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Celts, normally pronounced // (see Pronunciation of Celtic), is widely used to refer to the members of any of the peoples in Europe using the Celtic languages or descended from those who did. Britannica; Irish Celtic language It can refer in a wider sense to those who participate in a Celtic culture. The focus of this article is the ancient peoples of Europe; for Celts of the present day, see Modern Celts.

Although more recently restricted to the Atlantic Ocean coast of Western Europe (known as the "Celtic fringe"), Celtic languages were once predominant over much of Europe, with territory largely ceded to expanding Germanic tribes and the invading Roman Empire. Archaeological and historical sources show that at their maximum extent in the third century BC, Celtic peoples were also present in areas of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor. Britannica; (Turkey) People and Culture

Overview The Celts had an Celtic polytheism and culture. During the Iron Age Celtic culture was spread from the Iberian Peninsula to Turkey and ancient Iberia at Caucasus, but their urheimat is a subject of controversy. Traditionally, scholars have placed the Celtic homeland in what is now southern Germany and Austria, associating the earliest Celtic peoples with the Hallstatt culture. However, modern linguistic studies seem to point to a north Balkan origin. The expansion of the Roman Empire from the south and the Germanic tribes from the north and east spelt the end of Celtic culture on the European mainland where Brittany alone maintained its Celtic language and identity. The known names of Celtic peoples are given in the list of Celtic tribes.

The development of Celtic Christianity in Ireland and great britain brought an early medieval renaissance of Celtic art between 400 and 1200, only ended by the Norman Conquest of Ireland in the late 12th century. Notable works produced during this period include the Book of Kells and the Ardagh Chalice. Antiquarian interest from the 17th century led to the term 'Celt' being extended, and rising nationalism brought Celtic revivals from the 19th century in areas where the use of Celtic languages had continued.

The term "Celt"has been adopted as a label of self-identity for a variety of peoples and often refers to groups who speak a Celtic language. However, it does not seem to have been used to refer to Celtic language speakers as a whole before the 18th century. Prior to that, the term , "Celt" was primarily used by Greeks and Romans as a label for groups of people who were distinguished from others by their cultural characteristics.

'Celticity' refers to the cultural commonalities of these peoples, based on similarities in language, material artifacts, social organisation and mythological factors. Earlier theories were that this indicated a common racial origin but more recent theories are reflective of culture and language rather than race. Celtic cultures seem to have had numerous diverse characteristics but the commonality between these diverse peoples was the use of a Celtic languages.

'Celtic' is a descriptor of a family of languages and, more generally, means 'of the Celts,' or 'in the style of the Celts'. It has also been used to refer to several archaeological cultures defined by unique sets of artifacts. The link between language and artifact is aided by the presence of inscriptions. See Celtic (disambiguation) for other applications of the term

Today, the term 'Celtic' is generally used to describe the languages and respective cultures of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany, also known as the Celtic nations. These are the regions where four Celtic languages are still spoken to some extent as mother tongues: Irish language, Scottish Gaelic language, Welsh people, and Breton language plus two recent revivals, Cornish language (one of the Brythonic languages) and Manx language (one of the Goidelic languages). 'Celtic' is also used to describe regions of Continental Europe that have Celtic heritage, but where no Celtic language has survived; these areas include the northern Iberian Peninsula (northern Portugal, and the Autonomous communities of Spain of Galicia (Spain), Asturias and Cantabria), and to a lesser degree, France. (see Modern Celts)

'Continental Celts' refers to the Celtic-speaking people of mainland Europe. 'Insular Celts' refers to the people of Britain and Ireland. 'Atlantic Celt' was introduced to refer to people in Iberia, France, Ireland and Britain with a Celtic heritage.

Name The origin of the various names used since Classical antiquity for the people known today as the Celts is obscure and has been controversial. In particular, there is no record of the term "Celt" being used in connection with the inhabitants of Ireland and Britain prior to the 19th century.

The name "Celts" English "Celt(s)", Latin Celtus pl. Celti (Celtae), Greek Κέλτης pl. Κέλται or Κελτός pl. Κελτοί (Keltai or Keltoi) seem to be based on a native Celtic ethnic nameJulius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico s:Commentaries on the Gallic War/Book 1#1: "All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae live, another in which the Aquitani live, and the third are those who in their own tongue are called Celts (Celtae), in our language Gauls (Galli). (singular *Celtos or *Celta with plurals *Celtoi or *Celtas), of uncertain origin. The root would seem to be a Primitive Proto-Indo-European *kel- or (s)kel-, but there are several such roots of various meanings to choose from (*kel- "to be prominent", *kel- "to drive or set in motion", *kel- "to strike or cut", etc.). A likely meaning would be superior, so "Celt" = "member of a superior culture". Celt should be pronounced Kelt.

Ancient uses The first literary reference to the Celtic people, as Κελτοί (Κeltoi) is by the Greece historian Hecataeus of Miletus in 517 BC; he locates the Keltoi tribe in Rhenania (West/Southwest Germany). The next Greek reference to the Keltoi is by Herodotus in the mid 5th century. He says that "the river Ister begins from the Keltoi and the city of Pyrene and so runs that it divides Europe in the midst (now the Keltoi are outside the Pillars of Heracles and border upon the Kynesians, who dwell furthest towards the sunset of all those who have their dwelling in Europe)". This confused passage was generally later interpreted as implying that the homeland of the Celts was at the source of the Danube not in Spain/France. However, this was mainly because of the association of the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures with the Celts.

According to Greek mythology, Κελτός (Celtus) was the son of Heracles and Κελτίνη (Keltine), the daughter of Βρεττανός (Bretannus).Patrhenius, Love Stories 2, 30 Celtus became the eponymous ancestor of Celts."Celtine, daughter of Bretannus, fell in love with Heracles 1 and hid away his kine (the cattle of Geryon) refusing to give them back to him unless he would first content her. From Celtus 1 the Celtic race derived their name." In Latin Celta came in turn from Herodotus' word for the Gauls, Keltoi. The Romans used Celtae to refer to continental Gauls, but apparently not to Insular Celtic languages. The latter were long divided linguistically into Goidelic and Brythons (see Insular Celtic languages), although other research provides a more complex picture (see below under "Classification").

The term in English The English word is modern, attested from 1707 in the writings of Edward Lhuyd whose work, along with that of other late 17th century scholars, brought academic attention to the languages and history of these early inhabitants of Great Britain.(Lhuyd, p. 290) Lhuyd, E. "Archaeologia Britannica; An account of the languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great Britain." (reprint ed.) Irish University Press, 1971. ISBN 0-7165-0031-0In the 18th century the interest in "primitivism" which led to the idea of the "noble savage" brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things "Celtic". The antiquarian William Stukeley pictured a race of "Ancient Britons" putting up the "Temples of the Ancient Celts" such as Stonehenge before he decided in 1733 to recast the Celts in his book as Druids. The Ossian fables written by James Macpherson and portrayed as ancient Scottish Gaelic language poems added to this romantic enthusiasm. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic revival".*Lloyd and Jenifer Laing. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992 ISBN 0-500-20256-7

Nowadays "Celt" and "Celtic" are usually pronounced and , derived from a Greek root keltoi, when referring to the ethnic group and its languages. The pronunciation , derived from the French celtique, is mainly used for the names of sports teams (for example the National Basketball Association team, Boston Celtics and the Scottish Premier League side, Celtic F.C. in Glasgow."Although many dictionaries, including the OED, prefer the soft c pronunciation, most students of Celtic culture prefer the hard c." MacKillop, J. "Dictionary of Celtic Mythology." New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-869157-2

Modern uses In a historical context, the terms "Celt" and "Celtic" are used in several senses: to denote peoples speaking Celtic languages; the peoples of prehistoric and early historic Europe who shared common cultural traits which are thought to have originated in the Hallstatt culture and La Tène cultures; or the peoples known to the Greeks as Keltoi, to the Romans as Celtae and to either by cognate terms such as Gallae or Galatae. The extent to which each of these meanings refers to the same group of people is a matter of debate.{] and the Celtic Congress. In this sense, there are six modern nations that can be defined as Celtic: Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales. Only four, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany have First language of Celtic languages and in none of them is it the language of the majority. However, all six have significant traces of a Celtic language in personal and place names, and in culture and traditions.

Some people in Galicia (Spain), Asturias and Cantabria, in north-western Spain, and Entre Douro e Minho, Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro in Norte, Portugal Portugal wish to be considered Celtic because of the strong Celtic cultural identity and acknowledgement of their Celtic past. The Celtic element is seen as the key differentiator of the Galician-Portuguese identity from the Mediterranean Sea Iberians, Ancient Rome or Moors influences of southern and eastern Spain, and southern Portugal.

Regions of England such as Cumbria and Devon likewise retain some Celtic influences, yet haven't retained a Celtic language (even Cornwall became fully English-speaking during the 18th century) and are therefore not categorised as Celtic regions or nations. Cornish language aside, the last attested Celtic language native to England was Cumbric language, spoken in Cumbria and southern Scotland and which may have survived until the 13th century, but was most likely dead by the 11th century. As in the case of Cornish language, there have been recent attempts to recreate it, based on medieval Mystery play and other surviving sources.

