The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

THE WANDERINGS OF THE WIROS i6i
Dodona. These were the " Achaean " heroes, who seem to have made themselves
masters of the Mycenean city states, groaning under the rule of Minoan t5n-ants. A
generation later these joined others in attacking Egypt, and it was their grandsons who,
under the leadership of the king of men, sacked the city of Priam.
The next movement came from the Celtic mountain zone. It was between 1200
and 1175 B.C. that the Celtic lords, accompanied by the bravest of their henchmen,
left the Celtic cradle, crossed the Rhine, and passed through the BeUort gap into Gaul.
By degrees they conquered the whole of the country, though they made their mark
less in Aquitaine and Brittany. Others, passing in all probability down the Rhine,
landed on the east coast of Great Britain, and settled in the eastern counties and in Wessex.
It is too soon, as yet, to define the area which they occupied, but the available evidence,
derived from the swords and the finger-tip ware, suggests the region south-east of the
chalk scarp. Later on a few of these passed across the densely-wooded Midland plain,
across Wales by the upper Severn valley and the Bala cleft, and reached the gold fields
of Ireland. It was some Uttle time, however, before they settled in any numbers in the
land which still preserves their language.
This seems to be all that we can as yet restore of the movements of the Q Wiros,
though there is a sequel to be added later ; we must turn now to the problem of the
P speaking people. We have seen that about the time that the Celts were leaving the
mountain zone for the west, bands of Wiros from the plain, passing through the Moravian
gate, across GaUcia and PodoUa, reached the rich valley of the Koban to the north of the
Caucasus mountains. Here they learned the use of iron from their humble neighbours
on the other side of the mountains, who were perhaps the Chalybes, and made for
themselves steel blades for their swords. It was during their sojourn here that they must
have mixed with other Wiros who were still roaming the steppes of this region, and
who were almost certainly of Iranian speech, which was spoken in this area in the time of
Herodotus, and still survives among the Ossetes'' in the Caucasus moimtains. They
may, too, have come into contact and intermarried with other folk, who were perhaps
not Wiros. For some reason, which I do not pretend to explain, their speech, which on
their arrival must have been allied to Thracian, changed its phonological laws, and
they acquired the habit of labialising the Qu of their original tongue.
»5 Miiller {1864) 524-539.
11