SWITZERLAND AND AUSTRIA ORIGIN OF CELTIC CULTURE
Ever since a tombstone was found in the Lindenhof gardens in 1747 with an inscription in Latin with the name of a boy named Lucius Aelius Urbicus, it had always been thought that Zurich (Switzerland) had a Roman origin. And it is also that the archaeological findings on the wall of the old city corroborated that a military garrison of the Roman Empire settled there and that later that settlement became a civil town.
But in 1999 there was another discovery, due to canalization work, some prehistoric Celtic archaeological objects were discovered. Mainly clay pots and coins that indicated that there was a prehistoric Celtic settlement on the shores of the Swiss lake long before the Roman one.
The Celts were settled by the first time around the Alps during the Hallstatt period (referring to a town in Austria) at the end of the Bronze Age about 1500 BC and from Iron Age (1200-400 BC) They were tribal societies of endo-Germanic origin that spread throughout Central Europe, Gaul, Spain and the British Isles. Later when the Roman Empire was lengthening and they reached them they were absorbed by the invading Roman society.
It must be taken into account that the term Celtic does not refer to an ethnic or genetic entity, but to a particular society of a cultural and in particular linguistic nature. They shared thesame culture and language with particularly abstract and mystical connotations.
The Celtic people has been reinvented continuously throughout history influencing each other with cultures that came in contact, but has always kept one ‘s cultural identity, common among all Celtic communities scattered across Europe. So the Celts were European communities united by a similar artistic and cultural style, and not just a people settled in the northernmost area, in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
The term “Celtic” was already used by the Greeks 500 BC, referring to the barbarian peoples who lived in those hills near the north of the Alps and in the areas beyond the mountains, the current Czech Republic, Serbia, Turkey, France, Germany and some parts of Spain and Portugal.
The “keltoi” as the Greeks called them, lived in small village communities among the hills and had a more abstract and conceptual art than the classical Mediterranean civilizations that lived in cities and favored a more material and worldly art, and less spiritual, as was the Roman in its beginnings.
The Roman Empire arrived and dominated in Great Britain between the years 43 and 410 AD, so also at the time those northern peoples adopted the Christianity brought by them. Just as the Celtic culture was influenced by its invaders (Christian crosses gave rise to the typical Celtic cross associated with Ireland, for example), the Roman culture was also influenced by its culture and art, also assimilating its myths and legends that were integrated later in Christianity until being consolidated in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
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SWITZERLAND AND AUSTRIA ORIGIN OF CELTIC CULTURE SWITZERLAND AND AUSTRIA ORIGIN OF CELTIC CULTURE SWITZERLAND AND AUSTRIA ORIGIN OF CELTIC CULTURE SWITZERLAND AND AUSTRIA ORIGIN OF CELTIC CULTURE
