Theory that \'Celts\' are a myth

[Rumo]

So the Gauls (in modern France) referred to themselves as Celts, and the Celts? in Belgae did not. And the Celtic-speakers of Britain and Ireland did not call themselves Celts. The one group of people in what is now Spain were Celtic, but the Iberians and Lusitanians were not Celtic? Clearly to me, at least, it's unfair to say the Britons and Irish did not consider their Celtic roots. Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic are still Gaelic (Gallic/Gaulish and those people did call themselves Celts, if we can believe Caesar who knew them first hand).

Ironically, if we take Caesar's account at face value, then the only true Celts are the Gauls , all the other, from the British Isles and Iberian peninsula to Anatolia are not really Celts. For Caesar the Gauls were living between the Ocean and the rivers Garonne, Rhone, Seine and Marne, except for two tribes - Sequani and Helvetii which were more to the east, the latter being separated from Germans by the Rhine river.

Andrew M. Riggsby, Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words (2006), p. 67:

From time to time Caesar makes reference to information he gained by inquiring of local informants. Yet as both a military commander and governor of three provinces - Illyricum, Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul - Caesar was a very busy man. One might reasonably assume that much of his information, whether German or Gallic, was at best second-hand.

And I tend to agree with that. Even if at times he indeed had personal brief meetings with his informants, I know of no evidence Caesar was speaking in Gallic and not using translators.

Riggsby makes also an interesting remark on the factuality of ancient accounts which directed me to a book in his bibliography. J. H. C. Williams, Beyond the Rubicon: Romans and Gauls in Republican Italy (OUP 2001), p. 220-1:

Apparently factual remarks in the literary sources therefore require cautious handling as evidence for three reasons. First, what Polybius or Cato have to say about the material aspects of Celtic life is not to be considered value-free and reliable simply because it appears to convey information rather than opinion. The two are deeply implicated in one another. Secondly, what they wrote cannot be considered to convey a full picture of ancient reality. Facts can be selectively omitted, or denied, as well as included. Polybius on Celtic towns is a case in point. He misses them out, indeed denies their existence is his sketch of Celtic life in Book 2, but then proceeds to include a number of them in his subsequent narrative of the Romans' wars against the Celts. Whether he was right to consider them as towns in the proper sense is of course an entirely different matter, and this brings us to the third caveat about the use of Greek and Roman literary evidence is reconstructing the realia of life in pre-Roman northern Italy. Anything said by the relevant Greek and Roman authors about the alien and, for most of them, the past world of the Celts in Italy may simply be factually wrong, a consequence of misinformation or misunderstanding, the opportunities for which will have been manifold.

Except for the fact Caesar was contemporary with the world he was describing, all the other points are valid for his account, too.

In this book there's also a nice wording in introduction, summarizing why 'Celts' are a myth (p. 12):

'Celtic' has become, in the opinion of many, so controversial as to be an unacceptable academic usage, on the grounds that it imputes a spurious, or at least dubious, cultural, linguistic and ethnic homogenity to an area (most of Iron Age western Europe) and a time (the Iron Age) for which there is insufficient evidence to show that any such homogeneity existed. The way in which the term 'Celtic' has commonly been used by academics, it is argued, has involved an unfortunate confusion between two different kinds of ethnic terms which need to be carefully distinguished: those referring to ethnic, or ethno-linguistic, categories imposed from without upon populations with no sense of themselves as belonging to that category, and those referring to ethnic communities which are conscious of themselves as separate historical and cultural groups. The ethnonym 'Celt', as used by Greek and Roman writers and modern historians and archaeologists, more probably belongs to the former rather than the latter group, given that the evidence on which it is based is taken entirely from external sources which may or may not have accurately described contemporary ancient communities.