Another area of Europe associated with the Celts is France, which traces its roots to the Gauls. In Scotland, the Gaelic language traces at least some of its roots to Human migration and settlement by the Irish Dál Riata/Scotti. The settlement of Germanic immigrants in the lowlands—among other things—reduced the spread of the Gaelic language which was supplanting Brythonic in Scotland; this has meant that Scots-Gaelic-speaking communities survive chiefly in the country's northern and western fringes.

Use of the term for pre-Roman peoples of Britain and Ireland The first person to use the term "Celt" in relation to Britain and Ireland was George Buchanan in 1582. After its employment by Edward Lhuyd in 1707,(Lhuyd, p. 290) Lhuyd, E. "Archaeologia Britannica; An account of the languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great Britain." (reprint ed.) Irish University Press, 1971. ISBN 0-7165-0031-0the use of the word "Celtic" as an umbrella term for the pre-Roman peoples of Britain gained considerable popularity in the nineteenth century, and remains in common usage. However its historical basis is now seen as dubious by many historians and archaeologists, and this usage has been called into question.

Dr Simon James (archaeologist), formerly of the British Museum, in his book The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? makes the point that the Ancient Rome never used the term "Celtic" (or, rather, a cognate in Latin language) in reference to the peoples of Britain and Ireland, and points out that the modern term "Celt" was coined as a useful umbrella term in the early 18th century to distinguish the non-English inhabitants of the archipelago when England united with Scotland in 1707 to create the Kingdom of Great Britain and the later union of Great Britain and Ireland as the United Kingdom in 1800. Nationalists in Scotland, Ireland and Wales looked for a way to differentiate themselves from England and assert their right to independence. James then argues that, despite the obvious linguistic connections, archeology does not suggest a united Celtic culture and that the term is misleading, no more (or less) meaningful than "Western".

Miranda Green, author of Celtic Goddesses, describes archaeologists as finding "a certain homogeneity" in the traditions in the area of Celtic habitation including Britain and Ireland — she sees the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland as having become thoroughly Celticised by the time of the Roman arrival, mainly through spread of culture rather than a movement of people.

In his book Iron Age Britain, Barry Cunliffe concludes that "...there is no evidence in the British Isles to suggest that a population group of any size migrated from the continent in the first millennium BC...". Modern archaeological thought tends to disparage the idea of large population movements without facts to back them up, a caution which appears to be vindicated by some genetic studies. In other words, Celtic culture in the Atlantic Archipelago and continental Europe could have emerged through the peaceful convergence of local tribal cultures bound together by networks of trade and kinship — not by war and conquest. This type of peaceful convergence and cooperation is actually relatively common among tribal peoples; other well known examples of the phenomenon include the Six Nations of the Iroquois League and the Nuer of East Africa. He argues that the ancient Celts are thus best depicted as a loose and highly diverse collection of indigenous tribal societies bound together by trade, a common druidic religion, related languages, and similar political institutions — but each having its own local traditions.

Michael Morse in the conclusion of his book How the Celts came to Britain concedes that the concepts of a broad Celtic linguistic area and recognizably Celtic art have their uses, but argues that the term implies a greater unity than existed. Despite such problems he suggests that the term Celt is probably too deep-rooted to be replaced and — what is more important — it has the definition that we choose to give it. The problem is that the wider public reads into the term quite anachronistic concepts of Ethnocentrism that no one on either side in the academic debate holds.

The name "Gauls" English "Gaul(s)" and Latin Gallus or Galli might be from an originally Celtic ethnic or tribal name (perhaps borrowed into Latin during the early 400s BC Celtic expansions into Italy). Its root may be the Common Celtic *galno, meaning "power" or "strength". Greek Galatai (see Galatia in Anatolia) seems to be based on the same root, borrowed directly from the same hypothetical Celtic source which gave us Galli (the suffix -atai is simply an ethnic name indicator).

The English form Gaul comes from the French Gaule and Gaulois, which is the traditional rendering of Latin Gallia and Gallus, -icus respectively. However, the diphthong au points to a different origin, namely a Romance adaptation of the Germanic *Walha-. See Gaul#Name.

The word "Welsh" The word "Welsh" originates from word wælisc, which is anglo-saxon for foreigner. {{cite book|author=Neilson, William A. (ed.)|title= Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, second edition|publisher= G & C Merriam Co.|year= 1957|pages= p.2903|--> Though it may be Germanic in origin, it may still ultimately have a Celtic source. Possibly the result of an early transition from (in the 4th century BC) of the Celtic tribal name Volcae into early Germanic (becoming the Proto-Germanic Walh, "foreigner of the Roman lands" and the suffixed form *-walhisk). The Volcae were one of the Celtic peoples that for two centuries barred the southward expansion of the Germanic peoples in what is now central Germany on the line of the Harz mountains and into Saxony and Silesia.

In the Middle Ages territories with primarily romance-language speaking populations (France and Italy) were known as Welschland as opposed to Deutschland, and the word is cognate with Vlach (see: Etymology of Vlach) and Walloons as well as with the "-wall" in "Cornwall". Other examples are the surnames Wallace and Walsh. During the early Germanic period, the term seems to have been applied to the peasant population of the Roman Empire, most of whom were, in the areas immediately settled by the Germanic people.

Origins ] Genetic Evidence Most of our genes are inherited as a mixture of genetic material from both of our parents, but there are two exceptions. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down from our mothers unchanged and so can be traced back from daughter to mother. Similarly all boys inherit their Y chromosome from their father, since women do not have a Y chromosome, and so this can be traced back from son to father. Population genetics studies the patterns in the minor variations in this DNA to obtain information on the movement of populations.

In his book Neanderthal, archaeologist Douglas Palmer refers to genetic research conducted across Europe, then states the original modern genetic group in Europe arrived between 9,000 and 3rd millennium BC with the spread of farming, displacing the earlier hunter gatherer populations. Such displacement coincided with a population explosion, since farming is capable of supporting up to sixty times greater population than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the same area:

However, modern genetic studies have shown that the original spread of modern man across Europe took place more than 20,000 years ago and re-expanded from refuges after the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. It now seems likely that the farmers from the Middle East did not generally displace the hunter-gatherers but that farming was slowly adopted by the latter. However, the association of the Indo-European language family with farming remains unproven.

The Y-chromosomes of populations of the Atlantic Celtic countries have been found in several studies to belong primarily to haplogroup Haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA), which implies that they are descendants of the first people to migrate into North-West Europe from the Iberian refuge after the last major ice age. According to the most recently published studies of European haplogroups, around half of the current male population of that portion of Eurasia is a descendant of the R1b haplogroup(subgroup of Central Asian haplogroup K). Haplotype R1b exceeds 90% of Y-chromosomes in parts of Wales, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.

Two published books - The Blood of the Isles by Bryan Sykes and The Origins of the British: a Genetic Detective Story by Stephen Oppenheimer - are based upon recent genetic studies, and show that the majority of Britons have ancestors from the Iberian Peninsula, as a result of a series of migrations that took place during the Mesolithic and, to a lesser extent, the Neolithic eras.

Sykes says that the maternal and paternal origin of the British and Irish are different, with the former going back to Palaeolithic and Mesolithic times. He identifies close matches between the maternal clans of Iberia and those of the western half of the Isles. Once in the Isles the maternal lines mutated and diversified. He sees little genetic evidence relating to people from the heartland of the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures. On the paternal side he finds that the "Oisin" (R1b) clan is in the majority which has strong affinities to Iberia, with no evidence of a large scale arrival from Central Europe. He considers that the genetic structure of Britain and Ireland is "Celtic":

Oppenheimer's theory is that the modern day people of Wales, Ireland and Cornwall are mainly descended from Iberians who did not speak a Celtic language. In Origins of the British (2006), Stephen Oppenheimer states (pages 375 and 378):

{{Cquote] (modern Spain and Portugal), ranging from a low of 59% in Fakenham, Norfolk to highs of 96% in Llangefni, north Wales and 93% Castlerea, Ireland. On average only 30% of gene types in England derive from north-west Europe. Even without dating the earlier waves of north-west European immigration, this invalidates the Anglo-Saxons wipeout theory...

...75-95% of Britain and Ireland (genetic) matches derive from Iberia...Ireland, coastal Wales, and central and west-coast Scotland are almost entirely made up from Iberian founders, while the rest of the non-English parts of Britain and Ireland have similarly high rates. England has rather lower rates of Iberian types with marked heterogeneity, but no English sample has less than 58% of Iberian samples...|20px|20px|Stephen Oppenheimer-->

Dr. Oppenheimer challenges the idea that all of Britain spoke a Celtic language (chapter 7).

Linguistic evidence There are few written records of the ancient Celtic languages produced by the Celts themselves. Generally these are names on coins and stone inscriptions. Mostly the evidence is of personal names and place names in works by Greek and Roman authors. The date at which the proto-Celtic language split from Indo-European is disputed but may be as early as 6000 BC, with it reaching Britain and Ireland by 3200 BC, according to Forster and Toth. However, generally a later date is considered more likely by most scholars. Gray and Atkinson put the splitting off of Celtic languages at around 5000 BC. In both cases there is a large estimating uncertainty.

Several studies have been carried out of the Celtic place names of Europe. A recent one is that by Sims-Williams. The map of this data in Oppenheimer shows that the remaining placenames are mainly in Britain and northern France but extend from Iberia to the Danube.

