Comments by "" (@jboss1073) on "What Does Celtic Even Mean? From the Ancient Celts to the Celtic Nations of Today" video.
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@papayariser It has nothing to do with knowing the Hallstatt region. The "Hallstatt and La Tene are Celtic" theory was only supported on its foundations by three facts, all of which have been refuted beyond doubt:
1. That Herodotus located the Celts in Central Europe "where the Danube river starts" - the refutation is that the source of the Danube hadn't been discovered until much after Herodotus' death, and he and Aristotle after him were under the impression the Danube started in the Atlantic in the same place where the Tartessus started - indeed those two rivers were often talked about in the same breath. Herodotus was therefore actually locating the Celts in Iberia, likely the Celtici, because those were the most prominent Celts "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" which meant the beyond the Strait of Gibraltar on the Atlantic coast of Iberia.
2. That the Celtic city names in Central Europe were the oldest Celtic city names - this turned out not only not to be true but the inverse turned out to be true, namely that the Celtic cities in Central Europe turned out to be among the most recently named ones.
3. That "Nyrax" referred to Norica, in Austria, Central Europe. No linguist actually defends this theory, and the theory's proponent himself said that the phonological evolution here would be a complete exception. Today scholars refer to Sardinia as possessing several places named Nora, Nurac, Nurace, and also their relationship to the Nuraghi, as a more probable cause of the name Nyrax among the Celts.
So there is nothing left that connects at a foundational level the Hallstatt and La Tene people to Celtic. In fact Sims-Williams himself I believe in his paper says their language cannot be discovered yet, and they could have spoken anything at all from around Pannonia, even non-Indo-European languages. It is not know what the Hallstatt and La Tene people spoke, and their technology can no longer be referred to as Celtic.
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@iainmc9859 I said:
"The only people who called themselves Celts are western Iberians and southern French, as per tombstone and pottery evidence."
You said:
"Sorry J Boss, you're wrong."
But let's examine your arguments:
"Plenty of people call themselves Celts, either by nationality, language, perceived ethnicity or DNA analysis. "
I didn't say anything about "call", I said "called". By that I meant in classical history, before Medieval times. British and Irish people only started calling themselves Celts in the 19th century with the Romanticist movement. This movement was rooted in Biblical fanaticism and has no bearing on any scientific reality. The Celtic ancestry of British and Irish people was completely made-up on the flimsy grounds of a linguistic connection which today even linguists no longer defend - the number one textbook on Celtic Languages admit that the Insular languages are too different from the Continental Celtic languages and should hence the Insular Languages should not be called "Celtic", thereby getting rid of the last justification for the Irish and British to get confused as being Celts.
The only people who called themselves Celts by endonym were western Iberians and southern French. This reality can only be changed by further archaeological research, but so far this is it. No pottery with the name "Celt" has been found outside western Iberia and southern France. And both Strabo and Siculus corrected Caesar's characterization of Celts in Gauls to say that actually the Augustan division of Gaul was correct, which assigned Gallia Celtica as a name to Gallia Narbonensis, not Gallia Lugdunensis as Caesar had incorrectly done.
"The question I pose is when an individual or group of people self-define as 'Celtic' and then leave documentary or physical evidence behind. "
The only people who called themselves Celts by endonym were western Iberians and southern French. That is the evidence of self-definition that the Celts left behind. Everyone else was called by other names. It just so happened that the Greeks chose the westernmost peoples, the Celts, in western Iberia and southern France, to generalize the name to all other western peoples as a literary shorthand. However many times they did discern exactly what they meant by Celts and Galatians and then they always said Celts were only in southern France in Gaul, not in northern France, and in Iberia they were "past the Pillars of Hercules" meaning westward of the Strait of Gibraltar meaning western Iberia.
"Specifically I question the accuracy of ancient Greco-Latin sources as defining other cultures as Celtic."
We do not need to believe them, however the corrections of Strabo and Siculus fit perfectly with the endonymic, emic evidence of tombstones, votive altars and personal pottery items all bearing the name "Celt" only found in western Iberia and southern France. That evidence does not come from Greco-Romans, it comes directly from Celtic-speaking tribes who specifically called themselves Celts by personal name and tribal name.
"I have no doubt that what we call Celto-Iberians as falling into this 'other' category and not being Greco-Latins, although that is date subjective as the south of France was a Greco-Latin colony pretty early on. "
If you think that when talking about Celts in Iberia I am talking about Celto-Iberians this only shows your ignorance, unfortunately. Celtiberians or Celto-Iberians were the northeastern Celts in Iberia. They were called Celtiberians by the Greeks, not Celts. The people the Greeks called Celts in Iberia were in western Iberia, modern Portugal and Galicia. This confirms the native evidence of self-identification of those Celts in personal names in their tombstones and personal pottery items in the area of western Iberia. Hence those people were the Celts because we find their own material where they wrote their own names and they wrote "Celti" as their last name and as their tribal name. So we're not talking about Celtiberians, we're talking about the Celts in western Iberia who were never called Celtiberians but only ever Celts both by themselves and by Greco-Romans.
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@iainmc9859 (part 1) Thank you for your very polite answer. I will be thrilled to take the time to tell you my sources.
"only mentioning tombstones and pottery evidence. You need to cite your sources to assert claims that Romanticism was simply Biblical fanaticism"
Okay, so two three things here: tombstone evidence, pottery evidence, biblical romanticism evidence.
Tombstone evidence: Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (simply do a search for the search string "celt" without quotes and you will see the results cluster around Lusitania), Hispania Epigraphica (do the same search), the Antroponimia indigena de la Lusitania romana by Jose Maria Vallejo Ruiz who documents all existing ancient epigraphic onomastic eviddence (i.e. names on tombstone) in Iberia and shows names rooted in "celt-" concentrated speccifically and clearly in Lusitania and becoming weaker the farther from Lusitania, disappearing by Madrid.
