In Our Time - The Celts

Episode Date: February 21, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Celts. Around 400 BC a great swathe of Western Europe from Ireland to Southern Russia was dominated by one civilisation. Perched on the North Western fringe of this vast Iron Age culture were the British who shared many of the religious, artistic and social customs of their European neighbours. These customs were Celtic and this civilisation was the Celts.The Greek historians who studied and recorded the Celts' way of life deemed them to be one of the four great Barbarian peoples of the world. The Romans wrote vivid accounts of Celtic rituals including the practice of human sacrifice - presided over by Druids - and the tradition of decapitating their enemies and turning their heads into drinking vessels.But what were the Celts in Britain really like? Was their apparent lust for violence tempered by a love of poetry and beautiful art? How far should we trust the classical historians in their writings on the Celts? And what can we learn from the archaeological remains that have been discovered in this country? With Barry Cunliffe, Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford University; Alistair Moffat, Historian and author of The Sea Kingdoms - The Story of Celtic Britain and Ireland; Miranda Aldhouse Green, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wales.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, around 400 BC, a great sway of Western Europe, from Ireland to southern Russia, was people by one civilization,

perched on the north-western fringe of this vast Iron Age culture with the British, who shared many of the religious, artistic and social customs of their youth. European neighbours. These customs were Celtic, and those who made up this civilization were the Celts. The Greek historians who studied and recorded the Celts way of life considered them to be one of the four great barbarian peoples of the world. The Romans wrote vivid accounts of Celtic rituals, including the practice of human sacrifice, provided, presided over by druids, and the tradition of decapitating their enemies and turning their heads into drinking vessels. But it seems that

their apparent lust for violins was accompanied by a love of poetry and beautiful. beautiful art. How far should we trust written sources of the classical historians in their writings on the Celts? And what can we learn from the archaeological remains that have been discovered in this country? With me to discuss the Celts in Britain are Barry Cunleff, Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford University, an author of, among others, facing the ocean. Alistamoffett, writer and historian, an author of the Sea Kingdoms, the story of Celtic, Britain and Ireland, and Miranda Aldous Green, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wales, Newport, and author of dying for the gods.

Barry Cunle, let's start at the beginning. What do we mean by the term Celts and where did that term itself, that name come from? Well, I think what we've got to do is to realize that the term Celt means something different every time it's used, really. And if we start from the beginning, the first time we see the word Celtes used,

it's being used by the Greeks, to describe barbarians in northwest Europe, basically. What age we talk about it? The Greek's about the 5th, 4th century is BC. Yeah. They're saying that those people up there are barbarians. They're different from the ones in Africa. They're different from the ones in the east.

So let's call them Celts. So it's a general term for northern barbarians. So just a thing, does Celt mean anything? Does the Greek word Celtoid? Does it mean anything? It can. It's variously interpreted, but it probably just means the sort of other peoples or something of that sort.

It's very difficult to get at that one. And when we come on a bit later, people like Julius Caesar are being a bit more specific. They're saying in Gaul there are people who call themselves Celts and they actually, he gives some geography, they live more or less between the Garangirand Axis and the Seine. So they're sort of central Gaulish. But what no one ever does is to say that people who live in Britain are called Celts.

What we can say is that, as you said in your introduction, there is this shared belief system and shared belief system and shared value system over large slabs of Europe from, well, from the east of Europe right across to Ireland. And languages are similar across those areas. But we can't say that every one of those groups was called Celt. When the Greeks called them one of the four great barbarians, what did they mean by the term barbarians?

Is this just non-Greek or non-Roman? Did it take us any further? because as we're going to discover, they're far from barbaric in the normal painted savage sense, although the normal painted savage comes into the description sense. Indeed. No, I think what the Greeks were meaning were people who didn't speak Greek, people who made these unrecognizable sounds like bar, bar, bar, you know,

it's a derogatory term, people who are other than us, basically. And that's what we get the whole time in the classical writers, the Greek and Roman writers, it's the stereotype of the other. So we are stable, civilised people, ordered people. They are the opposite. They are unstable. There is no order there. And so on.

So it's like a caricature. What the classical writers tell us is the caricature of the Celts, but like all caricatures, there's an element of truth in it. So up there, meaning up from Greek and Rome, I mean, in northern north-western Europe, there are these people called, but we're not talking about a huge, unified lot. We're talking about lots of different tribes, aren't we?

