Ancient Celts Did Not Exist...

[Ursus]

it doesnt matter if they speak a slightly different dialect, or if they worship a different god....

 

Actually I believe it does, at least in this context. Celtic is usually defined as a cultural and linguistic term, not a racial one. You can have people of the same "race" practice different cultures. I think how people lived is more important a component of historical identity than their exact DNA strands.

[Northern Neil]

I think how people lived is more important a component of historical identity than their exact DNA strands.

Indeed. However, examination of DNA evidence throws more fuel into this debate. I revive this dormant discussion having recently read 'The Origins of the British' by Stephen Oppenheimer, published in 2006. He states that our current theories about the extent of the Celts in Europe are derived from VIctorian assumptions. For example: Assuming that all people who belonged to the LaTene culture were by definition Celtic.

 

To cut a massive story short, he states that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes contribution to the British gene pool is only 5%. Further, the degree of separation of English from mainland Germanic languages is more in the order of Several thousand years, rather than the 1500 years assumed in current (and again Victorian) theories. He concludes that the area we now call 'England' has been Germanic - not Celtic speaking from a very early time, and that insular Celts always HAVE been confined to the West. Historical evidence in support of this is Caesar and Tacitus' description of Belgae, Northern Gauls and lowland Britons, who are described as tall and blonde, which would make them resemble Germans in appearance. Neither of these historians says anything about the languages they speak. Again, inhabitants of Western Britain are described as shorter and dark. Even today, inhabitants of parts of Wales and Ireland resemble very strongly the physical appearance of people from the Iberian peninsula (Older theories explaining this by saying that shipwrecked Spanish sailors in the 16th century were responsible. Doubtful, given the tiny numbers involved.).

 

According to genetic studies, Britain was subject to a slow but constant colonisation from two directions - from the Iberian peninsula, Western Gaul and Brittany, settling in Ireland and Western Britain. The other migration came from north east Gaul and the Low Countries/Jutland, which of course settled the south east of the island.

 

Getting back to the original context of this discussion, basically the term 'Celt' in ancient times included a lot of peoples who spoke a mixture of language, Germanic, Celtic and even Scythian(which I believe is related to Iranian.) We have always assumed this mass of people to be celts because they largely belonged to the LaTene culture.

 

This is a bit like assuming that all people who drive German cars are German. What the ancients called Celtic and what we now call Celtic are very different things. It seems that the modern Celts, as a linguistic group, have always lived in the areas they now inhabit (plus the Iberian peninsula), and further East the people we assumed to be celts were actually not, in the linguistic sense.

[M. Demetrius]

caesar said in his commentaries that all the celtic peoples, including the germans, speak a mutually intelligible dialect.

How, then, are we to explain the startling difference between Gaelic spoken in Ireland and the language of the Welsh? Are we to assume that they evolved from a "mutually intelligible dialect" in just over two millennia?

Not that unbelievable, really. Read Chacer in the original. It's certainly unintelligible to a modern English reader, unless he's studied the Old/Middle English language, isn't it? How about the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) differences in Shakespeare's English and our own? He was not using highbrow words for his day, he wrote so ordinary people could understand. Now I need a dictionary, and sometimes a cultural study to know what he really meant.

 

Consider what our ancestors (some of mine are British) spoke in the year 8.

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

Ave

Well, when I did my "A" levels in Chaucer, I was actually pleasantly surprised to see how many words were actually intelligible, to me at least. It does, on the whole, require commentary and even translation at times but I think I could pick out a common linguistic skein.

E.g the opening part of the "Pardoner's Tale" in the Canterbury Tales:

"IN FLAUNDRES WHILOME WAS COMPANYE OF YONGE MEN THAT HAUNTED IN FOLYE"

It doesn't take much imagination to realize that what is being described here is a group of young men in Flanders that indulged in all types of folly.

I would be curious to know if such similar threads can be picked out by people that are familiar with both Welsh and Irish Gaelic.

[Ursus]

This is a bit like assuming that all people who drive German cars are German. What the ancients called Celtic and what we now call Celtic are very different things. It seems that the modern Celts, as a linguistic group, have always lived in the areas they now inhabit (plus the Iberian peninsula), and further East the people we assumed to be celts were actually not, in the linguistic sense.

 

 

Well, that is interesting. If the people in Brittania were more Germanic than Celtic, it helps explain why the Anglo-Saxon hordes were able to assimilate the post-Roman population so quickly; in a way the people were simply returning to their Germanic roots.

