed, Celtic art, described by Dr
Simon James as representing ‘an aesthetic sense fundamentally different from the classical canon which framed the Renaissance and modern Western conceptions of art, was one of the greatest
glories of prehistoric Europe’.

It is, of course, by the distinctive patterns of surviving artefacts that archaeology traces the emergence of the Celts before written records. The brilliance of metalwork, jewellery, weapons,
utensils, wagons and other items shows that the Celtic artists and craftsmen were exceptionally skilled and sought technological perfection in their work.

Celtic arts and crafts began to evolve in the distinctive form we recognise today during the early Hallstatt period. The decorative art is identified by geometric designs, such as chevrons,
parallel lines and concentric circles. Archaeologists have identified the centres of the developing Celtic art as being the Hallstatt royal sites such as Hohenasperg, west of Ludwigsburg in Swabia,
where there are many princely graves, and Heuneburg.

Celtic art was basically a design-centred technique developing in the later period with many zoomorphic emblems and representations. There are very few representations of complete human figures
on a realistic level such as occur in Greek and Roman art. However, there are stone sculptures of figures such as those at Hirschlanden and Glauberg.

Human faces did become a popular motif but they are generally given an almost surreal appearance. There is some evidence that Celtic artists were also capable of realistic portrayals but they
appear to have rejected this approach. The bronze head of a Celtic war goddess from the first century
BC
, from Dineault, Brittany, is a realistic representation, as is the
Celtic warrior appearing on a brooch, dating from the second century
BC
, and reckoned to be of Iberian Celtic workmanship.
There is also the figurine
of a goddess from the first century
AD
, from Chalmalières, now in the Musée Archéologique, at Clermont Ferrand. Dr James has suggested that, in the
light of the obvious Celtic ability to make realistic representations of the human body, ‘perhaps human figures and scenes were taboo’. This seems a likely explanation. In Moslem art,
too, human representations are taboo; the accent is on design because of religious proscription and not because of an inability on the part of the artists.

As the Hallstatt period came to its later stages and trade with Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians and the Latin world opened up, the Celtic artists were undoubtedly influenced by the new concepts
from the Mediterranean world, but they were highly selective as to what they took from these sources.

The La Tène period of art began to flourish with a continuation of geometric motifs whose intricate detail and ornamentation fascinates modern viewers. Many people think that the
intricacy and inexplicable symbolism might have had a religious connotation – again, much as similar motifs are used in Moslem art.

A great deal of La Tène art concentrated on jewellery and items of personal domestic use such as mirrors and combs, as well as weapons and decorated harnesses for horses. One of the
richest expressions of Celtic art, however, is to be found in the production of Celtic coinage.

The Celts had developed their own distinctive coinage by the late fourth century
BC
. It is safe to say that it was inspired by Greek coinage and had resulted from Celtic
trade with the Greek world. Greek coinage had come into being at the end of the seventh century
BC
. To put the Celtic development of coinage into context, the Insubrean
Celts of the Po valley were minting their own coins some fifty years before Rome started to do so; Roman coins also resulted from contacts with the Greek city states of southern Italy and were
based on the same weight standard as that used by the Greeks.

Dr Daphne Nash is inclined to believe that Celtic coinage arose because of the payment in Greek coinage to Celtic mercenaries selling their services to the Greek states
from the fourth century
BC
. She is not inclined to take into consideration the continuous trade between the Celts and Greeks which dated back to the seventh and sixth
centuries
BC
. I consider this to be an omission.

Coinage is to be found in all parts of the ancient Celtic world, with the significant exception of Ireland. No native coinage appeared to have developed here until the Christian period was well
under way. Some Roman coinage has been discovered. Early references imply that gold rings were used as currency. Caesar had said of first-century
BC
Britain: ‘For
money they used bronze, or gold coins, or iron ingots of fixed weights.’ Certainly coinage was being used in Britain by the second century
BC
, with each major tribe
and its king issuing stamped coins.

Throughout the Celtic world, coins were minted by first casting the metal, which was generally gold, silver or bronze, in moulds of burnt clay that had been prepared beforehand. This resulted in
the production of coins of exactly equal weight. The pieces were then finished manually, by hammering them between the two stamps. Most of these coins bore images which could have been of religious
significance.

We are extraordinarily lucky in that a great many of the Celtic coins survive, although what has been lost by melting down the gold and silver of many hordes can only be guessed at.

