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  1. #19
    EB Nitpicker Member oudysseos's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Irish are Not Celts

    Riastradh, I have gone over Blitzkriegs posts and I cannot see anywhere that he 'attacked' you. Indeed, until you called him an ass, I thought that this thread was both very interesting and refreshingly polite.
    And really, you haven't overcome the objections to your original position. You said that the Irish aren't Celts. Well then, who are they? Gaels, you say. O.K., who are the Gaels? Celtic-speaking peoples.
    In fact, 'Gael' might have been considered an insulting description by the 3rd century BCE people of Ireland, as it appears to derive from Guoidel in Old Welsh, meaning "pirate", or "raider". Perhaps the best description for the Irish in the EB time period would be 'Scoti' or 'Attacoti'. Both appellations are from a later period than EB, but still might be more accurate than 'Gael' or 'Celt'.

    You said their Warrior culture had nothing to do with Celtic tribes. Since there are no primary written sources from Ireland in the period in question, this is really a moot point. But you do have to expect to be challenged on assertions and assumptions, and it is not an attack on you personally to ask that you support a statement like
    nor are they thought to be a true celtic people by the majority of scholars, scientists and archaeologists today
    by quoting and/or citing some of these scholars, scientists and archaeologists.

    For example, Barry Cunliffe, whose authority on the Celts is generally conceded, has theorized that the
    profusion of archaeological evidence for exchange relations among the different Atlantic-facing sectors of the European coast, including Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia and Portugal in the late Bronze Age, 1200-200 BC, indicates that 'Atlantic Celtic' may have grown up as a lingua franca, or perhaps an elite language, among the various communities of the eastern seaboard
    (quoted in Empires of the Word, Nicholas Ostler). Cunliffe is an eminent archaeologist, has done work in Ireland, has found Celtic artifacts here, some of which are in the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street. This isn't directly about 'Warrior Culture' but does speak to the identification of the people in Ireland. Cunliffe, one of those scholars, scientists and archaeologists you mention, thinks that they were Celtic speaking.

    Another interesting aspect of Insular Celtic is its possible relationship with Punic. From Empires of the Word

    Another hypothesis is ... the theory of Celtic spread by navigation along the Atlantic coast, by noting that major partners in this network, for most of the first millennium BC, were the Phoenicians, many of them (specifically the Carthaginians) based in North Africa, and quite capable of maintaining links along the whole Mediterranean. Now it so happens that in the North African language families, Egyptian, Semitic, and Berber, there are direct parallels for at least seventeen of these curious characteristics of British and Irish Celtic, characteristics that are quite unparalleled in any Indo-European language, let alone their Celtic cousins, and which are indeed extremely rare globally. If Celtic was indeed spread as a coastal lingua franca, these North Africans, in trade and exchange, would have been among its speakers, and effective in moulding it.
    But there is no direct linguistic evidence for any of this at the moment: as to the spread of Gaukish across most of Europe, and the origins of Celtiberian, and the Celtic languages of the British Isles, we are in the realm of speculation and reconstruction.
    Here is an overview of the consensus of academic, scholary and archaeological opinion on Insular Celtic culture by D.W. Harding, The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 6, chapter 9.

    By contrast with continental Europe, our knowledge of the early Iron Age in Britain derives almost exclusively from the study of settlements and fortifications rather than cemeteries. In consequence, though the evidence for settlement patterns and economy, particularly in southern England, is substantial, the material assemblages from these sites reveal a limited range of types and a markedly insular character compared to the extensive cemetery inventories of Central Europe. Cross-channel connexions are none the less attested from the late Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age, the Channel itself serving as a natural route for trade and exchange rather than as a barrier to cultural communication. Population movements are notoriously difficult to substantiate archaeologically, but linguistic evidence alone requires the introduction of Celtic-speaking people into Britain and Ireland by a date which can hardly be later than the middle of the first millennium B.C. A simple equation between areas of Celtic settlement and the distribution of La Tene artefact types is plainly untenable here, since this would effectively exclude large parts of Scotland and Ireland which none the less have abundant evidence of Iron Age occupation. In Ireland, the contrast between the distribution of La Tene metalwork in the northern half of the country (coincident broadly with the distribution of beehive rotary querns) and its relative absence in the south west, where later prehistoric settlement is attested notably in small, stone forts (cashels, cathairs), has given rise to the use of the term 'non-La Tene' Iron Age for this variant of insular Celtic culture. The origins of Ireland's Celtic settlement are contentious, since the surviving linguistic evidence is Q-Celtic, predominantly if not exclusively, by contrast to P-Celtic in Gaul and southern Britain. Scottish Gaelic is generally reckoned not to have been transmitted across the North Channel until the invasions of the Scotti around the fourth century A.D. and thereafter, but it is not impossible that a Q-Celtic language was introduced earlier into Atlantic Scotland along a west coast route from Iberia and south-western Ireland. In archaeological terms, such an Atlantic cultural axis would be essentially non-La Tene, so that La Tene metalwork in Ireland would need to be explained as a separate introduction, perhaps involving reciprocal influences with northern England and southern Scotland, but not necessarily requiring population movements on any significant scale.
    My emphases throughout. Clearly, the Irish are considered to be 'Celtic' by scholars, scientists and archaeologists by at least the EB time period, even if they are not related to the Gauls. In fact I retract my earlier suggestion about Scotti: Gael, Scotti and Attacoti are designations that cannot be firmly tied to the 3rd century BCE, no matter how appropriate they might be for later time periods. 'Celt', however, by being general, subsumes all of these appellations, and is therefore the best name for the Celtic speaking people of Ireland in 272 BCE.


    P.S. I'm not dogmatic about Irish origins just 'cos I'm Irish. I'm sticking with Celt 'cos it seems the best general description, not 'cos my world will collapse if I can't call myself a Celt. I mean, who cares? we're all homo sapiens at the end of the day.
    Last edited by oudysseos; 12-08-2008 at 11:59.
    οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
    Even as are the generations of leaves, such are the lives of men.
    Glaucus, son of Hippolochus, Illiad, 6.146



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