Episode 1 The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice with Alice Roberts and Neil Oliver

ALICE ROBERTS: In early 2015 in Yorkshire,

the remains of a body were discovered in an unmarked grave.

They belonged to a man who had died in his early 20s.

Beside him lay a large sword,

and the heads of five spears.

It was an iron age ritual burial.

-NEIL OLIVER:

-Graves like this have been discovered throughout Europe,

and we now know that this man once shared a common culture

that stretched from Turkey to Portugal.

We know this because he was one of our pre-historic ancestors...

..a Celt.

In Britain we're never far from our Celtic past.

The Celts seem to belong to a shadowy, wilder,

more primal time than anything in more recent history.

But much about their origins, beliefs, and ultimate fate

remains a mystery.

But a story etched in vivid colour

is how these powerful tribal people battled for survival

against their arch-enemy, the Roman Empire.

From the first Celtic raiding parties

that rampaged through ancient Italy,

to Julius Caesar's campaign in Gaul.

And the Celts' last stand under the warrior queen, Boudicca.

One of the greatest cultural conflicts

that still defines our world today,

and reveals Europe's most enigmatic ancient people.

Rome.

Once the heart of Europe's greatest empire.

For hundreds of years,

this city ruled over lands stretching from Syria to Britain.

Rome's power was forged on its military strength,

enshrined in its laws, economy and monuments.

But even before this empire spread across Europe,

it would be challenged by powerful barbarian forces,

from lands north of the Alps.

Warrior tribes that would fire the imagination of Romans

for centuries to come.

The Celts.

This is the Roman image of the Celt.

It's called The Dying Gaul.

He's completely naked, he has tousled and unkempt hair,

a moustache, and around his neck he's wearing a torc,

which is the ultimate status symbol of the elite Celtic warrior.

In Roman eyes, this is the quintessential naked savage,

and more importantly

it's a naked savage who has been subdued, and defeated.

Here in his side he's bleeding from a mortal wound,

and in his agony he's dropped his sword to the ground

and then slumped alongside it, awaiting death.

It's a beautiful

and very powerful and moving work of art,

but it's also propaganda.

This is how Rome wanted its citizens to see,

to perceive the Celtic opponent.

As noble, yes,

but essentially a savage.

A powerful, potent image

to set against the idea of Rome

as a disciplined, ordered, civilising presence.

For 400 years,

the Romans and Celts would struggle for supremacy in Europe.

A conflict that, in the end, would define them both.

But while Rome would celebrate ITS victories

in monumental architecture...

the Celts would gradually fade from history.

One big difference between the Celts and the Romans

is that the Celts left us no written records of their own.

Theirs was an oral tradition, not a written one.

Unlike the Romans,

who documented almost every detail of their lives

in their writings, in their sculptures and in their monuments.

But the Celts aren't entirely invisible to us.

The world that they left behind

is there to be discovered - beneath our feet.

Throughout Europe,

archaeologists are unearthing the world of the Ancient Celts.

I'm in Central France, in Champagne country,

and here on the outskirts of Bucheres in April 2013,

a team of archaeologists found something very exciting indeed.

They were investigating this area

simply because this is going to be the site of a large new warehouse.

And what they stumbled across

was a burial site.

They discovered the graves of 27 men and women,

and they'd been buried here in the fourth century BC.

This was an iron age cemetery -

the people buried here were Celts.

Finds like Bucheres

give us direct insight into who the Celts really were.

This is one of the skeletons from those graves at Bucheres,

and in fact this is one of the most complete skeletons that were found

because some of the bones were in a very bad state of repair indeed.

Now, I've looked really carefully at these bones, and I can't see

any signs of injury or disease on them.

But in fact there are some marks or perhaps I should say stains

just here on the left forearm bones.

Now, this isn't a disease, this is

where something made of copper or copper alloy

has lain very close to these bones in the grave,

and in fact, with all of these skeletons,

with all these graves at Bucheres,

it's not the human remains themselves that are the most interesting -

it's what was buried with them.

The bodies were accompanied into the afterlife by their possessions,

and they reveal a surprisingly sophisticated culture.

We've got some fibulae,

some brooches here,

some bracelets,

some little pins just there

and a couple of necklaces as well.