 

 

I'm coming to the conclusion that the great mass of Iron Age tribes surrounding Rome are best left as one nebulous mass of peoples who didn't take the pains to write their own culture down for posterity. It is probably better to simply divy them up into groups of semi-civilized groups and completely uncivilized groups (using literacy, urbanism and development of government as benchmarks for civilization). I'm sure that would offend a lot of Celtophiles and Germanophiles, but there you go.

[Northern Neil]

I would be curious to know if such similar threads can be picked out by people that are familiar with both Welsh and Irish Gaelic.

I believe so, just as the Dutch 'Dit train is vol' can be translated to 'This train is full'. Yet, English and Dutch remain - largely - unintelligible. I believe that Welsh and Gaelic have corresponding similarities. However, it seems to me, using Cunliffe and Oppenheimers theories, that the people who call themselves Celts now are not neccessarily the same people who the Romans and Greeks called Celts, and who followed the La Tene culture - given that they are said to have spoken a language intelligible to Germans.

[Gladius Hispaniensis]

You know, just as a thought - I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to investigate the linguistic roots of people currently living in the part of Turkey that used to be known as Galatia. We know there was a massive migration of "keltoi", whatever was meant by that term, into that part of Asia Minor, in the Classical Age.

I'm pretty sure everyone speaks Turkish now but I wouldn't be surprised if certain basic words of the language they used when they moved into the area still survive. This would give an intriguing clue as to who the Romans and Greeks really referred to when they said "keltoi" - the Celts as we know them today or the people who had linguistic similarities with the Germans as Neil is suggesting.

Edited January 21, 2008 by Gladius Hispaniensis

[DecimusCaesar]

In Tim Newark's 'The Ancient Celts', the author even calls the Dacians 'Celts'. I am not sure I've seen anyone else do this. In the book he writes:

 

The Dacian people were a mixture of many different races and cultures. Steppe warriors from north of the Black Sea appear to have invaded the area, and their Sarmatian culture mixed with Graceo-Thracian culture to the south in present-day Bulgaria and the Celtic culture of central Europe to the west. We therefore have a people who retained Celtic manners long after the body of Celts had moved westwards.

 

He also refers to Trajan's column, claiming that some of the weapons carried by the Dacians show signs of Cetic influence. This is interesting as it goes back to John Collis work on Iron Age Europe where he stated that La Tene art and artifacts are not proof of Celtic civilisation.

 

Personally I can't see how The Dacians can fit into what we might define as 'Celtic', considering that most archaeologists state that they were a people who lived primarily in western continental Europe and areas of Anatolia.

 

What does everyone else think of this classification of Dacians as Celts? Do they really have much similarities with traditionally 'Celtic' people such as the Gauls or Celt-Iberians?

[Northern Neil]

I think this is part of the assumption that all people who were of the La Tene culture were by definition Celtic, and is a result of the early 20th century view that race, language and culture came in one package - at least where the Celts were concerned. A view somewhat puzzling when one considers that Greeks and Romans both were part of a 'classical' culture, yet they were linguistically separate.

 

Given that the La Tene culture was extant through a massive part of central Europe it is logical that the Dacians would be influenced by it. I believe that the Dacians were part of the linguistic grouping known as 'Thraco - Phrygian' which includes Thracians, Dacians, Phrygians and Cimmerians. The only language of this group which survives today is Armenian, and the language group is distantly related to Greek, in the same way that (Insular) Celtic is related to Italic -and Latin.

[Melvadius]

There are several issues that need to be considered when trying to extrapolate where someone comes from whether you are using cultural, linguistic of some other form of archaeological evidence, which is why there are so many arguments about what people mean and/or should mean by as 'simple' a term as Celtic.

 

I well remember the BBC supported survey "Blood of the Vikings" a few years back. This identified some of the difficulties in determining where people came from and even if their DNA could help identify Scandinavian ancestory. Danish/ Anglo Saxon blood was felt to be too closely related to southern English to be able to tell the difference and IIRC they tried to only use individuals from families which had lived in a given area for at least 6 generations.

 

There is however an opposite problem when it comes to spoken languages where a given word may have more than one meaning. A couple that my parents knew both came from the islands of Scotland but nearly ended up in blows because of a misunderstanding over a word they used in a conversation in Gaelic. While both were native Gaelic speakers the same word meant a different thing on each of their islands so when asked for a table cloth the husband passed the wife a napkin.

