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Calling all armchair generals! Boudica's Last Stand.
I was down the pub at lunch time and put this point from 317680 to some bloke at the bar;

"These ideas about the origin of the name Boudica are all very well, but fail to account for the king of the Iceni, Prasutagus, having what appears to me to be a perfectly good 'celtic' name! All the study demonstrates is that there a lot of names that look a bit like Boudica or Bodicca or Bodvocca spread around all over the place, including 'celtic' regions."

to which he said;

For a discussion of the name Prasutagus, see ‘The language of inscriptions on Icenian coinage’ by Daphne Nash Briggs, pp 83-102 in Davies, JA (ed) The Iron Age in Northern East Anglia: New Work in the Land of the Iceni. BAR British Series 549. ISBN 9781407308852 (2011),

Prasutagus was probably a secular title equivalent to the sacral title Esuprastus, for a man who very likely spent some of his education in Rome and who would have known Latin and maybe Greek quite well.

The Prasu- or –prastus part is a loan from Latin praesto ‘stand before’ with a meaning well rendered by modern English preside and priest.

Tagos was Greek for ‘commander’ and also the name of a river in Portugal. It has not been accepted into Delamarre’s corpus of the Gaulish language and epigraphic databases show no sign of it in compounded names that look particularly Celtic. There was a tagos toutas in Cisalpine Gaul and a Tiotagos in Reims; neither region was as Celtic as some people like to make out.

It is possible to construct etymologies for Prasutagus in Germanic (and probably Outer Mongolian too) that are at least as plausible as anything in Celtic. His title proves as little about his ethnicity or home language as, for example, the name Richard or the title archbishop does today.


at whcih point I had to go for another round.... Big Grin
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Messages In This Thread
Re: Calling all armchair generals! - by Ensifer - 03-11-2010, 03:13 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-18-2012, 06:26 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 12:02 AM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 02:50 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 05:40 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 02-19-2012, 11:26 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-24-2012, 05:11 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-24-2012, 09:42 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-24-2012, 10:10 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-25-2012, 03:11 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-25-2012, 03:25 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-25-2012, 08:36 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-26-2012, 02:57 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 04-27-2012, 01:50 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by Steve Kaye - 08-05-2012, 02:24 PM
Re: Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by John1 - 08-22-2012, 07:17 PM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-07-2014, 02:18 PM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-08-2014, 01:50 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-11-2014, 02:03 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-18-2014, 07:54 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-20-2014, 02:37 AM
Calling all armchair generals! Boudica\'s Last Stand. - by antiochus - 11-25-2014, 08:29 AM

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