The fibulae are gorgeous.

This fibula is the piece de resistance.

It has a repeating pattern running along the body of interwoven spirals,

and then this strange white button just here

is actually made of coral,

so that would have come from the Mediterranean.

This is a fairly classic Celtic torc.

The thing which characterises them is this opening at the bottom

with these two terminals,

and the whole neck ring would have been twisted open

in order to place it around somebody's neck.

And it's got this nice decoration

stamped onto the shaft.

A few of the graves contained weaponry,

and these swords are absolutely beautiful.

They are still in their scabbards,

and the degradation of the iron

has meant that it's sprung apart,

so you can actually probably see

the sword sitting inside there.

Now, the length of these swords is interesting.

They're not quite as long as the slashing swords

that would have been carried by the cavalrymen amongst the Celts.

So these are designed to be carried by warriors on foot.

And here, this iron band

is decorated - we've got these strange circles just here

but if you look at them really closely you realise what they are.

These circles, which are made of coral,

are the eyes of two dragons.

So we've got this lovely symmetrical pattern on this scabbard,

which is actually very different from this one.

Both these styles are typical of the period,

but they're very individual at the same time.

And you imagine that these swords would have been

very prized personal items.

The picture emerging

is that the Celts were a people with individual style

and technical skill,

who took pride in their appearance and weaponry.

It's a far cry from the naked savage depicted by Rome.

Over 2,500 years ago,

the Celts and Romans were destined to meet,

as Celtic influence spread south of the Alps into Northern Italy.

And we know that some Celts must have come through here -

the Alpine pass of Valcamonica.

Carved, etched into the rocks hereabouts

are markings that some archaeologists believe could be

the very earliest depictions of Celts.

As they came through these high Alpine passes,

they encountered a mountain people called the Cammunni -

and it may well be the case that it was those Cammunni

who made these marks in the rocks

and so created the very first indelible record

of what the Celts looked like and what they had.

And what you've got on here

is something really quite remarkable.

Most obvious perhaps

is a depiction of a four-wheeled vehicle - a chariot.

Elsewhere, there's a couple of warriors,

or at least figures who seem to be armed with spears and shields -

but it's a fabulous, unforgettable snapshot

of what someone saw when a new people arrived.

What IS clear

is that the Celts who ventured south were ready to fight.

This whole area is just peppered, littered with the rock carvings,

so that you've even got to need to look underneath the leaf mould

in case you're missing something.

We'll clear it away...

and look there!

Right away, that's fantastic.

See that figure there, look?

A man, his head,

two legs, got shoes on,

and he's holding a spear.

And then in his left -

well, that's either a small kind of type buckler-type shield,

or it could be a trophy. Could be a man's severed head, who knows?

And so it goes on. You've just got to keep revealing the canvas.

There's more...

There's a crowd of them there,

armed with spears and shields and swords.

More of them.

They're fantastic.

Everything about it seems to be either

war-like and aggressive, or jubilant.

You know, the figures are either

threatening combat

or they're celebrating victory -

but they're very much alive.

Whoever saw them and decided to commit their image to the rock

had been impressed,

and wanted to make sure that

some aspect of their arrival was remembered.

The Celtic tribes were migrating,

taking new lands

and moving south towards Central Italy.

The ordered, structured world of Rome had a storm coming.

THUNDER RUMBLES

To find out what happened when the Romans first met the Celts,

we have to rely on this - Livy's History of Rome.

Now, bear in mind that Livy - Titus Livius - WAS a Roman

so he's likely to be partisan,

and he was writing 300 years after the event.

He tells us that that first meeting

between the Romans and the Celts

took place in 387 BC, in Clusium,

a town in what's now Tuscany, 100 miles north of Rome.

It's hard to believe,

strolling around this peaceful Tuscan hill town today,

but events that unfolded here

would set in train centuries of conflict and bloodshed.

Livy writes that "outlandish warriors in their thousands,

"armed with strange weapons, marched to Clusium

"in search of new lands to conquer and riches to plunder."

They were led by a Celtic tribal leader and warlord

called Brennus.

While the Celtic horde descended upon Clusium,

the town's officials sent word to Rome asking for armed protection.

