The Celtic people were the predominate culture in ancient Europe. And by “ancient Europe” I mean Pre-Roman Empire, because the Romans conquered a considerable amount of their homeland, meaning that they only lived in Ireland and Scotland after the Roman Empire. The Celts lived all over Europe, with predominant colonies being in Spain, Germany/Austria/Czech, Britain, and northwest Turkey. A unique thing about these people and their culture, however, is that they didn’t get to all these places through war and conquest like Roman culture and people, they simply spread out independently across the land with no centralized government. They only thought for what was best for the clan, with the only government type thing being the religion, which was kept by the priests, or druids as they called themselves.
Yet even this wasn’t a governmental or controlling thing like the Greek religion, it was simply a belief in higher powers that normally manifest as nature, so the main method of worship was giving gifts in the wild. For example: There’s a group of hunters going through the forest, and they can’t find any deer, so the Celts would pray to the nature around them (most of the time a god named Woden) to give them some deer to hunt. They believe that the they would then find a pack of deer, and if they did, cut off a leg or the head and leave it on a rock or tree stump as a thank you to the gods.
Strangely, we find little to no reference to the Druids in the eastern and southern areas such as Turkey and Spain. It’s in Turkey (a place without Druids) that the first Celtic people adopted Christianity, and they did this while Jesus was alive, which was strange. Those who didn’t go down to Turkey met a different people, the Aryans.
The Aryans were an overall nomadic people, meaning they didn’t live in any one place, ranging from India to Germany, but it is believed that they originated in southern Russia, because the oldest evidence of their culture is there, but the Celts knew them as coming from the Ukraine area. However, the Aryans brought several major qualities and distinctions to the Celts, such as iron working and chariot riding.
Iron working is probably the most famous part of Celtic culture, so much so that we can see how the Celtic word for iron “Isarnom” became the Proto-German word “Isarna” which turned into the English word “Iron”. The Romans, when they came up to Europe, were surprised by how the Celts used iron weapons even though they were “barbarians” according to the Romans. Another thing that surprised and inspired the early Romans was the chariots that these “barbarians” used, such as the one in the picture above. The Romans designed their chariots off these, and then the Romans spread the design across their empire.
Overall, I think the Celtic people were an amazing people, and were extremely advanced in their culture, philosophy, and fighting skills. I am proud to be one of their descendants.
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