A direct clue that the different names used by the Greek (who normally called any Celts or ) and the Latin authors (preferring Galli) actually referred to speakers of the same or similar languages is given by Jerome (AD 342-419). In his commentary on Paul of Tarsus epistle to the Galatians, he notes that the language of the Anatolian Galatians in his day was still very similar to the language of the Treveri.Galatas excepto sermone Graeco, quo omnis oriens loquitur, propriam linguam eamdem pene habere quam Treviros ("That the Galatians, apart from the Greek language, which they speak just like the rest of the Orient, have their own language, which is almost the same as the Treverans'.") S. Eusebii Hieronymi commentariorum in epistolam ad Galatas libri tres, in Migne, Patrologia Latina 26, 382. St Jerome probably had first-hand knowledge of these Celtic languages, as he had both visited Trier and Galatia.Birkan, Kelten, p. 301.

Archaeological evidence . The yellow area shows the region of birth of the La Tène culture style. The orange area indicates an idea of the possible region of Celtic influence around 400 BC.The only direct archaeological evidence for Celtic speaking peoples comes from coins and inscriptions. However it has been assumed that the Hallstatt (c. 1200-475 BC) and La Tene (c. 500-50 BC) cultures are associated with the Celts. Only in the final phase of La Tene are coins found. It has been suggested that the Hallstatt culture may have been adopted by speakers of different languages whereas the La Tene culture is more definitely associated with the Celts.

Historical evidence Polybius published a history of Rome about 150 BC in which he describes the Gauls of Italy and their conflict with Rome. Pausanias in the second century BC says that the Gauls "originally called Celts live on the remotest region of Europe on the coast of an enormous tidal sea". Posidonius described the southern Gauls about 100 BC. Though his original work is lost it was used by later writers such as Strabo. The latter, writing in the early first century AD, deals with Britain and Gaul as well as Spain, Italy and Galatia. Caesar wrote extensively about his Commentarii de Bello Gallico in 58-51 BC. Diodorus Siculus wrote about the Celts of Gaul and Britain in his first century History.

Homeland The question of the original homeland of the Celts has caused much controversy, with many competing theories.

1) The Celtic language family is a branch of the larger Indo-European family, which leads some scholars to a hypothesis that the original speakers of the Celtic proto-language may have arisen in the Black Sea-Caspian Sea steppes (see Kurgan). It is not generally accepted, however, that Celtic became differentiated from other branches of Indo-European at such an early stage. By the time speakers of Celtic languages enter history around 600 BC, they were already split into several language groups, and spread over much of Central Europe, the Iberian peninsula, Ireland and Britain.

2) Some scholars think that the Urnfield of northern Germany and the Netherlands represents an origin for the Celts as a distinct cultural branch of the Indo-European family. This culture was preeminent in central Europe during the late Bronze Age, from ca. 1200 BC until 700 BC, itself following the Unetice culture and Tumulus cultures. The Urnfield period saw a dramatic increase in population in the region, probably due to innovations in technology and agricultural practices. The Greek historian Ephorus of Cyme in Asia Minor, writing in the fourth century BC, believed that the Celts came from the islands off the mouth of the Rhine who were "driven from their homes by the frequency of wars and the violent rising of the sea".

The spread of Iron Age led to the development of the Hallstatt culture directly from the Urnfield (c. 700 to 500 BC). Proto-Celtic, the latest common ancestor of all known Celtic languages, is considered by this School (discipline) to have been spoken at the time of the late Urnfield or early Hallstatt cultures, in the early first millennium BC.

The spread of the Celtic languages to Iberia, Ireland and Britain would have occurred during the first half of the 1st millennium, the earliest chariot burials in Britain dating to ca. 500 BC. Over the centuries they developed into the separate Celtiberian language, Goidelic and Brythonic languages. Whether Goidelic and Brythonic are descended from a common Insular-Celtic language, or reflect two separate waves of migration, is disputed.

3) The prehistoric Beaker culture (2800 – 1900 BC) has often been pointed at as ancestral to the Celtic people. This people derive from the western extremity of Corded Ware in the Netherlands, where otherwise marginal groups took advantage of their contacts by sea and rivers and started a diaspora of North West European culture from Ireland to the Carpatian Basin and south along the Atlantic coast and following the Rhone valley until Portugal, North Africa and Sicily, even penetrating northern and central Italy. The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe - Barry Cunliffe, Oxford University Press, p250-254, 1994 The new international trade routes opened by the Beaker people where there to remain and the culture was succeeded by a number of Bronze Age cultures, among them the Unetice culture (Central Europe), ca. 2300 BC, and by the Nordic Bronze Age, a culture of Scandinavia and northernmost Germany-Poland, ca. 1800 BC. Almost all of this areas emerge to history as Celtic. Bodmer(1992)Bodmer, W. F. (1992) Proc. Br. Acad. 82, 37-57; suggested that the Celtic populations of Britain trace their origins to an early settlement of the British Isles by Paleolithic Europeans, rather than by a later migration from central Europe in the first millennium B.C., also associated with the spread of the Celtic culture.

4) The Hallstatt culture was succeeded by the La Tène culture of central Europe, and during the final stages of the Iron Age gradually transformed into the explicitly Celtic culture of early historical times. Celtic river-names are found in great numbers around the upper reaches of Danube and Rhine, which led many Celtic scholars to place the ethnogenesis of the Celts in this area. Others however believe that the fact that the La Tène culture is too late to explain the original Celtic homeland; rather its extent demonstrates the subsequent spread of a pre-existing Celtic culture throughout Switzerland, Austria, southern and central Germany, northern regions of Italy, eastern France, Bohemia, Moravia, Portugal, Slovakia and parts of Hungary and Ukraine. The technologies, decorative practices and Metalworking styles of the La Tène were certainly influential on the continental Celts, but they were highly derivative from the Greek, Etruscan civilization and Scythian decorative styles with whom the La Tène settlers frequently traded.

5) Today's Celtic nations are clustered along the Atlantic coast of Europe. Genetic studies now suggest (see Celt#Population Genetics) that certain Celtic-speaking peoples share genetic ancestry with the Basque people on the Atlantic coast of Spain and France."In April last year, research for a BBC programme on the Vikings revealed strong genetic links between the Welsh and Irish Celts and the Basques of northern Spain and southern France. It suggested a possible link between the Celts and Basques, dating back tens of thousands of years." English and Welsh are races apart J. F. del Giorgio in The Oldest Europeans mentions that mythologists like Robert Graves reached a similar conclusion through comparative mythology and the study of Celtic customs. Celtic scholars however believe that such similarities reflect an earlier common heritage of the indigenous populations of the Atlantic fringe, long before the arrival of the Celts.

6) Diodorus Siculus and Strabo both suggest that the Celtic heartland was in southern France. The former says that the Gauls were to the north of the Celts but that the Romans referred to both as Gauls. Before the discoveries at Hallstatt and La Tene, it was generally considered that the Celtic heartland was southern France, see Encyclopedia Britannica for 1813.

7) At odds with all the above theories is the assertion of Pliny the Elder that Celtica (the country of origin of the Celts) was in the delta of the river Guadalquivir in the south of Portugal and Spain:"praeter haec in Celtica Acinippo, Arunda, Arunci, Turobriga, Lastigi, Salpesa, Saepone, Serippo. altera Baeturia, quam diximus Turdulorum et conventus Cordubensis, habet oppida non ignobilia Arsam, Mellariam, Mirobrigam Reginam, Sosintigi, Sisaponem." This view is not shared by modern Celtic scholars, although the recent genetic research discussed above seem to support the Iberian origins of the peoples that were later called Celts.

Distribution Britain and Ireland A large portion of the indigenous populations of Britain and Ireland today may be partially descended from the ancient peoples that have long inhabited these lands, before the coming of Celtic and later Germanic peoples, language and culture. Little is known of their original culture and language, but remnants may remain in the names of some geographical features, such as the rivers River Clyde, River Tamar and Thames, whose etymology is unclear but almost certainly derive from a pre-Celtic Substratum. By the Roman period, however, most of the inhabitants of the isles of Ireland and Britain were speaking Goidelic or Brythonic languages, close counterparts to Gallic languages spoken on the European mainland.

Historians explained this as the result of successive invasions from the European continent by diverse Celtic-speaking peoples over the course of several centuries. The Book of Leinster, written in the twelfth century, but drawing on a much earlier Irish oral tradition, states that the first Celts to arrive in Ireland were from Spain. In 1946 the Celtic scholar T. F. O'Rahilly published his extremely influential model of the early history of Ireland which postulated four separate waves of Celtic invaders. It is still not known what languages were spoken by the peoples of Ireland and Britain before the arrival of the Celts.



