A Brief History of the Celts (3 page)

I am delighted that
The Ancient World of the Celts
is appearing in a new, easily accessible edition in the Brief History Series. Such a general introduction appears to be needed more
than ever following their confused helter-skelter descent into Iron Age People.

Peter Berresford Ellis, April 2003

THE ORIGINS OF THE CELTS

W
hen the merchant-explorers of Greece first started to encounter the people they came to refer to as Keltoi, at the start of the sixth century
BC
, the Celtic peoples were already widely spread through Europe and still rapidly expanding. It was Herodotus of Halicarnassus (
c
. 490–
c
. 425
BC
) who says that a merchant named Colaeus, from Samos, trading along the African coast about the year 630
BC
, was driven off course in his ship by
tides and winds and eventually made landfall at the Tartessus, the modern River Guadalquivir in southern Spain. In the valley of the Guadalquivir are the modern cities of Cordoba and Seville. At
Tartessus, Colaeus found a tribe of the Keltoi exploiting the rich silver mines of the area.

About 600
BC
merchants from Phocis, in central Greece, made a treaty with these same Keltoi to trade goods for their silver. The king of these Keltoi was named
Arganthonios, which seems to derive from the Celtic word for silver,
arganto
. Herodotus tells us that his name became a byword for longevity among the Greeks for he reportedly died as late
as 564
BC
.

From where did the Greeks derive the name Keltoi? Julius Caesar gives the answer at the beginning of his
De Bello Gallico
(
Gallic War
). He refers to the
Gauls as those ‘who are called Celts in their own language’. So, it appears, and logically so, that Celt was a name that the Celts called themselves. If this is so, what does the name
mean?

Numerous doubtful etymologies have been put forward. One suggests an Indo-European root
quel
, denoting ‘raised’ or ‘elevated’. This survives in the Latin
celsus
and the Lithuanian
kéltas
, comparable to the old Irish word
cléthe
. Thus it would be argued that the Celts described themselves as
‘exalted’, ‘elevated’ or ‘noble’. Another suggestion is the Indo-European root
kel
-, to strike, surviving in the Latin -
cello
and the
Lithuanian
kalti
. This seems just as unlikely as the first suggestion. Henri Hubert suggested that it might be cognate with the Sanskrit
cárati
, to surround, found in the
old Irish
imm-e-chella
.

Of all the suggestions, perhaps the most acceptable so far has been that the word derived from the Indo-European root
kel
- meaning ‘hidden’. This survived in both old Irish
as
celim
(I hide) and old Welsh,
celaf
. The Celts were ‘the hidden people’, perhaps a reference to their religious proscription against setting down their vast store
of knowledge in written form in their own language. As Caesar observed in his
Gallic War
: ‘The Druids believe that their religion forbids them to commit their teachings to writing,
although for most other purposes, such as public and private accounts, the Celts use the Greek alphabet.’ In old, and even in modern Irish, the word
celt
still exists for an act of
‘concealment’. The word
celt
is also used for a form of dress or mantle, designed to ‘conceal’ or ‘hide’ the genitalia, which is now known in English as
a kilt.

The various ancient names incorporating the word
celt
are probably names identifying the person’s ethnic background although Professor Ellis Evans argues they are more likely to
be from the root
kel
-, to exalt. The father of Vercingetorix,
Celtillus, who held suzerainty over all the Gaulish tribes, might well have been known as
‘exalted’ but in Irish mythology, the Ulster hero Celtchair’s name is clearly shown to mean ‘mantle’ or ‘concealment’.

However, the fact that there were personal names incorporating the synonymous terms ‘Celt’ and ‘Gaul’, in whatever form the Greeks and Romans chose to present them, did
lead to some confusion when the classical writers tried to link the Celts into their own cultural concepts and creation myths. Appian (Appianos of Alexandria who flourished
c
.
AD
160) tried to explain the origin and names of the Celts by writing about two kings called Keltos and Galas who he said were the sons of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, and his wife Galatea.
Of course, the character of Galatea, whose name meant ‘milk white’ (from
galakt
, the Greek word for milk), was used by Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid as the eponymous ancestor of
the Galatae. It is argued that she actually took her place in Greek and Roman literature following the impression the Celts made on the Greeks during their invasion and sack of Delphi. Greek
writers frequently remarked on the ‘milk white’ skin of the Celts.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (
fl. c
. first century
BC
) records a story of Keltos being the son of Heracles (Hercules) and Asterope, daughter of Atlas. Yet another
Greek, Diodorus Siculus (
c
. 60–
c
. 30
BC
) made the Celts originate with Galates, whose parents were Heracles and the daughter of a local king of
Gaul.

I find that it is not stretching the imagination to suggest that when the Greek merchants first started to encounter the Celtic peoples and asked them who they were, the Celts simply replied,
‘the hidden people’ – that is, to Greek ears, Keltoi.

As there is no documentary evidence about the Celts prior to these early Greek writings, some scholars argue that it is not justifiable to speak of ‘Celts’ before the sixth century
BC
. Others argue that we can build a reasonable picture of Celtic
life during the first millennium
BC
by the use of comparative
Indo-European linguistics and archaeological evidence.

So, who were the Celts and where did they come from?