 

It is obvious that over time cultural influences spread I have heard the argument that the Anglo Saxon influence in England was only really a few individuals who took over in Eastern England without any large scale migration similar to what happened with the Normans a few centuries later - intermarrying with the native population and influencing that way. This is supported to some extent that words change their meaning and indeed different slang words develop so I suspect oral roots of some words or terms will always be in doubt even if they eventually pass into written language.

 

At the end of the day the argument will probably continue until and if someone invents a time machine to go back and tries to carry out an on the spot survey but then that will probably end up with complaints that they have biased their results by the act of observation.

 

Just picture the scene man with clipboard carrying out a survey in the Norwegien court:

 

"Tell me Eric the Red have you considered taking a ship as far to the west as you can going via Iceland and Greenland to Vinland?"

[Guest]

Hello everyone.

New to this forum, bit of a johnny-come-lately to this thread i know, but i as far as i can tell, the 'Celts' were invented by romantic nationalist 'historians' of the 1800's...in pretty much the same way as the Vikings were. A new Europe, with new nations, some seeking a national identity in a romantic past filled with noble heroes (and occasionally heroines) and fair maidens. The ihabitants of the British Isles before and during the Roman occupation should rightfully be called Britons, i think. They most certainly would not have called themselves celts, and the word is not even useful as a catch-all for people in Britain during the Roman period. I can't find any Roman writings that use the word, (although i admit that my search has not been exhaustive) and this only strengthens my opinions about the romantic nationalists of the 1800's..who gave us so much false history that persists in spite of lots of evidence that proves lots of what they thought is rubbish. Wagnerian opera still inspires far too many films, for example, as does the artwork that our friends of the 1800's made to illustrate their theories. Just look at the film (and i shudder to even write the word) Gladiator, for example. Let's not let accuracy and authenticity get in the way of a new version of Wagnerian Opera, eh?

Anywaaay, that's my two pen'orth...The Celts did not exist. Not the way they have been presented to us by the historians of the past, anyway.

[Bryaxis Hecatee]

keltoi is the greek name so it is normal roman sources do not speak of them ( but they speak of gauls ) and the celts themselve did certainly not call themselve celts but more probably by using their tribes' names...

[Kosmo]

In Tim Newark's 'The Ancient Celts', the author even calls the Dacians 'Celts'. I am not sure I've seen anyone else do this. In the book he writes:

 

The Dacian people were a mixture of many different races and cultures. Steppe warriors from north of the Black Sea appear to have invaded the area, and their Sarmatian culture mixed with Graceo-Thracian culture to the south in present-day Bulgaria and the Celtic culture of central Europe to the west. We therefore have a people who retained Celtic manners long after the body of Celts had moved westwards.

 

He also refers to Trajan's column, claiming that some of the weapons carried by the Dacians show signs of Cetic influence. This is interesting as it goes back to John Collis work on Iron Age Europe where he stated that La Tene art and artifacts are not proof of Celtic civilisation.

 

Personally I can't see how The Dacians can fit into what we might define as 'Celtic', considering that most archaeologists state that they were a people who lived primarily in western continental Europe and areas of Anatolia.

 

What does everyone else think of this classification of Dacians as Celts? Do they really have much similarities with traditionally 'Celtic' people such as the Gauls or Celt-Iberians?

 

"Celts" lived in many areas near or within Dacia as the "celts" are supposed to originate from Central Europe. There were groups that lived in the Middle Danube valley ( today Hungary) and Transilvania and were defeated by Burebista. Others lived for 100 years in Tracia, as the kingdom of Tylis. From this group the Galatians of Anatolia branched out. There were other groups in the central and western Balkans. East of dacians there were the bastarnae and other celts living in Moldova and Ukraine reaching the Black Sea and the steppes. For some 300 years celts lived in Dacia and even more time in neighboring regions.

Dacian material culture had many La Tene elements, including celtic iron working, but the language was a branch of tracian and the religion had some unique aspects.

[Celtictool]

Is anyone interested in continuing this discussion? Please reply if you are! I would not mind discussing this further.

[GhostOfClayton]

Hi, Celtictool. I would be tempted to say something interesting, new (and maybe even controvertial) on the subject. Regular contributors watch the threads, and the conversation is likely to restart of its own accord.