When names or human heads begin to appear on the coins in the mid-second century
BC
, they are personal names of rulers, comparable with the names of Roman consuls of the
republican period and the emperors of the later period. We have the coins of many famous Celtic kings and rulers such as Cunobelinus (Cymbeline), who was issuing his coinage in the years before the
Roman Claudian invasion. We have coins, and
some rare gold coins, of Vercingetorix, the great Gaulish king who fought Caesar and is considered the last ruler of the
‘free Gauls’.

The majority of the late Celtic coins have heads on one side and a pattern based on an animal on the reverse. Some experts consider the heads to be gods or goddesses. I ammore inclined to
believe that the heads are those of the actual rulers, male and female. Early coins do have representations of deities but it is always quite clear what they are. For example, a second-century
BC
bronze coin of Belgic Gaul, issued by the Remi tribe, shows a figure in a lotus position holding accoutrements very much like the figure on the Gundestrup Cauldron. The
heads of deities seem clearly to be identified as such. The later heads are of bearded and unbearded males and of females with elaborate individual hairstyles.

The animals on the reverse are often horses, sometimes with a chariot, and even a charioteer. Sometimes a horseman is represented. The next most popular figure is a boar. Less frequently coins
carry representations of lions, bears, cattle, goats and ravens. The zoomorphic emblems are usually accompanied by other artefacts above or below them. These undoubtedly possessed a symbolic
significance which we can longer discern. The man-headed horse and the goat-headed snake are particularly Celtic and are found in many pieces of artwork. Severed human heads also abound.

No examination of the Celtic world is complete without a consideration of these coins, whose sheer exuberance and artistry illustrate so many Celtic concepts. Their composition also gives us
invaluable information about the metallurgy and metrology of the period.

While Greek and Latin terms have subsequently been given to these coins (such as
stater
and
tetradrachme
), Dr Bernhard Maier has rightly pointed out that we do not know what
the Celts named their coinage. The only native evidence we have is from early Irish sources from the time the Irish kings started
to use a coinage system. The value of
currency in eighth-century Ireland, the period from when our evidence comes, was fixed on the cow. A full-grown cow or ox was the general standard of value not only in Ireland but throughout the
Celtic world. Greek coinage developed from the value of an iron cooking spit (
obelos
), hence the
obol
, six
obols
being equivalent to one
drachma
. For the Irish
the value represented by one milch cow was usually called a
séd
. Cormac’s Glossary lists a classification of the
séd
from the milch cow (the top value) to a
heifer (called a
dartaid
) or the worst value. The Irish law system later seems to have adopted a
miach
, or sack of corn (oats or barley), as a general standard of currency.

In early times we find a native coin called a
crosóc
, whose tabular weight was entirely different from later coins. It was reckoned to be eighteen grains of wheat (13.5 troy
grains). This coin was marked with a cross, but we should not immediately conclude that this was a Christian symbol for the Celts used cross motifs as solar symbols, including the swastika-style
cross which evolved into Brigit’s cross. The
crosóc
fell out of use when the
screpall
and
pinginn
came into being around the fourth and fifth centuries
AD
.

These two coins were both of silver. The
pinginn
weighed eight grains of wheat or 6 troy grains while the
screpall
, also called a
sical
, weighted twenty-four grains
(18 troy grains). It has been pointed out that the words
screpall
and
sical
must undoubtedly have been borrowed from the Latin (
scrupulus
and
siculus
in turn
derived from the Hebrew
shekel
). But on closer examination we find there are several native names for these coins (
puingcne
,
opuingc
,
oiffing
,
faing
and
fang
were all alternative names for the
screpall
, and
píss
was an alternative for the
pinginn
).

The evolution by the Celts of metalworking was the foundation of their technological advancement. Their proficiency in iron working was a significant step in European progress. How the Celts
came by these techniques is impossible
to say. It may simply be that they developed them through the process of working other metals. The first peoples to emerge as
advanced in such techniques, in the late second millennium
BC
, were the Indo-European Hittites. Iron ore was abundant in the Anatolian mountains where they had settled, and
iron became a valuable metal among the Hittites. It was worked by a few skilled craftsmen. King Anittas received as tribute from the city of Puruskhanda an iron sceptre and an iron throne. Iron
swords began to be produced here but not in such quantity as to make a significant difference in warfare. However the Celts, experimenting over many centuries with smelting and forging techniques,
probably arrived at their knowledge without outside influence.

In ancient Celtic society, the smiths were accorded a high status. They were considered to rank with the professional intellectuals and were thus part of the intellectual caste of society.
Perhaps this was because they were regarded as possessing some Otherworld knowledge; some magical skill in that, by means of fire, water and their art, they produced strong metal from the rough
iron ore.