BELL RINGS

But the request was denied.

Instead, Rome sent three of her ambassadors to negotiate

a peaceful settlement.

It would be the first time Rome would come face-to-face

with her greatest adversary,

and so begin centuries of struggle for the heart and soul of Europe.

As negotiations started, the Celts demanded land,

and, with vastly superior numbers, they were in no mood for compromise.

There was a fierce argument

and in the heat of the moment a Roman ambassador stabbed his

spear through a Celtic chieftain's heart, killing him instantly.

In a single stroke, the oath of neutrality,

one of Rome's own accepted customs, was broken.

The Celts demanded that the Roman in question be handed over

to them for suitable punishment The demand was ignored.

Big mistake.

Livy wrote, "The Celts flamed into the uncontrollable anger

"and set forward with terrible speed covering miles of ground.

"The cry went up, 'To Rome!'"

The Romans came face-to-face with the Celts in 387 BC,

but from modern archaeology we know that Celtic culture goes back

much further than that.

Some of the earliest evidence comes from a tiny village

south-east of Salzburg in Austria, called Hallstatt.

It's a place that has given its name to an entire Celtic period

and has become synonymous with early Celtic culture.

This is Hallstatt, tucked away in a fold of the Austrian Alps.

It's a quiet town with an even quieter population,

and yet it's one of the most famous names in archaeology,

and the ideal starting point for any investigation of the Celts.

Because it's here that we catch

the very first glimpses of Celtic material culture,

by which I mean identifiable things

left behind by Celts - Hallstatt culture.

I had it drummed into my head when I was an archaeology student.

And, now, 30 years after I first heard the term, I'm finally here.

Starting in 1846, archaeologists at Hallstatt

gradually unearthed over 1,000 graves out of perhaps 5,000

scattered across the upper valley, an entire city of the dead.

Within the graves were over 20,000 artefacts

dating as far back as 800 BC.

Intricate brooches, gold bracelets,

vessels made of sheet bronze, iron daggers and axes.

This was the earliest evidence of a long forgotten prehistoric culture,

a culture we now recognise as Celtic.

Archaeologist Hans Rechstreiter has worked here for over 25 years.

What was special about the graves that were found here?

It's the number of the graves. We have more than 5,000 of them,

and also the grave goods we found in the graves.

We have a lot of jewellery and other luxury products in the graves.

In Hallstatt, more than 60% of the graves

are with a lot of grave goods.

Ah, so the majority of people who died and were buried

in these graves were rich enough

-to take stuff with them?

-Yes. That's it.

How do you know this wasn't a graveyard for the wealthy?

How do you know the poor weren't buried somewhere else?

No, the traces on the skeletons,

the muscle marks show that also the people in the rich graves

have worked their whole lives,

these muscle marks show traces of heavy workload.

So what kind of activity creates

that kind of build-up of wear and tear on the bones?

For the women, for example,

we see that they have heavy marks on one shoulder,

it seems they have carried heavy loads on one shoulder.

For the men, we have no muscles on the legs,

but we have a lot of muscles here in the shoulders.

Right, so whatever it was they were doing required upper body strength

but not a lot of moving around.

-No.

-Right.

What made Hallstatt unique can still be found buried

deep inside these mountains.

A valuable commodity that made

the ancient people who lived here rich and Hallstatt famous.

On the right, we have the first prehistoric site

we are entering here. Take care, it's slippery.

Right. Now, this tunnel is a little different than the one we walked up!

Oh, yeah, it is. Here you see the remains of one of these huge

prehistoric tunnels.

So you've re-excavated a space that was originally made 3,000 years ago?

And the shining crystalline sand, that's the salt?

That's the salt, yes. Pure rock salt.

This is the salt of the pre-historic miners were looking for.

And this salt is heading in this direction

so the pre-historic miners followed the direction of the salt.

Salt was highly prized as a vital preservative in the ancient world,

and the Celts of Hallstatt mined it on a massive scale.

This mountain is riddled with huge excavated galleries,

up to 200 metres long and 20 metres high.

Everything the miners left behind is preserved perfectly.

Here you see thousands of burnt tapers to illuminate the light.

-Tapers from the end of flaming torches?

-Yes.