Later research indicated that the culture may have developed gradually and continuously between the Celts and the indigenous "Basque" people of Britain. In Ireland little archaeological evidence was found for large intrusive groups of Celtic immigrants, suggesting to historians such as Colin Renfrew that the native late Bronze Age inhabitants gradually absorbed European Celtic influences and language. Although archaeological evidence has often been proved unreliable in the past. It should also be noted that genetic evidence proves that most Celtic people of coastal and northern Ireland have little traces of R1b genes, therefore indicating that when the Celts came to Ireland, the absorption of the indigenous inhabitants was regional (mainly central). "study shows R1b is regional (panel C) in the Isles, and that parts of Ireland (coastal and northern) have some of the lowest R1b genes in the region. Also this study used many more subject samples than other studies in Ireland"

Julius Caesar wrote of people in Britain who came from Belgium (the Belgae), but archaeological evidence which was interpreted in the 1930s as confirming this was contradicted by later interpretations. The archaeological evidence is of substantial cultural continuity through the first millennium BCE, although with a significant overlay of selectively-adopted elements of La Tène culture. There is numismatic and other evidence of continental-style states appearing in southern England close to the end of the period, possibly reflecting in part immigration by élites from various Gallic states such as those of the Belgae. However, this immigration would be far too late to account for the origins of Insular Celtic languages. In the 1970s the continuity model was taken to an extreme, popularized by Colin Burgess in his book The Age of Stonehenge which theorised that Celtic culture in Great Britain "emerged" rather than resulted from invasion and that the Celts were not invading aliens, but the descendants of the people of Stonehenge. The existence of Celtic language elsewhere in Europe, however, and the dating of the Proto-Celtic culture and language to the Bronze Age, makes the most extreme claims of continuity impossible.

More recently a number of genetics studies have also supported this model of culture and language being absorbed by native populations. A study by Christian Capelli, David Goldstein and others at University College, London, London showed that genes associated with Gaelic names in Ireland and Scotland are also common in certain parts of Wales (in most cases) are similar to the genes of the Basque people, who speak a non-Indo-European language. This similarity supported earlier findings in suggesting a large pre-Celtic genetic ancestry, possibly going back to the Paleolithic. They suggest that 'Celtic' culture and the Celtic language may have been imported to Britain by cultural contact, not mass invasions around 600 BC. A different possibility is that the Celtic language should differentiated from the Celtic culture.

Some recent studies have suggested that, contrary to long-standing beliefs, the Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons) did not wipe out the Romano-British of England but rather, over the course of six centuries, conquered the native Brythonic people of what is now England and Gododdin and imposed their culture and language upon them (this may also be the case with the Celts and basques of Ireland), much as the Gaels may have spread over Northern Britain. Still others maintain that the picture is mixed and that in some places the indigenous population was indeed wiped out while in others it was assimilated. According to this school of thought the populations of Yorkshire, East Anglia, Northumberland and the Orkney and Shetland Islands are those populations with the fewest traces of ancient (Celtic) British continuation."By analyzing 1772 Y chromosomes from 25 predominantly small urban locations, we found that different parts of the British Isles have sharply different paternal histories; the degree of population replacement and genetic continuity shows systematic variation across the sampled areas."

Gaul At the dawn of history in Europe, the Celts in present-day France were known as Gauls to the Romans. Gaul probably included Belgium and Switzerland. Their descendants were described by Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars. Eastern Gaul was the centre of the western La Tene culture. In later Iron Age Gaul, the social organisation was similar to that of the Romans, with large towns. From the third century, BC the Gauls adopted coinage, and texts with Greek characters are known in southern Gaul from the second century.

Greek traders founded Massalia in about 600BC, with exchange up the Rhone valley, but trade was disrupted soon after 500BC and re-oriented over the Alps to the Po valley in Italy. The Romans arrived in the Rhone valley in the second century BC and found that a large part of Gaul was Celtic speaking. Rome needed land communications with its Spanish provinces and fought a major battle with the Saluvii at Entremont in 124-123 BC. Gradually Roman control extended, the Roman Province of Gallia Transalpina being along the Mediterranean coast. The remainder was known as Gallia Comata "Hairy Gaul".

In 58 BC, the Helvetii planned to migrate westward but were forced back by Julius Caesar. He then became involved in fighting the various tribes in Gaul, and by 55 BC, most of Gaul had been overrun. In 52 BC, Vercingetorix led a revolt against the Roman occupation but was defeated at the siege of Alesia and surrendered.

Following the Gallic Wars of 58-51 BC, Celticia formed the main part of Roman Gaul. Place name analysis shows that Celtic was used east of the Garonne river and south of the Seine-Marne. However, the Celtic language did not survive, having been replaced by a Romance language, French.

Iberia areas in Iberian Peninsula, showing Celtic and Proto-Celtic languages in green, and Iberian languages in purple, circa 250 BC.. showing Celtic and Proto-Celtic languages in green.Traditional 18th century/19th century centuries scholarship surrounding the Celts virtually ignored the Iberian Peninsula, since Archaeological culture relatable to the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures that have defined Iron Age Celts was rare in Iberia, and did not provide a cultural scenario that could easily be linked to that of Central Europe.

Modern scholarship, however, has proven that Celtic presence and influences were very substantial in Iberia. The Celts in Iberia were divided in two main archaeological and cultural groups, even if the divide is not very clear:

The origins of the Celtiberians might provide a key to unlocking the Celticization process in the rest of the Peninsula. The process of celticization of the southwest by the Keltoi and of the northwest is however not a simple celtiberian question. Recent investigation about the Callaici Bracari in northwest Portugal is bringing new approaches to understand Celtic culture evidences (language, art and religion) in western Iberia. Archeological site of Tavira, official website

Italy There was an early Celtic presence in northern Italy since inscriptions dated to the sixth century BC have been found there. In 391BC Celts "who had their homes beyond the Alps streamed through the passes in great strength and seized the territory that lay between the Appeninne mountains and the Alps" according to Diodorus Siculus. The River Po and the rest of northern Italy (known to the Romans as Cisalpine Gaul) was inhabited by Celtic-speakers who founded cities such as Milan. Later the Roman army was routed at the battle of Allia and Rome was sacked in 390BC.

At the battle of Telemon in 225 BC a large Celtic army was trapped between two Roman forces and crushed.

The defeat of the combined Samnium, Celtic and Etruscan alliance by the Romans in the Samnite Wars sounded the beginning of the end of the Celtic domination in mainland Europe, but it was not until 192 BC that the Roman armies conquered the last remaining independent Celtic kingdoms in Italy.

The Celts settled much further south of the Po River than many maps show. Remnants in the town of Doccia, in the province of Emilia-Romagna, showcase Celtic houses in very good condition dating from about the 4th century BC.

Other regions The Celts also expanded down the Danube river and its tributaries. On of the most influential tribes, the Scordisci, had established their capital at Singidunum in 3rd century BC, which is present-day Belgrade. The concentration of hill-forts and cemeteries shows a density of population in the Tisza valley of modern-day Vojvodina, Hungary and into Ukraine. Expansion into Romania was however blocked by the Dacians.

Further south, Celts settled in Thrace (Bulgaria), which they ruled for over a century, and Anatolia, where they settled as the Galatians. Despite their geographical isolation from the rest of the Celtic world, the Galatians maintained their Celtic language for at least seven hundred years. St Jerome, who visited Ancyra (modern-day Ankara in 373AD, likened their language to that of the Treveri of northern Gaul.

The Boii tribe gave their name to Bohemia (Czech Republic) and Celtic artifacts and cemeteries have been discovered further east in both Poland and Slovakia. A celtic coin (Biatec) from Bratislava's mint is displayed on today's Slovak 5 crown coin.

As there is no archaeological evidence for large scale invasions in some of the other areas, one current school of thought holds that Celtic language and culture spread to those areas by contact rather than invasion. However, the Celtic invasions of Italy, Greece, and western Anatolia are well documented in Greek and Latin history. Examine the Map of Celtic Lands for more information.

There are records of Celtic mercenaries in Egypt serving the Ptolemies. Thousands were employed in 283-246 BC and they were also in service around 186 BC. They attempted to overthrow Ptolomy II.

Romanisation Under Caesar the Romans conquered Celtic Gaul, and from Claudius onward the Roman empire absorbed parts of Britain. Roman local government of these regions closely mirrored pre-Roman 'tribe' boundaries, and archaeological finds suggest native involvement in local government. Latin was the official language of these regions after the conquests.

The native peoples under Roman rule became Romanized and keen to adopt Roman ways. Celtic art had already incorporated classical influences, and surviving Gallo-Roman pieces interpret classical subjects or keep faith with old traditions despite a Roman overlay.

The Roman occupation of Gaul, and to a lesser extent of Britain, led to Roman-Celtic syncretism (see Roman Gaul, Roman Britain). In the case of Gaul, this eventually resulted in a language shift from Gaulish language to Vulgar Latin (see also Gallo-Roman culture). However, the Celts were master horsemen, which so impressed the Romans that they adopted Epona, the Celtic horse goddess, into their pantheon. During and after the fall of the Roman Empire many parts of France threw out their Roman administrators.

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Gaulish Calendar The Coligny Calendar, which was found in 1897 in Coligny, Ain, Ain, was engraved on a bronze tablet, preserved in 73 fragments, that originally was 1.48 m wide and 0.9 m high (Lambert p.111). Based on the style of lettering and the accompanying objects, it probably dates to the end of the 2nd century.Lambert, Pierre-Yves (2003). La langue gauloise. Paris, Editions Errance. 2nd edition. ISBN 2-87772-224-4. Chapter 9 is titled "Un calandrier gaulois" It is written in Latin inscriptional capitals, and is in the Gaulish language. The restored tablet contains sixteen ver

Celts, normally pronounced // (see Pronunciation of Celtic), is widely used to refer to the members of any of the peoples in Europe using the Celtic languages or descended from those who did. Britannica; Irish Celtic language It can refer in a wider sense to those who participate in a Celtic culture. The focus of this article is the ancient peoples of Europe; for Celts of the present day, see Modern Celts.

