#gauls

[escapismsworld]

Dying Gaul, a statue likely made in Roman times, commemorating a Greek Battle Victory over Gauls

[illustratus]

The Sacred Grove of the Druids, set design from Vincenzo Bellini's Opera ''Norma''

[doubtspirit]

The Wicker Man of the Druids

An 18th-century illustration of a wicker man. Engraving from A Tour in Wales written by Thomas Pennant (1726-1798).

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Luis de Madrazo y Kuntz (Spanish, 1825-1897) Don Pelayo, rey de Asturias, c.1853-56 Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain

[wroogymoony]

Fulliautomatix and Unhygienix.Ready to fight.This is another fanart that I've made.

[mapsontheweb]

Old historic map of Gaul under Roman domination, taken from the Historical Atlas of Droysen, 1886.

In large the provinces of Roman Gaul, in small the pre-Roman regions, in the top box the siege of Alesia.

[heroineimages]

Revisiting my Gauls

After revisiting my Roman adventuresses, I've started fiddling with some of my Gaul adventuress designs. I'm rather pleased with barbarian's proto-kettle-helm design.

[bencollinsauthor]

Hello,

I just self-published my debut fantasy novel: A Promise Wrought in Steel. It’s the first in a series about grief, apathy, fate, politics, passion, and anger.

It takes place in a world with gods, their consequences, and alchemy, but most of its troubles are cause by armies rather than the mystical. Armies like the legion of Tunulm, which forty years ago inflicted bitter reprisals on the Tribes of the Veltoi. Now an alliance of Veltoi tribes march south against their neighbor, and war and the chaos it brings shall reign in the Republic. And alchemy, the study of change, of secrets, may lead to truths too harsh to bear.

There is gore and violence, and there are allusions to sex and two sex scenes, if those aren’t your thing I understand.

[stairnaheireann]

The Celts of Ancient Ireland

The first historical record of the Celts was by the Greeks about 700 BC, the Celts were a loose grouping of tribes that lived in an area north of the Alps around the Danube river in central Europe. Over the next few hundred years they spread east and west across Europe. The Celts first arrived in Ireland about 500 BC, there is no reliable information on how or when the Celts became the dominant…

[fanofcarson]

Goals

[arthurdrakoni]

Flag of the Gallic League

is the flag of the Gallic League. It comes from a world where Carthage won the Punic Wars and crushed Rome. Carthage and Greece did establish some colonies across the Mediterranean, and even sent expeditions up the major rivers of Europe. However, neither created a vast spanning empire the way Rome would have. Gaul remained divided between numerous tribes and city-states. The southern regions saw lots of influence from Carthage and Greece as a result of trading ports. Greco-Carthaginian influence begins to tapper off the further north one travels. Over time, the city-states of Gaul began to establish a series of trading alliances with one another, and this would eventually lead to a political alliance. Thus, the Gallic League was born.  

The thinking was that the city-states of Gaul could do more by pooling their resources than any of them could individually. The city-states are divided into a series of cantons, each of which has a high degree of autonomy. The cantons administer to their personal affairs, while the League government deals with diplomacy and international relations. The League capital constantly moves around. This way, no one canton can wield more influence than the others. The Gallic League has proven to be quite successful, and can easily stand as an equal to major powers such as Carthage, Greece, and Egypt.  

The Gauls have developed a written language using a modified form of the Greek alphabet. Several Greek philosophers have opened schools on the southern coast of Gaul. The Gauls also learned shipwright technics from Carthage, and the first expedition across the Atlantic was lead by Gauls. Gaul established a few colonies in the New World, but the indigenous people were largely able to resist colonization. That said, many indigenous peoples of the Americas did become valuable trading partners for Gaul. Gaul gained considerable wealth by acting as the middle man to the products of the New World. On the whole, the Gallic League is one of the biggest success stories of the world created by Carthage’s victory in the Punic Wars.  

The flag is a green pennon with a gold boar on it. The boar is consider the most important animal to the Gauls, and the green references to the lush forests and fields of Gaul. 

