A particular powerful amalgam soon came to the fore in the western part of the region, speaking the Indo-European dialect which may be term ‘proto-Celtic’.
Discovery by Johann George Ramsauer in Hallstatt, Austria confirmed that Celts came to existence around 800 BC. The Hallstatt cemetery is the first solid evidence of a culture that eventually came to be known as Celtic.
That these original Celts were a warlike people is evidenced by the number of weapons, particularly swords, which they buried with their dead; and this probably accounts for their name also.
The earliest written accounts of the Celts come mostly from non-Celts like the Greeks and Romans, who often saw Celts as the enemy.
The first mention of the Celts was in the classical world by a man name Herodotus. He referred to the race as ‘Keltoi’ which means mysterious people.
The basic meaning of the term Celts appears to have been ‘warrior’ and was probably used by themselves as a laudatory term reflecting their success in overcoming other peoples and spreading their power.
These people knew about iron-smelting and the use of other metal. Iron tools and weapons rendered the Celts superior to their neighbors and were doubtless the basis of their sudden eruption throughout Europe at the beginning of the first millennium BC.
The horsemanship was a major part of the Celt’s identity. As such it stands to reason why they were always on the go.
The Celts in the La Tene period were definitely of an age of aggressive expansion. It was the period of their greatest military might. The Celts had a great cultural revolution circa 350 BC.
In 387 BC, Celtic warriors attacked Rome, sacking the city and leaving only when the Romans paid them a hefty ransom.
The Celtic nation stretched basically through the whole of Western Europe and was bordered by the Rhine and the Italian Alps in the East.
The origin of Celts people