Although more recently restricted to the Atlantic Ocean coast of Western Europe (known as the "Celtic fringe"), Celtic languages were once predominant over much of Europe, with territory largely ceded to expanding Germanic tribes and the invading Roman Empire. Archaeological and historical sources show that at their maximum extent in the third century BC, Celtic peoples were also present in areas of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor. Britannica; (Turkey) People and Culture

Overview The Celts had an Celtic polytheism and culture. During the Iron Age Celtic culture was spread from the Iberian Peninsula to Turkey and ancient Iberia at Caucasus, but their urheimat is a subject of controversy. Traditionally, scholars have placed the Celtic homeland in what is now southern Germany and Austria, associating the earliest Celtic peoples with the Hallstatt culture. However, modern linguistic studies seem to point to a north Balkan origin. The expansion of the Roman Empire from the south and the Germanic tribes from the north and east spelt the end of Celtic culture on the European mainland where Brittany alone maintained its Celtic language and identity. The known names of Celtic peoples are given in the list of Celtic tribes.

The development of Celtic Christianity in Ireland and great britain brought an early medieval renaissance of Celtic art between 400 and 1200, only ended by the Norman Conquest of Ireland in the late 12th century. Notable works produced during this period include the Book of Kells and the Ardagh Chalice. Antiquarian interest from the 17th century led to the term 'Celt' being extended, and rising nationalism brought Celtic revivals from the 19th century in areas where the use of Celtic languages had continued.

The term "Celt"has been adopted as a label of self-identity for a variety of peoples and often refers to groups who speak a Celtic language. However, it does not seem to have been used to refer to Celtic language speakers as a whole before the 18th century. Prior to that, the term , "Celt" was primarily used by Greeks and Romans as a label for groups of people who were distinguished from others by their cultural characteristics.

'Celticity' refers to the cultural commonalities of these peoples, based on similarities in language, material artifacts, social organisation and mythological factors. Earlier theories were that this indicated a common racial origin but more recent theories are reflective of culture and language rather than race. Celtic cultures seem to have had numerous diverse characteristics but the commonality between these diverse peoples was the use of a Celtic languages.

'Celtic' is a descriptor of a family of languages and, more generally, means 'of the Celts,' or 'in the style of the Celts'. It has also been used to refer to several archaeological cultures defined by unique sets of artifacts. The link between language and artifact is aided by the presence of inscriptions. See Celtic (disambiguation) for other applications of the term

Today, the term 'Celtic' is generally used to describe the languages and respective cultures of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany, also known as the Celtic nations. These are the regions where four Celtic languages are still spoken to some extent as mother tongues: Irish language, Scottish Gaelic language, Welsh people, and Breton language plus two recent revivals, Cornish language (one of the Brythonic languages) and Manx language (one of the Goidelic languages). 'Celtic' is also used to describe regions of Continental Europe that have Celtic heritage, but where no Celtic language has survived; these areas include the northern Iberian Peninsula (northern Portugal, and the Autonomous communities of Spain of Galicia (Spain), Asturias and Cantabria), and to a lesser degree, France. (see Modern Celts)

'Continental Celts' refers to the Celtic-speaking people of mainland Europe. 'Insular Celts' refers to the people of Britain and Ireland. 'Atlantic Celt' was introduced to refer to people in Iberia, France, Ireland and Britain with a Celtic heritage.

Name The origin of the various names used since Classical antiquity for the people known today as the Celts is obscure and has been controversial. In particular, there is no record of the term "Celt" being used in connection with the inhabitants of Ireland and Britain prior to the 19th century.

The name "Celts" English "Celt(s)", Latin Celtus pl. Celti (Celtae), Greek Κέλτης pl. Κέλται or Κελτός pl. Κελτοί (Keltai or Keltoi) seem to be based on a native Celtic ethnic nameJulius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico s:Commentaries on the Gallic War/Book 1#1: "All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae live, another in which the Aquitani live, and the third are those who in their own tongue are called Celts (Celtae), in our language Gauls (Galli). (singular *Celtos or *Celta with plurals *Celtoi or *Celtas), of uncertain origin. The root would seem to be a Primitive Proto-Indo-European *kel- or (s)kel-, but there are several such roots of various meanings to choose from (*kel- "to be prominent", *kel- "to drive or set in motion", *kel- "to strike or cut", etc.). A likely meaning would be superior, so "Celt" = "member of a superior culture". Celt should be pronounced Kelt.

Ancient uses The first literary reference to the Celtic people, as Κελτοί (Κeltoi) is by the Greece historian Hecataeus of Miletus in 517 BC; he locates the Keltoi tribe in Rhenania (West/Southwest Germany). The next Greek reference to the Keltoi is by Herodotus in the mid 5th century. He says that "the river Ister begins from the Keltoi and the city of Pyrene and so runs that it divides Europe in the midst (now the Keltoi are outside the Pillars of Heracles and border upon the Kynesians, who dwell furthest towards the sunset of all those who have their dwelling in Europe)". This confused passage was generally later interpreted as implying that the homeland of the Celts was at the source of the Danube not in Spain/France. However, this was mainly because of the association of the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures with the Celts.

According to Greek mythology, Κελτός (Celtus) was the son of Heracles and Κελτίνη (Keltine), the daughter of Βρεττανός (Bretannus).Patrhenius, Love Stories 2, 30 Celtus became the eponymous ancestor of Celts."Celtine, daughter of Bretannus, fell in love with Heracles 1 and hid away his kine (the cattle of Geryon) refusing to give them back to him unless he would first content her. From Celtus 1 the Celtic race derived their name." In Latin Celta came in turn from Herodotus' word for the Gauls, Keltoi. The Romans used Celtae to refer to continental Gauls, but apparently not to Insular Celtic languages. The latter were long divided linguistically into Goidelic and Brythons (see Insular Celtic languages), although other research provides a more complex picture (see below under "Classification").

The term in English The English word is modern, attested from 1707 in the writings of Edward Lhuyd whose work, along with that of other late 17th century scholars, brought academic attention to the languages and history of these early inhabitants of Great Britain.(Lhuyd, p. 290) Lhuyd, E. "Archaeologia Britannica; An account of the languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great Britain." (reprint ed.) Irish University Press, 1971. ISBN 0-7165-0031-0In the 18th century the interest in "primitivism" which led to the idea of the "noble savage" brought a wave of enthusiasm for all things "Celtic". The antiquarian William Stukeley pictured a race of "Ancient Britons" putting up the "Temples of the Ancient Celts" such as Stonehenge before he decided in 1733 to recast the Celts in his book as Druids. The Ossian fables written by James Macpherson and portrayed as ancient Scottish Gaelic language poems added to this romantic enthusiasm. The "Irish revival" came after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 as a conscious attempt to demonstrate an Irish national identity, and with its counterpart in other countries subsequently became the "Celtic revival".*Lloyd and Jenifer Laing. Art of the Celts, Thames and Hudson, London 1992 ISBN 0-500-20256-7

Nowadays "Celt" and "Celtic" are usually pronounced and , derived from a Greek root keltoi, when referring to the ethnic group and its languages. The pronunciation , derived from the French celtique, is mainly used for the names of sports teams (for example the National Basketball Association team, Boston Celtics and the Scottish Premier League side, Celtic F.C. in Glasgow."Although many dictionaries, including the OED, prefer the soft c pronunciation, most students of Celtic culture prefer the hard c." MacKillop, J. "Dictionary of Celtic Mythology." New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-869157-2

Modern uses In a historical context, the terms "Celt" and "Celtic" are used in several senses: to denote peoples speaking Celtic languages; the peoples of prehistoric and early historic Europe who shared common cultural traits which are thought to have originated in the Hallstatt culture and La Tène cultures; or the peoples known to the Greeks as Keltoi, to the Romans as Celtae and to either by cognate terms such as Gallae or Galatae. The extent to which each of these meanings refers to the same group of people is a matter of debate.{] and the Celtic Congress. In this sense, there are six modern nations that can be defined as Celtic: Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales. Only four, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Brittany have First language of Celtic languages and in none of them is it the language of the majority. However, all six have significant traces of a Celtic language in personal and place names, and in culture and traditions.

Some people in Galicia (Spain), Asturias and Cantabria, in north-western Spain, and Entre Douro e Minho, Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro in Norte, Portugal Portugal wish to be considered Celtic because of the strong Celtic cultural identity and acknowledgement of their Celtic past. The Celtic element is seen as the key differentiator of the Galician-Portuguese identity from the Mediterranean Sea Iberians, Ancient Rome or Moors influences of southern and eastern Spain, and southern Portugal.

Regions of England such as Cumbria and Devon likewise retain some Celtic influences, yet haven't retained a Celtic language (even Cornwall became fully English-speaking during the 18th century) and are therefore not categorised as Celtic regions or nations. Cornish language aside, the last attested Celtic language native to England was Cumbric language, spoken in Cumbria and southern Scotland and which may have survived until the 13th century, but was most likely dead by the 11th century. As in the case of Cornish language, there have been recent attempts to recreate it, based on medieval Mystery play and other surviving sources.

