The Shaping of the Celtic World

The story of the Celtic people is one of the most amazing in the history of ancient Europe. Their destiny carried them in a few short centuries over the greater part of the continent, which they conquered and colonized. They laid the foundation for western European civilization; before the rise of the Roman Empire, their influence was felt across Europe from Asia Minor to the Atlantic seaboard. A remarkable people endowed with artistic talent and technological skills, the Celts were among the finest metal craftsmen of the ancient world. From Celtic workshops have come some of the most magnificent treasures of early Europe—gold and bronze crafted into amazingly vibrant art.

The Celts arrived on the European stage as a warrior class and went on to become an amazing people that flourished before the Roman Empire spread its wings over Europe. As a group of peoples, they shared many bonds of social customs, art, religious practices, and of course language—which is spoken to this day in several European areas, particularly along the Atlantic seaboard in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and western France.

In material culture, the Celtic peoples heralded modern civilization. Their widespread use of iron enabled them to conquer vast tracts of land and to increase the amenities of life by felling forests and opening up new areas for agriculture. It revolutionized their method of warfare by making available in quantity the strong, iron-slashing sword, and improved their economy by opening up hitherto undeveloped land, later to be controlled by their great hill-top towns or oppida.

Their legacy includes a host of famous place-names. Many great rivers of northern and central Europe—the Rhine, Danube, Neckar, Thames, and numerous others—owe their names to remote Celtic antiquity. The great cities of London, Belgrade, and Paris preserve in their names the presence of otherwise forgotten Celts. In the many areas of Continental Europe inhabited by Celtic peoples, significant excavations and finds have brought their material culture to light and established, for future generations, instant contact with the realness of Celtic civilization. The most spectacular excavations have been those of the “princely” graves in Germany and France; the most notable, possibly, that of Dürrnberg near Salzburg in Austria. There, excavation of a prehistoric salt-mining settlement, consisting of a village and a cemetery with two thousand graves, yielded a vast collection of artifacts.

The Celts originated in homelands at the headwaters of the Rhine and Danube rivers. It was there the first identifiable Celtic period (dating from around 700 BC) was named after Hallstatt, a town near Salzburg in Austria. From there they moved westward across what was later called Gaul, and southwards into the Iberian peninsula as far as present-day Cadiz, which they reached sometime before 450 BC. At about the same time, other Celtic tribes moved southwards over the Alps, occupying the Po River valley in northern Italy. Other tribes would later follow an eastward course through Macedonia, invading Greece via Thrace and Thessaly and attacking the Temple of Delphi in 279 BC. As many as twenty-five thousand Celts went even further eastwards into Asia Minor and settled the area that became Galatia (in present-day Turkey). On the Atlantic seaboard there were frequent movements between Gaul and southwestern Britain and Ireland. Further western migration in pre-classical times was that of the Belgae tribes from northern Gaul into Britain and Ireland about 250 BC.