Comments by "" (@jboss1073) on "The Celts through The Eyes of The Romans: Blue War Paint? Phalanx?" video.

This is the wrong exposure as it is based on outdated information gleaned from popular sources.
3
Metatron is still clinging to outdated theories that Hallstatt and La Tene were Celtic because Herodotus did not know where the Danube truly started. He is woefully uninformed and simply trusting popular sources instead of listening to the President of the International Congress for Celtic Studies, Dr. Patrick Sims-Williams in his paper "An Alternative to 'Celtic from the East' and 'Celtic from the West'" where the thoroughly refutes any notion that Celts were Central Europeans and connected to Hallstatt and La Tene. The people who called themselves Celts were Lusitanians (shocking, I know) and the Celtici tribes all around them, encompassing all of Iberia except for Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior. They had trading posts and settlements in southern and central France. That is it for the Celts.
2
This video is completely confused and totally wrong about what the Celts are and who they were. Metatron, stick to Roman and Greek things, because you are way outdated in your knowledge of the Celts.
1
The British were never Celts.
1
@Inquisitor_Vex Tell me how they were Celts, then.
1
@Inquisitor_Vex Not even close. There was no tribe called Celts in Gaul that we can attest to directly, only indirectly via Strabo, the Keltai (whom he says are the tribes after whom all of the Keltoi were generally called by the Greeks). However, people who called themselves Celts did exist during the Iron Age, numbering close to one million total. Now tell me how the British were ever Celts.
1
@Inquisitor_Vex Quoting Julius Caesar to find out who the Celts were is the equivalent of quoting Hitler to find out who the Jews were. Julius Caesar's report De Bello Gallico was dismissed by Gaius Asinius Pollio as "put together without much regard for the truth". Both Strabo (Geographia 4.1.1, 4.1.14, 4.4.1) and Diodorus Siculus (V.32.1) cricitized Julius Caesar's political division of Gaul on the grounds of not accounting for ethnicities, and both said the correct division was the Augustan division of their times, which instead of "Gallia Lugdunensis = Gallia Celtica" had the correct association "Gallia Narbonensis = Gallia Celtica", and both Strabo and Siculus confirm that in all of Gaul, there were Celts only in Gallia Narbonensis. Strabo even says the Belgae, contrary to how Julius Caesar divided them, actually started from Armorica and populated all the northern coast of Gaul. This confirms recent genetic tests that found out that Gaul was genetically British in the north half and Iberian in the southern half (Source: Origin and mobility of Iron Age Gaulish groups in present-day France revealed through archaeogenomics). "Ironic you say “not even close” and then proceed to make the exact argument I guessed you would. I.E. “the celts were never in Britain” / “the people in Britain didn’t call themselves celts”." I had already said that before. I am still waiting for you to show how the British were ever Celts. "Celtic tribes" as the concept you used in your sentence did not exist at the time, so you're being anachronistic there. Irish and Welsh were also never said to be Celtic. Try again.
1
@Inquisitor_Vex It's not a "word", it's a name, a tribal name, a personal name, native to a certain ethnicity, so please do not culturally appropriate it nor offensively suggest it's a mere word for dictionaries to define. Dictionaries don't define who the Jews are; likewise they cannot define who the Celts are. And the notion that people can be called Celts because they speak a Celtic language has already been refuted by John Collis who suggests that by that line of thinking, Romance speakers would be Romans. Throughout history, languages have been named after their speakers, not the speakers named after the language they spoke. Hence why the Romans never considered calling themselves Latini - only the Latini tribe were Latins, and the Romans spoke their language. Try again.
1
@Inquisitor_Vex Right, you cannot. No one can. Because the British and the Irish and the Welsh are not Celts and never were Celts. QED.
