The Ancient Celts

The Ancient Celts
By Barry Cunliffe
Published in 2018
496 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 3/5

Barry Cunliffe is one of my favorite historians; but I find the celts to be a boring civilization. The result was a great book that I didn’t find very interesting.

Writing history is hard. You can easily slip into a number of common mistakes such as refuting other historians who the reader doesn’t know or care about; over-flavoring and accidentally writing historical fiction; including too much historiographic detail and writing a phone book; including too little historiographic detail and writing a conspiracy book; or narcissistically focusing on your own historical journey that nobody cares about.

Barry Cunliffe always manages to walk the fine line.

The book starts with a discussion of the broader history of celtic studies. The Celts themselves had no or little concept of being Celtic - the very term is a later historiographical error. The word comes from a Roman description of the people of what is today France and Northern Italy. Interestingly enough, the Romans wrote that the Irish and Britons were similar to the Celts but were not themselves Celts. Weirdly enough, today the word “Celtic” often refers to Britons such as Welsh or Scottish, the Irish, and a handful of continental people like the Galicians and Bretons.

The Celts were a savage and noble people. Although Cunliffe tries his best to collect many Celtish accomplishments such as long distance trade, complex social organizations, and art - the picture he paints is ultimately of a savage and primitive people. They had no writing, no large scale states, no math, built no buildings that have survived, and ultimately contributed little to the intellectual progress of humanity.

I was a little bit disappointed. I hoped to find some sort of secretly advanced civilization that equaled the Romans but has been neglected. Instead, I found exactly what I expected, and that made me feel a little bit sad. Many of my ancestors were French Celts, and the Romans were not. One always hopes to learn that one’s ancestors achieved civilization without the help of foreign conquerors.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the celts, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone that doesn’t already have that specific niche interest.