Celtic roots lie in Spain and Portugal?

Posted by

1

From ICWales: Our Celtic roots lie in Spain and Portugal.

Professor John Koch suggests the Welsh can trace their ancestry back to Portugal and Spain, debunking the century-old received wisdom that our forebears came from Iron Age Germany and Austria.

His radical work on Celtic origins flatly contradicts the writing of Sir John Rhys, who in the late 19th century established the idea that we originally came from central Europe.

Sir John believed the Celts were the remnants of a great culture that extended here from modern-day eastern France, Switzerland, southern Germany and Austria.

But Professor Koch, of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies, in Aberystwyth, says archaeological inscriptions on stones show we came from southern Portugal and south-west Spain. [continue]

One thought on “Celtic roots lie in Spain and Portugal?”

  1. I attended Prof. Koch’s lecture on this subject at Bangor University yesterday (6.5.08): highly interesting and convincing. It also ties in with much of Stephen Oppenheimer’s work (bar the highly improbable notion that eastern England was English-speaking long before the Romans arrived).

    Where can one find more information on the Tartessian inscriptions which underpin Koch’s thesis?

Comments are closed.