1
@Inquisitor_Vex I am only a messenger. Who says so is Patrick Sims-Williams, the current President of the International Congress of Celtic Studies, which sets the course for Celtic Studies programs across universities worldwide. You are simply repeating outdated talking points from popular literature. But to understand the Celts you need to know the latest conclusions that the most authoritative academics have come to. Patrick Sims-Williams is an admitted "Celtosceptic" and as such he agrees that the British, Irish and Welsh were never Celts. John Collis himself explains everything I am saying, in an academic lecture you can find on YouTube, entitled Celts and the End of Roman Britain. So please spare me the childish "if you say so" remarks and kindly admit that in this case you simply had outdated, popular information that is not up-to-date with current authoritative mainstream Celtic scholars.
1
@Inquisitor_Vex Hold on, that is not correct. The theory he presented is the one currently made mainstream in all of Celtic Studies by being the one held by its current president - that is, the current president of the International Congress of Celtic Studies. It is not about believing it. The only reason "Celts" and "Britons" were initially erroneously associated with each other is because the first scholars rushed through reading a Herodotus' passage on the Celts and misunderstood him to be locating the Celts at the true source of the Danube river. No academic today defends that to be the correct reading of Herodotus anymore. Instead, it is clear that the Romans only discovered the source of the Danube much after Herodotus died, and that in his passage he is assuming that the Danube starts in the Pyrenees, in order for his point about that river dividing the whole European continent in half to work. Otherwise, it doesn't. Plus, the phrasing is clear in that he is talking about the westernmost parts of Europe, hence he could not be talking about the true source of the Danube, which is in Central Europe. And finally, he phrases it so as to anchor Celts knowingly as the westernmost people except for the Cynetes, and then says that the river Danube starts from Celtic lands, i.e. not the contrary, which would be saying that he knows where the Danube starts and that the Celts live nearby; in other words, he was using the Celts being westernmost to located the source of the Danube, and not using the source of the Danube to locate the Celts. Will you please read Patrick Sims-Williams' paper "An alternative to 'Celtic from the East' and 'Celtic from the West'"? If only you would read it, you would quickly understand. Also, there were two more reasons to conflate Britons and Celts, but they are much more minor than the one I explained above. They are also explained in Sims-Williams' paper I suggested to you above. But for completeness, I will quickly summarize them. The first other reason is the name Nyrax which scholars thought was Heuneberg, on the basis of Noreia sharing N and R with Nyrax. However, even Dechelette said that is not a good enough reason to consider Nyrax to be Noreia, because actually the vowels matter most. And nowadays with Nura, Nurra, Norace and other related places in Sardinia, not to mention the context of the passage in which Nyrax is cited, makes today's scholars confident that Nyrax was in Sardinia. Sardinia was also home to the Celsitani tribe, of PIE root *cels- which is the same as *celt and used in Iberia interchangeably with it. There were also continental Celtic tribes called Serdi and other Sardinian-cognate names. The second reason was the existence of Celtic place names in Central Europe. However, all of those turned out to be too recent to prove any connection with any source population, much less Celts. All I am saying is that Celt is an ethnic name which belongs to southwestern Europeans, not an academic word with which the Britannic peoples can shower themselves in, as they do not have any historical connection with it whatsoever. Ancient people knew the name "Celts" at the same level as any other tribal name, like "Atrebates". The Romans mostly used the name Celt to refer to Iberian peoples - for Gauls and northern Italian tribes, the name Gallic, Gallian, Gallia was used. And I have already explained how Julius Caesar's Gallia Celtica was incorrectly named as per Strabo and Siculus. The Greeks also mainly use Keltoi, Keltikoi for southwestern Europeans, Iberians and southern French, while using Galatai for northern France, Germany and eastern Continental Europe. Also, Eratosthenes, Ephorus and Pseudo-Scymnus, all called "Celtica" the western part of Iberia, "outside the Pillars of Hercules". Finally, George Buchanan in 1582, the pioneer in coining the term "Celtic languages", suggested we should call the larger term "Gallic languages". He also said that the Celts are the Iberians because the Keltoi lived in southern France and they were related to the Celtici in Iberia, whereas he said the Britannic peoples were Belgian as the Belgae lived both there and in northern France. Hence he correctly identified what the genetic study I linked you concluded about northern France being Britannic and southern France being Celtic/Iberia in genes.
