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British Museum exhibition traces history of the use of the term Celts
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A new exhibition on the story of the Celts opened at the British Museum, tracing the shifting use of the term through artworks covering 2,500 years of history from Scotland to Spain.
“Celts: art and identity” examines the origin and usage of the term, which was first coined by the ancient Greeks to refer to barbarians from the north, and later used for the Celtic revival of the last 300 years in the British Isles.
Using jewelry, swords, carved stone crosses and massive armlets weighing more than a kilogram, the London museum shows how Celts have often been set apart from their neighbors.
“Celts can be a slippery term,” said Julia Farley, curator of the British Museum’s Iron Age collections.
“The story we are telling isn’t so much the story of a people as the story about a label,” she said.
In around 500 BC, the Greeks called their northern barbarian neighbors “Keltoi.”
It was a blanket term describing all tribes beyond the frontier rather than a specific people.
“Because the Celts didn’t really write anything down, we learn everything through the lens of the ancient Greeks. And to them it wasn’t necessary to distinguish between the different tribes,” project curator Rosie Weetch said.
While Greek society was structured around cities, Celts lived in farmsteads and small village communities.
But their accomplishments were on a par with the finest achievements of Greek and Roman artists.
More than 250 objects have been selected from the collections of the British Museum and others across Europe to illustrate the skill of the Celtic peoples.
They include the Gundestrup cauldron, the largest known example of European Iron Age silver work, which was found in a peat bog in Denmark.
As the Roman empire expanded, it took in lands that had been considered Celtic, such as Spain and Gaul.
The forgotten word eventually came to be used for the related pre-Roman languages of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany in northern France.
It led to the creation of a re-imagined, romanticized Celtic past that began to appear in art and literature as 19th-century discoveries fired up public imagination. It is now used to affirm the differences which set apart the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish from their English neighbors, and the Bretons from the French.
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