The first European people north of the Alps to emerge into recorded history, the Celtic peoples were distinguished from their fellow Europeans by virtue of the languages which they spoke and
which we now identify by the term ‘Celtic’. (The use of this term to identify this group of languages was only adopted with the development of Celtic studies.) The Scot, George Buchanan
(1506–1582), was one of the first to recognise the relationship between the surviving Celtic languages. By the time the Celtic peoples first appeared in written records, they had already
diversified into speaking differing dialects, so we may usefully speak of the existence of several Celtic languages even though their speakers retained common links in terms of social structure,
religion and material culture.

These Celtic languages constituted an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The Indo-European family encompasses most of the languages spoken in Europe, with a few notable
exceptions such as Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, and also includes the languages of Iran and northern India. At some point in remote antiquity, there was a single parent language which
we call ‘Indo-European’ for want of a better designation. This parent language, as its speakers began to migrate from where it was originally spoken, diversified into dialects. These
dialects then became the ancestors of the present major European and North Indian language groups: Hellenic (Greek), Italic (Latin or now the Romance languages), Celtic, Germanic, Slavonic, Baltic,
Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan (including Sanskrit), Armenian, Anatolian, Tocharian, Hittite and so forth.

Even now there remain common forms of construction and vocabulary among all the Indo-European languages which are not found in other languages. For example, the word ‘name’
incorporates a very profound and ancient concept, and it survives with hardly any change in the Indo-European languages. ‘Name’ in English comes from the
Anglo-Saxon
nama
; this is
namn
in Gothic;
name
in German;
noma
in Frisian;
nomen
in Latin;
namn
in Norse;
naam
in Dutch;
onoma
in Greek;
namman
in Sanskrit;
aimn
in Irish;
anu
in old Welsh but
enw
in modern and so forth.

Other features common to the Indo-European group include a clear, formal distinction of noun and verb, a basically inflective structure and decimal numeration. An interesting example of the
relationship between the Indo-European languages can be seen in the cardinal numbers, one to ten. ‘One, two, three’ sounds very similar to the Irish
aon
,
dó
,
tri
, the Welsh
un
,
dau
,
tri
, the Greek
énas
,
duo
,
treis
, the Latin
unus
,
duo
,
tres
and the Russian
odin
,
dva
,
tri
. But they bear no relation to the Basque
bat
,
bi
,
hirur
or the Finnish
yksi
,
kaksi
,
kolme
, because
those are not Indo-European languages.

The earliest Indo-European literatures are Hittite and classical Sanskrit. Hittite writing emerged from 1900
BC
and vanished around 1400
BC
,
surviving on tablets written in cuneiform syllabics which were not deciphered until 1916. The classical Sanskrit of the Vedas is of later origin, usually dated around 1000–500
BC
.

Where was this parent language originally spoken and when did it begin to break up? It is probable, but only probable, that the speakers of the parent tongue originated somewhere between the
Baltic and the Black Sea. It also seems probable that the parent tongue was already breaking into dialects before the waves of migrants carried it westward into Europe and eastward into Asia.
Although it is still a matter of argument among academics as to when this parent language might have existed, most speculation puts the date at around the fourth millennium
BC
.

Professor Myles Dillon was one of several Celtic scholars who argued that the Celtic dialect, the ancestor of the Celtic
languages, began to emerge from the Indo-European
parent about the start of the second millennium
BC
. What is extraordinary are the close similarities that have survived between Irish and Vedic Sanskrit, two cultures which
developed thousands of miles apart over thousands of years. When scholars seriously began to examine the Indo-European connections in the nineteenth century they were amazed at how old Irish and
Sanskrit had apparently maintained close links with their Indo-European parent. This applies not only in the field of linguistics but in law and social custom, in mythology, in folk custom and in
traditional musical form.

The following examples demonstrate the similarity of the language of the Vedic Laws of Manu and that of the Irish legal texts, the Laws of the Fénechus, more popularly known as the Brehon
Laws:

Arya
gives us the much misunderstood term Aryan; the old Irish
noeib
becomes the modern Irish
naomh
, a saint; and the Irish
bodhar
(deaf) was
borrowed into eighteenth-century English as ‘bother’. To be ‘bothered’ is, literally, to be deafened. Finally, the word
vid
, used not only for knowledge but for
understanding, is the root of
Veda
; the Vedas constitute the four most sacred books of Hinduism – the
Rig Veda
, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, Atharva Veda
. The same root
can be seen in the name of the Celtic intellectual caste, the Druids – i.e.
dru-vid
which some have argued meant ‘thorough knowledge’.

Unfortunately, no complete ‘creation’ myth of the Celts has survived. When these myths came to be written down, in the insular Celtic languages of Irish and
Welsh, Christianity had taken a hold and the scribes bowdlerised the stories of the gods and goddesses, thus obscuring their symbolism and significance. That the Celts did have a vibrant and rich
pre-Christian mythology, including a creation myth, is seen not only in the Christianised stories but in the few allusions in the classical writers. However, most of the classical writers tend,
like the Christians after them, to incorporate the Celtic myths and gods into their own cultural ethos.

The fact is that many of the surviving Irish myths, and some of the Welsh ones, show remarkable resemblances to the themes, stories and even names in the sagas of the Indian Vedas. Once again,
this demonstrates the amazing conservatism of cultural tradition. By comparing these themes we find that Danu, sometimes Anu in old Irish and Dôn in Welsh and also surviving in the epigraphy
of the Continental Celts, was the mother goddess. She was the ‘divine waters’ which gushed to the earth in the time of primal chaos and nurtured Bíle the sacred oak, from whom
the gods and goddesses sprang. Her waters formed the course of the Danuvius (Danube).