Gaul

I appreciate you user

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What were the gallic relations with each other like?

It's really hard to put anything concrete about the Celts due to the fact that they were orally recording their history and weren't one polity. Most of what we know of them are from the Romans and Greeks.

You had Celtic polities who were sophisticated as fuck in the Southern bits of Western Europe while they're full oogabooga tier in Britain.

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Celt aesthetics>roman aesthetics

Sexy

Veeky Forums is a /pol/ colony

That's some pretty effin' sweet art boyo

To expand on the subject of this thread, in a Roman related thread someone pointed out how Celts in film are always depicted in a really historically inaccurate way, essentially either as angry cavemen or in a fashion identical to later Germanic peoples.

Personally I think it's because if you depicted them in a more accurate fashion, it would be hard to distinguish them from Romans in an action scene. If you saw a guy like the front lad in this image in a movie for only a few seconds with a rapidly moving camera, you'd possibly have trouble recognizing him as a non-Roman.

I'd say it's a mixed bag. I love Celtic art when it comes to the shapes and patterns they employed. What I like less is their depiction of humans, which are really heavily overstylised and somewhat crude looking compared to everything else they did. It's always weird to see these really elaborate shapes and stuff contrasted with the wonky looking stick figures.

I think it also conflicts to much with the commonly accepted view of Celts.
Painting Barbarians as anything else than, well, Barbarians may confuse people even when there's no action inside.

Were the Gauls just manlets or were their horses gigantic? Even their cows are taller than most of the people in that pic

romans were manlets

There's a short fellow and a large chubby fellow called Asterix and Obelix

And they defeated the Romans numerous times.

Or there's the more likely option, that the artist just fucked up.

I think it's just good ol' cinema laziness. The same reason why Roman legionaries will inevitably dressed in (often leather) Segmentata and wearing imperial helmets in 200BC.
I think it's mostly laziness by the researchers and costume department, along with the previously mentioned contrast to make them easy to tell apart from the Romans.

They were 168-170 that's like 5'6-5'7 cm tall on average

I want to bang gaulish chicks

Most humans were pretty shorter than now prior to agricultural industrialization and modern food production

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is there an explicit reason they wore pajama bottoms? Like was that pattern easier to produce or what.

They couldn't have been that advanced since they didn't write their shit down

They did write, they used the Greek alphabet.

Yeah but that wasn't very common

>and artistically were indeed very impressive

Not particularly, Niggers being much more impressive and Celts not having cities until like the second third- secentury bc

Could the Gauls, just before their conquest, be described as a 'civilization'? By that I mean did they have true cities or statehood? I know they had large fortified settlements and political confederations, but I don't know if they could be called cities or states. I'm leaning towards a 'yes' but I don't really know.

>cities

Not in the modern sense, they had some fortified settlement but they don't correspond to the definitin of cities

>states

No, they didn't

I love these mirrors.

>Not in the modern sense, they had some fortified settlement but they don't correspond to the definitin of cities
Why not? Did they not serve the same functions (manufacturing, trade, administration, etc) as true cities?

>No, they didn't
Again, why not? Lack of bureaucracy?

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Britons > Gauls

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>why not?

Small size, no city planning, no differentiated districts

>why not?

No evidence of it, for Myceneans we have written evidence of it, enormous palaces filled with all kinds of luxuries, for the celts we have no such things.

There aren't large towns which have control on surrounding villages for instance.

What were the battle tactics of the Celts? Did they really rely on massed charges to overwhelm the enemy?

Did they have formations or was it a simple 1-1 every man for himself?

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>Small size, no city planning, no differentiated districts
>No evidence of it, for Myceneans we have written evidence of it, enormous palaces filled with all kinds of luxuries, for the celts we have no such things.
>There aren't large towns which have control on surrounding villages for instance.

Actually, we have archaeological evidence that says the very opposite. The large oppida especially definitely were separated into districts, and their fortifications and positioning do definitely relate to the projection of influence.

As for the Mycenaean comparison, the problem here is the difference in societal build-up. The Mycenaeans were extremely centralised, which also resulted in a centralisation of wealth. That's very different from the Celts.

They actually had horselets (basically ponies) for the most part, italian and iberian horses were extremely valued by the gauls and there even was one tribe that was almost wiped out in raids when they started breeding them, which is why they were exceedingly happy to side with Caesar during the gallic wars.