Another area of Europe associated with the Celts is France, which traces its roots to the Gauls. In Scotland, the Gaelic language traces at least some of its roots to Human migration and settlement by the Irish Dál Riata/Scotti. The settlement of Germanic immigrants in the lowlands—among other things—reduced the spread of the Gaelic language which was supplanting Brythonic in Scotland; this has meant that Scots-Gaelic-speaking communities survive chiefly in the country's northern and western fringes.

Use of the term for pre-Roman peoples of Britain and Ireland The first person to use the term "Celt" in relation to Britain and Ireland was George Buchanan in 1582. After its employment by Edward Lhuyd in 1707,(Lhuyd, p. 290) Lhuyd, E. "Archaeologia Britannica; An account of the languages, histories, and customs of the original inhabitants of Great Britain." (reprint ed.) Irish University Press, 1971. ISBN 0-7165-0031-0the use of the word "Celtic" as an umbrella term for the pre-Roman peoples of Britain gained considerable popularity in the nineteenth century, and remains in common usage. However its historical basis is now seen as dubious by many historians and archaeologists, and this usage has been called into question.

Dr Simon James (archaeologist), formerly of the British Museum, in his book The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention? makes the point that the Ancient Rome never used the term "Celtic" (or, rather, a cognate in Latin language) in reference to the peoples of Britain and Ireland, and points out that the modern term "Celt" was coined as a useful umbrella term in the early 18th century to distinguish the non-English inhabitants of the archipelago when England united with Scotland in 1707 to create the Kingdom of Great Britain and the later union of Great Britain and Ireland as the United Kingdom in 1800. Nationalists in Scotland, Ireland and Wales looked for a way to differentiate themselves from England and assert their right to independence. James then argues that, despite the obvious linguistic connections, archeology does not suggest a united Celtic culture and that the term is misleading, no more (or less) meaningful than "Western".

Miranda Green, author of Celtic Goddesses, describes archaeologists as finding "a certain homogeneity" in the traditions in the area of Celtic habitation including Britain and Ireland — she sees the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland as having become thoroughly Celticised by the time of the Roman arrival, mainly through spread of culture rather than a movement of people.

In his book Iron Age Britain, Barry Cunliffe concludes that "...there is no evidence in the British Isles to suggest that a population group of any size migrated from the continent in the first millennium BC...". Modern archaeological thought tends to disparage the idea of large population movements without facts to back them up, a caution which appears to be vindicated by some genetic studies. In other words, Celtic culture in the Atlantic Archipelago and continental Europe could have emerged through the peaceful convergence of local tribal cultures bound together by networks of trade and kinship — not by war and conquest. This type of peaceful convergence and cooperation is actually relatively common among tribal peoples; other well known examples of the phenomenon include the Six Nations of the Iroquois League and the Nuer of East Africa. He argues that the ancient Celts are thus best depicted as a loose and highly diverse collection of indigenous tribal societies bound together by trade, a common druidic religion, related languages, and similar political institutions — but each having its own local traditions.

Michael Morse in the conclusion of his book How the Celts came to Britain concedes that the concepts of a broad Celtic linguistic area and recognizably Celtic art have their uses, but argues that the term implies a greater unity than existed. Despite such problems he suggests that the term Celt is probably too deep-rooted to be replaced and — what is more important — it has the definition that we choose to give it. The problem is that the wider public reads into the term quite anachronistic concepts of Ethnocentrism that no one on either side in the academic debate holds.

The name "Gauls" English "Gaul(s)" and Latin Gallus or Galli might be from an originally Celtic ethnic or tribal name (perhaps borrowed into Latin during the early 400s BC Celtic expansions into Italy). Its root may be the Common Celtic *galno, meaning "power" or "strength". Greek Galatai (see Galatia in Anatolia) seems to be based on the same root, borrowed directly from the same hypothetical Celtic source which gave us Galli (the suffix -atai is simply an ethnic name indicator).

The English form Gaul comes from the French Gaule and Gaulois, which is the traditional rendering of Latin Gallia and Gallus, -icus respectively. However, the diphthong au points to a different origin, namely a Romance adaptation of the Germanic *Walha-. See Gaul#Name.

The word "Welsh" The word "Welsh" originates from word wælisc, which is anglo-saxon for foreigner. {{cite book|author=Neilson, William A. (ed.)|title= Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, second edition|publisher= G & C Merriam Co.|year= 1957|pages= p.2903|--> Though it may be Germanic in origin, it may still ultimately have a Celtic source. Possibly the result of an early transition from (in the 4th century BC) of the Celtic tribal name Volcae into early Germanic (becoming the Proto-Germanic Walh, "foreigner of the Roman lands" and the suffixed form *-walhisk). The Volcae were one of the Celtic peoples that for two centuries barred the southward expansion of the Germanic peoples in what is now central Germany on the line of the Harz mountains and into Saxony and Silesia.

In the Middle Ages territories with primarily romance-language speaking populations (France and Italy) were known as Welschland as opposed to Deutschland, and the word is cognate with Vlach (see: Etymology of Vlach) and Walloons as well as with the "-wall" in "Cornwall". Other examples are the surnames Wallace and Walsh. During the early Germanic period, the term seems to have been applied to the peasant population of the Roman Empire, most of whom were, in the areas immediately settled by the Germanic people.

Origins ] Genetic Evidence Most of our genes are inherited as a mixture of genetic material from both of our parents, but there are two exceptions. Mitochondrial DNA is passed down from our mothers unchanged and so can be traced back from daughter to mother. Similarly all boys inherit their Y chromosome from their father, since women do not have a Y chromosome, and so this can be traced back from son to father. Population genetics studies the patterns in the minor variations in this DNA to obtain information on the movement of populations.

In his book Neanderthal, archaeologist Douglas Palmer refers to genetic research conducted across Europe, then states the original modern genetic group in Europe arrived between 9,000 and 3rd millennium BC with the spread of farming, displacing the earlier hunter gatherer populations. Such displacement coincided with a population explosion, since farming is capable of supporting up to sixty times greater population than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the same area:

However, modern genetic studies have shown that the original spread of modern man across Europe took place more than 20,000 years ago and re-expanded from refuges after the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. It now seems likely that the farmers from the Middle East did not generally displace the hunter-gatherers but that farming was slowly adopted by the latter. However, the association of the Indo-European language family with farming remains unproven.

The Y-chromosomes of populations of the Atlantic Celtic countries have been found in several studies to belong primarily to haplogroup Haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA), which implies that they are descendants of the first people to migrate into North-West Europe from the Iberian refuge after the last major ice age. According to the most recently published studies of European haplogroups, around half of the current male population of that portion of Eurasia is a descendant of the R1b haplogroup(subgroup of Central Asian haplogroup K). Haplotype R1b exceeds 90% of Y-chromosomes in parts of Wales, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.

Two published books - The Blood of the Isles by Bryan Sykes and The Origins of the British: a Genetic Detective Story by Stephen Oppenheimer - are based upon recent genetic studies, and show that the majority of Britons have ancestors from the Iberian Peninsula, as a result of a series of migrations that took place during the Mesolithic and, to a lesser extent, the Neolithic eras.

Sykes says that the maternal and paternal origin of the British and Irish are different, with the former going back to Palaeolithic and Mesolithic times. He identifies close matches between the maternal clans of Iberia and those of the western half of the Isles. Once in the Isles the maternal lines mutated and diversified. He sees little genetic evidence relating to people from the heartland of the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures. On the paternal side he finds that the "Oisin" (R1b) clan is in the majority which has strong affinities to Iberia, with no evidence of a large scale arrival from Central Europe. He considers that the genetic structure of Britain and Ireland is "Celtic":

Oppenheimer's theory is that the modern day people of Wales, Ireland and Cornwall are mainly descended from Iberians who did not speak a Celtic language. In Origins of the British (2006), Stephen Oppenheimer states (pages 375 and 378):

{{Cquote] (modern Spain and Portugal), ranging from a low of 59% in Fakenham, Norfolk to highs of 96% in Llangefni, north Wales and 93% Castlerea, Ireland. On average only 30% of gene types in England derive from north-west Europe. Even without dating the earlier waves of north-west European immigration, this invalidates the Anglo-Saxons wipeout theory...

...75-95% of Britain and Ireland (genetic) matches derive from Iberia...Ireland, coastal Wales, and central and west-coast Scotland are almost entirely made up from Iberian founders, while the rest of the non-English parts of Britain and Ireland have similarly high rates. England has rather lower rates of Iberian types with marked heterogeneity, but no English sample has less than 58% of Iberian samples...|20px|20px|Stephen Oppenheimer-->

Dr. Oppenheimer challenges the idea that all of Britain spoke a Celtic language (chapter 7).

Linguistic evidence There are few written records of the ancient Celtic languages produced by the Celts themselves. Generally these are names on coins and stone inscriptions. Mostly the evidence is of personal names and place names in works by Greek and Roman authors. The date at which the proto-Celtic language split from Indo-European is disputed but may be as early as 6000 BC, with it reaching Britain and Ireland by 3200 BC, according to Forster and Toth. However, generally a later date is considered more likely by most scholars. Gray and Atkinson put the splitting off of Celtic languages at around 5000 BC. In both cases there is a large estimating uncertainty.

