Where did the Celts come from?

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“Where did the Celts come from?

The Celts were a people that developed in Central Europe in the first millennium BC and spread across the continent, reaching the British Isles and Asia Minor. Leading Celtic scholars say they existed between 600 BC. and 600 AD.

When we study them, we need to consider that the designation “Celtic” is generic, as it incorporates different peoples seen in antiquity as one, and this was due to the cultural proximity that existed between them. Currently, language is the criterion used by historians to define who is Celtic and who is not. The Celtic languages ​​belonged to the Gaelic and Brythonic stocks.

In the region of origin of the Celts, there was a great cultural evolution, which, in the long term, allowed the emergence of peoples understood as Celts. The starting point was the Urnfield culture, which, over time, evolved into the emergence of the Hallstatt Culture and, finally, gave rise to the La Tène Culture. The first two are seen as proto-Celts, as they had Celtic characteristics but were not yet fully Celtic. La Tène, yes, is already considered a properly Celtic culture.

Thus, the populations that inhabited Central Europe gave rise to the Celts during the process of cultural evolution. However, there are studies that speculate that Celtic populations settled in Central Europe after migrating from Central Asia during the Neolithic.”

“Why are they called Celts?

As we have already seen, the term Celtic is a generic name for different peoples who had a similar culture and spoke languages ​​from the same linguistic stocks. This term was established by the Greeks sometime between 540 BC. and 424 BC. The two officials known to have used this designation were Hecataeus of Miletus and Herodotus.

They referred to the Celts, in their own language (Greek), as Keltoi. This name was used, in the case of Hecataeus of Miletus, for example, to refer to peoples who inhabited the region close to Massilia, a Greek colony installed in the south of France. We can see, then, that the Greek naming started from the principle of “view from the outside”, which means that it represents the image that the Greeks had of different peoples with cultural proximity and who lived outside the coastal regions of the Mediterranean Sea.

As the Greeks did not know details about these peoples, they were seen only as one, in this case, the Keltoi. This vision was consolidated through the Romans, a people who had a lot of contact with the Celts on the northern borders of their lands. The Romans, in turn, called them celti, celtae or galli.”

“Where did the Celts live?

The Celts left traces of their presence in different places in Europe, including northern Spain and Portugal, on the Iberian Peninsula.
We have already seen that the Celts emerged in Central Europe and gained space throughout the European continent. Here we are not talking about a single tribe, but about several tribes that shared this culture and languages ​​with the same origin.

Among the regions where the Celts settled are the Iberian Peninsula (currently Portugal and Spain); Gaul, region of present-day France; the British Isles, where Ireland and the United Kingdom are today; Thrace, in Eastern Europe (now Bulgaria); and Asia Minor, in present-day Turkey. All of them received Celtic populations belonging to different tribes. Among these, we can mention the Ordovics, who inhabited the region of Wales; the Celtiberians, who inhabited the north of Portugal and Spain; the Helvetii, who inhabited the territory of Switzerland; the biturigs, who dwelt in the region of France; and the Galatians, who settled in the region of Turkey.

Historians study the reasons for this great migration of Celts across Europe and believe that it began around the 4th century BC. In this period, the Celts who inhabited the Central Europe of the La Tène Culture began to migrate due to the overpopulation in this region as well as the scarcity of resources. This measure aimed to find better places to survive.

In addition, the wars fought between the Celtic tribes themselves and with the Romans in the following centuries were a factor that probably contributed to these migrations. The Roman presence was even the first stage towards the end of the Celts. Christianization also contributed to this in 600 AD.”

“Society and Religion

The Celts were socially organized into tribes they called tuatha. They were formed by the union of families that had the cultural bond as a trait. This bond brought the tribes closer together, but did not guarantee peaceful coexistence. Furthermore, cultural proximity did not mean that they were identical in all respects, as there were differences in language and religion, for example.

As far as Celtic society is concerned, there were five major groups: the druids, the nobles and warriors, the free men, and the slaves. The tribes were ruled by kings, elected from among nobles and warriors, two classes that were part of the Celtic aristocracy. However, the most powerful group in this society were the druids.

Druids assumed different roles in Celtic society. They could act in the role of accumulators of knowledge of the people, mainly because Celtic wisdom was oral and, therefore, its accumulation and transmission was their function; they could still make and enforce local laws and do so even against kings; and they were known to fulfill religious functions, although this last function is still unclear.

Regarding the orality of the Celts, historians consider it as one of the main factors why much of this culture was lost. The Celts only began to report details about themselves in writing from Roman influence. In addition, most of the accounts we have today were written by other peoples, such as Greeks, Romans and Christianized peoples.

There was a patronage relationship between the Celtic social classes, with the poorer groups offering their services to influential and powerful people. This allowed nobles and great warriors to secure influence through large numbers of followers, as well as getting people to work for them. In return, they offered protection and economic support to their customers.

The ferocity of the Celtic warrior was recorded by the Greeks and Romans.
Nobles and warriors were, as mentioned, groups that were part of the social elite of the Celts. The Celtic warriors had their fame transmitted by the Greeks and Romans, peoples who, at different times, fought conflicts against Celtic tribes. These accounts tell of the ferocity of Celtic warriors and highlight their characteristics, such as prowess with horses.

Free men were common men, of little financial condition and who were, above all, linked to agricultural work. Finally, slaves formed the Celtic social base and were usually foreign prisoners of war.

In terms of religion, the Celts were polytheistic and had a wide variety of gods. These peoples had in their religion beliefs in the afterlife and funerary practices that led them to bury different objects with the person who had died.

The Celts believed that nature was sacred and had several practices and beliefs that reinforced this, one of them being performing their religious rituals in nature, outdoors. They believed in the possibility of transmigration from the human body, especially to the bodies of birds and fish.

They had several religious rituals, such as Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas and Samhain. The Celts practiced human and animal sacrifice, and in the case of human sacrifice, there could be practices of necromancy — the making of predictions through how blood gushed out of the human body or the shape of its innards.”

Yamna culture: The origin of the Celts