CELTI. – By this name the Greek sources designate a group of peoples belonging to the Indo-European family who, having probably been settled since the Neolithic period in a region bounded approximately by the North Sea and the Alps, the Rhine and the Danube, began in the Bronze Age the diaspora that led them to occupy those territories in which they can be traced in the historical period.
CONTENTS:
I. Prehistory
II. Religion
III. Evangelization
IV. Liturgy
V. Art.I. PREHISTORY
The C. become appreciable at a relatively late period, that is, when they came into contact with the cultivated Europe of the Mediterranean basin. But when Hecataeus (6th century B.C.) first mentions them, a very long period of Celtic history had already unfolded, precisely the period marked by the great migrations—a period which, not without differences of opinion among scholars, can be reconstructed on the basis of palaeontological and archaeological remains. These make it possible to establish with sufficient certainty that the C. settled, in the first centuries of the Bronze Age (ca. 1800–800 B.C.), in north-eastern and eastern France (perhaps also making some incursions into the British archipelago), and then occupied the whole of France (Gaul, according to the generic designation used by the Latins), Britain and Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula as far as the southern foothills of Portugal, and northern Italy (Cisalpine Gaul: between the Alps, the northern slopes of the Apennines and the Adige). The Celtic upheaval cannot be said to have ended with these settlements, since even in historical times the C. did not cease to be restless, above all for purposes of plunder: the sack of Rome in 390 B.C., the sack of Delphi in 278 B.C., followed by the passage into Asia Minor, Galatia (v.) were established, remaining independent until 25 B.C. In addition to the absence of a Celtic literature, making research into these peoples still more problematic is the fact that, on the one hand, the C. were led to assimilate themselves to the indigenous populations of the territories into which they poured, forming hybrid populations (C.-Thracians, C.-Scythians, Celtiberians, etc.), while, on the other, they soon entered the sphere of Roman expansion, by whose civilization they were ultimately absorbed completely. Today only Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man are Celtic.For information on the C. in historical times V. BRITANNIA, GALAZIA, GALLIA, IRLANDA.
BIBL.: G. Dottin, Manuel pour servir à l'étude de l'antiquité celtique, 2nd ed., Parigi 1915; H. Hubert, Les Celtes et l'expansion celtique jusqu'à l'époque de La Tène, there 1932; J. Pokorny, Zur Urgeschichte der Kelten und Illyrier, Halle 1938.
II. RELIGION
The sources for knowledge of the religion of the C. are palaeoethnological, literary, and archaeological. Among the former are those concerning the indigenous populations of the countries in which the C. settled in successive waves; the latter may be divided into two groups: one represented by writers of the Roman imperial age—Caesar, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, etc.—and the other by the evangelizers of the early Middle Ages, St. Gregorio di Tours, St. Patrizio,