S5003992

Chapter Four

The Celts outside Gaul

By the third century bc when the first independent Celtic coinages appeared, the regional structure of Celtic Europę was already weli defined. Each major geographieal region contained several inter-related tribal groupings that shared a rangę of distinctive cultural or economic conventions. Occasionally there is evidence that an entire regional grouping acknowleged a shared name such as Armorici or Belgae, and we have many individual tribal names, and sometimes names of constituent parts of tribal groupings. The name ‘Celts’ itself (known to the Mediterranean world as Celtae, Calatai, or* Galii), may in fact once have denoted a regional grouping of this sort somewhere in northem Gaul or the Rhineland (cf. the legend of Ambigatus in chapter 1), but the Celts’ long-range colonial activitv from the fifth century onwards laid the foundations for many other Celtic regions far outside their original homelands. By the time their coinages first appeared, the term ‘Celtic’ had lost any specific regional connotation.

It is remarkable that the earliest native coinages of each of the major regions of Continental Celtic Europę were first struck at around the same time. Indeed, this suggests that the timing was influenced by extemal circumstances that affected the entire Celtic world during the late third and early second centuries. As argued above, the most likely circumstance was the Roman conąuest of the mercenary-employing communities of the Helle-nistic world, depriving the Celts of the principal source of Mediterranean gold and silver coinage to which they had become accustomed. By the mid third century it seems likely that imported coinage had come to be regarded as an indispensable form of wealth in many Celtic communities, and any shortage in supply of Mediterranean coins together with the military relationships that generated them was likely to create a predicament, for which one solution was to begin to make local substitutes.

BOAB '

THE CELTS OUTSIDE GAUL

1.    Tolamon 5. Eporodia    __________ Boundary \»

2.    Conoa    6. Ba»el    traditions

3.    Pl&ccntia    7. Manching

4.    Cremona    8. Bratislava