Yes, we're talking about a very large number of different tribes, hundreds of different tribes, and we know the names of some of these different tribes, and some are more like each other than others. But Celt is a good general purpose term for lumping them all together and saying something of value about the similarity of people up there north of the Alps. Miranda Alhaus Green, Barry Connolly have said that, as referred to the dispute it may be or difficult it may be about referring easily to the British as Celts.

Could you develop that? Yes, I think so. I think what Barry's getting at is something which is very true and that is that if we look at the classical writers of whom about 30 or 40, you might mention the ancient Britons, there is no source which actually mentions the Britons as Celts. I mean, Caesar, for example, writing in the mid-first century BC,

calls them Britannie. They're never called Ketani. Celts. Caesar does say that he noticed great similarities of attitude and customs between the South East British and the Gauls, but that's as far as we get in terms of getting close to being able to call the Britain's Celts. So there is this problem. People who are arguing against the use of the term Celts are worried that by calling Britain's Celts and everybody else Celts in Europe, you're kind of ironing out differences and getting away from the fact that there's tremendous regional diversity in Europe

from about the 5th century BC or in fact of course even earlier but there are so many differences that some people wonder whether it's at all useful to use this blanket term because it is in a sense homogenising the past and I think that's what causes the problem the other thing about calling Britain's Celts

is that that opens the way for people who wish to make a direct link between past Celts and present Celts because the term Celtic is used for people living on the western periphery in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and so on, and because Celtic languages are known about and people identify themselves as Celts, you know, living in these peripheries now, it's easy then to elide backwards to say, oh yes, the British Celts, they were there in the Iron Age, they're the same Celts as the Welsh and the Irish and the Scottish now, and that of course is nonsense. but the use of that blanket term tends to make that kind of homogenising process,

which I think is academically a bit suspect. Well, where does that take us then? I mean, are we talking now of the British, when I say British Celts, am I talking incorrectly, or am I talking about a degree of difference too far, as it were, the finch that became a non-finch in Darwinian sense? You hop over the channel and suddenly they're having this much the same sort of traditions and we find very similar this, that and the other, but they're not Celts.

Because Caesar and the other 39 classical writers don't call them Celts, they are not Celts. I mean, do we stop the discussion and start talking about something else, or can we still use the word Celtic to get us into this? Can you briefly on that? Because Alistair is champing to get in. Yes. I mean, all of your, I mean, yeah, fine.

I think that the term can be used. I think we need to be sure of what we're talking about. We need to be sure of our definitions. I think it's fine to use the term Kelt for the Iron Age past and even for Iron Age Britain. As long as we know what we're saying, what I think we do need to be clear about is that if we're using the term Kelt for the Iron Age past in Britain, that if we're using the same term to discuss 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st century identity in the north and west of Europe, we're not necessarily talking about the same thing. Well, I mean, this programme rarely comes as close to home as the 18th, 1927.

That was a very, very difficult water for us to get into. Can we just flip back 2,000 years? Well, we're much more comfortable. Alistair, what is your, well, not reaction, but what's your view on this British Celtic? What I want to do is to clear up a sort of platform. Sure. Because we're going to discuss the British Celts,

so we need to call them something else, but talk about what was going on then around the turn of the millennium from 2,300 BC to 2,300 AD, that kind of thing. I mean, I'd be happy to call them Hobbits or Daleks or Captain Scarlett and the Misterons. I don't really care. But what I think is going on here is a very interesting historical three-card trick. I've looked at two and a half thousand years

of Celtic history in Britain and Ireland and basically in a rapid sketch the pattern is dead straightforward. Military defeat, colonisation, marginalisation, pastiche, led by Walter Scott, a fellow borderer, shortbread tins, tartan and all the rest of it. And now, hey guys, we don't exist.

So that's what's going on, it seems to me. It's a more subtle removal of our history than in the past, but it's a removal nonetheless. Miranda's contention that to talk of British Celts in 1 AD and 2001 AD as being unconnected and characterising that as nonsense, I think is amazing, frankly. Of course they're Celts. Of course they share cultural coherence all down the west of Britain.

