A Brief History of the Celts (5 page)

Many scholars seem to regard Caesar as if he was an expert who had spent his life studying the language and sociology of the peoples he was fighting against. Those same scholars would probably
be the first to quibble at the suggestion that Lieutenant General Frederick, Lord Chelmsford be deemed an expert on Zulu culture because he campaigned against them in 1879. Yet time apparently
alters all things. Caesar, with his prejudices, his attempts at justification and his downright
inaccuracies, becomes an inviolable authority. Virgil says in his
Eclogues
that ‘time bears away all things, even the mind’. Certainly there seems an unwillingness to question the words of classical commentators on the Celts, simply because
they were written 2000 years ago and more. Time has borne the mind away so far as open-minded discussion of source and bias is concerned.

Since Rome’s conquest of the Celtic world, the picture that has been conjured is that of wandering hordes of Celtic warriors, brightly clothed or without any clothes at all, raiding the
‘civilised’ centres of Rome and Greece without provocation, drunken, ruthless, bloodthirsty, searching for plunder. It is an image that is no longer acceptable, as the following pages
will demonstrate.

AN ILLITERATE SOCIETY?

I
n 1970 a reviewer for
The Times
of London, writing about an exhibition of early Celtic art at the Royal Scottish Museum and subsequently
at London’s Hayward Gallery, commented: ‘Little definite is known about the Celtic peoples because they left no written records.’ It was the one occasion where the current author
wrote an indignant letter to
The Times
correcting the statement. Even if the reviewer had been speaking merely of the ancient Celts, he would have been in error. One of the great
‘myths’ about the Celtic peoples is that they were an ‘illiterate’ society.

In support of this idea that the Celts were illiterate, a passage from Julius Caesar is usually cited. What the Roman general actually wrote was:

When this text is read carefully, one can see that what Caesar is saying is that while the Celts did not write native books of philosophy, history and such, the Celts were literate, with the
Gauls, in particular, using the Greek alphabet. Archaeology has demonstrated that the Celts also used other alphabets to write their various dialects in. They used Phoenician (Iberian), Etruscan,
Greek and Latin letters and sometimes combinations of all, depending on the area the texts came from. In fact, to date, we have some 500 Celtic inscriptions and pieces of textual evidence from a
period dating between the sixth and first centuries
BC
. New Celtic textual discoveries have become frequent in recent years.

The earliest Celtic inscriptions occur in the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans had learnt the art of writing by the mid-seventh century
BC
and there are about 10,000
examples of Etruscan writing which survive. None of the Etruscan inscriptions or texts have so far been interpreted because it is not an identifiable Indo-European language nor can a cognate
language be found which might present a clue to interpretation. However, using the Etruscan alphabet, the oldest inscriptive monuments fashioned by the Celts are dated to around the end of the
sixth century
BC
.

Some thirty-three early inscriptions were found between the Rivers Ticino and Adda, tributaries of the Po. After Sir John Rhys’ work on these inscriptions, some Celtic scholars became
dubious about their authenticity until it was realised that Celtic was not one homogeneous language but that there were dialect differences between these inscriptions and other
written Celtic remains. There are a further two inscriptions found engraved on war helmets discovered in 1912 at Negau, Lower Styria, not far from Marburg on the Drave, which are
proper Celtic names engraved in Etruscan letters. These are also dated to the sixth century
BC
.

As Latin influences began to penetrate the area there was a change from Etruscan lettering to Latin characters. Graffiti on pottery, manufacturers’ names and marks, and funereal
inscriptions show that the Celts were far from illiterate. One funereal inscription at Todi was actually bilingual in Celtic and Latin.

There are around sixty inscriptions from southern Gaul, some dated to the third century
BC
. Inscriptions using Greek characters seem to have been more popular here at
this period before Rome had penetrated into the area. Over twenty more inscriptions using the Latin alphabet, including potters’ records, as well as texts, have been found north of
Narbonensis, notably the Coligny Calendar and the graffiti from La Graufesneque in the Cévennes. The La Graufesneque graffiti were found in 1901 and date back to the first century
AD
. The words are carved into fragments of burnt clay in a cursive Latin script.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating is a text found in 1887 at Rom (Deux-Sèvres) on a thin lead plate in Latin script dated to around the end of the first century
BC
, which is a poetic dedication to the Celtic horse goddess, Epona. Dr Garrett Olmsted, who has made the most recent translation of the inscription, comments that the closest example
to the Rom inscription is a Vedic hymn to Indra, demonstrating yet again the common Indo-European root of the Celtic and Sanskrit traditions.

The text, as Dr Olmsted gives it in translation, reads:

The poet here is using various synonyms for Epona in his invocation of her.

The other corpus of textual evidence comes from the Iberian Celts, notably from northern Spain in the area between Saragossa and Burgos, and includes some of our lengthiest texts in Celtic
languages. Notable among them was a text found in 1908 at Peñalba de Villastar, in the Spanish province of Tereul, where an inscription was found carved in Latin letters dated to the first
century
BC
; it seemed to be a Celtiberian votive offering to the god Lugus. A similar inscription was found at Luzaga (Guadalajara).

My argument that the Celts were not an illiterate society – if we take illiteracy to signify merely ignorance of letters or literature, for one must not forget that they had a very
sophisticated oral tradition as most ancient societies had – has been endorsed several times since 1970. An excavation at Botorrita, 20 kilometres south of Saragossa, the ancient site of
Contrebia Belaisca, revealed a bronze tablet some 40 centimetres by 10 centimetres, inscribed in Celtiberian, using a variant Iberian script. This dated from the second century
BC
. The 200-word text gave instructions relating to a Celtic ritual, and is now in the Archaeological Museum in Saragossa. In the early 1990s another long text in Celtiberian was
discovered at the same site at Botorrita.

