A Brief History of the Celts Read online

  PETER BERRESFORD ELLIS is one of the foremost living authorities on the Celts and the author of many books in the field including The Celtic Empire (1990), Celt and Saxon (1993), Celt and Greek (1997), Celt and Roman (1998) and The Ancient World of the Celts (1998). Under the pseudonym Peter Tremayne he is the author of the bestselling Sister Fidelma murder mysteries set in Ireland in the 7th Century.

  Praise for the first edition, The Ancient World of the Celts

  ‘An authoritative account.’

  Irish Times

  ‘A truly sumptuous publication . . . clearly-written.’

  Elizabeth Sutherland, The Scots Magazine

  ‘[A] well-articulated insight into the world of the Celts. . . If there ever was a truly thorough investigation into the Celts, then this is it.’

  Adam Phillips, Aberdeen Press & Journal

  ‘A timely antidote to the pre-conceptions which have for so long hampered a proper understanding and appreciation of Celtic society.’

  George Children, 3rd Stone

  ‘A splendid new book for fans of all things Celtic, or anyone who wants to know more about how they lived and why they were so successful across Europe. . . . An excellent book for both reference and enjoyment.’

  Gail Cooper, Evening Leader

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  A Brief History of The Circumnavigators

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  A Brief History of The Druids

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  A Brief History of The Dynasties of China

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  A Brief History of Fighting Ships

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  A Brief History of The Great Moghuls

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  A Brief History of The Hundred Years War

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  Jasper Ridley

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in hardback in the UK as The Ancient World of the Celts

  by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 1998

  This revised paperback edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2003

  Copyright © Peter Berresford Ellis 1998, 2003

  The right of Peter Berresford Ellis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1-84119-790-4

  ISBN 978-1-84119-790-6

  eISBN 978-1-47210-794-7

  Printed and bound in the EU

  10 9 8

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Map

  Preface

  1 The Origins of the Celts

  2 An Illiterate Society?

  3 Celtic Kings and Chieftains

  4 The Druids

  5 Celtic Warriors

  6 Celtic Women

  7 Celtic Farmers

  8 Celtic Physicians

  9 Celtic Cosmology

  10 Celtic Road Builders

  11 Celtic Artists and Craftsmen

  12 Celtic Architecture

  13 Celtic Religion

  14 Celtic Myth and Legend

  15 Early Celtic History

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Between pp. 76 and 77

  2nd century BC silver horse harness found at the Villa Vecchia Manerbio

  Cernunnos, the horned god, panel from the Gundestrup cauldron in the National Museum, Copenhagen (Werner Forman Archive, London)

  Celtic inscription from Gaul, 2nd/1st century BC (G. Dagli Orti, Paris)

  Stylized head from the Hallstatt period, in the Keltenmuseum Hallein (AKG/London, photo Erich Lessing)

  Realistic head from the Le Tène period from the 3rd century BC, in the Musée Granet Art (G. Dagli Orti, Paris)

  A visualization of Caesar’s ‘wicker man’ from Aylett Sammes’ Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, 1676 (E.T. Archive, London)

  Celtic afterlife depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron in the National Museum, Copenhagen (AKG/London, photo Erich Lessing)

  Illustraion of a Druid from Costumes of the British Isles (1821), Meyrick and Smith (E.T. Archive, London)

  Bronze shield dating from the 1st century BC, British Museum, London (E.T. Archive, London)

  Celtic war helmet dating from the 1st century BC, British Museum, London (Werner Forman Archive, London)

  A female figure of the early Celtic period in the Museum in Este, (G. Dagli Orti, Paris)

  Bucket found at Aylesford, Kent dated to the 1st century BC, British Museum, London (Werner Forman Archive, London)

  Reconstruction of a typical Celtic farm building of the 1st century BC (Mick Sharp Photography)

  Horned helmeted figure holding a spoked wheel depicted on the Gundestrup cauldron, National Museum, Copenhagen (AKG/ London, photo Erich Lessing)

  The Corlea Road, a causeway across a bog in Co. Longford, dated to 148 BC (Top, The Heritage Service, Dublin/Professor Barry Rafferty, University College, Dublin)

