The Celts: Search for a Civilization

The Welsh hero Pryderi, in the Mabinogion, is the son of Pwyll, lord of Llys Arbeth, and Rhiannon, a horse-goddess. Pryderi’s parentage is at once noble, divine and intimately connected with that animal so beloved by the Celts: the horse. His connection with horses is emphasized again when he is abducted as a newborn baby and then turns up lying on

They are Iron Age people – their story spans most of the first millennium BC, from the end of the Bronze Age to the arrival of Romans in Celtic lands. They left virtually no written records, but they made stunning art, knew the secrets of metallurgy and had their own myths and religion.

Livy’s tale of the sons of Ambigatus has Segovesus and his followers heading off for Bohemia, and, by the middle of the fourth century BC, there are historical accounts of Celts in the Balkans, and intimations that they had got as far as Romania.

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’.

In 2007, the Celtic linguist John Koch met up with Barry Cunliffe, and told him that some scholars were describing some inscriptions on ancient stone stelae from southwestern Portugal as ‘Celtic’.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the then director of the Hallstatt salt mines in Austria developed an interest in archaeology and embarked on the excavation of a huge cemetery near the mine. Between 1846 and 1863, Johann Georg Ramsauer and his team unearthed nearly a thousand graves, containing not only the bones of the individuals who had been buri

The rebelling Iceni and Trinovantes, led by the warrior queen, laid waste to Camulodunum (modern Colchester), the first capital of the Roman province of Britannia. Meanwhile, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, the Roman governor of Britain, was campaigning in Anglesey, targeting the Druids, who were perhaps even more powerful and influential than Celtic kin

Macedonia. In 335 BC, the Celts had approached the leader of the expanding Macedonian empire, Alexander the Great, to secure a friendly alliance. Strabo recorded this meeting in his Geography and described Alexander receiving the Celtic envoys and asking them what they most feared. Strabo thought that this was probably a loaded question – Alexander

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.