Several studies have been carried out of the Celtic place names of Europe. A recent one is that by Sims-Williams. The map of this data in Oppenheimer shows that the remaining placenames are mainly in Britain and northern France but extend from Iberia to the Danube.

A direct clue that the different names used by the Greek (who normally called any Celts or ) and the Latin authors (preferring Galli) actually referred to speakers of the same or similar languages is given by Jerome (AD 342-419). In his commentary on Paul of Tarsus epistle to the Galatians, he notes that the language of the Anatolian Galatians in his day was still very similar to the language of the Treveri.Galatas excepto sermone Graeco, quo omnis oriens loquitur, propriam linguam eamdem pene habere quam Treviros ("That the Galatians, apart from the Greek language, which they speak just like the rest of the Orient, have their own language, which is almost the same as the Treverans'.") S. Eusebii Hieronymi commentariorum in epistolam ad Galatas libri tres, in Migne, Patrologia Latina 26, 382. St Jerome probably had first-hand knowledge of these Celtic languages, as he had both visited Trier and Galatia.Birkan, Kelten, p. 301.

Archaeological evidence . The yellow area shows the region of birth of the La Tène culture style. The orange area indicates an idea of the possible region of Celtic influence around 400 BC.The only direct archaeological evidence for Celtic speaking peoples comes from coins and inscriptions. However it has been assumed that the Hallstatt (c. 1200-475 BC) and La Tene (c. 500-50 BC) cultures are associated with the Celts. Only in the final phase of La Tene are coins found. It has been suggested that the Hallstatt culture may have been adopted by speakers of different languages whereas the La Tene culture is more definitely associated with the Celts.

Historical evidence Polybius published a history of Rome about 150 BC in which he describes the Gauls of Italy and their conflict with Rome. Pausanias in the second century BC says that the Gauls "originally called Celts live on the remotest region of Europe on the coast of an enormous tidal sea". Posidonius described the southern Gauls about 100 BC. Though his original work is lost it was used by later writers such as Strabo. The latter, writing in the early first century AD, deals with Britain and Gaul as well as Spain, Italy and Galatia. Caesar wrote extensively about his Commentarii de Bello Gallico in 58-51 BC. Diodorus Siculus wrote about the Celts of Gaul and Britain in his first century History.

Homeland The question of the original homeland of the Celts has caused much controversy, with many competing theories.

1) The Celtic language family is a branch of the larger Indo-European family, which leads some scholars to a hypothesis that the original speakers of the Celtic proto-language may have arisen in the Black Sea-Caspian Sea steppes (see Kurgan). It is not generally accepted, however, that Celtic became differentiated from other branches of Indo-European at such an early stage. By the time speakers of Celtic languages enter history around 600 BC, they were already split into several language groups, and spread over much of Central Europe, the Iberian peninsula, Ireland and Britain.

2) Some scholars think that the Urnfield of northern Germany and the Netherlands represents an origin for the Celts as a distinct cultural branch of the Indo-European family. This culture was preeminent in central Europe during the late Bronze Age, from ca. 1200 BC until 700 BC, itself following the Unetice culture and Tumulus cultures. The Urnfield period saw a dramatic increase in population in the region, probably due to innovations in technology and agricultural practices. The Greek historian Ephorus of Cyme in Asia Minor, writing in the fourth century BC, believed that the Celts came from the islands off the mouth of the Rhine who were "driven from their homes by the frequency of wars and the violent rising of the sea".

The spread of Iron Age led to the development of the Hallstatt culture directly from the Urnfield (c. 700 to 500 BC). Proto-Celtic, the latest common ancestor of all known Celtic languages, is considered by this School (discipline) to have been spoken at the time of the late Urnfield or early Hallstatt cultures, in the early first millennium BC.

The spread of the Celtic languages to Iberia, Ireland and Britain would have occurred during the first half of the 1st millennium, the earliest chariot burials in Britain dating to ca. 500 BC. Over the centuries they developed into the separate Celtiberian language, Goidelic and Brythonic languages. Whether Goidelic and Brythonic are descended from a common Insular-Celtic language, or reflect two separate waves of migration, is disputed.

3) The prehistoric Beaker culture (2800 – 1900 BC) has often been pointed at as ancestral to the Celtic people. This people derive from the western extremity of Corded Ware in the Netherlands, where otherwise marginal groups took advantage of their contacts by sea and rivers and started a diaspora of North West European culture from Ireland to the Carpatian Basin and south along the Atlantic coast and following the Rhone valley until Portugal, North Africa and Sicily, even penetrating northern and central Italy. The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe - Barry Cunliffe, Oxford University Press, p250-254, 1994 The new international trade routes opened by the Beaker people where there to remain and the culture was succeeded by a number of Bronze Age cultures, among them the Unetice culture (Central Europe), ca. 2300 BC, and by the Nordic Bronze Age, a culture of Scandinavia and northernmost Germany-Poland, ca. 1800 BC. Almost all of this areas emerge to history as Celtic. Bodmer(1992)Bodmer, W. F. (1992) Proc. Br. Acad. 82, 37-57; suggested that the Celtic populations of Britain trace their origins to an early settlement of the British Isles by Paleolithic Europeans, rather than by a later migration from central Europe in the first millennium B.C., also associated with the spread of the Celtic culture.

4) The Hallstatt culture was succeeded by the La Tène culture of central Europe, and during the final stages of the Iron Age gradually transformed into the explicitly Celtic culture of early historical times. Celtic river-names are found in great numbers around the upper reaches of Danube and Rhine, which led many Celtic scholars to place the ethnogenesis of the Celts in this area. Others however believe that the fact that the La Tène culture is too late to explain the original Celtic homeland; rather its extent demonstrates the subsequent spread of a pre-existing Celtic culture throughout Switzerland, Austria, southern and central Germany, northern regions of Italy, eastern France, Bohemia, Moravia, Portugal, Slovakia and parts of Hungary and Ukraine. The technologies, decorative practices and Metalworking styles of the La Tène were certainly influential on the continental Celts, but they were highly derivative from the Greek, Etruscan civilization and Scythian decorative styles with whom the La Tène settlers frequently traded.

5) Today's Celtic nations are clustered along the Atlantic coast of Europe. Genetic studies now suggest (see Celt#Population Genetics) that certain Celtic-speaking peoples share genetic ancestry with the Basque people on the Atlantic coast of Spain and France."In April last year, research for a BBC programme on the Vikings revealed strong genetic links between the Welsh and Irish Celts and the Basques of northern Spain and southern France. It suggested a possible link between the Celts and Basques, dating back tens of thousands of years." English and Welsh are races apart J. F. del Giorgio in The Oldest Europeans mentions that mythologists like Robert Graves reached a similar conclusion through comparative mythology and the study of Celtic customs. Celtic scholars however believe that such similarities reflect an earlier common heritage of the indigenous populations of the Atlantic fringe, long before the arrival of the Celts.

6) Diodorus Siculus and Strabo both suggest that the Celtic heartland was in southern France. The former says that the Gauls were to the north of the Celts but that the Romans referred to both as Gauls. Before the discoveries at Hallstatt and La Tene, it was generally considered that the Celtic heartland was southern France, see Encyclopedia Britannica for 1813.

7) At odds with all the above theories is the assertion of Pliny the Elder that Celtica (the country of origin of the Celts) was in the delta of the river Guadalquivir in the south of Portugal and Spain:"praeter haec in Celtica Acinippo, Arunda, Arunci, Turobriga, Lastigi, Salpesa, Saepone, Serippo. altera Baeturia, quam diximus Turdulorum et conventus Cordubensis, habet oppida non ignobilia Arsam, Mellariam, Mirobrigam Reginam, Sosintigi, Sisaponem." This view is not shared by modern Celtic scholars, although the recent genetic research discussed above seem to support the Iberian origins of the peoples that were later called Celts.

Distribution Britain and Ireland A large portion of the indigenous populations of Britain and Ireland today may be partially descended from the ancient peoples that have long inhabited these lands, before the coming of Celtic and later Germanic peoples, language and culture. Little is known of their original culture and language, but remnants may remain in the names of some geographical features, such as the rivers River Clyde, River Tamar and Thames, whose etymology is unclear but almost certainly derive from a pre-Celtic Substratum. By the Roman period, however, most of the inhabitants of the isles of Ireland and Britain were speaking Goidelic or Brythonic languages, close counterparts to Gallic languages spoken on the European mainland.

Historians explained this as the result of successive invasions from the European continent by diverse Celtic-speaking peoples over the course of several centuries. The Book of Leinster, written in the twelfth century, but drawing on a much earlier Irish oral tradition, states that the first Celts to arrive in Ireland were from Spain. In 1946 the Celtic scholar T. F. O'Rahilly published his extremely influential model of the early history of Ireland which postulated four separate waves of Celtic invaders. It is still not known what languages were spoken by the peoples of Ireland and Britain before the arrival of the Celts.