Actually it seems that beyond the southern coast latin ruled since the conquest of Gallia Narbonensis. The long haired gauls spoke and wrote latin rather than greek.

They likely used shieldwalls of sorts and other basic tactics.

They did a lot of different things. They definitely employed shieldwalls of some sort (Caesar actually called them testudos), they also employed skirmishers. Their cavalry tactics were very effective according to Roman sources, and were centered mostly around skirmishing as well as charging softer targets.

We know for a fact that they employed a sort of horned saddle, which the Romans used too. From what I understand the origin is unknown, but it's very possible that it was a Celtic design.

Celts- the Continental Ones close to Southern Europe at least- literally invented the concept of Javelin throwing heavy infantrymen fighting in fluid formations that Romans and Greeks copied.

They were also some of the best horsemen in Western Europe. So much so that Epona - the continental Celtic horse goddess- became enshrined as a Roman goddess of horses centuries when Gaul was firmly under Rome.

That's funny, the romans say they copied that from the sabines. What about some sources for the claim? Especially since Caesar remarked how undisciplined and unformed they were in combat, which seems to stride with the idea of them fighting in fluid formations (which is actually harder to do compared to close ones).

I have a question. There are increasing amounts of depictions of Celts wearing a sort of leather or textile armour broadly resembling a linothorax in shape. Pic related.
They appear a lot in Total War, initially in mods for Rome 1 as well as in vanilla Rome 2. Does anyone know where evidence of this comes from?

Here's a Rome 2 Screenshot with this armour.

>effin'
>boyo

Veeky Forums is an 18+ website, boyo.

>If you saw a guy like the front lad in this image in a movie for only a few seconds with a rapidly moving camera, you'd possibly have trouble recognizing him as a non-Roman.

That makes me wonder how Romans and Celts were able to distinguish each other in the heat of battle.

Tall and pink fleshed barbarians vs dark, roman manlets. The problem is Hollywood uses British and American actors for both sides.

In all seriousness there probably were moments of misidentification but if you were fighting in a unit it probably didn't happen extremely often.

Shield art/shape and moustaches.

Celtic warriors were mostly a social class of their own, and were expected to show their tribal colours. That alone would make for some level of recognizability. War paints were a thing too, and gauls were renowned for long hair and at least moustaches against the shortcropped and shaved romans.

Did the Celts ever use axes as weapons? And why stop using it by the time the Romans arrived?

Much of what we know is coloured by Romans then further coloured by Victorians

- They were not dumb arseholes
- Heads were kept for religious and often respectful reasons (from this guy was a fierce opponent now I have his strength to this is a worthy foe/ancestor)
- They had excellent metalworking skills
- A rich oral tradition, remember the romans didn't write much before 200bc. Many Celts did actually write in Latin and etruscan script.
- Human sacrifice probably wasn't as widespread as.made out, and remember the romans frequently killed people very badly for religious and legal reasons.
- small rural settlements were the order of the day, there were shit loads of them
- A decent transport system, most roman words for carts and transport are celtic in origin indicating the dirt roads were actually fairly good to travel on, can't build wheels without track after all
- What we call celtic is probably horribly confused, and owes much to anti-English identity in Victorian era, it's probable the Atlantic fringe of Spain, Brittany, UK were closely tied and adopted la tene trappings and culture as it spread out.

>remember the romans didn't write much before 200bc
You're getting confused with classic latin literature. Roman historians continually reference older records of all sort of shit from religious hymns to legal procedures going back as far as the early monarchy (in fact going so far back that Cicero complains how archaic and hard to understand the latin is). Whereas the gauls wrote nothing at all in their own language, and adopted latin and greek when they needed to write. Big fucking difference.

>remember the romans frequently killed people very badly for religious and legal reasons
You talk of coloured views, but you seem distinctly anti roman yourself.
The romans stopped practicing human sacrifice by the early republic and they literally only had 3 crimes with a death sentence: patricide, perduellio and unchastity (by and with a vestal virgin). Ever the paterfamilias stuff was basically an archaism that was not applied by the mid republic.
Of course they could be exceedingly mean to slaves and foreigners, but eh who wasn't.

Idk, some of the craftmanship on certain gaulic and celtic objects from almost 3000 years ago, to the fall of Rome, speaks to a level of societal development that only could be achieve by a fairly sophisticated, domestic, and organized culture. Also the size of the army's they were able to field in defense (rather than being a nomadic horde) and their ability to make huge alliances during Roman invasions is quite impressive.