Through 1968–1971 at Chamalières, south-west of Clermont-Ferrand, a Gallo-Roman sanctuary was excavated. The sanctuary was the source of two natural springs
where several thousand wooden votive gifts were found. In January 1971, a lead tablet was discovered there inscribed in Gaulish and dated to the second half of the first century
BC
, or early first century
AD
. It was an appeal to the god Maponus for protection and consisted of 336 letters, one of the longest Gaulish Celtic texts. Maponus
was the ‘Divine Son’ whose cult is also found in Britain and who may be equated with Mabon in the tale of Culhwch and Olwen.

In August 1983, at l’Hospitalet-du-Larzac, 14 kilometres south of La Graufesneque, another lead tablet was found inscribed with a text amounting to 160 words which seemed to be another
invocation to the deities.

The exact number of texts found in Eastern Europe and Galatia has not been calculated – nor have they yet been evaluated from a linguistic point of view – although we are speaking of
perhaps one hundred or more. Celtic coins also supply a rich field of personal names from which we may learn word roots and sound values. Then there is the insular Celtic textual evidence.

To put the earliest Celtic inscriptional remains in context we should point out that the earliest Latin inscriptional remains are almost contemporary, dating from the beginning of the sixth
century
BC
. There is an inscription in stone, the Lapis Niger, from the Forum and an inscription on a fibula giving a manufacturer’s name. However, it is difficult to
find many Latin inscriptions prior to the third century
BC
. For the Romans, Greek was the language of learning until the third century
BC
when a
Latin literature began to take shape with the works of poets such as Gnaeus Naevius (
c
. 270–190
BC
) and Quintus Ennius (239–169
BC
), both of whom were from the Greek areas of southern Italy. But soon a ‘Celtic school’ of writers emerged, usually Celts from Cisalpine Gaul, northern
Italy, who adopted Latin as a
lingua franca
to write in rather than writing in their mother tongue. Caecilius Statius, a young Insubrean warrior captured at the battle of
Telamon in 225
BC
and taken as a slave to Rome, earned his freedom and became Rome’s leading comic dramatist. The titles of forty-two of his works are known.

Many of the writers we now think of as ‘Roman’ were in fact Celts using the imperial language instead of their mother tongue. H.W. Garrod, in his introduction to the
Oxford Book
of Latin Verse
(1912), was one of the first to point out that Cisalpine Gaul had become the home of a vigorous school of poets with a common quality which could be identified as Celtic.

This school of Celtic writers was not confined to the Celts from the Po valley, the first to be conquered by the Roman empire and ‘Latinised’. Throughout the Celtic world, by virtue
of the spread of the Roman empire in its military form and then in its Christian form, Celts adopted Latin as their
lingua franca
. Their work included not only poetry but also history,
biography and philosophy.

However, the bulk of Celtic learning, story-telling and history was to remain an oral tradition until the start of the Christian era, which is when Irish took its place as Europe’s
third-oldest literary language after Greek and Latin. The written language emerged in two phases. The first was the development of a native Irish alphabet – Ogam. This was named after Ogma,
the god of eloquence and literacy, who was also known to the British and the Continental Celts as Ogmios.

Ogam is frequently mentioned in the myths and sagas. It is an alphabet of short lines drawn to meet or cross a base line, originally using twenty characters. The language it represents is
archaic; most of the surviving inscriptions date from the fourth to sixth centuries
AD
and are on stone. There are some 370 inscriptions, the bulk surviving in Ireland but
with a few
in Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Cornwall. Some of them are bilingual with Latin. Of these inscriptions, the greater number are concentrated in south-west
Munster, particularly Co. Kerry, and have been argued to be a creation of the Munster poets.

From later Irish texts in Latin script we hear that in earlier times Ogam was used to write ancient stories and sagas; it was incised on bark or wands of hazel and aspen. These ‘rods of
the Filí’ (poets) were kept in libraries or Tech Screptra. We have evidence of this from Aethicus of Istria, who wrote a
Cosmography
, used by Orosius Paulus in his
History
Against the Pagans
, composed in seven books in
AD
417. Aethicus reports that he sailed to Ireland and spent time there examining their books which he calls
ideomchos
, implying that they were particular to Ireland and strange to him. Aethicus could well have been examining these Ogam-incised ‘wands’, which was how the Chinese
originally recorded their literature. However, while we have numerous references to their existence, it is only the Ogam-inscribed stones that have survived.

A clue to what happened to these early Irish books can be found in the
Leabhar Buidhe Lecain (Yellow Book of Lecan)
compiled about 1400 by Giolla Iosa Mór Mac Firbis, a work
containing copies of many early texts, even one dating from the fifth century
BC
. This text, written by Benignus, mentions that Patrick, in his missionary zeal, burnt 180
books of the Druids. The Irish Christian sources are all fairly clear that books existed in Ireland before the coming of Christianity.

However, Irish literature began to emerge from the sixth century
AD
. The flowering of Irish literature demonstrated that it was the result of a lengthy period of a
sophisticated oral tradition. While the literary language was flourishing from this period, the oldest surviving complete manuscript books which provide sources for Irish mythology, history and
many other matters only begin to date from the twelfth century
AD
, though there are many fragmentary texts from earlier periods.
One of the earliest
is
Leabhar na hUidre
(
Book of the Dun Cow
) compiled in
AD
1106.
Leabhar Laignech
(
Book of Leinster
) was compiled around
AD
1150 at the same time as another book known simply as Rawlinson Manuscript B 502 (see Chapter 14).