\'The myth of Celtic and Roman Britain\'

[Phaichtos]

There is something pretty unsavoury about it all - claims about blood and belonging are seldom motivated by strictly historical concerns.

- Nathan

This is very true. It actually saddens me that so many people who are "interested" in things like aboriginal Europe (one of my primary interests) are in it just because they believe that "white people" are superior to everybody else. Luckily, people like this tend to be walking counterpoints to their own assertions of "white superiority", but it does tend to cast a shadow of guilt by association at times.

Actually serious scholars have linked the language forms of Ireland and northern Spain. (I've not heard anyone seriously link them to Israel.) Don't know whether that theory is currently in fashion. Since it's more than fifteen minutes old, I suspect it's out. :roll:

One assertion in the debate about the Celtishness of Britain is that Brythonic was so different from Gaelic. There are many theories which use that issue to both defend or refute the Celt credentials of the Britons.

Actually, I've recently been looking into the work of Barry Cunliffe (a well-respected archaeologist) and in particular in his Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 he points out the overt similarities between many of the peoples of "Atlantic Europe" as opposed to the normal north-south clines we tend to think of when it comes to "the natives". I'm no expert on aboriginal (or modern, for that matter) Spain myself, but it actually wouldn't surprise me much if 1) the language of modern northern Spain shows some traces of a Celtiberian substrate (isn't this region still called "Galicia"?) and 2) that given the location of Spain and Ireland on the Atlantic fringe, if there weren't some sort of genetic interchange in the past. I would pause before using any of the pseudo-racial arguments that have been put forth in our dark past (for instance, that the alleged "swarthiness" of the Welsh is due to an admixture of Spaniards or even Phoenicians), but that still doesn't mean that there wasn't some kind of interchange in prehistory.