A Brief History of the Celts

by Peter Berresford Ellis

  Certainly far more work is due to be done in this field and comparisons with early Vedic records as well as records in Hittite need to be completed. The Hittite records, written in cuneiform on clay tablets dating from around 1900–1400 BC, are the earliest example of an Indo-European language being committed to a literature. The material is rich in cosmological records. As a relative of Vedic Sanskrit and Celtic, its cosmological philosophies provide fascinating comparisons. It is suggested that these Hittite records were merely translations of Babylonian texts. But if there are philosophic and linguistic parallels between these early Indo-European remains, then we might indeed be on the path to an understanding of ancient Indo-European cosmology.

  The Coligny Calendar is far more elaborate than the rudimentary Julian calendar and incorporates a highly sophisticated five-year synchronisation of lunation with the solar year. It is a masterpiece of calendrical calculation. Against the months are subscribed either the letters MAT or ANM. One does not need to be an expert linguist to recognise these as the equivalent of maith (Irish) or mad (Welsh) meaning ‘good’, and of an maith (Irish) or anfad (Welsh) meaning ‘not good’.

  The months are named in Gaulish Celtic with Giamon as the midwinter month and Samon as the midsummer month. Both names can be recognised in the surviving Celtic languages. What is significant here is that the old Irish name for November was Gam. Today November has been erroneously renamed Samhain which was originally the name for the feast of the god Samhain on 31 October/1 November. Samhain has nothing to do with the word sam meaning summer.

  It is by misunderstanding and misuse that this name was extended to the whole month of November and thus confused people as to why a dark month should bear the element of the name of summer in it. To get round this one observer has suggested that Samhain must mean ‘end of summer’. A good try. However, in thinking that Samon was the name for November another error was perpetuated by unwary commentators on the Coligny Calendar when they placed Giamon (winter) as the May month. The May month was clearly called in old Ireland Cet-Samhin, the first of the summer period. Cet-Gamred was November, the first of the winter months or black period, and it is still so called in Scottish Gaelic. So, in the Coligny Calendar, we have a black half of the year and a light half of the year and in between the two halves is the Gaulish Celtic word atenvix, which translates as ‘renewal’, as in the old Irish word athnugud.

  There are sixty-two consecutive months in the calendar, divided into periods of twenty-nine or thirty nights each. In Celtic fashion, the calendar reckons periods by nights. Caesar observed: ‘They count periods of time not by the number of days but by the number of nights; and in reckoning birthdays and the new moon and the new year their unit of reckoning is the night followed by the day.’ Pliny implies that it was by the moon that the Celts measured their months and years and also ‘ages’ or thirty-year periods. Presumably, the thirty years was regarded as a generation.

  Dillon and Chadwick comment:

  The Calendar of Coligny is evidence of a considerable degree of competence in astronomy, and may reflect the learning of the Druids. Moreover, in the division of the year into a bright and a dark half, in the month of thirty days with a five year cycle, at the end of which an intercalary month was added, this Gaulish calendar resembles that of the Hindus.

  The Vedas and Upanishads show that the Hindu year was indeed divided into two halves in a fashion analogous to the Celtic year. The Vedic references, such as the Bhadaranyaka, indicate that the Vedic calendar was lunar, with a variable 354/355 days, included intercalary months and followed a thirty-year cycle like the Celtic one. Plutarch mentions a thirty-year festival among the Celts when Cronus (Saturn) entered the sign of Taurus.

  It is clear that by the first century AD the majority of the Continental Celtic peoples had adopted the new forms of astronomy and astrology that were used in the Graeco-Roman world. These had emerged from Babylonia into Greece and thence to Rome. The older methods used by the Celts, once common to Indo-European society, were swept away. Evidence for the pre-Graeco-Roman (Babylonian) concepts appears in fragmentary form in early Irish cosmological writings.

