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The ancient Celts were a widespread group of tribes whose rich culture has been identified through burials, artifacts and language.
www.history.com
1. The Celts were the largest group in ancient Europe.
The ancient culture known as the Celts once extended far beyond the British Isles. With territory stretching from Spain to the Black Sea, the Celts were geographically the largest group of people to inhabit ancient Europe.
The difficulty of tracing Celtic history is that none of these ancient peoples living in Western or Central Europe would have called themselves Celts. That name came from the Greeks, who made their first contact with a “barbarian” people they called the
Keltoi in 540 B.C. on the southern coast of France. The ancient Celts were never a single kingdom or an empire, but a collection of hundreds of tribal chiefdoms with a shared culture and distinctive language.
2. The Celts were described as barbaric warriors.
Since the Celts themselves left no written histories, we’re left to rely on the admittedly biased accounts of their enemies in battle, the Greeks and later the Romans. Historians don’t know why the Greeks called them the
Keltoi, but the name stuck, and the Celts developed a reputation in Greece as hard-drinking, hard-fighting savages. Celtic warriors often battled naked and were prized as mercenaries throughout the Mediterranean.
The Romans called the Celts
Galli or
Gallia and frequently clashed with Celtic tribes that invaded Roman outposts in Northern Italy. In 387 B.C, a fearless Celtic warlord named Brennus sealed the barbaric reputation of the Celts by violently sacking and pillaging Rome and putting most of the Roman Senate to the sword.
3. Ancient Celtic burial mounds reveal a complex society.
The Celts were far from savages, as evidenced by the intricate metalwork and jewelry excavated from ancient Celtic hill forts and burial mounds across Europe. One such mound near Hochdorf, Germany, held the remains of a Celtic chieftain and a wealth of artifacts pointing to a complex and stratified Celtic society.
The Hochdorf chieftain’s mound dates from 530 B.C, what archeologists call the late Hallstatt period, when Celtic culture was concentrated in Central Europe. The chieftain was laid out on a long bronze couch with wheels and dressed in gold finery including a traditional Celtic neck band called a
torc. He was surrounded by ornate drinking horns and a large bronze cauldron, which still held the remains of high-proof honey mead.
4. The Celts may have been one of the first Europeans to wear pants.
The ancient Celts were famous for their colorful wool textiles, forerunners of the famous Scottish tartan. And, while only a few tantalizing scraps of these textiles survived the centuries, historians believe that the Celts were one of the first Europeans to wear pants. They didn’t have buttons, though, so they fastened their clothing with clasps called
fibulae.
5. Druids passed down histories and laws through the oral tradition.
The ancient Celts were “aliterate,” says Arnold, meaning that they actively chose not to write down their histories, sacred stories and laws, in order to safeguard the information. The Celtic religion, for example, required animal and human sacrifices to a pantheon of gods, but that esoteric knowledge was restricted to Celtic priests called Druids and passed on orally from generation to generation.
6. The Celtic Queen Boudicca led a bloody revolt against the Romans.
The Romans conquered Britain in 43 A.C. under Claudius, and the Celts were slowly subjugated and Romanized. They didn’t go down without a fight, though. The legendary Celtic queen Boudicca led a bloody revolt against the Romans in 61 A.C. in which her forces destroyed the Roman stronghold of Londinium and massacred the inhabitants, according to Roman sources.
In Celtic culture, women could hold the highest position in the social hierarchy. Others were Druidesses who specialized in political prophecy and played important roles in Celtic military campaigns.
7. The Celts were eventually defeated by Romans, Slavs and Huns.
After the Roman conquest of most Celtic lands, Celtic culture was further trampled by Germanic tribes, Slavs and Huns during the Migration Period of roughly 300 to 600 A.C. As a result, few if any people living in Europe and the British Isles identified as Celts until the 1700s, when the Welsh linguist and scholar Edward Lhuyd recognized the similarities between languages like Welsh, Irish, Cornish and the now extinct Gaulish, and labeled them “Celtic.”
8. The embrace of a Celtic identity is relatively recent and tied to opposition to British rule.
The 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a full-blown Celtic revival in the British Isles driven by political anger over British rule in places like Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Musicians, artists and authors like William Butler Yeats proudly embraced a pre-Christian Celtic identity. But because the Celts were so much more than an Irish or Scottish phenomenon, historians remain divided over the accuracy of modern claims to Celtic heritage.
Yeah but we thought there was only 3 million EU people in UK, apparently there's 5 million