The Galatian kingdom of central Anatolia, founded in the third century BCE by a war band of Celtic mercenaries in the service of the Bithynian king Nicomedes I, was the easternmost Celtic-speaking state of the ancient world. For more than seven centuries, the Galatians maintained a distinct Celtic identity, a Celtic language, and a Celtic political tradition in a region surrounded by Greek, Phrygian, Cappadocian, and eventually Roman populations. To follow the Celtic settlement of Galatia is to examine one of the most remarkable examples of cultural and linguistic survival in the ancient world, a survival that took place at the eastern edge of the Iron Age Celtic expansion and that has left its mark on the religious, literary, and linguistic heritage of the entire region. The Galatian story is part of the broader history of the Celtic civilization and is intimately connected to the Celtic encounter with the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.
The Foundation of Galatia
The foundation of the Galatian kingdom is recorded in the fragments of the Greek historian Memnon of Heraclea, who wrote a history of Heraclea Pontica in the third or early second century BCE. According to Memnon, a war band of some twenty thousand Celtic warriors, led by the chieftains Leonnorius and Lutarius, crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor in the aftermath of the great Celtic invasion of Greece in 279 BCE. The Celtic mercenaries were hired by Nicomedes I of Bithynia, who was fighting a civil war against his brother Zipoetes II. In 275 BCE, the Celtic warriors played a decisive role in Nicomedes’ victory, and as a reward the grateful king granted them a large territory in the central Anatolian highlands.
The territory granted to the Celts was in the region that the Romans later called Galatia, an area centered on the modern Turkish capital of Ankara and extending across the rolling grasslands of the central Anatolian plateau. The Celtic settlers, who brought with them their families, their slaves, and their movable property, established themselves in a series of hilltop settlements and small towns, including the later capitals of the three Galatian tribes.
The Three Tribes of Galatia
The Galatian kingdom was organized as a loose confederation of three tribal groupings: the Tolistobogii, the Trocmi, and the Tectosages. The tribal names are clearly Celtic, and the name of the Tectosages in particular suggests a connection with the powerful Gaulish tribe of the Toulouse region, the Volcae Tectosages. The tradition that the Galatian Tectosages had migrated from the Toulouse region is preserved by the Greek geographer Strabo, and the linguistic evidence supports the idea that the Galatian tribes came from different parts of the Celtic world.
Each of the three tribes occupied a defined territory within Galatia, and each had its own capital, its own chief, and its own internal political organization. The Tolistobogii occupied the western part of Galatia, with their principal centre at Pessinus and their most famous sanctuary on the hill of Dindymus, dedicated to a mother goddess identified by the Greeks as the Phrygian Cybele. The Trocmi occupied the eastern part of Galatia, with their capital at the fortress later known as Eccobriga, near modern Çankırı. The Tectosages occupied the central part of Galatia, with their capital at the later Ancyra, modern Ankara.
Galatian Political Organization
The political organization of the Galatian kingdom combined Celtic and Hellenistic elements. The three tribes were ruled by hereditary chiefs, whose title in the Celtic language is preserved in the Greek sources as touta or teuta, a word that has been identified with the Old Celtic teuto- meaning “people” or “tribe.” The chief of each tribe was advised by a council of elders and a council of warriors, and he led the tribe in war and represented it in dealings with the outside world.
In addition to the three tribal chiefs, the Galatians had a federal assembly, the concilium Galatarum, which met annually at a sacred grove called the Drunemeton, the “sacred oak grove,” in the territory of the Trocmi. The assembly had the power to elect a federal commander and to decide on matters of war and peace affecting the whole Galatian people. The federal assembly is one of the clearest examples of Celtic political organization in the ancient world, and it has been compared to the assemblies described by Caesar among the Gauls of the first century BCE.
The Galatians at War
The Galatians were formidable warriors, and they played a significant role in the wars of the Hellenistic period. In the third century BCE, the Galatian war bands raided the surrounding regions with impunity, sacking the cities of the Aegean coast and the Syrian frontier and extracting tribute from those who could pay. The Greek historian Livy records that the Galatians were employed as mercenaries by the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt, the Seleucid kings of Syria, and the Antigonid kings of Macedonia, and that their reputation as warriors was such that they were sought after by every major Hellenistic power. The Galatian mercenaries appear in the Hellenistic sources as a kind of Celtic foreign legion, and their presence in the armies of the eastern kingdoms striking examples of the reach of the Celtic world in this period.
The Roman Conquest of Galatia
The Roman Republic became involved in Galatian affairs in the second century BCE, when the Senate intervened to settle a dispute between the Galatians and the kingdom of Pergamon. The settlement of 166 BCE, recorded in a decree of the Roman Senate preserved by the Greek historian Polybius, established the boundaries of the Galatian territory and recognized the independence of the Galatian kingdom under Roman protection. The end of Galatian independence came in 25 BCE, when the Roman emperor Augustus reorganized the eastern provinces and incorporated the Galatian territory into the Roman Empire as the province of Galatia. The Galatian ruling families were allowed to retain their titles and a measure of local autonomy. The Celtic language continued to be spoken in the countryside, and the Galatian elite continued to identify themselves as Galatians long after they had become Roman citizens.
Saint Paul and the Galatian Church
The Galatians appear in the New Testament as the recipients of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, written probably in the 50s CE. Paul’s letters to the Galatians were addressed to a community of Christians in central Anatolia whose personal names still included distinctly Celtic elements. The Epistle to the Galatians important documents of early Christianity, and it preserves a unique window into the religious life of a Celtic-speaking Christian community at the edge of the Roman world. Paul’s famous statement that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female” was addressed to a community in which Celtic personal names were still in everyday use.
The Survival of the Galatian Language
The survival of the Galatian language remarkable cases of linguistic persistence in the ancient world. The Galatian language, a form of Celtic closely related to Gaulish, is attested in a small but significant corpus of inscriptions, personal names, and place names. The most important Galatian inscription is the epitaph of a Galatian named Lucius, found at the village of Kizöldün in central Anatolia and dated to the fourth or fifth century CE, which contains a clearly Celtic personal name and a formula that has been identified as a Celtic epithet. Saint Jerome, writing in the late fourth century, claimed that the Galatians of his day still spoke a language that was essentially the same as that of the Treveri of Gaul. The Galatian language was probably extinct by the sixth century CE, but the legacy of the Galatians survived in the personal names, the place names, the religious practices, and the artistic traditions of central Anatolia long after the Celtic language itself had ceased to be spoken.
Related Topics
- The Iron Age Celtic expansion traces the broader context in which the Galatian kingdom was founded
- The Celtic encounter with Rome provides the background to the Roman conquest of Galatia in 25 BCE
- The Celtic language family sets out the linguistic context
- The Celtic religion and mythology survived in Galatia in syncretic forms
- The Celtic art and craftsmanship of the Galatian region