And this is everything that the wealth of Hallstatt society

was all built on, it's this.

So that explains the marks on the skeletons in the graves.

-It's the labour in here.

-Oh, yes, it is.

The tool handles we find in here,

those are the handles of the bronze picks to break

these huge plates of salt, and the work of those picks explains

the marks on the male skeletons, and we think the marks

on the female skeletons are from carrying the huge plates of salt.

So, they bear the marks of a lifetime of labour on the skeletons.

Yes. So, for the Hallstatt people this was their life,

this was their surrounding. This was quite normal.

-They were subterranean.

-Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Within this ancient mine

are also very personal reminders of the people that worked here.

So, am I right in thinking that that there is proof of a life?

Yes, this is pre-historic excrement.

I'll be honest with you, I never expected to catch

this intimate a glimpse of a Celtic salt miner.

I feel a strange sense of communion and brotherhood.

Oh, yeah.

In these excrements, we also find eggs of parasites,

so we have the proof that nearly all the miners

had parasites in their stomachs.

So, it was not a nice time more than 2,000 years ago.

-If it gets wet, it still smells.

-Oh, no.

That is unbelievable. The Iron Age is alive and well down here.

It's preserved because of the salt in here.

It's my first salted poo.

LAUGHTER

The salt from this mountain was of such high quality,

it became a prized commodity, traded throughout the region.

The people of Hallstatt grew rich from this white gold

at a time when another commodity

was starting to transform pre-historic society -

iron.

The secrets of iron production had spread from Asia Minor,

through the Eastern Mediterranean, into Central Europe.

People had long been able to extract copper and tin to make bronze.

Iron ore was more plentiful,

but iron was harder to extract, and to work.

Repeated heating and hammering yielded a metal hardened, durable,

and perfect for weaponry.

The Celts became masters at it.

The extraordinary finds at Hallstatt revealed the Celts as wealthy,

industrious and technologically sophisticated.

It was the birth of a new and very distinctive culture,

one that would grow, influence, and, ultimately, dominate Europe.

Hallstatt would become famous as the birthplace of a new culture

that thrived and spread across great swathes of Europe.

By 500 BC, the Celts had arrived in Northern Italy.

And by 387 BC,

having been wronged by Roman ambassadors at Clusium,

the Celtic Chieftain Brennus

and his men were marching south to Rome, hungry for revenge.

The Roman army, having received word of the approaching Celtic horde,

marched north to meet them, led by General Quintus Sulpicius.

Sulpicius had six legions under his command,

approximately 24,000 soldiers.

Just 11 miles from Rome, he encountered his enemy

on a plain next to the River Allia.

This is by no means the most atmospheric place.

Right behind me, there's a high speed rail track,

the whole area is criss-crossed with overhead power lines,

but we believe that thousands of people died here.

This is the battlefield of Allia, where the Roman army came

face-to-face with the Celts for the very first time in pitched battle.

And it's worth remembering too that the Roman commander Sulpicius

had next to no knowledge of his foe.

He knew nothing about their tactics or their weaponry

and, furthermore, he'd been caught on the hop, with hardly any time

to prepare for what he could now see was ahead of him and coming his way.

Mike Loades, an expert in ancient military tactics, has been

piecing together what happened on the battlefield nearly 2,500 years ago.

-Hi, Neil.

-How are you?

-Good to see you.

-You, too.

-It doesn't really have the feel of a battlefield.

-No.

It's not the prettiest, is it?

It's a reminder that history happens

under our feet where we live our everyday lives.

I kind of like the ordinariness of it.

What about the topography, would it have appealed to a commander?

Well, you've got to remember that this is not the Roman army

of later years, we're talking 387 BC, this is a fledgling Rome.

It's a small force, and they're fighting in a phalanx,

that's 10-15 rows deep, shoulder-to-shoulder.

You've got that rigid, static,

entrenched Roman attitude to fighting.

You hold your ground, you take your position.

What I think Sulpicius was trying to do was force a pitched battle

on this plain, that's where he set his phalanx,

expecting that Brennus would bring his hordes on to engage them.

And, on that hill, which probably didn't have

all those trees on back then,

Sulpicius would have put his cavalry,

the equites - the elite Roman soldiers.