  Pliny refers to the reputation of Gaulish Celtic astrologers in the first century AD. But by the time they emerge into historical scrutiny they were, as Hippolytus tells us, using the Graeco-Roman forms. We know that Favorinus of the Volcae Arecomii, born in AD 80, had a reputation in the Roman world for his astrology. The Aedui astrologer Caecilius Argicius Arborius, of the third century AD, was another astrologer of note and he drew up a birth chart for his grandson, the poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius of Bordeaux. We know this from Ausonius’ Parentalia in which he also tells us that Arborius was of the Druid caste. Perhaps the name Arborius, linking him with sacred trees, is an indication of this connection?

  Another Celtic astrologer was Anthedius, a friend of the Gaulish Celtic bishop, Apollinaris Sidonius. And a fourth-century Gaul wrote a Celto-Latin comedy play entitled Querolus (Complaint) whose main character is a Celtic astrologer named Mandrogente, meaning ‘born of a horse’. The Roman biographer Flavius Vopiscus observed drily that ‘superstition based on astrology always prevailed over the Celts’.

  It is from the sixth century AD that we begin to find a wealth of written evidence from the insular Celts concerning cosmology. From it we find that Irish cosmology falls into four historic phases. The pre-Christian phase, of which we have only fragmentary knowledge, indicates that the Celts shared the Indo-European knowledge of numerology, astronomy and astrology which emerges in the Vedas. Then, as the Celtic world entered the Christian period, the new Graeco-Latin learning arrived from Babylonia. In the earliest Irish evidence, the cosmology shows the influence of the Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy, second century AD, whose teachings on astronomy and astrology were accepted until the arrival of Arabic influences and the work of Copernicus. From the eleventh century, the Irish astronomers and astrologers used the Arab forms which had entered Europe.

  In Britain there is a sculpture showing the zodiacal signs dating from as early as the third century AD. It was found in Housesteads, at the northernmost edge of Roman influence, and is now in the museum at Newcastle on Tyne. One of the earliest surviving texts in old Welsh is a tenth-century discussion about the zodiac which is called seraul cichol.

  Aibhistín, an Irish astronomer writing in AD 655, shows a masterful display of computational skills and in his text we find evidence of an ancient lunar-based astrological system which appears to have similarities to the twenty-seven lunar mansions of the Vedic system, called the Nakshatras. Aibhistín is the earliest medieval writer to discuss the relationship of the tides to the phases of the moon. He is also the first Christian writer to proclaim that the Three Wise Men in the Gospel of St Matthew were astrologers.

  In the late 1980s an important discovery was made when the ‘lost’ Irish calendrical eighty-four-year Easter table, covering the years AD 438–521, was found in the Biblioteca Antoniana in Padua (MS.I.27). The table is linked with early Irish calendrical systems and it is the very calendrical study which was used by St Columbanus to argue the dating of Easter with Pope Gregory the Great in the early seventh century. A preliminary study has been published in Peritia, Journal of the Medieval Academy of Ireland, Vols 6–7, 1987–88.

  Our first Irish astrological chart survives from the eighth century. This was found in the library at Basle in Switzerland. From the ‘Ptolemaic’ period we have Diciul’s classic De Astronomiam, a text on astronomy and astrology, written in AD 814. Diciul, a famous Irish geographer, was taught by Brother Fidelmid of Fermanagh who, it is reported, went to Egypt to measure the pyramids which he did with great accuracy.

  As a demonstration of early Irish sophistication in matters of astronomy we may cite the Irish annals. Dr Dan MacCarthy of Trinity College, Dublin, recently examined twelve of these annals and chronicles, collating all observations made of astronomical phenomena between AD 442 and 1133. What emerged was a body of records of eclipses, comets, a
urorae and even a supernova, carefully and accurately set down.

  It appears that, following the introduction of Christianity into Ireland, when the great ecclesiastical universities displaced the bardic colleges, the latter became the centres for studying the heavens, particularly those at Durrow and Clonmacnoise. Through the medieval period, astronomical observation was a sustained activity in many Irish monastic schools. A comparison of the Irish records with Continental records shows that the former tend to be trustworthy while the latter are often badly transcribed, wrongly recorded and inaccurate. Between AD 627 and 1133 some thirty astronomical observations were found to exist only in Irish records. No other European textual evidence for these events was found, but they corresponded to many non-European sightings, from India, China and Japan, and when calibrated the Irish records were in precise accord.

