Area Where the Danube Area Celts would have been located
The Danube
is a river in
Central Europe
, the
European Union
's longest and the
continent
's second longest (after the
Volga
).
Classified as an
international waterway
, it originates in
the town of
Donaueschingen
--which is in the
Black Forest
of Germany--at the
confluence
of the rivers
Brigach
and
Breg
. The Danube then flows southeast for
2,872 km (1,785 mi), passing through four
Central European
capitals before emptying
into the Black Sea
via the
Danube Delta
in
Romania
and
Ukraine
.
Once a long-standing frontier of the
Roman Empire
, the river passes through or
touches the borders of ten countries:
Romania
(29.0% of basin area),
Hungary
(11.6%),
Serbia
(10.2%),
Austria
(10.0%),
Germany
(7.0%),
Bulgaria
(5.9%),
Slovakia
(5.9%),
Croatia
(4.4%),
Ukraine
(3.8%), and
Moldova
(1.6%).[1]
Its
drainage basin
extends into nine more.
The Celts
or Kelts were an
ethnolinguistic
group of
tribal
societies in
Iron Age
and
Medieval
Europe who spoke
Celtic languages
and had a similar culture,
although the relationship between the ethnic, linguistic and cultural elements
remains uncertain and controversial.
Diachronic distribution of Celtic peoples:
core
Hallstatt territory, by the 6th century BC
maximal Celtic expansion, by 275 BC
Lusitanian
area of Iberia where Celtic presence is uncertain
the six
Celtic nations which retained significant numbers of Celtic
speakers into the
Early Modern period
areas where
Celtic languages remain widely spoken today
The earliest archaeological culture that may justifiably be considered
Proto-Celtic
is the Late Bronze Age
Urnfield
culture of Central Europe, which
flourished from around 1200 BC. Their fully Celtic descendants in central Europe
were the people of the Iron Age
Hallstatt culture
(c. 800–450 BC) named for the
rich grave finds in
Hallstatt
, Austria. By the later
La Tène
period (c. 450 BC up to the Roman
conquest), this Celtic culture had expanded by
diffusion
or
migration
to the
British Isles
(Insular
Celts), France and
The Low Countries
(Gauls),
Bohemia
, Poland and much of Central Europe, the
Iberian Peninsula
(Celtiberians,
Celtici
and
Gallaeci
) and
northern Italy
(Golaseccans
and Cisalpine Gauls
) and, following the
Gallic invasion of the Balkans
in 279 BC, as
far east as central
Anatolia
(Galatians).
Beginning in 2010, it was tentatively proposed that the language of the
Tartessian
inscriptions of south
Portugal
and southwest Spain (dating from the
7th–5th centuries BC) is a Celtic one; however, this interpretation has largely
been rejected by the academic community.
The earliest undisputed direct examples of a Celtic language are the
Lepontic
inscriptions, beginning in the 6th
century BC.
Continental Celtic languages
are attested
almost exclusively through inscriptions and place-names.
Insular Celtic
is attested beginning around the
4th century through
ogham inscriptions
, although it was clearly
being spoken much earlier. Celtic literary tradition begins with
Old Irish
texts around the 8th century.
Coherent texts of
Early Irish literature
, such as the
Táin Bó Cúailnge
(The Cattle Raid of
Cooley ), survive in 12th-century recensions.
By the mid 1st millennium AD, with the expansion of the
Roman Empire
and the Great Migrations (Migration
Period) of
Germanic peoples
, Celtic culture and
Insular Celtic
had become restricted to
Ireland, the western and northern parts of Great Britain (Wales,
Scotland, and Cornwall
), the
Isle of Man
, and
Brittany
. Between the 5th and 8th centuries,
the Celtic-speaking communities in these Atlantic regions emerged as a
reasonably cohesive cultural entity. They had a common linguistic, religious,
and artistic heritage that distinguished them from the culture of the
surrounding polities. By the 6th century, however, the
Continental Celtic languages
were no longer in
wide use.
Insular Celtic culture diversified into that of the
Gaels
(Irish,
Scottish
and
Manx
) and the
Brythonic
Celts (Welsh,
Cornish
, and
Bretons
) of the medieval and modern periods. A
modern "Celtic
identity" was constructed as part of the Romanticist
Celtic Revival
in Great Britain, Ireland, and
other European territories, such as
Portugal
and
Spanish Galicia
. Today,
Irish
,
Scottish Gaelic
,
Welsh
, and
Breton
are still spoken in parts of their
historical territories, and
Cornish
and
Manx
are undergoing a revival.