Link to the original flag on my blog: https://drakoniandgriffalco.blogspot.com/2022/05/flag-of-gallic-league.html?m=0

[illustratus]

Vercingetorix Surrendering to Caesar by Henri-Paul Motte

[pinturasdeguerra]

58-51 aC Guerra de las Galias - Peter Dennis

[loveforskekshod]

[hindbodes]

[murshili-ii]

Celtic Month Bonus Piece: Techtosagii

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Our seventh and final Celtic Month piece doesn’t correspond to any holiday; it’s a bonus piece in honor of the ancient Galatian Celts who invaded Greece and entered Anatolia during the 3rd Century BC. They settled in the land that would become known as Galatia; and they were by far the easternmost of the Celts. They’d later go on to become some of the first Gentile Christians, to whom Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians was written.

Before you read what the piece means to me, share what it means to _you_. I’m just the artist; you’re the beholder.

Leave a comment.

~ ~

The only Celts around today are the Insular Celts, who survived on the British Isles. Even the Bretons, who do live on the mainland, are the descendants of Britons who fled overseas during the Anglo-Saxon Invasion of Britain.

But the Celts used to be a prolific people; they once dominated Europe. The Celtic Gauls lived throughout what is now France, Switzerland, Belgium, northern Italy, southern Germany, and Austria. What is now northeastern Spain was home to the Celtiberians.

They were unstoppable warriors. A Gaulish king named Brennus invaded and sacked Rome in the 4th Century BC. Gauls later invaded and settled the Balkans, and even briefly invaded Greece, during the 3rd Century BC. At the height of their expansion, a group of Gauls known as the Galatians turned east from the invasion of Greece, and settled in central Anatolia, the region of what is now Turkey that would be known as Galatia for centuries thereafter. This was the high-water mark of Celtic expansion; the farthest afield they would ever expand.

The signature Roman sword, the gladius, was adopted from the Celts; and so were other weapons and tactics that made later Classical armies powerful. The Greeks and Romans alike romanticized the Gauls for their courage and virtue, even while scorning them as barbarians, in a way that’s highly comparable to the way European settlers in North America would later view the Native American peoples.

Following Julius Caesar’s conquest of Transalpine Gaul, the Continental Celts began to be assimilated into Latin culture, losing their Celtic language and identity; and the Celtiberians were to follow, along with their other mainland neighbors.

Even after their conquest by the Roman Republic in the 2nd Century AD, the Galatians continued to speak a Celtic language at least until the 4th Century AD, and likely until the 6th Century AD; making them among the latest-surviving Mainland Celts. They would eventually be absorbed into Greek and, later, Turkish culture; leaving the Insular Celts as the last Celts left in the world.

When the Apostle Paul wrote his Epistle to the Galatians in the 1st Century AD, it appears that Christian communities were already forming in Galatia; making the Galatians some of the earliest Gentile Christians. Christianity wouldn’t begin to spread in Ireland for another several centuries.

The exact same region of central Anatolia that became Galatia was also, about a thousand years prior, the heartland of the Hittite Empire, one of the most powerful Bronze Age nations, ruled by speakers of the Hittite language; the earliest Indo-European language of which we have written record, an ancient relative of the Celtic languages as well as most of today’s European, Persian, and North Indian languages.

I like to think that, while moving into the exotic new land that would become their home, the Galatians came upon the ruins of ancient Hittite cities, and maybe even the Hittite capital, Hattusas.

What you see in the foreground of this piece is a Hittite fortification inspired by the Lion Gate at Hattusas.

In the background, you can see the convoy of the Galatians, traveling, with their Greek spoils of war, into this new land.

In the near foreground, we see a Galatian prince and his Greek war-captive exploring the ruins.

(That penannular brooch that the Galatian prince is wearing is really more of an Insular Celtic thing; but penannular brooches are so distinctively Celtic that I couldn’t resist.)

The Techtosagii (or Textosagii, or in Latin, Tectosages) were one of the three Galatian tribes that participated in the Invasion of Greece and ultimately settled in Anatolia. Their name seems to consist of two words also found in other Celtic languages, and can be compared to Old Irish “techtaid” (“to have, to possess”) and “saigid” (“to seek out, to strive for”). It could be translated as “Possession-Seekers”, “Estate-Seekers”, “Wealth-Seekers”, or “Home-Seekers”; and that’s exactly what they were: people on the move looking for a new land to be the source and substance of their prosperity.

It isn’t known what drove them to leave their original homeland; some writers say it was greed; others say it was overpopulation; others say it was famine. In the end, they found the new home they were seeking. They would make the land their own, and their descendants would prosper there.