The most important and interesting thing, I think, from the point of view, my point of view in this discussion is that these languages still exist. They don't exist anywhere else in Europe, Celt-Iberian, Lepontic and Gawlish, All these European Celtic languages have died. They're still alive here. Related languages are still alive here. The Scottish Calic, the Welsh, Manx and Cornish. And they hold inside them two and a half thousand years of history.

There's no question about that. They're the most important surviving artifact, if you like. And the difficulty, of course, is that so few people who claim that the Celts don't exist don't understand these languages. They don't read them, they haven't learned them, and so on. So in a way it's easy to claim that. So I would rather, as you say, get over that, put it to one side. We'll call them Hobbits or whatever you like.

No, no, I'm not on to Hobbits, so let's take it. But my point is dead straightforward. These peoples have a great deal in common, not only their languages, not only their geography, but also their history. And that history has had a great deal in common with itself, I suspect, for a very long time. Would you like to come back on that brief, either of your brief? I'd quite like to come back on language, because I, I'd like to come back on language, because I, I, I think I share your view on this, that the people who speak a common language

are likely to have a common identity. So I'm very happy with that. But we talk about the Celtic languages in the West. We've got to remember what we're talking about. We're talking about a concept that developed in 1700 by the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. We're not talking about anything of reality. He could have called the languages of the West.

He could have called them at Lashmolan Museum. which I think we would have done now rather than Celtic. He only called them Celtic because he was making a preconceived jump. And we call them Celtic now. Fine. There are languages which were spoken by the Celts in Central Gaul. So I've got no problem with that. But we just have to be slightly careful about how we use our arguments.

I don't disagree with you at all. But you can see where these post-imperial jitters come from. Sure, sure, sure. I can indeed. Here we are. having our history our name taken away from us. No thank you.

No, I would go back to the point we started with that the Celts are constantly being reinvented and remodeled. What we have now in our concept of Atlantic Celts is the most recent remodeling of a concept that started 1,000 years BC. Can I just move you...

Say what you want and then I'll ask my question. I was just going to say a little bit about language because I mean one of the problems about languages is that it's difficult to trace them back into prehistory. But we do have sets of place names normally encapsulated in Roman writings and geographies and so on, which do show that over this vast swath of northern Europe, there are commonalities of place names which you get popping up again and again, whether you're in Ireland, whether you're in Scotland, whether you're in Gaul or Eastern Europe or even in parts of Turkey. Places like the Nemeton names, the Nemer.

meaning sanctuary or sacred place, Briga, Dunum, these are fortified places. These you do find in Spain, in France, in Eastern Europe and so on. And that is... And in Cumbent, indeed. And that, of course, is a very unifying thing. So, I mean, in a way, we can take language backwards. What we can't do necessarily is to say a great deal

about what people were speaking in the 5th century BC. We just don't really have the evidence. Okay, we're going to stop that for Bromit, if you don't mind. Can I just before, just getting, finishing off this first part about the Cal's Miranda, and then briefly, there is, we're going to come to sort of rather caricature descriptor, stereotypical descriptions we may think of them. But this, one of the things interested me, I might have learned it at school or something, but until I went back I didn't, really, is the technological authority that they had.

We're talking about people who worked wrought iron, which was difficult to work, and so on. the technological basis of their society gives them, in my view, a kind of force that they stop being scavenging tribes, just jumping on horses every 10 seconds? They are tremendously sophisticated in terms of the technology, both in terms of iron and wrought iron, and in terms of art styles. And art is, I think, one of the most important keys to trying to get a handle on unified groups of people. the art styles, the techniques of working bronze and iron

are absolutely superb, even noted by the Romans, as being absolutely second to none. I'd just like to continue this, the technology. We'll come to the out in a minute. This does put a different cast on them. If you have a technology, if you have to cut down all this woodland, you have to make all this stuff, you have very, very highly skilled people.