I think Sulpicius was planning to either

sweep down in a flanking manoeuvre, or come round behind the Celts.

So what did go wrong for Sulpicius and his Romans?

Well, the first thing is Brennus didn't do what Sulpicius

thought he was supposed to do, he didn't play the game.

He didn't let his undisciplined hordes rush forward,

he had control of them.

And they went streaming up that hill

and they drove that elite Roman cavalry off the battlefield.

The Celts were much more imaginative, swirling and using

the landscape, and they would hit and run, and fluid,

it's just a different way of commanding the battlefield.

It sounds as if the analogy is that the Celt is the flowing stream

and the Roman is the rock in the river.

With the elite cavalry dealt with, the Celtic warriors

turned their attention to the Roman phalanxes on the plain.

BATTLE CRIES

CLASHING OF SWORDS

THUNDER CLAPS

Overrun and outmanoeuvred, the Roman legionnaires

fled in panic, terrified by the Celtic charge.

Many were cut down in the rout,

others drowned in the Allia, weighed down by their heavy bronze armour.

The Romans would later claim they lost 20,000 men that day.

The city of Rome was left to its fate.

The Romans may have thought their enemy had come out of nowhere,

but the Celts had had connections

with the Mediterranean world for years.

Hill forts are iconic features of Celtic Europe -

Iron Age castles that were the homes of chiefs

and great centres of power.

Heuneburg, built in the 6th century BC,

lies 250 miles west of Hallstatt in southern Germany.

This is Heuneburg, and, in 600 BC,

this whole place would have been covered in Iron Age buildings.

And archaeologists are arguing that we shouldn't just view this as a hill fort,

but that this was a city, perhaps the first city north of the Alps.

The Celtic City of Heuneburg is estimated to have had a population

of 5,000 and its construction was on a grand scale.

A five-metre-high white wall surrounded the entire citadel,

punctuated by huge defensive towers, which were further protected

by a large earthen ditch, six metres deep.

This was architecture designed to be impregnable and to impress.

Dirk Krausse is the Head of Archaeology at Heuneburg.

These walls are pretty magnificent, aren't they?

They're much more magnificent than I expected, for an Iron Age fort.

Yeah, because they are unique, and they are very extraordinary.

Normally they built with timber, and stone, and earth,

but here they used limestone foundation

and above they built with mud bricks.

And this painting is necessary for the protection of the mud bricks

because we have bad weather here, north of the Alps.

It's also for the demonstration of power because these walls

were seen from miles away

so everyone who came here knew this is a mighty side.

So this is what the walls look like underneath all that white paint?

Yeah, these are the mud bricks. They're not baked clay bricks

but they are dried in the sun or the air.

So just how unusual is this style of building for the Iron Age?

It's extraordinary. They didn't build with mud bricks

north of the Alps - never, never before and never afterwards.

Where has this idea come from?

For a long time, it was a mystery where this idea came from,

but the combination of mud bricks and of towers which were built

in the citadel wall here,

you find it only in the Phoenician culture, for example, in the Levant,

or in Sicily, or in the Iberian peninsula.

So maybe an architect came here

who learnt to build in a Phoenician context.

It's an example of this Mediterranean influence,

centuries before you think Mediterranean influence

-really takes off with the Roman Empire.

-Yeah.

When you get up on top of the Heuneburg, you realise just

why it was such an important site.

It dominates the landscape but it's also extremely well connected

within this landscape. That, down there, is the Danube,

which, of course, carries on and flows east to the Black Sea,

and to the south of Heuneberg,

the Rhine rises. These are really important river routes

but there are also important overland routes nearby as well.

The autobahns of the Iron Age.

Silver from Iberia, amber from the Baltic,

wine and pottery from Italy and Greece crisscrossed

the continent, east to west, south to north.

Its links to the wider world made Heuneberg a vital hub

for trade and industry, and helped to build the foundations

of a powerful civilisation.

The enormous wealth from this trade transformed early Celtic leaders

into more than chiefs.

It created an elite class,

the oligarchs of the Iron Age.

Some can even be regarded as royalty.

This burial mound protected the grave of a man

who died around 530 BC.