Later research indicated that the culture may have developed gradually and continuously between the Celts and the indigenous "Basque" people of Britain. In Ireland little archaeological evidence was found for large intrusive groups of Celtic immigrants, suggesting to historians such as Colin Renfrew that the native late Bronze Age inhabitants gradually absorbed European Celtic influences and language. Although archaeological evidence has often been proved unreliable in the past. It should also be noted that genetic evidence proves that most Celtic people of coastal and northern Ireland have little traces of R1b genes, therefore indicating that when the Celts came to Ireland, the absorption of the indigenous inhabitants was regional (mainly central). "study shows R1b is regional (panel C) in the Isles, and that parts of Ireland (coastal and northern) have some of the lowest R1b genes in the region. Also this study used many more subject samples than other studies in Ireland"

Julius Caesar wrote of people in Britain who came from Belgium (the Belgae), but archaeological evidence which was interpreted in the 1930s as confirming this was contradicted by later interpretations. The archaeological evidence is of substantial cultural continuity through the first millennium BCE, although with a significant overlay of selectively-adopted elements of La Tène culture. There is numismatic and other evidence of continental-style states appearing in southern England close to the end of the period, possibly reflecting in part immigration by élites from various Gallic states such as those of the Belgae. However, this immigration would be far too late to account for the origins of Insular Celtic languages. In the 1970s the continuity model was taken to an extreme, popularized by Colin Burgess in his book The Age of Stonehenge which theorised that Celtic culture in Great Britain "emerged" rather than resulted from invasion and that the Celts were not invading aliens, but the descendants of the people of Stonehenge. The existence of Celtic language elsewhere in Europe, however, and the dating of the Proto-Celtic culture and language to the Bronze Age, makes the most extreme claims of continuity impossible.

More recently a number of genetics studies have also supported this model of culture and language being absorbed by native populations. A study by Christian Capelli, David Goldstein and others at University College, London, London showed that genes associated with Gaelic names in Ireland and Scotland are also common in certain parts of Wales (in most cases) are similar to the genes of the Basque people, who speak a non-Indo-European language. This similarity supported earlier findings in suggesting a large pre-Celtic genetic ancestry, possibly going back to the Paleolithic. They suggest that 'Celtic' culture and the Celtic language may have been imported to Britain by cultural contact, not mass invasions around 600 BC. A different possibility is that the Celtic language should differentiated from the Celtic culture.

Some recent studies have suggested that, contrary to long-standing beliefs, the Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons) did not wipe out the Romano-British of England but rather, over the course of six centuries, conquered the native Brythonic people of what is now England and Gododdin and imposed their culture and language upon them (this may also be the case with the Celts and basques of Ireland), much as the Gaels may have spread over Northern Britain. Still others maintain that the picture is mixed and that in some places the indigenous population was indeed wiped out while in others it was assimilated. According to this school of thought the populations of Yorkshire, East Anglia, Northumberland and the Orkney and Shetland Islands are those populations with the fewest traces of ancient (Celtic) British continuation."By analyzing 1772 Y chromosomes from 25 predominantly small urban locations, we found that different parts of the British Isles have sharply different paternal histories; the degree of population replacement and genetic continuity shows systematic variation across the sampled areas."

Gaul At the dawn of history in Europe, the Celts in present-day France were known as Gauls to the Romans. Gaul probably included Belgium and Switzerland. Their descendants were described by Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars. Eastern Gaul was the centre of the western La Tene culture. In later Iron Age Gaul, the social organisation was similar to that of the Romans, with large towns. From the third century, BC the Gauls adopted coinage, and texts with Greek characters are known in southern Gaul from the second century.

Greek traders founded Massalia in about 600BC, with exchange up the Rhone valley, but trade was disrupted soon after 500BC and re-oriented over the Alps to the Po valley in Italy. The Romans arrived in the Rhone valley in the second century BC and found that a large part of Gaul was Celtic speaking. Rome needed land communications with its Spanish provinces and fought a major battle with the Saluvii at Entremont in 124-123 BC. Gradually Roman control extended, the Roman Province of Gallia Transalpina being along the Mediterranean coast. The remainder was known as Gallia Comata "Hairy Gaul".

In 58 BC, the Helvetii planned to migrate westward but were forced back by Julius Caesar. He then became involved in fighting the various tribes in Gaul, and by 55 BC, most of Gaul had been overrun. In 52 BC, Vercingetorix led a revolt against the Roman occupation but was defeated at the siege of Alesia and surrendered.

Following the Gallic Wars of 58-51 BC, Celticia formed the main part of Roman Gaul. Place name analysis shows that Celtic was used east of the Garonne river and south of the Seine-Marne. However, the Celtic language did not survive, having been replaced by a Romance language, French.

Iberia areas in Iberian Peninsula, showing Celtic and Proto-Celtic languages in green, and Iberian languages in purple, circa 250 BC.. showing Celtic and Proto-Celtic languages in green.Traditional 18th century/19th century centuries scholarship surrounding the Celts virtually ignored the Iberian Peninsula, since Archaeological culture relatable to the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures that have defined Iron Age Celts was rare in Iberia, and did not provide a cultural scenario that could easily be linked to that of Central Europe.

Modern scholarship, however, has proven that Celtic presence and influences were very substantial in Iberia. The Celts in Iberia were divided in two main archaeological and cultural groups, even if the divide is not very clear:

The origins of the Celtiberians might provide a key to unlocking the Celticization process in the rest of the Peninsula. The process of celticization of the southwest by the Keltoi and of the northwest is however not a simple celtiberian question. Recent investigation about the Callaici Bracari in northwest Portugal is bringing new approaches to understand Celtic culture evidences (language, art and religion) in western Iberia. Archeological site of Tavira, official website

Italy There was an early Celtic presence in northern Italy since inscriptions dated to the sixth century BC have been found there. In 391BC Celts "who had their homes beyond the Alps streamed through the passes in great strength and seized the territory that lay between the Appeninne mountains and the Alps" according to Diodorus Siculus. The River Po and the rest of northern Italy (known to the Romans as Cisalpine Gaul) was inhabited by Celtic-speakers who founded cities such as Milan. Later the Roman army was routed at the battle of Allia and Rome was sacked in 390BC.

At the battle of Telemon in 225 BC a large Celtic army was trapped between two Roman forces and crushed.

The defeat of the combined Samnium, Celtic and Etruscan alliance by the Romans in the Samnite Wars sounded the beginning of the end of the Celtic domination in mainland Europe, but it was not until 192 BC that the Roman armies conquered the last remaining independent Celtic kingdoms in Italy.

The Celts settled much further south of the Po River than many maps show. Remnants in the town of Doccia, in the province of Emilia-Romagna, showcase Celtic houses in very good condition dating from about the 4th century BC.

Other regions The Celts also expanded down the Danube river and its tributaries. On of the most influential tribes, the Scordisci, had established their capital at Singidunum in 3rd century BC, which is present-day Belgrade. The concentration of hill-forts and cemeteries shows a density of population in the Tisza valley of modern-day Vojvodina, Hungary and into Ukraine. Expansion into Romania was however blocked by the Dacians.

Further south, Celts settled in Thrace (Bulgaria), which they ruled for over a century, and Anatolia, where they settled as the Galatians. Despite their geographical isolation from the rest of the Celtic world, the Galatians maintained their Celtic language for at least seven hundred years. St Jerome, who visited Ancyra (modern-day Ankara in 373AD, likened their language to that of the Treveri of northern Gaul.

The Boii tribe gave their name to Bohemia (Czech Republic) and Celtic artifacts and cemeteries have been discovered further east in both Poland and Slovakia. A celtic coin (Biatec) from Bratislava's mint is displayed on today's Slovak 5 crown coin.

As there is no archaeological evidence for large scale invasions in some of the other areas, one current school of thought holds that Celtic language and culture spread to those areas by contact rather than invasion. However, the Celtic invasions of Italy, Greece, and western Anatolia are well documented in Greek and Latin history. Examine the Map of Celtic Lands for more information.

There are records of Celtic mercenaries in Egypt serving the Ptolemies. Thousands were employed in 283-246 BC and they were also in service around 186 BC. They attempted to overthrow Ptolomy II.

Romanisation Under Caesar the Romans conquered Celtic Gaul, and from Claudius onward the Roman empire absorbed parts of Britain. Roman local government of these regions closely mirrored pre-Roman 'tribe' boundaries, and archaeological finds suggest native involvement in local government. Latin was the official language of these regions after the conquests.

The native peoples under Roman rule became Romanized and keen to adopt Roman ways. Celtic art had already incorporated classical influences, and surviving Gallo-Roman pieces interpret classical subjects or keep faith with old traditions despite a Roman overlay.

The Roman occupation of Gaul, and to a lesser extent of Britain, led to Roman-Celtic syncretism (see Roman Gaul, Roman Britain). In the case of Gaul, this eventually resulted in a language shift from Gaulish language to Vulgar Latin (see also Gallo-Roman culture). However, the Celts were master horsemen, which so impressed the Romans that they adopted Epona, the Celtic horse goddess, into their pantheon. During and after the fall of the Roman Empire many parts of France threw out their Roman administrators.

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Gaulish Calendar The Coligny Calendar, which was found in 1897 in Coligny, Ain, Ain, was engraved on a bronze tablet, preserved in 73 fragments, that originally was 1.48 m wide and 0.9 m high (Lambert p.111). Based on the style of lettering and the accompanying objects, it probably dates to the end of the 2nd century.Lambert, Pierre-Yves (2003). La langue gauloise. Paris, Editions Errance. 2nd edition. ISBN 2-87772-224-4. Chapter 9 is titled "Un calandrier gaulois" It is written in Latin inscriptional capitals, and is in the Gaulish language. The restored tablet contains sixteen ver

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