  As one example, in AD 1054 the Italians recorded what appeared to be a supernova in the Crab Nebula dating it to 19 April 1054 – significantly, the date of the death of Pope Leo I. But the Irish sources dated it nearly eight weeks later. Who was right? The answer was found in Chinese and Japanese records, comparison with which demonstrated that the Irish date was accurate. The Italians had adjusted the date to coincide with Pope Leo’s death.

  The system used by the Irish astronomers and astrologers changed again in the eleventh century AD when new Arabic learning, mathematics, medicine, astronomy and astrology entered Europe through such universities as Montpelier and Bologna. Irish professors teaching there at the time doubtless brought the new knowledge back to Ireland. We find a rich source of manuscript texts and books about astronomy and astrology written in Irish between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries AD, including translations from Arabic, Greek and Latin as well as native texts. But, by this time, the ancient ideas had more or less been filtered out.

  The identification of parallels between Celtic cosmology, predominantly surviving in early Irish texts, and the cosmology of the Vedas is important. If, as some Western authorities on astronomy and astrology claim, the Vedas had really borrowed wholesale from the Babylonians via Greece at the time of the invasion of Alexander of Macedonia, then we should not be able to see similarities between old Irish and Sanskrit in the fields of linguistics, cosmology and numerology. Why? Because Babylonian culture would have introduced a completely alien element into Vedic culture and there would be no parallels in the Celtic culture. Babylonian culture derives from two non-Indo-European sources: Sumerian, the oldest recorded language, dating to 3500 BC and unrelated to any other known group, and Hamito-Semitic. Certainly we could not expect parallel cognitive terms and ideas to exist in two diverse branches of Indo-European culture if one of them had been heavily influenced by non-Indo-European learning.

  This area of Celtic studies is only just opening up to scholarship; through it we may discover not only the realities of Celtic cosmology but also how the original Indo-Europeans viewed their universe.

  10

  CELTIC ROAD BUILDERS

  In discussing classical commentaries on the Celtic use of heavy wagons and chariots, Dr Anne Ross observed: ‘That some provision for all this activity and coming and going must have been made in the way of roads is clear; and it is an aspect of Celtic life which cannot simply be ignored.’ Prior to 1970 the evidence for roads was scanty although Dr Ross, myself and several others argued that an efficient network of roads must have existed throughout the ancient Celtic world and that the Romans only improved on it.

  The evidence in classical works was there for the discerning reader. Diodorus Siculus talked about merchants using heavy goods wagons in the Celtic lands. Strabo actually mentions the roads in Narbonensis. Then we have the heavy wagons found among the grave goods of the Celtic princes of the Hallstatt period. It is also significant that many of the words connected with roads and transport in Latin are Celtic loan words. The late Professor Stuart Piggott estimated that there were no fewer than nineteen Celtic words connected with roads and transport adopted into pre-empire Latin. In his study, The Earliest Wheeled Transport, Professor Piggott points to ‘the rich vocabulary of Celtic loan words’ and says:

  The Celtic vehicle words in Latin seemed roughly divisible into two groups, the majority being those absorbed in the language at a relatively early date and then used for a variety of Roman wagons, carriages and two-wheelers; a plausible origin would be among the Cisalpine Gauls.

  When the Celts first swept down the Italian peninsula and won their early victories over the Roman armies, moving vast distances with their war chariots, wagons and other vehicles, they were clearly used to such transport and the road systems required to move it. According to Roman sources, however, the Romans did not begin to build their own road systems until nearly eighty years after the Celts arrived at the gates of Rome. This road building was initiated in 312 BC by Appius Claudius whose first major construction was named after him – the Appian Way.

  The wheel had appeared in prehistory and reached all parts of Europe long before the emergence of the Celts. Through the Bronze Age it had developed from a single cast piece to a hub, usually with eight spokes, set into a wooden curved section in the circumference of the wheel, a felly, made up of two strips bent into the circle with overlapping ends secured in place.