He's become known as the Hochdorf Prince, because despatched with him

into the afterlife were some of the most remarkable finds of the early

Celtic world, now housed in the depository of the Stuttgart Museum.

This is fantastic. Just look at this.

This is the couch that the Hochdorf Prince was laid to rest on

in his tomb.

And it's made entirely out of sheet bronze riveted together.

It's got this wonderful hammered pattern, stylised warriors

fighting in single combat, and then, at each end,

we've got the representation of a four-wheeled chariot pulled by

two stallions with a warrior holding a shield and a spear.

You've got to remember that when it was put in the grave

it would have been a beautiful, shiny, bronze object,

not this green, verdigrised appearance we see now.

And you can see that this bronze couch is at the moment

resting on these steel legs which of course are not original.

This is what it originally stood on.

So this is one of the eight legs of this couch, and you can see

that it's a little bronze figurine, so this is a woman

bearing a pot on her head and she's drilled all over,

and would have been inlaid with coral,

and she's standing astride a wheel, so she's a miniature unicyclist,

so this couch would have been on casters.

Also discovered in the tomb were drinking horns, bronze plates,

and a vast cauldron decorated with three lions,

that would have contained up to 500 litres of honey mead.

This is the cauldron.

It is enormous.

The size of it is incredibly impressive.

And cauldrons really are emblematic of something which was pretty

fundamental in Celtic society, and that, of course, was feasting.

This was the way that chieftains showed their power,

and their wealth, and kept their allies close to them.

Just based on the size of his cauldron, the Hochdorf Prince

must have been a fairly important person.

But the greatest luxuries of all were found on the Prince himself.

Our Hochdorf Prince was wrapped in layers and layers of cloth,

and, not only that,

he was adorned with all of this gold, and it is stunning.

He was wearing this beautiful, golden neck ring.

When you look at it really, really closely, you realise what appears

at first glance to be an abstract pattern is in fact a little repeating

stamp of a tiny rider on a horse.

And then there are these two golden fibulae, or brooches,

and you can see the pins have been deliberately bent,

so this is part of the strange ritual of his funeral.

He was buried with these brooches

but they're not to be used again by a living person.

And other objects like a bronze dagger which has been

encased in gold, again with a hammered pattern all over it.

But I think what is most extraordinary about this

entire collection are his shoes.

Now, of course, I say shoes but the shoes themselves

have long since rotted away,

but what we have left are these wonderful gold plaques

going round the top of the shoe here and right up and over the toe.

So, having lived in luxury, he took luxury to the grave with him,

and he also took everything he needed to carry on feasting

right into the afterlife.

From the tiny Alpine village of Hallstatt had grown

one of Europe's great ancient cultures.

The Celts may not have fitted the classical model,

but they were a rich, complex and structured society.

A telling contrast of the Roman image of a naked warrior,

the wild barbarian of the Dying Gaul.

I learnt the accepted theory as an archaeology student,

but brand-new research is suggesting that Celtic origins might be

far more complex. And intriguing.

If we're trying to track down the Celts and find out how and where

it all started, there are a number of lines of evidence we can follow.

There's archaeology, so we can look for their material culture,

their swords and shields, and jewellery,

and look at how that spreads across Europe.

But we can also look at language

because we believe that these Iron Age tribes

spoke very similar languages

and that we have surviving Celtic languages in the west of Europe,

in Wales, in Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany.

But it's not to any of those places I've come in search of ancient

Celtic language - it is to the Algarve, to south-west Portugal.

John Koch is a philologist - the study of literary text -

and he's behind a new theory of Celtic origins

that starts with a very old source -

the ancient Greek historian Herodotus.

John, I must say that I didn't expect to come to

Portugal in search of the Celts, but you think that they were here?

Oh, I've no doubt that the Celts were here.

As well as saying that the Celts lived near the source of the Danube

Herodotus in our first good references to the Celts,

writing in the 5th century BC,

says that they also lived beyond the Pillars of Hercules,

that's the Straits of Gibraltar,

and next to a people he calls the Kunetes.

And the Kunetes seems to be a Celtic name as well,

so we have Celts in name and Celts linguistically.

So, how do we square that, what Herodotus is telling us,

with this idea that the Celts come from Central Europe,

that is their homeland, and then they spread out

and that Western Europe is very much a kind of afterthought?

