Archaeology Magazine - June 1949 - 36

92
tophanes about the distance between Athens and
Sparta as indicated on a contemporary map. But
much more exact information had been won long
before the time of the shrewd observer or well
informed source upon whom Poseidonius based
his statement, afterwards repeated both by Caesar
and by Strabo, about the tripartite
cleavage of
Gaul, and the linguistic and other distinctions that
marked the parts.
Ptolemy's subdivision (ii 7.1 )
of what he calls Keltogalatia is substantially the
same, except that Narbonensis is now included as
well as Aquitania, Lugdunensis, and Belgica.
For some years I have occupied myself in trying
to discover more precisely than has been known
hitherto what the differences in language between
these four areas were, and I now think that I
have a fairly clear idea about it. In the present
paper I shall concern myself with linguistic differences within Belgica, by which I mean the subdivision of that name as understood in the time of
Caesar - that is, the Belgica and Germania Inferior of later date combined.
The epigraphic evidence is for the most part later than the time of
Caesar himself, but, as we shall see, it reflects an
earlier state of affairs. As for the other divisions
of Gaul I may refer to my 'Prolegomena
to the
Dialects of Ancient Gaul,' and the maps given
there ( HSCP 55, 1944), adding here only that
there are clear traces of Ligurian as well as
of Keltic in Narbonensis;
that in Aquitania, by
which again I mean the Aquitania
of Caesar
the
('Prolegomena,'
map 1)
pre-Roman dialect
was Iberian, except for a Keltic-speaking enclave
around Bordeaux, south of the Garonne;
that
Keltic was spoken all through the wide sweep of
Lugdunensis, from the Atlantic to the Rhine ; and
that differences of dialect, other than lexical,
within Lugdunensis, so far as they can be determined, are comparatively insignificant.
But when we come to Belgica, out of which
Germania Inferior was subsequently carved, not
as a province as such, but rather as a subdivision
made for purposes of military organization,
we
It
Germanic
traces
of
clear
to
find
speech.
begin
is not possible to say precisely where the ancient
linguistic frontier ran, at least not with the precision with which we know the modern linguistic
But the testimony of the ancient writers,
frontier.
evidence and
combined with the archaeological
with the epigraphic evidence, indicates that Germanic-speaking tribes not only had crossed the

ARCHAEOLOGY
Rhine before the time of Caesar, but also remained firmly entrenched in extensive territories
along its left bank.
KNOW NOTHING OF THE LANGUAGE OR
languages spoken in Gaul before the arrival
WE
of the Kelts, with the exception of Ligurian and
Iberian in the south.
Certainly the once fashionable theory which spread Ligurian all over the
map of western Europe was as ill-founded as is the
more recent theory, which does little more than
That is to say,
substitute Illyrian for Ligurian.
we have occasional glimpses of an extremely ancient stratum of Indo-European
speech, not to be
familiar classithe
more
into
of
pigeonholed
any
The
rest.
the
and
fications, Keltic, Germanic,
true explanation of certain similarities that have
for example bebeen observed in nomenclature,
tween Keltic and Slavonic, is most likely to be that
these similarities reflect this early stratum of not
Such
Indo-European.
very clearly differentiated
of the eviat any rate is a wiser interpretation
dence than the attempt to extend a strictly definable geographical
label, namely Illyrian, to such
a degree that, by embracing everything from Spain
to the Russian Steppes, it becomes quite meaningless.
Accordingly, from the linguistic point of view,
it is Keltic-speaking tribes that we can first clearly
They seem to have spread
distinguish in Gaul.
the enfrom southwestern
Germany throughout
tire Rhineland, and then to have crossed the river
itself into Gaul. When at a later date the territory on the right bank of the Rhine had come to
be largely occupied by Germanic-speaking
tribes,
the old Keltic names often endured, conspicuously
the names of rivers, as testimony to the former
occupation of those regions by Kelts. The expansion of the Germans to the west of the Rhine
begins at a date earlier than the written history
of western Europe, but the ancients were in no
Thus the Aduatuci
doubt about their presence.
are stated to have been a remnant of the Cimbri
and Teutones, whose invasion of Gaul took place
in 113 B.c. Again, Ariovistus and his Germans
until
endangered the Sequani and Mediomatrici,
a stop was put to their further advance by Caesar
But some of them rehimself and his legions.
Under the early
mained in occupation there.
not
the
Vangiones
only
(round about
Empire
the
Nemeteš
about
Mainz),
(round
Speyer), the
Archaeology Magazine - June 1949

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