The Celts: Search for a Civilization

we’re defining Celts as people who speak Celtic, can we really find Celts as early as the fifth millennium BC?

The persistence of the standard model is puzzling – and yet, despite a paucity of evidence, there are still a few archaeologists clinging on to it. This perplexes geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, who has written: ‘The current orthodox view of the origins of the Celts is one of the last remaining archaeological myths left over from the nineteenth cen

Now we’re peering right back into the Bronze Age, and seeing Britain and Ireland as part of this Atlantic network. Tartessos forms a hub connecting the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa with north-western Europe. Knowledge, skills and language travel up and down the coasts by sea. And so it’s in these thriving coastal communities, facing the A

Did the people of the early Urnfield culture speak a Celtic or nearly Celtic language? Place-name evidence suggests this is unlikely – there are very few Celtic place names in the Carpathian basin.

In the end, it was the density of the Celtic words and forms in Tartessian which convinced John that Tartessian really was the oldest attested Celtic language.

Celtic language was being spoken in Tartessos during the late Bronze Age and into the early Iron Age. That name of the king of Tartessos, Arganthonios, is itself Celtic. It’s very similar to the title ‘Argantodannos’, found on silver coins from Gaul, from much later.

attempted a translation of the inscription. The first word seemed to be the name of a god or gods – the Lugoves. It was a Celtic name, similar to ‘Lugh’ in the Irish pantheon and ‘Lleu’ in Welsh. So the inscription began by invoking the Lugoves of the Neri tribe. Then, ‘araiai kalte’ could mean something about ploughed land and a grove – which refe

John thought the word ‘narke’ meant something like ‘lies unmoving, beneath’. The next part seemed to invoke ‘the heroes’ – that’s the meaning of the ‘isiinkolobo’ word. Then there was a word relating to carrying – ‘te-ro-bare’ – which means that the necropolis has received the deceased, who is named as ‘Ta[ch]seoonus’.

the Museu da Escrita do Sudoeste, Almodôvar (the Museum of South-western Inscriptions, Almodôvar).