
Who were the Celts? Were they a people, a civilisation, an empire, or a fiction of historical imagination? They flit as ghosts through Europe's ancient past, purported ancestors of the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Cornish and Bretons. Yet they have never been identified with any one...

The history of the Celts is the history of a misnomer. There has never been a distinct people, race or tribe claiming the name of Celtic, though remnants of different languages and cultures remain throughout Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall. The word keltoi first appears...