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?

Like Cú Chulainn, in the Irish myths, then; but here was a whole population, a tribe, who seem to have been known as ‘the Hounds’.

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.

These three names – Celts, Gauls, and Galatians – sometimes seem to coincide in meaning. At other times, they are used to differentiate between different levels of ethnic groupings: Celts within the larger territory of Gaul; Celts as a group of tribes in the west, and Galatians as a group of tribes in the east; Celts and Galatians as essentially th

But what did those Iron Age people believe about the world around them? What deities did they worship, and what stories did they tell each other around the fire? These seem like impossible, ephemeral ideas to grasp hold of, especially when talking about a society that was pre-literate for so much of its existence. But we know that the Celtic langua

Ultimately, the diaspora of the Celts as far as Anatolia was intimately related to the break-up of the Macedonian empire. And the turmoil following the death of Alexander the Great also drew the Celts to Egypt – arriving in North Africa as mercenaries, just as they had done in Asia Minor. After Alexander’s death, with no clear successor identified,

If Celtic archaeology teaches us anything, it’s that the ‘Celts’, through time and from the Atlantic to Anatolia, were culturally diverse. There is no one package of Celtic material culture and behaviour.

Sifting through these classical sources, pulling together the mentions of Celts, Gauls and Galatians, together with places which sound Celtic, like Brettanike and Ierne, we can tentatively define a swathe of Europe that represents the widest extent of Celtic lands, from the beginning of the eighth century BC through to the first century BC. It’s hu

Among the most richly furnished of all the Hallstatt burials is that of the Hochdorf Prince.