You have to have settlements in a very strong way. This is where the stuff is made. and so on. It's a different, for many people this thing, I think, well, as I did, vaguely unaware of all that. Oh, there's no doubt it's a sophisticated culture, and I think it's that sophistication in the production of the items that Miranda mentioned, which actually drives the expansion

and the spread of these languages, in my view. I think that chaotic languages spread through trade, through the fact that these people who spoke these languages in central Europe had the grip of this technology and were able to take with it their language. I mean, it's a process of acculturation, if you like, that goes on. I mean, I guess a good analogy is the internet. I remember

a piece in the Independent a couple of years ago, Rahmch McCray, talked about English being driven by the internet. And I think to a degree, chaotic languages in Europe were driven by this metal technology, which was so advanced. I mean, they made stunning weapons. I mean, what's the slashing sword called? The Spatha

and so on, which has a razor edge to it because they can hone it to an amazing sharpness. Now, if you're a cavalry warrior and you've got a slashing sword that will cut like a razor, well, you want one. Well, there's masses of illustrations of swords in your books, Barry, aren't there? Which are wonderful. Can I just take up Alice's point and come back to the swords

in a moment? Absolutely right. I would argue that the Celtic language evolved as very much a lingua franca for trade and exchange and not just trade and exchange of materials, but of ideas and technologies and belief systems.

And that's why the language as a unifier has got to be seen alongside technology and belief systems. Can we just stick with the technology? Yeah, okay, technology. One thing that I love of Celtic work is the barrel. Now, just a little bit of technology, to be able to shrink an iron hoop onto a barrel

is a pretty G-whisbet of technology and to be able to do that onto a spoked wheel. And they could do that to perfection as far back as the 6th century BC. And the chances are, that a thing like the barrel was actually invented by the Celts. Yes. Now, we have, let's...

Can we have a sort of general agreement that we'll call the British Celts, the British Celts? We'll call them the British Celts. Is that around the table? Do we have a little consensus here? All right, all right. We have one vote for, one... We have an all right, kind of a bit of a shake of a head and one four.

Well, mine's got inverted comments around. Yes. Yeah, well, I'll call them British Celts and... Absolutely. All right. Now, we're talking about tribal lives here in these islands, aren't we, Barry Cullin? Can you give us some idea of the shape and size of the tribes? We only know about the tribes as tribes really from the first century BC,

because it's then that they begin to mint coins and we can find their tribal names and plot the distributions and find the capitals. And they were at that stage really quite small, Colchester, for example, capital of one of the tribes, Catevaloni, more or less Essex and into Hertfordshire. The Atribata is based on Silchester,

pretty well Hampshire with a bit of Berkshire thrown in. It's that sort of thing. What is particularly interesting, I think, is that many of these tribes at that stage map on more or less to the English county. I'm not suggesting continuity, but that there is a unit of government, government there that makes sense.

What size are we talking about? We're talking about 400 people, 4,000 people, 40 people. We're very, very difficult to say. If we just take population as a whole, I think we've underestimated population of the island as a whole. And many of us now would think perhaps 2 million in the Iron Age is not at all excessive. So we might be talking about tens of thousands in some of these slightly larger tribal groups like the Catapalani. And the hierarchical structure, was it, did we have the three-class system, as it were? We can get at this through the archaeology to some extent. If you look at the burials in the southeast of Britain, you can see that there are kingly burials,

you can see that there are rich, rich burials, which might be sort of elite chiefdom burials, and then you can see those lower down with just mirrors or swords in and those lower down still. You can recognise in the burial evidence. Those who are scattered to the winds. Left where they tell. Literally scattered to the winds.

But four or five sort of grades you can recognise in the archaeological evidence. So this is likely to be a reflection of a fairly structured society. And the Roman writers looking back on this period, talk about kings and warring kings and so on. And some of these people actually do call themselves kings on the coins. One thing that struck me about Caesar's remarks, Emerander Othus Green, was that he said,

common folk commit themselves in slavery to the nobles. and one of the three great exports of the British Guards were dogs, slaves and wool, wool and cloaks. So did he find that unusual that common folk committed themselves in slavery to the novels? Was this an unusual thing he found him on the British Council? I think Caesar is probably talking from the perspective of being a patrician Roman. And clearly he belonged to a slave-owning society, that of Rome. and when he came to Britain, he found, and when he came to Gaul, he found a strictly hierarchical society where anybody who counted,

they were the knights or the druids, the craftsmen, but everybody else was in an almost sort of surf-like state. And I think he found that that was strange. Interestingly, archaeologically, we've got quite a lot of evidence for slave ownership. We have gang chains, for example, from late Iron Age sites in North Wales, in Southeast Britain. slave gang chains, iron chains for five or six people at a time. So the chain gang goes back to these?

