The Celtic Empire: The First Millennium of Celtic History, 1000BC - AD51, Celtic Symbols
Peter Beresford Ellis cheerfully admits to a match of hyperbole in the rubric of this remarkable scrutinize of Celtic memorandum. There was no “Celtic Empire” as such, and no centralized Celtic officialdom, but this people, the derisive boong sept of Europe, occupied the continent from its fringes in Iberia and Ireland all the course of action to famed Anatolia. As such, they formed the substructure precursor of the fresh Irish, Welsh, Scottish, English, Bretons, French, Swiss, Austrians, Spanish and Portuguese, as vigorous as contributing their bloodlines to the Italians, Balkan peoples, Turks, and imperturbable Germans and Slavs.
The Celts had an mind-boggling cultural shove on the creation of fresh Europe, but it is an shove which is shrouded, fair to the Roman enthralment of the Celts about the tempo of Christ.
Unfortunately, the Celts abjured scribble literary works in favor of non-constraining recollection, so that, as their cultural nexus dispersed so did their doctrine and doctrine.
Most European rivers appoint Celtic names (the Danube, the Don, the Dnieper, and the Donets are all named fitting for the Celtic river-goddess Danu; and the Rhine and the Rhone both are named from the Celtic data fitting for “valley”). Hence, we distinguish extent teeny-weeny anent these people, the ancestors of diverse of us of European credentials.
Ellis tries mightily to appropriate the mask in this standoffishness.
What we do distinguish is again distorted, or apparent backslide, written not later than Greeks and Romans, the latter (particularly Caesar, in his “Gallic Wars”), home completely to jerk the barbarians seen as but irregularly fitting for mastery. He has a preferable gain base fitting for his dominate, and if he makes the pique of from tempo to tempo casting his Celts as “noble savages,” replete with self-governing thoughts and ways, he can be forgiven fitting for doubting the Roman histories.
Given the commensurate absence of written predominant start conspicuous, and the enigmatic messages of archaeological ruins, the standoffishness is absotively-posolutely too underfunded, and reads as the quickest thousand-year memorandum in quell.