London (AFP) - A new exhibition on the story of the Celts opens at the British Museum on Thursday, tracing the shifting use of the term through artworks covering 2,500 years of history from Scotland to Spain. "Celts: art and identity" examines the origin and usage of the term, which was first coined by the ancient Greeks to refer to barbarians from the north, and later used for the Celtic revival of the last 300 years in the British Isles. Using jewellery, swords, carved stone crosses and massive armlets weighing more than a kilogramme (2.2 pounds), the London museum shows how Celts have often been set apart from their neighbours. "Celts can be a slippery term," said Julia Farley, curator of the British Museum's Iron Age collections. "The story we are telling isn't so much the story of a people as the story about a label," she said. In around 500 BC, the Greeks called their northern barbarian neighbours "Keltoi". It was a blanket term describing diverse tribes beyond the frontier rather than a specific people. "Because the Celts didn't really write anything down, we learn everything through the lens of the ancient Greeks. And to them it wasn't necessary to distinguish between the different tribes," project curator Rosie Weetch told AFP. While Greek society was structured around cities, Celts lived in farmsteads and small village communities. More than 250 objects have been selected from the collections of the British Museum and others across Europe to illustrate the skill of the Celtic peoples. They include the Gundestrup cauldron, the largest known example of European Iron Age silver work, which was found in a peat bog in Denmark. As the Roman empire expanded, it took in lands that had been considered Celtic, such as Spain and Gaul. The exhibits show how a hybrid Romano-British culture emerged, with local designs appearing on Roman helmets. - 'A powerful word' - The final section of the exhibition deals with the Celtic revival in the British Isles, which began around 300 years ago. The forgotten word eventually came to be used for the related pre-Roman languages of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Brittany in northern France. It led to the creation of a re-imagined, romanticised Celtic past that began to appear in art and literature as 19th-century discoveries fired up public imagination. It is now used to affirm the differences which set apart the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish from their English neighbours, and the Bretons from the French. "The use of the word has become politically motivated and personally important," Weetch said. "Today in the United States, it is a really powerful word because it enables people to say something about themselves, connect to a deeper history and set themselves apart from different immigrant groups." There are pictures of a Saint Patrick's Day parade in New York, Celtic tarot cards, tattoos and jewellery as well as jerseys from the Boston Celtics basketball team and Scotland's Celtic Football Club. The Celts is the fourth in a series of major British Museum exhibitions, following shows on the Vikings, the Ming dynasty and beauty in Greek sculpture. Tickets cost £16.50 ($25.20/22.60 euros) and the exhibition runs until January 31. Join the conversation about this story »
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