Absolutely, absolutely. Working for the chain gang? Indeed. Seeing that in Celtic. Yep. And we actually have a wonderful picture from the National Museum where Cardiff students were put into one of the slave gang chains

to see how they actually worked in operation. Very good. And it was very interesting to find how immediately you're in a gang chain, your head goes down, you become a kind of non-person, you become just a body, as it were. And it's unbelievable how defeated, how humiliated being in a gang chain makes you, because you have to behave like everybody else,

you have to be in exactly the same position as everybody else. And that kind of gang chain effect, I think you're also finding in some of the Iron Age bog bodies that you get in Northern Europe, including Britain, with ropes around their necks. Again, it's a humiliation thing. And so this idea of degradation, slavery, contempt is something which I think we can find in the material culture and Caesar. Going from heads down to heads off, Alastair Moffat, there was a great culture of decapitation in battle. One of the first things, not one of the first things, but one of the things the Roman writers observed that after great battles,

when the Gauls, the Gaulish Celts swept him, they decapitated their enemies, they scarred the skulls, they gilded them sometimes, turned them at a... They put them in fences to ward off their enemies, ghosts, skulls, and so on. What was that all about? And how did it fit in with the druidical aspect of the religion? I think the reason that they decapitated their enemies was somehow to capture something of their soul, to possess them absolutely. And as you say, many of these heads...

They thought that the head contained the soul. Yes, I mean, and many of these heads are preserved in oil and so on, and there are tales of Celtic chieftains refusing to give up the head of a defeated warrior for many pounds of gold and so. on. It's not something that's exclusive to Celtic society. The Vikings did this too. And there are stories of warriors right into the Middle Ages in the north of Scotland tying heads to their saddles and so on to show that they defeated enemies. So I think it was obviously a trophy thing. In terms of these fences that you talk about, these what one writer's called ghost fences,

where priests would use skulls as a method of warding off or keeping out difficult or evil things. that still continues as a tradition every Halloween kids make tonnet lanterns and pumpkins and tonnets yeah sure and their druidical skulls in my view a memory of that at least Can we trace back that heads to go into the Celtic religion I was using it as an entry point for that as well

so people think oh the druids big knives circles stabbing sacrifice that seems to be sort of right as well isn't it Well there are interesting relics of this I mean, one of the druids came up in the 7th century at the Synod of Whitby, amazingly, which was organised to discuss the correct dating for Easter, the Celtic dating versus the Roman dating.

Rome 1. Exactly, Rome 1. One of the things they also argued about was the tonsure, the monkish tonsure. And Rome 1 again. And Rome 1 again, because they wanted the one that imitated the crown of thorns, as I were. But to go back to the druid. Let me finish this point, because the Celtic tonsure has been shown to have been how the druids looked. Oh, really?

Because it was cut from ear to ear over the crown of the head and shaved at the front with long hair at the back. And that's why they rejected it, because it was a pungent whiff of the pagan past. And indeed there is a representation of the third century BC from Bohemia showing somebody with that Celtic tonsia. So this is what these men looked like. Yeah, but I don't think we should take, you know,

the druids as all blood and thunder and heads being cut off everywhere. Because Caesar gave them great authority, didn't he, said they conceded laws and settled disputes? and move across tribal boundaries and teach young people and astronomy. And he's talking about teachers and leaders. And they didn't do military service and they didn't pay taxes. There were special people in the community. Yeah, I think what Caesar does, as Miranda was saying earlier,

is that he sort of clumps all sorts of ideas together and sort of half understands them and half presents them. And what he's doing with the druids is saying that there are a whole range of specialists, sort of vaguely intelligent judicial religious specialists. Let's call them all druids and let's say they do all this. What he's probably talking about is a whole range of different functions linked to different people. But there is this class of specialist people. Now, what seems to me to be the key that Caesar says in that text of his

is that they are the intermediaries between man or people and the gods. And you can't, as an ordinary person, communicate, the gods unless you do it through a druid. So they had enormous power. Yeah, exactly. But who were the cultic gods, well? And how much did the cults believe in the cultic gods?