  For the Celts the wheel became a solar symbol. Indeed, from 1500 BC the spoked wheel had become a religious symbol in most northern European societies, particularly as representative of the sun. The Celts often buried models of bronze wheels with their dead, perhaps as a means of lighting their journey to the Otherworld. Wheel models have also been found at Celtic shrines, and the symbol appeared on Celtic warrior amulets, helmets and coins.

  The Celtic wheelwrights created a new and highly sophisticated concept in wheel-making during the seventh century BC. They gave the felly a double thickness. The inner felly was made of a single piece of wood bent into a circle. The outer felly consisted of several separate sections bent into an arc following the curvature of the inner felly. They were then joined with iron clamps. In addition to this, and to make the wheel rigid, the ends of the spokes penetrated the inner and the outer felly and the whole was bound with an iron tyre attached with large-headed nails; the nail heads formed the running surface of the wheel, giving that extra purchase.

  What was particularly intriguing was that this iron tyre was made too small for the wheel but it was then heated. The Celtic smithies knew that iron expanded with heat. Once expanded, it was forced over the wheel and burnt itself into position. On cooling, the iron contracted and bound the wheel tightly.

  The Celts were now able to produce wheels that could carry a range of weapons and chariots far superior to those of their neighbours. Julius Caesar’s preoccupation with the movement of British Celtic heavy war chariots, which initially appeared to his soldiers as the first tanks must have appeared to German infantry in the 1914–18 war, certainly implies the existence of a good road system in Britain. Caesar shows that even his cavalry had difficulty facing the British chariots:

  The cavalry, also, found it very dangerous work fighting the charioteers; for the Britons would generally give ground on purpose and after drawing them some distance from the legions would jump down from their chariots and fight on foot, with the odds in their favour.

  Caesar points out that after his legions had crossed the Thames into the territory of Cassivellaunus, the British king,

  disbanding the great part of his troops, . . . retained only some four thousand charioteers, with whom he watched our line of march. He would retire a short way from the route and hide in dense thickets, driving the inhabitants and cattle from the open country into the woods wherever he knew we intended to pass. If ever our cavalry incautiously ventured too far away in plundering and devastating the country, he would send all his charioteers out of the woods by well-known lanes and pathways [my emphasis] and deliver very formidable attacks, hoping by this means to keep them afraid to go far afield.

  The remains of such chariots hav
e been found in the Parisii graves in Yorkshire. But heavy, iron-tyred chariots could not have been used in the manner that Caesar described without good roads, and evidence for the sophistication of Celtic roads was discovered in the mid-1980s.

  The Corlea bog, near the village of Kenagh, Co. Longford, was at the southern extremity of a raised bog covering an extensive area of central Ireland. While the bogland was being explored by Bord na Móna (the Irish Turf Board) in the early 1980s, traces of a roadway were discovered. It was wooden-based but preserved by the anaerobic conditions. Archaeologists began excavations in 1985 and the timbers from the roadway were sent off for dendrochronological analysis. All the samples pointed to a tree-felling date of 148 BC.

  This was not the first discovery of a Celtic roadway, but it was the first to attract publicity and impinge on the minds of scholars. In fact, in 1957, in Derraghan More, over a kilometre away, a similar roadway had been discovered and a tree-ring date of 156 BC plus or minus nine years was given. It was obvious that both roadways were part of the same major highway, which proved what had been argued for some years – that the ancient Celts were sophisticated road builders but that, because they used the materials which came naturally to hand, the great forests of northern Europe, only in bogland conditions was any evidence of them preserved. Most of the roads had been overlaid by Roman engineers, working with more enduring stone. Everyone had assumed that it was the Romans who had initially constructed these roadways, whereas in fact they were merely strengthening an existing road system laid out by the Celts.

  The Corlea roadway of 148 BC shows that highly sophisticated planning and organisation were needed, together with a massive quantity of timber and a large labour force. Oak and birch were the principal woods used in the construction together with alder, elm, hazel and a few yew trees. Birch formed the substructure, supporting the weight of the upper timbers. Oak planks were put on the birch runners. The roadway was consistently 3–4 metres wide and the oak planks were often carefully adzed to ensure a smooth, flat surface.