Well, I think we need to look at that differently,

we need to re-examine that whole idea.

It simply doesn't work.

For John, what doesn't work is the absence of archaeological

evidence linking the Celts here to the Celts of Central Europe.

But there is evidence linking the Iberian Celts to Britain,

Ireland and the Atlantic coastline.

The clues are etched into ancient stone tablets

that date to the 7th century BC,

the same period as the Hallstatt Celts.

So, John, what have we got here, what is this stone?

Is it a gravestone?

This was found in the far south-west of the peninsula,

a place called Fonte Velha, which was a necropolis,

-a burial ground of the early Iron Age.

-Can you read it, John?

This bit, "logobol," the first word,

looks very much like dedications

that we have in north-western Spain of "lughubol."

And these are dedications to the Celtic god Lugh.

"Neerobol" probably means something like, "to the Chief men."

So we have, "to the Gods Lugh and to the Chief Men,"

is the opening of this inscription.

"Logon," I think up here, I think this might be the word for "burial"

because we get a very similar word in Northern Italy

in a Celtic inscription probably about 500 years later.

So this looks like a Celtic word written in stone?

It looks like a Celtic... I mean, it's a Celtic name

and it looks like it has a Celtic inflected ending on it,

so it's grammatically Celtic and it's etymologically Celtic.

And it still has links to extant Celtic languages,

to Celtic languages spoken by living people?

Oh, yeah, that's how we know, I mean that's sort of,

by definition, this is how we decide something is Celtic.

John thinks that this is an ancient language

written down using the alphabet of the Phoenicians,

Mediterranean seafarers who reached the Iberian peninsula

as long ago as 900 BC.

Although this language has been written using that alphabet,

it's not Phoenician.

It's Celtic.

This early Celtic has clear links to later Celtic languages

spoken in Britain and Ireland, such as Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish.

And John believes that Bronze Age traders

and seafarers used this proto-Celtic as they traded silver,

copper and tin up and down the Atlantic coastline,

from Portugal to Northern Spain,

Brittany to Ireland, and the West Country.

For me, this is really exciting, cos this is new.

This idea is turning what we think about the Celts totally on its head.

Instead of thinking about a migration out of Central Europe,

we've got something really interesting happening on this

Atlantic fringe, something that could actually be the origin of the Celts.

This new theory suggests that rather than being invaded

by Iron Age Celts, our Celtic heritage arrived in Britain

during the Bronze Age using a very different mechanism.

So, my Celtic-ness might have much more to do

with the exchange of ores and ingots,

than with the blood and gore of a raiding party.

And if that's true, then Britain and the far west of Europe

may have had much more influence on the spread of Celtic culture

in Central Europe than was previously imagination.

And there's a fascinating piece of evidence to support all of that.

This is a Gundlingen sword, an early Celtic sword.

It has this elegant leaf shape

and it sweeps back into a big, broad pommel. It's typically Celtic.

Now, a generation ago, swords like this were sited as evidence

of the spread of the Celts into the west from Central Europe.

So, you'd find them made of iron all over Central Germany

and France. But, recently, archaeologists have been

finding lots of sword like this in Britain, made of bronze,

just like this one. They're from the early 8th century.

They're before Hallstatt.

It suggests there may have been swords

made in Britain from bronze that influenced the weapons technology

of the early Iron Age, spreading from west to east,

from Britain to the Central Europe and not the other way round.

So when it comes to the case of a Celtic warlord

like Brennus and his men,

they may have been carrying weapons

that were shaped by a technology that had its foundations in Britain.

In 387 BC, for the first time,

the Celtic and Roman worlds had clashed at the Battle of Allia.

According to the Roman historian Livy, 20,000 legionaries had

lost their lives that day, leaving the city of Rome at the mercy

of the Celtic army, under the command of Chief Brennus.

Livy wrote the following -

"As there was no hope of defending the city, the decision was taken to

"withdraw all men capable of bearing arms together with the women and

"children and able-bodied senators into the fortress on the Capitol.

"From that stronghold, properly armed and provisioned,

"it was their intention to make a last stand for themselves,

"for their Gods, and for the Roman name."