Well, again, Caesar, we keep on coming back to Caesar. I wish we had a few more good sources. Is he really reliable? No, no, no, no. You've got to interpret Caesar. You've got to try and interpret Caesar. He didn't actually understand what, all, everything he was seeing,

nor did he communicate it accurately. I always think of Caesar's texts being rather like perhaps the letters written by the wife of a missionary in Africa to a maiden aunt back at home. You know, it goes through all these black boxes so that what she is observing and what she's communicating are two entirely different things. But there are grains of truth in season. That's what we've got to get at. But this intermediary between people and the gods is very important. And Caesar says, and I do believe this, that the druids, and the druid.

can excommunicate you virtually and make you unclean because they won't let you communicate with the gods and if they do that you're actually outside society so that's very powerful Yeah and they won't let you come to sacrifices which is the great punishment but who are these gods Alastair

One of the things that the Celts do is they climb hills and that's interesting and on the top of hills they build these enclosures and there's a huge one on top of Eildon Hill north in the borders which may have enclosed as many as 500 hutsances and they build fire on these hills. And the place names that Miranda

was talking about remembers this. I mean, Tinto Hill in the south of Scotland is from the word Chena for fire. Fire Hill is what it means. And they built these fires at festival points, at points in the calendar which were important to them as Stocksmen and as farmers. And these four festivals

occur at sensible. I mean, Halloween if you like, is a memory of one of them, hence the attachment of the town at lanterns and so on. It's a very wispy and hard to catch memory. So they climb hills. They're They light fires, and they do a whole range of things, as Barry said. One of the things about the Celtic priestly class that characterises them is an absolutely prodigious memory.

I'm coming to that in a minute. I'm still trying to get after these gods. It's obviously quite difficult to get any gods. So for the third time of asking you, how's... I think as the literary evidence and the archaeological evidence, give us a handle on the Celts as being people who believed in spirits of place, they believed in a multiplicity of divinities in all aspects of nature

so there would be sky gods, there would be water gods, there would be mountain gods, there would be fire gods, there would be sun gods. And there was quite a lot of archaeological evidence for this. And one of the most important pieces of archaeological evidence is the veneration of water shown by the deposition of important, prestigious objects, often military objects,

into water, into marshes, rivers, lakes and so on. And this goes on throughout Europe. Often these weapons are richly broken to send them over into the other world and to generate a force by the breaking. They're then cast into water and sacrifices are made to the gods. And as honest to point down in his book,

Excalibur is a sort of lovely relic of that coming out of the lake and being thrown back into the lake and sound. But what do these gods do? And if I were a Celt, what would the gods do? They're interactive. What do I get from them? What do they want from me?

You enter into a kind of contract with the gods. So that you... Do they have names? Well, we can back-project from the Roman period when the Roman period gives us Celtic god names on inscriptions. They've got names. We don't know how far we can back-project those names into prehistory. But say, I mean, there is one particular god

who's mentioned in classical sources like Lucan, a god called Taronis. He's a thunder god, he's a sun god. He's a sky god. What I do for him or him for me? You will probably say to him, I want to pray for you. I'm very anxious that there'll be a good harvest this year. If I sacrifice this or that animal or even this or that human to you,

I will expect in return a good harvest. And you will also indulge in aversion sacrifices. So, for example, if you wanted to make quite sure you weren't going to be defeated in battle, you wanted to ward off something bad happening, you would have a sacrifice in anticipation of that event. Very there now, sir. Well, just to follow on what? Miranda says. We've actually got hard archaeological evidence for this. I was excavating some years ago an Iron Age Hill Fort called Dainbury down in Hampshire. And we found there large numbers of grain storage pits where silos, underground silos, where people have stored their seed grain and putting it in the realms of the deities of the underworld, the catholic deities for safety in this liminal period between cropping it and sewing it. And then you take it out and you sew it. What you want to do is to have a contract with the

the gods to make that fertile. So you put an offering and we find these offerings in the bottoms of the grain storage pits and you might put a cow or a dismembered horse or even a piece of an ancestor or some horse gear or something in the bottom of the pit. And then quite often we find that slightly later on in the year when the harvest presumably comes in, you put another offering in which is the thank offering. So one is propitiating the deity saying please and the other is propitiating the deity, saying thank you. Can we come to the oral culture now, Alastamoff, which is something that is a kind of despairing aspect, really.

You have this great civilisation. We hear these fragments and shahs come from, and they didn't write it down. We know that we are told that 300 stories could be remembered by some of the reciters or presider, which is quite easy to be. I used to think that was a terrible difficult thing to believe, till I got to know some very good classical actors in this country,

and their memories are prodigious what they can. So that can be held. So I believe all that. But they didn't write it down. So A, why didn't they, briefly? And B, more importantly, where does that leave us in discovering as much about them as makes real sense?

