7-02. The Great Replacement of the Kelts
It was with Kelts that the Teutons came in contact towards the sources of the Oder in the mountains which form the boundary of Bohemia. Now there is no race to which the Teutons owe so much as to the Kelts. The whole development of their civilisation was most strongly influenced by the latter — so much so that in the centuries next before the Christian era the whole Teutonic race shared a common civilisation with the Kelts, to whom they stood in a relation of intellectual dependence; in every aspect of public and private life Keltic influence was reflected. How came it then that a people whose civilisation shews such marked characteristics as that of the Teutons of the Later Bronze Age could lose these with such surprising rapidity — perhaps in the course of a single century?
The earliest habitat of the Teutons extended, as we have seen, on the south as far as the Elbe. This river also marks the northern boundary of the Kelts. All Germany west of the Elbe from the North Sea to the Alps was in the possession of the Kelts, at the time when the Teutons occupied the western shores of the Baltic basin. The vigorous power of expansion which this race displayed in the last thousand years of the prehistoric age has left its traces throughout Europe, and even in Asia; and that is what gives it such importance in the history of the world. The whole of Western Europe — France with Belgium and Holland, the British Isles and the greater part of the Pyrenaean peninsula, in the south the region of the Alps and the plains of the Po — has been at one time or another subject to their rule. Eastward, migratory swarms of Kelts pushed their way down the Danube to the Black Sea and even into Asia Minor.
The starting point of this movement was probably in what is now northwestern Germany and the Netherlands, and this region is therefore to be regarded as the original home of the Keltic race. Place names and river names, the study of which is a most valuable means of elucidating prehistoric conditions, enable us to prove the existence in many districts of this original Keltic population. Among Keltic river names are the Rhine (Keltic Renos from an older Reinas, Rainas), the Main (Old High-Germ. Moin, in which the Keltic diphthong is preserved), the Embscher (Embiscara from an older Ambiscara) and the Lippe, also perhaps the Lahn, Sieg, Ruhr, Leine and even the Weser. The mountain names Taunus, Finne and Semana (the old name for the Thuringian Forest) also betray a Keltic origin.
Keltic names are scattered over the whole of western Germany and as far as Brabant and Flanders, but occur with especial frequency between the Rhine and the Weser. In the north the Worpe-Bach (north-east of Bremen) marks the limits of their distribution, in the east the course of the Leine, down to Rosoppe; in the south they extend as far as the Main where the Aschaff (anciently Ascapha) at Aschaffenburg forms the last outpost of their territory. They are not found on the strip of coast along the North Sea, occupied later by the Chauci and Frisians, nor on the western side of the Elbe. From this we may safely conclude that these districts were abandoned by their original Keltic population earlier, indeed considerably earlier, than those to the west of the Weser, and also that the expansion of the Teutons westwards proceeded along two distinct lines, though doubtless almost contemporaneously — one westward along the North Sea and one in a more southerly direction up the Elbe along both its banks.
With this view the results of prehistoric archaeology are in complete agreement. We have determined the area of distribution of the Northern Bronze Age — which we saw to be specifically Teutonic — as consisting, in the earlier period (up to c. B.C. 1000), of Scandinavia and the Danish islands, and also Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg and West-Pomerania, and therefore bounded on the south-west by the Elbe. But in the Later Bronze Age (c. B.C. 1000-600) this territory is enlarged in all directions. On the south and west especially, to judge from the evidence of excavations, it extends from the point at which the Wartha flows into the Oder, in a south-westerly direction through the Spreewald and Flaming districts to the Elbe; then further west to the Harz, and from there northwards along the Oker and Aller to about the estuary of the Weser, and finally along the coast-line as far as Holland.
In Thuringia the Keltic peoples maintained their hold somewhat longer. The northern part of it — above the Unstrut — may have received a Teutonic population in the course of the fifth century B.C.; the southern in the course of the fourth. On the other hand, the whole region westward from the Weser and the Thuringian Forest as far as the Rhine was still in the possession of the Kelts about the year B.C. 300, and was only conquered by the Teutons in the course of the following century. The Keltic local names in -apa — which lie mainly in the country between the Weser and the Rhine — were unaffected by the Teutonic sound-shifting, therefore must have been already adopted into the vocabulary of the advancing Teutons. Then, too, prehistoric remains in this region down to the "Middle La Tène Period" (c B.C. 300), and in its southern parts even later, are so distinctively Keltic that there can be no doubt it was still in Keltic occupation.
It may be taken as the assured result of all the linguistic and archaeological data, that only about the year B.C. 200 the whole of north-western Germany was held by the Teutons, who had now reached the frontier-lines formed by the Rhine and the Main.
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