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Gallic? Mercs in Egypt


Phalanx
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So the Ptolemaic barbarian sword mercenary is labeled as "Gallic".  Is this technically correct?  The word Gallic usually pertains to the Gauls, ergo to France, which would be quite a distance to get mercs.  The most common opinion of historians is that the Ptolemaics purchased their barbarian swords from Galatia, which is not in France.

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1 hour ago, niektb said:

Galatians are Celts, not Gauls :)

Celts and Gauls are different ? They aren't same but is like some American call us Spanish to us, I'm Spanish , in some way my ancestry is from Spain, but I'm from Honduras, I'm so a Mesomarican Ancestry, mostly of my people indeed but my family comes from Spain and the to Cuba and then to Honduras.

 

same here Celts were warrior around north western even eastern Europa , they improved so a lot in battle they invade Balkans and cross to modern  Turkey. They are conquerors not to form a unified empire but a large Celtic region.

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2 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I think Romans call them Gauls, Greek call them Keltoi.

Yes that it's correct, we have perspectives here.

The Galatians originated as a part of the great Celtic migration, which invaded Macedon, led by Brennus. The original Celts who settled in Galatia came through Thrace under the leadership of Leotarios and Leonnorios c. 278/277 BC. These Celts consisted of three tribes, the Tectosages, the Trocmii, and the Tolistobogii.

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Gallic? yes

from where? Galia Narbonensis,

France? yes.

-----

 Brennus invaded Greece in 281 BC with a huge war band, but was turned back before he could plunder the temple of Apollo at Delphi. At the same time, another Gaulish group of men, women, and children was migrating through Thrace. This had split off from Brennus' people in 279 BC, and had migrated into Thrace under its leaders Leonnorius and Lutarius. These invaders appeared in Asia Minor in 278–277 BC; others invaded Macedonia and killed the Ptolemaic ruler Ptolemy Ceraunus, but were eventually ousted by Antigonus Gonatas, the grandson of the defeated Diadoch Antigonus the One-Eyed.

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Then..

The invaders came at the invitation of Nicomedes I of Bithynia, who wanted their help in a dynastic struggle against his brother. Three tribes crossed over from Thrace to Asia Minor. They numbered about 10,000 fighting men and about the same number of women and children, divided into three tribes, TrocmiTolistobogii and Tectosages. They were eventually defeated by the Seleucid king Antiochus I, in a battle where the Seleucid war elephants shocked the Celts. While the momentum of the invasion was broken, the Galatians were by no means exterminated.

Instead, the migration led to the establishment of a long-lived Celtic territory in central Anatolia, which included the eastern part of ancient Phrygia, a territory that became known as Galatia. There they ultimately settled, and strengthened by fresh accessions of the same clan from Europe, they overran Bithynia and supported themselves by plundering neighbouring countries. The Gauls invaded eastern Phrygia on at least one occasion.[3]

Strabo describes the constitution of the Galatian state: by custom, each tribe was divided into cantons, each governed by a chief ("tetrarch") followed by a judge, whose powers were unlimited except in cases of murder, which were tried before a council of 300 drawn from the 12 cantons and meeting at a holy place, 20 miles southwest of Ancyra, written in Greek as Δρυνεμετον (Drunemeton or Drynemeton, Gaulish *dru-nemeton "holy place of oak"). It is likely it was a sacred oak grove, since the name means "sanctuary of the oaks" (from drus, meaning "oak" and nemeton, meaning "sacred ground"). The Galatian arrivals left the local population of Cappadocians in control of the towns and most of the land, paying tithes to their new overlords, who formed a military aristocracy and kept aloof in fortified farmsteads, surrounded by their bands.

-----That I proposed the sacred ground will be a kind marvel / monument for celts.-----

 

These Celtic warriors were respected by Greeks and Romans (illustration,[which?] below). They were often hired as mercenary soldiers, sometimes fighting on both sides in the great battles of the times. For years, the chieftains and their war bands ravaged the western half of Asia Minor, as allies of one or other of the warring princes, without any serious check. This ended when they sided with the renegade Seleucid prince Antiochus Hierax ruling in Asia Minor, who tried to defeat Attalus, the ruler of Pergamon (241–197 BC). Instead, the Hellenized cities united under Attalus's banner, and his armies inflicted several grave defeats upon them, about 232 forcing them to settle permanently and to confine themselves to the region to which they had already given their name. The theme of the Dying Gaul (a famous statue displayed in Pergamon) remained a favorite in Hellenistic art for a generation.

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The king of Attalid Pergamon hired Galatians in the increasingly devastating wars of Asia Minor. One of the tribes in his service, the Aigosages, refused to obey after a lunar eclipse on 1 September 218 BC. Another band deserted from their Egyptian overlord Ptolemy IV (reigned 221-204 BC) after a solar eclipse had broken their spirits.

 

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In the first century BC Julius Caesar reported that the people known to the Romans as Gauls (Galli) called themselves Celts,[17] which suggests that even if the name Keltoi was bestowed by the Greeks, it had been adopted to some extent as a collective name by the tribes of Gaul. The geographer Strabo, writing about Gaul towards the end of the first century BC, refers to the "race which is now called both Gallic and Galatic," though he also uses the term Celtica as a synonym for Gaul, which is separated from Iberia by the Pyrenees. Yet he reports Celtic peoples in Iberia, and also uses the ethnic names Celtiberi and Celtici for peoples there, as distinct from Lusitani and Iberi.[18] Pliny the Elder cited the use of Celtici in Lusitania as a tribal surname,[19] which epigraphic findings have confirmed.[20][21]

 

Latin Gallus (pl. Galli) might stem from a Celtic ethnic or tribal name originally, perhaps one borrowed into Latin during the Celtic expansions into Italy during the early 5th century BC. Its root may be the Common Celtic *galno, meaning “power, strength”, hence Old Irish gal “boldness, ferocity” and Welsh gallu “to be able, power”. The tribal names of Gallaeci and the Greek Γαλάται (Galatai, Latinized Galatae; see the region Galatia in Anatolia) most probably have the same origin.

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