Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [161]
† Recorded in the Gaulish name of an old village in the French Jura, Isarnodori, ferrei ostii, ‘iron door’. Grimm (1876, vol. I, ch. 4: 5).
Although the technical level was high, then, its military application tended to emphasise individual leaders’ prowess, sustained by these prestige products, rather than the development of overwhelming large-scale organisation. Their communities remained small, without even a feudal structure of overlords and kings. Literacy was unnecessary, and largely avoided. Perhaps, as some of their descendants would do two thousand years later on the other side of the world, they had been able to rely on their superior weapons, and prevail against vast odds without troubling to outwit their opponents.
Although Celtic warriors and their villages became widespread, they did not eliminate or submerge the communities in their path. (In this, they contrast markedly with the spread of the Pax Romana, and of Latin with it.) To mention only the ancient communities of whose language we can find some trace, Celtic speakers are found in coexistence with Germans north of the Alps, with Veneti and Etruscans south of them, with Basque speakers (Aquitani) in southern Gaul, with Iberians and Tartessians in Spain, and with Macedonians and Thracians in the Balkans. This was a culture that harried its neighbours and thrust them aside, but did not subjugate or incorporate them.
But besides the raid, and military conquest of new land, there was perhaps one other channel through which the Celtic languages spread, and indeed developed into new and separate languages. This was navigation.
It was an accepted tradition of medieval Europe that Ireland had been populated from the coast of Spain. The usual grounds quoted are twin mistakes about geography and etymology. The reconstructed Tabula Peutingeriana shows Ireland as an island offshore from Brigantia (La Coruña), and St Isidore’s influential sixth-century Etymologiae states: ‘Hibernia…extends north from Africa. Its forward parts face (H)iberia and the Cantabric Ocean [viz. the Bay of Biscay]. Whence too it is called Hibernia.’26
However, there may have been a lot more to this link. Avienus, gathering coastal navigation information in the fourth century, says, of the ‘Holy Island’: ‘the race of the Hierni inhabits it far and wide. Again the island of the Albiones lies near, and the Tartessians were accustomed to carry business to the end of the Oestrymnides. Citizens of Carthage too and the common folk round the Pillars of Hercules went to these seas.’27
Now lernē was the common Greek term for Ireland, and the Oestrymnides are probably the Scillies, or Cornwall, since he also notes that these islands are ‘rich in mine of tin and lead’.28 The whole passage is evidence for a link between the British Isles and the southern Iberian region of Tartessus, known to be a focus of Carthage’s trade empire.
This link is amply confirmed by archaeological evidence. Impressed by the apparent profusion of 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, Barry Cunliffe has suggested that ‘Atlantic Celtic’ may have grown up as a lingua franca, or perhaps an elite language, among the various communities on the eastern seaboard.29
This hypothesis, though archaeologically inspired, has a certain attraction from the linguistic and cultural point of view. It gives a medium for the spread of Celtic across to the southern side of the Pyrenees, when there is no tradition of invasion from the north, and most of the intervening territory between southern Gaul and central Spain was in fact always held by Basques. It gives a basis in history to a persistent theme of old Irish literature,