Which country did the celts live in?
The Celts were a loose grouping of tribes that lived in an area north of the Alps around the Danube river in central Europe. The Celts began migrating from their Central European homeland around 1000 BC. Over the next few hundred years they spread east and west across Europe. Within 300 years their territory encompassed much of Europe, extending as far as Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) in the east. As the Celtic peoples dispersed throughout Europe, their settlements became increasingly isolated from one another. Meanwhile, the Roman civilization was on the rise in the Mediterranean, driving the Celts further west into Britain and Ireland. The shift westward began around 700 BC and continued into the first two centuries AD, when Roman expansion was at its height. By the way, the term “Celts” was an invention of the 18th century; the name was not used earlier. The idea came from the discovery around 1700 that the non-English island tongues relate to that of the ancient continental Gauls, w
Theories abound on the origin, distribution and identity of this people/s. It was widely believed “they” came from south-western Russia and the Caucasus, during the Bronze Age, spreading west. The word Celt is indeed suspect, and ambiguous. It is possibly more helpful to treat it as a culture, much like the Hellenic culture spread through the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age, but not necessarily by Greeks. Remains of ‘Celts’, place-names, artefacts, have been found from China to Ireland, Galatia in Turkey to Cordoba in Spain. What seems to unite them is: tribalism, chiefs whether male or female (such as the matriarchal Parisii who founded Paris, and emigrated to Britain), cattle rearing and stealing, chariots, close knowledge and use of horses, trousers (which they got from the Scythians), a complex religious attitude involving nature-spirits, gods and goddesses, re-incarnation, oracular heads. Research from chromosomes reveals a number of oddities: in the traditional ‘celtic’ areas of
