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.
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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.
