#protogreek

This is another one of those asks that was eaten by tumblr but we still had the name of the asker this time. Sorry it took us so long @tharkun-istari

What do you think about the relation between arcaic greeks or proto-greeks and continental celts mythology? Are they related to each other? Do you think both of them come from a common thought before they expanded for west Europe (including british islands and Ireland) and Greece?

There are a couple of problems we ran into when answering this question, the major one being that these cultures didn’t tend to write anything down. Because of this, a lot of our answer is built upon conjecture. Given, the conjecture is not our own but has been studied by linguists or scientists for a long time and is generally agreed upon in their fields. Still, the fact remains that a lot of it is conjecture.

We talked this from two perspectives which each gave a different answer. The first way we came at this was from a linguistic perspective which shows that Greek and Celtic languages do derive from a common ancestor several thousand years ago, and it is very probable that their pantheons also derive from a common proto-pantheon. There are a lot of similarities in the general structure and the names and natures of particular gods that are too close to just be chance.

The second way we came at this ask was from an archaeological perspective which concludes that given that there is no archaeological or other concrete evidence that the Archaic/Proto-Greeks and Continental Celts are related to each other, any mythological parallels would be coincidence and may be attributed to both cultures sharing myths with each other after they have already been established as independent entities.

They were, however, certainly aware of one another. The Greeks founded colonies along the southern coast of what is now France, while Celtic tribes invaded Greece in 279BC, almost sacked Delphi, and ended up settling in Galatia in what is now Turkey. There are inscriptions in ancient Gaulish in an adapted Greek alphabet found in the South of France.

There was a genetic analysis done that corroborates the migration patterns that we do know of (which itself is corroborated by archaeological analysis of different ruins and the items left behind, like jewelry, carvings, and burial sites) that link the Celts of the UK to Bohemia - which straddles the Czech Republic and very south Germany - via the Gaels of France/Spain through the Italian Alps.

The closest we could find that the Celts (of the UK, at least) are really Greeks is the Scota myth, and it's wiggly whether Scota herself was a Greek (unlikely as there's more versions of the myth that she was the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh) or her husband, who was a Greek prince. This myth doesn’t give nearly enough evidence to say that the proto-greek and continental celtic mythology are related from an archaeological perspective.

-the Chorus and the Muses

Further Reading:

Archaeology -

Scottish Myth of Scota (starting from page 41)

Bridgman, Timothy P. “Celts and Hyperboreans: Crossing Mythical Boundaries.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, vol. 22, 2002, pp. 39–55.

Linguistics -

Proto-Indo-European Religion

Mysterious Indo-European homeland may have been in the steppes of Ukraine and Russia