Pottery evidence: here are my sources excerpted for your convenience:
"The cognomen Celtus [natively attested in emic items such as personal pottery, in the form of graffito or inscription on pots, pans, combs, etc] is known from the Hispanic provinces as well as from Gallia Narbonensis"
Source: Zandstra, Marenne. Miles Aways From Home. Material culture as a guide to the composition and deployment of the Roman army in the Lower Rhine area during the 1st century AD, ISBN-13: 978-90-77744-00-0, p. 173
"Post cocturam graffiti on ceramics
19. CIILTI [-ii- was an alternative spelling for -e-]
Drag 17 (OF ATEPO), S-66.
Complete graffito, which features the genitive case of Celtus or Celtius. Both names are best known from Spain; the cognomen Celtus is also known from Gallia Narbonensis."
Source: Derks, T., & B. van der Meulen in prep.: ‘The Graffiti on Roman Ceramics and Metal from Velsen’, in: M. Driessen (ed.) in prep. in 2023.
Gallia Narbonensis is southern France, and when looked closely all those "Celti" name occurrences in Hispania are actually mostly in Lusitania and around its immediacies as documented by Jose Mariaa Vallejo Ruiz in his work I cited above.
Biblical romanticism evidence: This is covered in depth and explained completely by Stuart Piggot in his "Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination" book, the first to negatively review the claim that the ancestors of the British and Irish were Celts, and then again by John Collis in his "The Celts - Origins, Myths and Inventions" and also by Simon James in his "The Atlantic Celts - Ancient People or Modern Invention?". All those works show with citations and excerpts that nothing but Celtomania allied with biblicism were the fuel behind the association that Celts had anything to do with Britain and Ireland.
You can more easily see the whole review on this subject here on YouTube, just search: Celts and the End of Roman Britain by John Collis. This understanding is now shared by the President of the International Congress for Celtic Studies, Dr. Patrick Sims-Williams, which see also his paper "An Alternative to 'Celtic from the East' and 'Celtic from the West', 2020" for an authoritative and sweeping review for how Celts are no longer Hallstatt and La Tene either.
Then you say: "neither do you define your source for linguists that do not defend the connection of insularr P&Q Celtic to Gaulish and other transcontinental Celtic languages"
Here is the source and excerpt for your convenience - please read it very carefully, as I tried to give as much context as possible but you will have to deduce some of it, namely that this excerpt is in the middle of talking about the list of features that define so-called Celtic languages, and such list is numbered "14" and its items are "14a", "14b", "14c", and "14d":
"It will be noted that only one of the four strong features in (14c) (viz. particles) is securely attested for Continental Celtic. Although VSO does appear, its status there is uncertain in view of the scanty data, and the less unusual (in Indo-European) order of SOV may be the unmarked order. Mutations and inflected prepositions are seemingly absent.
By the same token, some of the weaker features in (14) (e.g., Ablaut, gender, copula, some tenses, infixed pronouns) are indeed seen in Gaulish or Celtiberian inscriptions. It is altogether curious that the features which, upon a synchronic typological comparison, are the least distinctive for neo-Celtic languages are the only features reasonably demonstrable as shared with the Continental varieties. Is this a result of evidentiary poverty, or have the Insular languages undergone a significant typological shift over the centuries?
Certainly we can see that, compared with the early Celtic languages, the modern languages are far less synthetic and much more analytic in structure. But this is hardly a trend confined to Celtic.
The fact that, on a typological level, the Insular languages seem to possess more traits with one another than they do with the ancient languages of the continent prompts much rumination concerning the interface of our synchronic analytical tools and our diachronic methods, about mechanisms of language contact which could account for the shift, and our understanding of linguistic evolution and processes of language change, which could also account for this development without appeal to outside influence.
The discrepancies among the various models of what is a "Celtic" language point up nagging and complex questions on assumptions forming the foundations of our discipline.
The study of these languages provokes us to find answers. So far, it appears that each of these three approaches to defining celticity has something to offer. Given the strong integrative trend of our age, it is perhaps not too daring to venture a prediction that the most satisfactory model will be one that partakes in proper measure of all three approaches.
Maybe only then will we gain a more comprehensive and adequate picture of what it means to be a Celtic language."
Source: The Celtic Languages, 2nd Edition, 2009, edited by Martin J. Ball and Nicole Mueller.
Then you say you take note of my endonymic evidence from western Iberia and southern France, which is very kind of you to trust that I had the evidence that I could show you upon asking as I believe I am hereby doing - thank you for your kindness. I am not sure we agree here; I was making the double-point that while no one in Britain and Ireland was ever called "Celt" in history outside this linguistics track that started with George Buchanan in 1582 (who incidentally recognized the Celts as the Spaniards and southern French as well), it is also the case that the direct ancestors of only the southern French and the western Iberians did in fact call themselves Celts - and the Lusitanians did so most of anyone else. Here I should jump ahead a bit and recommend you search "celtiberi" without quotes in the two online Epigraphic Databases I mentioned so you can see with your own eyes that indeed the Celtiberi self-identified as Celtiberi, written exactly that way in Roman script and in several of the earlier Iberian scripts. The book by Vallejo Ruiz will also show you the names rooted in Celtiberi- although they are much fewer and I would not recommend buying the book for those references.
(end of part 1)
@iainmc9859 Youtube is censoring and not letting me post my second part of that answer. Please go to pastebin dot com slash wFRsB8kd in order to read it. Thank you
EDIT: I am banned from posting for a day. I will answer your most recent message to me tomorrow.
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