I think the Romans were unusual and that they did write things down. Many cultures didn't write things down, not just the Celts. I mean, I think the almost obsessive nature of recording things, particularly after the period of the Empire, makes the Romans different.

So I think the Celts were not unusual in that sense. The difficulty as you say is that there's nothing on paper but why do we always trust things on paper? I mean, who would look at the Sun newspaper as a reliable record of anything? That's getting away from the point. Well, actually, lots of people wrote things.

Really in effect the Egyptians wrote things down, the Greeks wrote things down, the Romans wrote things down. The Celts didn't, I mean, let's take it as a useful starting point. They didn't write things down. So lots of people didn't say that will do for an answer. Now, what do you think we've lost by them not writing things down? Well, clearly we've lost stories. that's something which we don't have

I mean you know we haven't got a Tacitus we don't have a Caesar we're reduced to always making comments about the Celts from the outside often asking questions which are asked from the outside and answered from the outside so you rarely get an absolutely authentic meeting as it were from that culture

because it's been remembered that is why the languages are so important to me because they carry the stories inside them in terms of attitude in terms of systems for thinking about the world. If you want to know more about Scotland, learn Scots Gallic because it will tell you about that country in a way that English can only do so partially.

And the same is true in Wales and Ireland, and in Man and Cornwall. Yes, you have an example where the many descriptions of the brownness of a cow, is it? Absolutely. I mean, there's a Catalonian society, a society obsessed by cows in some ways. I mean, some of the earliest epics, the Tyne-Borkogne is about stealing a...

bull from the king of Ulster. And when people in Ireland in the early period want to compare their power, they count their cows. So cows are very important. And the ability to recognize 20 different colors of cow is very important. And the language is very sophisticated in that regard. It's not sophisticated in other ways, particularly so far as the modern period is concerned. But it also describes nature, the natural world very, very well, because that was

important too, where there was vital. Can I come to this? Are you sticking with the oral history point? Yes, can I for a while? Please. You mentioned, Asister mentions the Toin, this great Irish epic. Now, here is a piece of folk tradition that was remembered and remembered

and passed down and modified generation after generation. The 8th century, AD version, was eventually written down about the 12th century by monks and emasculated still further, but we do have it written down. And this is a great pan-European epic which reflects cattle raiding and all those things.

The Irish, modern Irish, have said, this is ours, you know, this is our history. I think that's not quite right. It's European. It's a European epic, a great European epic, of which we have one Irish version. But we do have it, and it's an amazing text about life in the past. That takes us to something that we've held off from, but it's actually the first way that people recognize the Celts when they're writing about them, which is to do with their raiding, their warrior

qualities. I mean, that was that the Romans spoke with all of their war of course, of their bravery, of their they would go naked into battle, even if all the odds are against them, and they would still go, can we just talk about that? And this idea of war rage and rage fit they got themselves into

beforehand, would you like to start with that? Yes, I mean, one of the things about the Greek and Roman writers about the Celts is that clearly it would have been in a war situation where they would tend to meet them, and therefore that would be sort of uppermost in their minds. And we get this picture from the classical writers of groups of Celts who were much bigger, much taller, much fairer than the Romans,

and different, and fought differently, and fought very much as individuals rather than as part of a massed army. So a complete contrast with the sort of very disciplined Roman forces. You get these individualistic, bombastic, flamboyant people dripping with jewelry and body paint. and whirling great sores around their heads and so on and being very, very fierce and frightening. And the archaeology to an extent does endorse this.

I mean, I think it tends perhaps to distort our picture of Celts because what has survived in terms of the archaeology tends to be the flamboyant, the rich metal work, the horse harness, the swords, the shields, the spears, that kind of thing. But certainly if you look at a lot of high-status graves in Britain, in our age, Celtic Britain, one of the marks of status will be that you're buried with your chariot perhaps

and your sword, your spear, and that would be something very important. So all of that has come to give us this picture of this sort of war, this war culture. The Strabo actually says the Celts are war mad. But we can get behind that a bit because here again we've got the classical world looking at something they don't understand and trying to explain it. If you look at it anthropologically, what we're seeing is endemic warfare. which is the norm for most of the world most of the time, where warfare is part of the social system in the Celtic world.

