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CHAPTER 1
Early fact and fantasy
Parts of the world of the ancient Celts are first mentioned by two Greek historians Hecataeus of Miletus ( c .560–480 BC ) and Herodotus of Halicarnassus ( c .485–424 BC ). Hecataeus wrote a ‘Description of the Earth’ that only survives in fragments in the work of some later writers. He mentions a Celtic city called Nyrax somewhere in the west, but its location is debated. He also refers to Celtic peoples in France north of the Ligurians who occupied the territory of the Greek colony of Massalia in the south, modern Marseille. Herodotus is equally brief in his ‘Histories’ as far as the Celts are concerned. The known world is divided into three major sections: Africa, which he calls Libya, Asia and India, and Europe (fig. 1.1). In Europe the two major barbarian peoples are the Scythians in the east and the Keltoi or Celts in the west. On the River Danube, which he calls the Ister, he writes that it rises in the land of the Celts near the city of Pyrene and flows through the middle of Europe. The Celts also live beyond the Pillars of Hercules and border on the Kunētes , who are the westernmost inhabitants of Europe. 1 In placing Celtic peoples beyond the Strait of Gibraltar he locates Celts in the Iberian peninsula and these Kunētes or Cynetes in the Algarve region were perhaps not Celtic-speakers but nonetheless were neighbours of Celtic-speaking peoples. The location of the city of Pyrene has been the subject of much discussion but some archaeologists would now equate it with the very wealthy early Iron Age settlement complex at the Heuneburg on the Danube, near Hundersingen, in southern Germany. The identification of the wider Celtic-speaking world would be a slow process and how and when this came about is a convoluted story. The answer to these questions, and the historiography of the Celtic world itself, is complicated. It involves history, archaeology and linguistics, and a vast body of serious scholarship in several languages on every aspect of the subject of Celtic studies. This is also a perilous territory inhabited by a few curious archaeologists, romantic nationalists, neo-pagans, assertive historians and fierce philologists. How did Ireland on the western fringe of Europe become a Celtic country and be seen to be a part of such a wider Celtic world is an equally difficult question. Archaeology is a large part of the story and it is archaeology that holds the likely answer. A century or so ago the solution seemed deceptively simple. In 1928, for instance, the eminent archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister in University College Dublin asserted that the Iron Age was brought about by the immigration of Celtic peoples
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