A Brief History of the Celts (4 page)

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.

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.