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| Celtic Territory from the 5th Century B.C. until the Roman Conquest, bbc.co.uk/wales website |  |
| In
the past, the term Celts has been used to refer to several tribes who
shared a relatively common culture and religion. Due to a lack of
knowledge, there is no certainty about the unity of their language.
Many archaeological finds and literary sources have proven that Celt
tribes settled in various European regions although no political unity
appears to have existed. The map above could distort the facts in three ways: A) The word "Territory" leads one to believe that the Celts had managed to create political unity. B) The large coloured areas with the arrows reinforce this misperception, indicating that the Celts had organized a military expansion. C) The "homeland" symbol matches more or less to the area around Halstatt where the first archaeological evidence of the Celts was found but doesn't give any indication about either the real origin of the Celts or about their ethnogenesis. It's worth mentioning that the map above is widely spread amongst the folk and romantic circles and many variants are circulating on the web, some of which are even entitled "The Celtic Empire", of course, as opposed to "The Roman Empire". |
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