Origins
The main root of the majority of Scottish, Irish and Welsh ancestry lies with the ancient Celts. Their traditions and beliefs are still evident today amongst these groups, and can be found in superstitions, place names and language. Perhaps because of their great skills, as warriors, orators and artists, around 517 BC the Greek explorer Hecateus de Miletus, in his Geography, was drawn to describe this transalpine people as: -
"One of the four great barbarian peoples".
The word that he initially used to describe them was keltoi - a term similar to one which they themselves may have used to describe themselves as "hidden people". This phrase may have arose simply because the Celts, although literate, avoided committing their customs into a written form, as Julius Caesar himself noted when talking of the Customs of the Gauls: -
"The Druids believe that their religion forbids them to commit their teachings to writing".
This great Roman leader went on to mention that he believed that the origin of this peculiar code is that quite simply: -
"They did not want their doctrine to become public property"
It is due to the testimony of the early classical historians, including Strabo and Polybius, that we know that the Celts were a literate people by the 1st century AD, with a well organized social structure and religion (the druids being the most important members of their society, outranking even kings) and had strongly enforced laws on social and anti-social behavior. The knowledge that Greek letters were used in the public accounts of the Celts indicates that at least some of the higher-ranking members of society were accountable to the laiety.
It is to the Druids that Ammianus Marcellinus turned to when he tried to find out the real, rather than the legendary, origin of the Gauls, and to him they declared: -
"That part of the population was in fact indigenous, but was joined by newcomers from remote islands and the country beyond the Rhine"
This reference to a previous indigenous population occupying Celtic lands is also reflected in the earlier work of Julius Caesar in the first Century BC who, in his description of the "Conquest of Gaul", talks of the inhabitants of Britain: -
"The interior of Britain is inhabited by a people, who claim, on the strength of an oral tradition, to be aboriginal; the coast, by belgic immigrants who came to plunder and make war - nearly all of them retaining the names of the tribes from which they originated - and later settled down to till the soil".
In both these cases we can see that, as early as the First Century BC, there were established oral traditions among the Celts which contained information about an aboriginal past and recent and not so recent population movements. The testimony from Marcellinus' druids indicate that these traditions seem to have continued unabated through the period of Roman Occupation.
Historically the original habitat of the Celt proper seems to have been central Germany, around the region of the Danube. During the first millennium BC, their territories seem to have expanded to a substantial size, no doubt absorbing many aboriginal cultures, across the whole of Western Europe. The Greek explorer Hecateus de Miletus stated that they lived in the land of the Ligurians around 517 BC - Liguria being a nation at the west of Italy, bordered by the Mediterranean sea and the rivers of the Macra, Var and Po. This would certainly be consistent with our knowledge of Celtic movements, during that period. There is a claim, in the "classical sources" that the ancestors of the Ligurians were Gauls or Germans (though a Greek origin has been espoused by some authorities, it seems likely that this claim could be an attempt to gain the respectability that a "classical" origin would bring).
Herodotus, writing around 445 BC, mentions that the River Danube had it's source in the land of the Celts. This assessment may also be correct as it seems likely that, as their numbers grew, the Celts expanded outwards from the Upper Danube regions, becoming the conquering "newcomers" of the ancient tales. Some of the figures in Irish mythology, such as the names of gods and goddesses, may reflect ancient Celtic origins: The family of gods known as the "Tuatha De Danaan" (probably meaning the family of bold An, as I shall show later) may come from the same Celtic language that gave a name to the aforesaid Germano-Hungarian river.

Copyright 1998 David F. Dale