And there were two forms of warfare. One was the raid where you built your own status by going up and pinching someone's cows or slaves or wives or something like that. And there are plenty examples of that. But the other is the kind of battle that Miranda was talking about where the two armies come together, they face each other. and they put out their heroes, and their heroes shout, yell abuse and I'm the greatest and all the rest of it. They boast. Then they go into battle in front of the two arms. They're going to the origins of the work.

I'll see you up there, with it. The word goes back to the, doesn't look I'm talking about it. So you've got these two, you know, the heroes fighting in front of the two armies. And then when one lot of heroes fight, someone dies and they go back and the next heroes come out and so on. It's competition, it's controlled warfare. Sometimes it goes wrong and the two armies fight. But normally it doesn't. Normally in the Celtic warfare, it is display and heroes.

Just like the football matches now. Football matches an exact parallel to this sort of endemic warfare. I know it's just like David and Goliath. Exactly. Yes, the heroes come around and shouting and doing. But the Roman, they met a different sort of way to... That's right. They made a different sort of way to play.

They had to modify their techniques as soon as they met the Romans. But can we talk a little bit more about this before we maybe have time for one last clear? And the rage fit and the way of steaming gospel. Which I'd like to all lie with the idea of history that they had, if this doesn't seem too ridiculous, was that it all came through people acting, men and women acting. It wasn't movements, it wasn't. It was to do with history.

It was to do with this man doing that, that man doing that, that woman doing that. Because women featured, we haven't got to that, I'm afraid, but women did feature very strongly in Celtic affairs. That's right. One of the things that's interesting about the comments that you get from classical writers about their bellicosity, about their war madness, is that they actually admire them. They admire their courage, frankly.

And that's something that we forget. You hear talk which verges on the kind of crazy savage stuff. But these people are immensely courageous. And they were able to work themselves up into what these almost transcendent rage fits, the Fragherachin, to become, in a Gaelic phrase, is beside themselves. People are now beside themselves with anger or whatever. And that's what the Celts tried to do so that they could nerve themselves to take on this fight or to take on this battle. Classical writers do talk about all-out charges as well. And of course,

they were still going on at Collodon in 1746 and they're still gone in Ireland in 1798. You know, the all-out flat-out charge. So this is not recklessness. This is a tradition, as it were. These are quite well-understood traditions. And it's to do, I think, with immense courage as much anything. Maybe backed up by the fact that they felt that the soul of a dead person moved to another living person. Caesar thought that that might be associated with it, but there isn't time for that.

Just a one thing which I'd feel terrible if I didn't just mention, but just to mention it he was even more terrible, Miranda, so I'm on to lose-lose. We know that women featured powerfully there. Women could inherit property, they could inherit power, they could act as druids. We know from Boadusia, a badica, that they could

ride in chariots and go to war. Is the reference to women now, sort of politically correct and rather we better mention a few women, or was it really important? I think it was really important, and I think that's borne out very much by the recent discovery of the chariot grave at Wetwang, the very recent one, where we have a very tall, powerful woman of about 35 years old

who died with her chariot. She was quite clearly a woman of immense power. We know that from the classical writers that there are women like Budica, like Artemisia in the first century, who were independent, powerful women in their own right. I think it was probably not the norm, but certainly the archaeological evidence shows that women could go right through society in a way which they couldn't in the Greek and Roman world.

And that's what's important. The difference between the position of women in Celtic society and in classical society is very profound. In Greek and Roman society, women couldn't even be citizens. It's quite clear that in Britain and in France women could be very powerful and very important. Would you agree with that by? Yes, absolutely.

And particularly in Britain, strangely enough. Or rather, we've got more evidence for it in Britain than in any other part of the Celtic world. Briefly, have you any accounting for that else? I think it's basically because as far as the Celtic society was concerned, although there were slaves, although there were kings, although there were priests, there's unquestionably a sense where it's a community,

and that still survives. You know, the Protestant religion that's been very powerful in the West has rather suppressed the position of women in recent times. But in the past, I think that wasn't the case. Well, thank you all very much. I enjoyed that. I'm sure a lot of people listening to it. I'll tell us if they didn't, anyway.

And to you, Miranda and Alist. And we'll be back next week discussing virtue with the philosophers, Roger Chris, Miranda Fricker, and Gailens Rawson. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio four.