1
It is all wrong. Hallstatt and La Tene are not even associated with Celts anymore.
1
The information on this video is completely outdated.
1
@crusaderACR Read Patrick Sims-Williams's paper entitled "An Alternative to 'Celtic from the East' and 'Celtic from the West'". He is the current President of the International Congress of Celtic Studies. Long story short: The British, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, Bretons, were never called Celts historically. The same Greeks who lived among the Celts of Iberia and southern France also visited Britannia and Hibernia (Ireland) and they never identified the people there as Celts, even though they sometimes called even the Basques and Lusitanians Celts. The British, Irish, etc, only started calling themselves Celts with the Romanticism movement of the 18th century which had lasting influences in academia up until today. These Romanticist ideas were usually associated with Biblical origins - hence the idea that the British are Celts is inherently tied with British Israelism - as well as with Nordic people - hence the idea that the British are Celts is inherently tied with Nordicism. The now-known erroneous association between Celts and Hallstatt and La Tene came from only three facts, all of which have come to be refuted: (1) Herodotus was misread to have located the Celts "at the source of the Danube river" which is correctly in modern-day southern Germany, when instead he said the opposite, i.e. he was trying to locate not the Celts by referring to the river Danube, but instead he was trying to locate the source of the river Danube by referring to the Celts. In other words, he had the location of the Celts secure in his mind, and the location of the source of the Danube was the thing in question which he was guessing where it started. Hence why he says with certainty that the Celts were the [1] westernmost people, [2] living beyond (western of, from the perspective of Greek sailors) the Straits of Gibraltar, and [3] neighbors of the Cynetes (who lived in modern-day southern Portugal), hence locating the Celts with 3 separate references without needing the source of the river Danube to locate them, and locating the Celts in Lusitania where currently the highest number and density of individuals named Celti have been found in local inscriptions, where it appears over a hundred times and which appears nowhere else more than once, and which also shows the idea of who was a Celt was not based on what language they spoke, but on blood relations. Therefore, Herodotus was not locating the Celts in southern Germany, but instead he was incorrectly locating the source of the Danube river in the Pyrenees (he says "Pyrene" also incorrectly), "in the land of the Celts" which he just described to be Iberia with 3 other references as I explained above. (2) the "Celtic town of Nyrax" in one of the old Greek texts was incorrectly assumed to be the old town of Noreia in modern-day Austria. However, it turned out to be a town in Sardinia, again keeping with the theme of Celts being southwestern Europeans like southern French and western Iberians. In Sardinia there are many towns called Nura, Nora, Nurac, and Nurace. (3) the Celtic place names in southern Germany and Austria were thought to be among the oldest, thereby proving the origin of the Celts to be there; however, those place names turned out to actually be among the most recent, from a Roman-time eastern migration of southeastern French Gauls. Finally, the so-called Celtic languages were named incorrectly based on the now-known wrong conception that the modern-day Bretons are the direct descendants of the Gauls when in fact they are Medieval-Age British transplants from Britain. Indeed, the so-called Celtic languages were first called "Gallic languages" and if this had remained so, the British, Irish etc would have wrongly associated their identity with Gauls instead of wrongly associating it with Celts. As well, being a speaker of a language family does not make one that name of that language - for instance, being a Romance speaker does not make the Iberians or the Romanians "Romans". Just like speaking Latin did not make the Romans "the Latini" - instead, they knew they spoke the language of the tribe of the Latini, showing that language names came from people names, not the other way around. Hence, speaking a Celtic language cannot make the British, Irish etc "Celts" not only because Romance speakers are not "Romans", but because whatever language the Irish speak has to be called a word derived from the name of the Irish, hence "Irish" is also the name of their version of Gaelic, and should also be the name of their language family - something like Britanno-Hibernian would be fine. People name languages; languages do not name people. I tried my best to summarize why the name "Celts" does not belong in any way, shape or form to the British and Irish etc according to the latest research which I cited above and invited you to read.
1
The Insular peoples were never called Celts.
1