Today I visited the The Celts: Art and Identity exhibition at the British Museum. It was a stunning experience. It includes a large number of world-famous objects, which people in this country are unlikely to encounter unless they make a special effort. Secondly it is a fantastic tribute to the power and longevity of an art-style, 'Celtic Art', which is recognized across the globe, and has lasted in public taste, more or less as long as 'Classical Art'. It is this art-style more than anything else which, for this exhibition at least, defines what it is to be Celtic. The almost abstract [they sometimes conceal animal images] curvilinear designs which characterize it began in Northern France around 350BC spread across Europe and lasted into the Middle Ages and beyond, a history of more than two thousand years. Here are those seductive curves on the Battersea Shield, thrown into the Thames during the Iron Age in the later part of the 1st Millennium BC...
And here they are in the Lindisfarne Gospel from Northumbria more than a thousand years later!
What is really touching is the power of memory involved here, the allegiance to - or the revival of - motifs which say 'This is Us' across centuries - despite the interventions of Romans and Saxons, not to mention Jutes or Huns or Scythians.
The exhibition is scrupulous in its insistence that although art expresses identity, this need not be what we call ethnic or national identity or even linguistic identity. As the curators point out, when we first hear about Celts [from the Greeks, around 500BC] they are living in Central Europe; while no-one referred to the peoples of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany as Celts until the 18th century. Let's face it, the idea of the Celts as a continent-wide 'community' of some kind is an invention of modern nationalism [usually benign, sometimes not] either in reaction to some 'other' people: in these islands, the English/Saesneig/Sassenachs, in France [Gaul], Germans and Romans; or even, not so long ago of EU enthusiasm [the Celts were 'the first Europeans'].
The curators are surely right; the kind of approach taken by Neil Oliver and the BBC in their recent series is crass and unhistorical. But I wonder if the curators haven't gone too far. There is very little mention of linguistics in the exhibition. Yet the evidence is clear. Personal and place-names in early sources show that people from Britain and Ireland, Gaul and as far as Northern Italy and Austria spoke one of two variants of a common Indo-European language group, which we call Celtic today, separate from Italic [Latin], Hellenic [Greek], Germanic, Baltic or Slavic. Even if they didn't feel themselves to be part of one big Celtic community, I suspect that had we been around to see it we would have noticed that the language went in parallel with some [not all] cultural characteristics. And from Caesar and Tacitus we know that these weren't shared with people to the North and East - whom they described as German.
So I think the exhibition could have grasped these issues more boldly. Especially as it looks as though as Roman power pushed into Northern Europe, 'Celtic' people did began to develop a stronger sense of identity, as we see with Vercingetorix's career and Tacitus's speech for the Caledonian Calgacus: "They have made a desert and they call it peace". The later part of the exhibition demonstrates this self-awareness well in the giant arm-rings and different clothes worn by people outside the empire. Perhaps that process explains why in the post-Roman period Irish monks began to emphasize Iron Age motifs in their manuscripts.
The curators are a bit timid in other respects. Many of the classical sources only describe the Celts because of their unwelcome arrival, mob-handed and greedy, in fleshpots of the Mediterranean like Delphi or Rome. On the evidence of this exhibition - fabulous statues, gorgeous weaponry - warriors were the people who ran these societies, just as the Greeks and Romans said. And everything else we know from the written sources indicates that Celtic societies were competitive and unstable. But the curators seem unwilling really to contemplate the implications of this. These warriors were probably as disruptive and difficult as mediaeval knights. Sadly we lack the evidence for the ideology and practices which might have mitigated the mayhem. But that doesn't mean we should necessarily disbelieve the classical sources which tell us of barbaric violence, human sacrifice etc On the whole this is a sanitized Celtic world, where violence is a police issue, no more. I'm not convinced.
There's a knock-on effect of this, which is that we don't really get any understanding of why when they did emerge into history, Celts were to be found battering at the walls of Greece and Rome. Mary Beard has talked about how the Roman empire faced problems with barbarian 'economc migrants' in the 4th century. There's no reason to think that the Celts/Gauls who threatened Rome and Greece were any different; in fact, following Peter Heather, they were probably the first examples of a process which would eventually sink the Roman Empire in the West.
With religion, archaeologists are always at a stand. And here the curators stay strictly on message, talking blandly of gods and legends which have been lost. And yet the two most spectacular exhibits are religious. The first is the almost incredible assemblage of the Snettisham hoards, buried - as a sacrifice or oblation? - in Norfolk around 70 BC.
These exhibits are fantastic, beautiful, mesmerizing, and very, very strange. Earlier in the exhibition we have been shown beautiful 'torcs' from all over the Celtic world, identified as status symbols. Now we find them deposited as part of 12 separate 'hoards' with almost no context, apart from an impressive 'enclosure' nearby which unfortunately dates from several decades later.The wealth implied by these things is spectacular [what about the stuff they didn't sacrifice?]; the craftsmanship superb. But why? Irrationality on this scale must imply religion but as far as the exhibition is concerned that's as far as one can go.
At the heart of this glorious exhibition is what is without doubt a religious object, the amazing Gundestrup Cauldron. Made of solid silver it was discovered in a bog in Denmark and dated to around 100 BC, it is usually described one of the 'masterpieces' of 'Celtic Art'. Yet as the exhibition makes clear it is not really 'Celtic' at all, although people we might call Celts seem to appear on it. It was probably made in Thrace [Romania/Bulgaria] and on the inside there are scenes which seem to derive from India, including a depiction of the goddess Lakshmi, and a shaman sitting in a forest doing what looks like tantric yoga. Some years ago I made a film about all this and you can see it here: it's part of a series called Down to Earth [Channel 4 1991], is presented by Catherine Hills, and features Timothy Taylor. I spoke to Tim recently and he says he stands by everything we said then.
Today I am astonished that the Danes allowed us to put their great treasure on a small electric turntable! But you need to see it in the flesh, as it were, to appreciate what an astonishing object it is; its sheer size and strangeness amazes everyone.
With the Gundestrup cauldron we are arriving into history, and the eruption of Rome into the Celtic world [rather than the other way round!]. As I said, the exhibition does a grand job of showing how traditional ideas and styles survived and were transformed in the process of 'Romanization', with the influences going both ways - and conflict being as significant as accommodation, both inside and beyond the area of Roman rule.
As you emerge from the exhibition, the last chamber celebrates the rediscovery of the Celts, Ossian, druids, eisteddfods and all. It demonstrates that the Celtic revival must be one of the most successful cultural enterprises in European history, although not one without problems, as we have seen in Ireland in the past decades. In a way the revival is the reason that this exhibition exists at all, despite the curators' attempts to avoid its influence. So if you decide, as I often do, to walk back through the exhibition to look again at things you now understand better, it's actually a rather wonderful way to see it, moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, backwards in time until certainties dissolve in the Celtic mist.
