Gaulish, Galatian, Celtiberian, and Gallo-Roman Evidence

This room gathers primary sources for Celtic-speaking peoples outside the better-known medieval Irish, Welsh, Breton, Manx, and Scottish traditions. The sources are older, harder, and often more fragmentary: inscriptions on stone, bronze, lead, pottery, and altar; Greek and Latin accounts of Gauls and Galatians; and Roman-period dedications preserving local divine names.

The translations are written for ordinary readers first. A page begins with the best English rendering the evidence can bear. Damaged readings, uncertain grammar, source text, and scholarly controls come afterward, so the text can be read before it is studied.

Many of these sources cannot honestly become smooth stories. A broken Gaulish curse, a Celtiberian bronze, or a potter's account may preserve only names, numbers, divine titles, and formulae. In those cases the Good Works Translation gives a bounded reader guide and keeps uncertainty visible rather than inventing certainty.

How to Read This Room

Start with the classical witnesses if you want continuous prose: Caesar, Strabo, Diodorus, Livy, Pliny, Lucan, Pomponius Mela, Polybius, Plutarch, Athenaeus, and Ammianus give Greek and Roman views of Gauls, Druids, warriors, sacrifice, law, feasting, invasion, and migration.

Move to the Gallo-Roman Latin dedications for divine names in living cult: Epona, the Matronae, Belenus, Sequana, Rosmerta, Sucellus, Sirona, Grannus, and regional forms of Mars.

Read the Gaulish inscriptions and calendars as direct but fragmentary voices: votive dedications, magical lead tablets, workshop ledgers, monument labels, and divine names. These are often closer to the ancient communities, but harder to translate.

Use the Galatian and Anatolian sources for the eastern Celtic world: the Galatian movement into Greece and Asia Minor, the three Galatian tribes, and rare local Zeus epithets from the Galatian borderlands.

Use the Celtiberian and Hispano-Celtic sources for western evidence: hospitality tesserae, bronze public texts, and sanctuary inscriptions from Celtic-speaking Iberia.

Colophon

This introduction was prepared for the Continental Celtic source room of the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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