Celt. The Celtic peoples were one of the great founding civilisations of Europe. They were the first European people north of the Alps to emerge into recorded history. The term is linguistic and not racial. In modern times the Celts are divided between the Goidelic
(Q) Celts-the Irish, Manx, and Scots- and the Brythonic (P)
Celts-the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons. Gaulish, identified as a P
Celtic language, died out around the fourth or fifth century A.D.
Today only sixteen million people live in a Celtic country, and of these only 2.5 million speak a Celtic language, as do, possibly, a further one million outside the Celtic areas.
Though writing was known to them, and used on funeral stones
and pottery prior to the first century B.C., it was not until the
Christian era that the change in religious perceptions allowed the
Celts to shake off the old druidic prohibition against committing
their store of knowledge to written form. It is from the sixth century
A.D. that an extensive written testimony in the Celtic languages
survives, including one of Europe's oldest and most vibrant mythologies, which until the Christian period had been handed down in
oral tradition.
First recorded by the Greeks as keltoi, perhaps from a native word
meaning "hidden people," by the Greek Hectaeus (ca. 517 B.C.), the
Celts had already begun to migrate through Europe from their
original homeland at the headwaters of the Danube, Rhine, and
Rhone (all three rivers still carrying their Celtic names). It is
thought that they were called "hidden people" because of the
prohibition by their religion to commit anything to written record.
The etymology of the word may well be the same root that gives
us ceilt, an act of concealment, and kilt,the short male skirt of
Celtic dress.
The Celts began their expansion through Europe around the
start of the first millennium B.C., at which time they possessed great
metalworking skills, especially in the use of iron (itself a Celtic
word borrowed into the German languages, iarn). This metal was
only just becoming known to craftsmen of the Classical world.
With their iron weaponry and tools, the Celts were able to cut
through the impenetrable forests of Europe
By the sixth century B.C. they were established in France and
Spain, as far south as Cadiz, and in the Po Valley of Northern Italy.
It is believed that the Goidelic form of Celtic was the more archaic
form and that it was Goidelic speakers who had settled in Spain,
Ireland, and Britain by at latest the start of the first millennium B.C.
Brythonic, or P Celtic, is regarded as a later modificatio& of the
Goidelic form.
It is believed that the two linguistic groups (Goidelic and Brythonic) diverged over 2,500 years ago. The Brythonic group began to simplify itself in its case endings and in the loss of the neuter, gender and dual number. The two groups also differed in the matter of initial mutation and aspiration. There is the famous substitution of "P" for "Q" in the Brythonic languages-hence the designation of"P" Celtic and "Q" Celtic. Thus the word "head" in Irish, ceann,
becomes pen in Welsh; the word "worm" in Irish,cruimh, becomes pryin Welsh, and so forth.
The Celts dominated Northern Italy for a time, defeating then Etruscan empire and then Rome itself in ca. 390-387 B.C. Other Celtic tribes pushed further east and were met by Alexander the
Great on the Danube in 335-334 B.C. in a peaceful conference. Not until after Alexander's death did the Celts invade Greece and sack the holy shrine at Delphi, pressing on to establish the state of Galatia on the central plain of Turkey. It is the Galatian state that provides us with our first accounts of how a Celtic state was governed. It was in the third century B.C. that the Celts achieved their greatest expansion before the rise of Rome halted them and they,
in turn, began to be pressed backwards by Roman expansion. Defeating the Celts of Northern Italy, then Spain, the Roman legions pushed into Gaul. At the same time the eastern Celtic areas
in Rumania, the Balkans, Czechrepublic, slovakia, Austria, and switzerland were being conquered and the people absorbed. The Galatian state also fell to Rome, although Gaulish Celtic was still spoken there, according to St. Jerome, who visited Ancyra (Ankara) , which
was a Celtic capital.
The Celts were an exciting and inventive civilisation with a
highly developed religion that unified all their tribes from Ireland
to Galatia. They had a sophisticated law system and were among the
first to develop the concept of immortaliry of the soul, a fact that
made the change to Christianiry an easy process with, significantly,
no Celtic martyrs being registered in the change. The Greeks
Aristotle, Sotion, and Clement acknowledged that much of early
Greek philosophy was influenced by the Celtic druids. The Celts of
Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) and many from Spain actually
contributed to Latin literature. Being forbidden to write in their
own languages by religious prohibition, they wrote in Latin.
Writers such as Gaius Valerius Catullus, Valerius Cato, M.
Terentius Varro, Caecilius Statius, Lucius Pomponius, Cornelius
Nepos, Trogus Pompeius, the famous Virgil, and many others
were, in fact, Celts. While from Spain, Marcus Valerius Martialis,
well known as Martial, made a frank assertion of his Celtic identity,
as did the teacher of rhetoric Marcus Fabius Quintilanus. Like their
descendants in more modern times, these Celts contributed to the
language of their conquerors rather than their own.
Only Ireland and the Isle of Man, of the Celtic lands, were not conquered by Rome. Although the northern part of Britain was
invaded, it never settled under Roman administration. As a major
European people, Celtic civilisation was smashed first by the
Romans and later by the expansion of the Germanic tribes. The
emergence of the medieval Celtic kingdoms was also short-lived,
as they quickly succumbed to the expanding English and French
empires. See under the individual Celtic countries.
Celtchair. [I] A Red Branch hero who, having violated the laws of
hospitality, has to undertake a task in compensation. He has to rid
Ireland of three terrible scourges. He is successful except with the
last scourge, which is in the form of a dog. He kills it but a drop of
blood trickles from his spear onto his flesh and Celtchair is killed
by its venom.
...CELT--CELTC..