The fortress was up there on the Capitoline Hill,

one of the seven hills upon which Rome was built.

The city, which had never been defeated,

was about to face the fury of its greatest foe.

Livy wrote - "Then news came that the Gauls were at the gates

"and all too soon cries like the howling of wolves

"and barbaric songs could be heard."

That howling of wolves and barbaric din

might have come from a carnyx - a Celtic war trumpet.

The Celts carried hundreds of them into battle.

Today, however, there is only one carnyx player in the world...

..musician John Kenny.

APPLAUSE

LOW TRUMPET-LIKE SOUND

MODULATING HIGH PITCHED SOUND

The carnyx clearly was used to strike fear into enemies in battle.

The sound is made in the same way that we activate a modern

trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba - you vibrate your lips.

HE DEMONSTRATES

But, with this instrument, the sound is entrapped in a bronze skull,

and the skull works exactly like our skull

because our vocal cords are amplified

by all the nasal passages, and the shape form of our skull,

that's why we can make a sound without opening our mouths.

HE HUMS

It's exactly the same with this instrument.

So the sound isn't projected forward, it's radial,

and that's extremely unusual in the world of musical instruments.

The sound of these trumpets, accompanied by howls

and shouts is thought to have been a deliberate part of the Celtic

battle plan designed to terrify the enemy.

The world at that time was a much quieter place

and these instruments can out-shout human beings

and play as loud as thunder, and as loud as the sea.

Furthermore, when they're played upright, they're 12 feet high

and they have a head, so if you see 12 or so of these

coming out of the mist in the morning screaming like mad,

its quite possible to imagine you're being attacked

by a race of giants.

HE PLAYS CARNYX

So, there we are.

By the time the Celts entered the city of Rome,

its citizens had either retreated to the Capitoline Hill or fled.

The streets were empty.

Livy tells us that the Celts came across a mansion

belonging to Roman nobility, and found the doors open.

Suspecting a trap, they entered cautiously.

But the only thing waiting for them was a group of elderly Romans

sitting motionless, in an act of silent defiance.

The Celtic warriors stood entranced by the spectacle.

On an impulse, a Celtic warrior reached out with his hand

and touched the beard of one of one of the seated figures.

The Roman lashed out and hit him over the head with his ivory staff.

It was the moment that sealed the city's fate.

Enraged, the Celtic warriors butchered the old men where they sat

and looted and burned the Imperial City to the ground.

Eventually, faced with the prospect of starvation or slaughter,

the Romans trapped on the Capitoline Hill

they had no choice but to surrender,

agreeing to pay the Celts a ransom in gold.

The commander, Quintus Sulpicius,

who had led the Army to defeat at the Battle of Allia,

agreed to negotiate a settlement with the Celtic warlord Brennus.

They agreed the sum of 1,000 pounds in weight in gold.

A colossal ransom for a city already ravaged.

Just to add insult to injury, Brennus used weights that

were heavier than normal to weigh the gold.

It was the second time he'd outwitted Sulpicius.

When the Roman commander objected, Brennus flung his sword

onto the scales shouting, "Vae victis!"

"Woe to the vanquished."

Vae victis!

It was a dramatic reminder that the Romans

were totally at the mercy of the Celts.

The Romans had learned the hard way that the Celts were far from

the wild savages portrayed.

During the course of four centuries, they had developed a complex

and powerful tribal network.

Theirs was a warrior culture with a shared language,

and extensive trading links.

They had expanded across Central Europe,

through the Alps, and south into Italy

where they had defeated the emergent Roman Empire.

In the years that followed, Rome was rebuilt

and defended by a new, impregnable barrier -

the Servian Wall.

It was a permanent reminder to its citizens of their defeat

at the hands of the Celts.

They were resolved never to let their city fall again.

For Rome it was a new beginning.

And over the next few hundred years

the Romans would collide again with the Celts

and battle for survival, for land,

for the very heart and soul of Europe.

Next time, 300 years later.

We discover the golden age of the Celts,

and their expansion to the furthest reaches of Europe and beyond.

In France, Rome's greatest military general, Julius Caesar,

is challenged by a warrior king

commanding an army of a quarter of a million men.

At stake is the survival of the Celtic heartland of Gaul.