  Celtic coin dated to the 1st century BC, Musée de Rennes, Brittany (Werner Forman Archive, London)

  Between pp. 140 and 141

  The Desborough Mirror (British Museum, London)

  The Snettisham Torc (British Museum, London)

  Flagon, one of a pair from Basse-Yutz in the Moselle, dated to the 5th century (British Museum, London)

  The broch of Carloway on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland (Ancient Art and Architecture Collection, London)

  Reconstruction of a ‘crannog’, Graggaunowen, Co. Clare (Bord Fáilte, Dublin)

  Cernunnos, from the Gundestrup cauldron, National Museum, Copenhagen (E.T. Archive, London)

  Section of the Gundestrup cauldron depicting Danu, National Museum, Copenhagen (Werner Forman Archive, London)

  7th century BC bronze wheeled cauldron, Landesmuseum, Graz (AKG/London, photo Erich Lessing)

  Model ship from the 1st century, the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin (Werner Forman Archive, London)

  The Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset (Fortean Picture Library, photo Janet Bord)

  The Uffington White Horse (Images Picture Library, Charles Walker Collection)

  Plate from the Gundestrup cauldron, National Museum, Copenhagen (G. Dagli Orti, Paris)

  Lindow Man (British Museum, London)

  PREFACE

  At the start of the first millennium BC, a civilisation which had developed from its Indo-European roots around the headwaters of t
he Rhine, the Rhône and the Danube suddenly erupted in all directions through Europe. Their advanced use of metalwork, particularly their iron weapons, made them a powerful and irresistible force. Greek merchants, first encountering them in the sixth century BC, called them Keltoi and Galatai. Later, the Romans would echo these names in Celtae, Galatae and Galli. Today we generally identify them as Celts.

  The ancient Celts have been described as ‘the first Europeans’, the first Transalpine civilisation to emerge into recorded history. At the height of their greatest expansion, by the third century BC, they were spread from Ireland in the west across Europe to the central plain of what is now Turkey in the east; they were settled from Belgium in the north as far south as Cadiz in Spain and across the Alps into the Po valley. They not only spread along the Danube valley but Celtic settlements have been found in southern Poland, in Russia and the Ukraine. Recent evidence has caused some academics to argue that the Celts were also the ancestors of the Tocharian people, an Indo-European group who settled in the Xinjiang province of China, north of Tibet. Tocharian written texts survive from the eighth to ninth centuries AD.

  That the Celts left a powerful military impression on the Greeks and Romans there is little doubt. In 475 BC they defeated the armies of the Etruscan empire at Ticino and took control throughout the Po valley; in 390 BC they defeated the Romans and occupied the city for seven months – it took Rome fifty years to recover from that devastating disaster; in 279 BC they invaded the Greek peninsula, defeating every Greek army which was sent against them before sacking the Greek holy sanctuary of Delphi and then returning back to the north. Some of them crossed into Asia Minor and established a Celtic kingdom on what is now the central plain of Turkey. So respectful of the Celts’ fighting ability were the Greeks that they recruited Celtic units into their armies, from Epiros and Syria to the Ptolemy pharaohs of Egypt. Even the fabulous Queen Cleopatra had an élite bodyguard of 300 Celtic warriors which, on her defeat and death, served the equally famous Herod the Great and attended his funeral obsequies in 4 BC. Hannibal used Celtic warriors as the mainstay of his army and, finally, after the conquest of their ‘heartland’ Gaul, the Celts even served the armies of their arch-enemy, Rome.

  Yet warfare was not their only profession. They were basically farmers, engaging in very advanced agricultural techniques whose methods impressed Roman observers. Their medical knowledge was highly sophisticated, particularly in the practice of surgery. As road builders they were also talented and it was the Celts who cut the first roads through the previously impenetrable forests of Europe. Most of the words connected with roads and transport in Latin were, significantly, borrowed from the Celts. As for their art and craftsmanship, in jewellery and design, they have left a breathtaking legacy for Europe. They were undoubtedly the most exuberant of the ancient European visual artists, whose genius is still valued and copied today; their masterpieces in metalwork, monumental stone carvings, glassware and jewellery still provoke countless well-attended exhibitions throughout the world.

  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 absurdi
ty 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.