Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [160]
TANOTALOS Dannotalos
KARNITUS built the tumulus
with a vertical note at the side:
TAKOS TOUTAS decision of the tribe
But Caesar notes that the most familiar script to the Gauls was Greek writing, and sure enough, Gaulish inscriptions written in Greek are found dating from 300 BC to AD 50. What is now the French Riviera was then very much a Greek coast, with notable colonies such as Nicaea (Nice) and Antipolis (Antibes), all focused on the metropolis of Massilia (Marseilles), which had been founded c.600 BC. There are about seventy such inscriptions on stone discovered so far, mostly gravestones and dedications, and there are also another 220 pieces of broken pottery with writing on them: this ancient equivalent of scrap paper and old bottles and cans is often gratifyingly durable.
segomaros uilloneos tooutious namausatis íorou belesami sosin nemeton
’Segomaros son of Uillu, citizen of Nemausus, dedicated to Belesama this shrine’
These Greek-lettered inscriptions are found along the coast, and all the way up the River Rhône, with a few more in the centre of France, on the upper reaches of the Loire and Seine. Caesar refers to Helvetian records written in Greek, and kept on wooden tablets. But this brings us well into the period of Rome’s conquest of Gaul (completed in 51 BC). Thereafter we do find Gaulish written in Roman letters, but only for a century, and never actually replacing the use of Greek script: there have only been sixteen such Gallo-Roman inscriptions discovered to date. The most magnificent remnant of this period yet discovered is a fragmentary Druidical calendar engraved on bronze found at Coligny, not far from the Roman administrative centre of Lugdunum (Lyon).
North of the Seine, the only inscriptions that have turned up are on potters’ stamps, which probably came from farther south. Advertising could also use ‘eye candy’ in a way decidedly reminiscent of the twentieth century: The inscription reads:
rextugenos sullias avvot Rextugenos (son) of Sulla made (this pot).
Otherwise, the only evidence of written Gaulish is a few Celtic personal names on pots at Manching in southern Germany, and on a sword at Port in western Switzerland.
But there is hard evidence of another Celtic language, known as Celtiberian, being written in the north-east of central Spain. There are in fact eighty-five inscriptions, and fifty legends on coins, from the last two centuries BC. There is not much in these that incontrovertibly proves them Celtic,* rather than some other related strain of Indo-European, though the suitably grandiloquent name Divorix does appear: ‘Divine-King’, comparable with Julius Caesar’s early adversary Dumnorix, ‘World-King’. But they are in the right time and place to be Celtiberians, and it was an accepted truth in the ancient world that these people were Celts: Martial, a first-century AD poet born in the local capital of Bilbilis, liked to claim ancestry from Celts and Iberians.24
However, by AD 50 Gaulish, and indeed Insubrian and Celtiberian, appear largely to have lost their literate status, even in their heartland areas.
How Gaulish spread
How, then, did these languages reach the far parts of Europe where they were spoken? The spread of Celtic across Europe, phenomenal as it was, happened before recorded history. The forces that drove it are a matter for speculation and intuition, rather than for observation and inference. But if we take the culture at its own evaluation, Gaulish owed its success, or rather the success of the lineages that spoke it, to their distinctive equipment, notably wheeled vehicles drawn by horses, and to the magnificent products of their smiths, especially ironwork for warriors’ swords, helmets and ring-mail armour.
A linguistic note confirms this. The words for ‘iron’ in Greek (sidēron), Latin (ferrum) and Celtic (isarno-)† have separate origins, but the Germanic word (e.g. Gothic eisarn. Old English īsern, īren) appears to have been borrowed from Celtic.25 This is unsurprising, since the Celts were evidently the middlemen for the transmission of ironworking