The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts. Rodney Castleden
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Название: The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts
Автор: Rodney Castleden
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007519439
isbn:
The people we call Celts were the descendants of these Middle Stone Age hunters, gatherers, and fishermen, and of the New Stone Age farmers, pastoralists, and stone circle builders who succeeded them.
One of the stone circles, Stonehenge, has become an emblem of Celtic Britain. Modern Druids have claimed it as theirs, and we could question this entitlement, but this process of claiming and adopting has probably been repeated over and over again through time. Stonehenge was once thought to be the work of a Mycenaean architect, partly because of the similarity between the stone trilithons and the architecture of the great Lion Gate at Mycenae, built in 1250 BC, and there are carvings on the stones that seem to show a Mycenaean dagger. But now radiocarbon dates show that they were raised long before that, in 2500 BC. The earth circle round them dates from 3100 BC, and the totem poles that stood close by were raised in 8000–7000 BC. Stonehenge turns out to be a monument that was modified and developed repeatedly, by indigenous people, during the course of the long evolution of the Atlantic Celtic culture. The site witnessed and expressed the whole span of the Atlantic Celts’ prehistory.
Most of the big standing stones in the lands of the Atlantic Celts were raised in the Neolithic (3000– 2000 BC), some in the Bronze Age (2000–600 BC), and a small number in the Iron Age. They clearly speak of the bond the Atlantic Celts had developed with standing stones.
The megaliths that are known to belong to the Iron Age tend to be relatively small—man-height—and single monoliths only. Some are simple, tapering, and rounded pillars, others are fluted like Doric columns. Another group is low and rounded, almost cushion-shaped, like the Turoe Stone in County Galway.
The Christian Celts of later centuries remained interested in the earlier megaliths. They Christianized some of the old pagan stones, converting them by carving their tops into crude crosses. They even raised a brand-new family of megaliths: magnificently carved massive Celtic crosses such as Muireadach’s Cross at Monasterboice in Ireland.
Big standing stones were a part of the Atlantic Celtic consciousness all the way through.
Another link across this long span of time was made in 1996, when the remains of Cheddar Man were subjected to DNA analysis. Cheddar Man is the complete skeleton of a man who lived in Somerset in 7150 BC and when he died was buried in Gough’s Cave at Cheddar. It was found that this Stone Age man’s DNA was a close match with that of a local teacher, Adrian Targett. So, a man living and working at the Community School in Cheddar in the late twentieth century turned out to be a direct descendant of someone living in the same place more than 9,000 years before.
THE CELTS AND THE OCEAN
The Celts and their culture are also deeply embedded in their windswept, wave-washed, and rocky landscape. The Atlantic coastline has played a major role in shaping the coastal communities and producing a convergence of mindset. The smell of the sea saturated the lives and histories of these communities. They depended on the richly stocked waters for fish, and for the trade that they made possible. Tribes on opposite sides of the English Channel traded with each other, and trade led to other contacts, including treaties of mutual defense and intermarriage; kinship bonds developed. On the British side of the Channel, the Durotriges, the Iron Age tribe of Dorset, traded with the Coriosolites, who lived on the north coast of Brittany around what is now St. Malo. Coins minted by the Coriosolites have been found at Hengistbury, the Durotrigians’ main port in Christchurch Harbor. The trade route ran by way of the Channel Islands, immediately off the coast and directly between the Coriosolites’ territory and Dorset; coins of the Coriosolites tribe have been found on Jersey. There were lively cross-Channel contacts between 100 and 50 BC; trade that had been going on for 2,000 years. In 80 BC the Durotriges looked across to Gaul when they adopted not only coinage but the simple designs they put on their coins.
After 50 BC there was a downturn in cross-Channel trade, which narrowed the horizons of the Durotriges and left them in a backwater. This was partly a result of piecemeal Roman conquests in Gaul generally and political settlements that left the Hengistbury merchants high and dry. It was probably largely due to an embargo imposed on the Durotriges by Julius Caesar as a punishment for supporting the Armorican rising against him in 56 BC. The people of Iron Age Dorset had felt sufficiently strong kinship with their trading partners across the sea to send warriors in an attempt to stem the Roman invasion of Gaul.
The resistance to Rome was a failure in the end, but it shows the determination of the Durotriges to resist the might of Rome. When the armies of Claudius arrived in Britain 90 years later, the fiercely independent Durotriges were once more among those offering the most aggressive resistance. Even though they were conquered by Vespasian in AD 44, they were still able, 20 years later, during the revolt of another fiercely independent tribe, the Iceni under Boudicca, to offer a potential threat to Rome’s hold on southern Britain.
This snapshot of one tribe’s activities during the first centuries BC and AD shows how a community of Atlantic Celts functioned in relation to other tribes—and not just near neighbors. There were networks of relationships that spread far and wide, thanks to the all-embracing ocean.
The relationship between peoples and the sea helps us to understand what has been called the longue durée: the underlying consistencies that bind communities together and the persistent rhythms that influence their development across long periods of time. The peoples of the Atlantic façade shared common values and beliefs over thousands of years, and this sharing was conditioned to a great extent by their unique habitat on rocky coastlines looking out across the ocean.
A simple Breton verse sums it up:
At sea, all is anguish.
At sea, all is prayer.
To this day, some of the islanders living on the small islands off the Irish coast depend on boats to get them about, yet they do not learn to swim. They surrender to fatalism when they see someone in difficulties in the sea because the sea is claiming its own. “But,” as an Aran islander once said, “we do only be drownded now and again.”
TWO KINDS OF IRON AGE CELTS
In 500 BC, there were two communities of Celts, the central European Celts and the Atlantic Celts, leading parallel lives. How much contact was there between the two?
The arrival in Britain of distinct artistic styles that can be related to the styles prevailing in central Europe shows that there was contact. The similarities of style are so strong that they formed the basis of the idea of migration. Now it is thought more likely that only small numbers of people were on the move, perhaps traders and a small number of migrants, yet these movements were enough to take stylistic ideas from one area to the other.
The western Celts interacted with successive European cultures: the Hallstatt, La Tène, and Belgic cultures within the Iron Age, then the Roman civilization, and then the cultures of the Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Vikings. On the Atlantic fringe, sometimes the culture of the western Celts spread far and wide, making a continuously identifiable Atlantic culture. On occasions this culture was continuous with the central European culture, so that a very СКАЧАТЬ