8 Facts About the Celts

The difficulty of tracing Celtic history is that none of these ancient peoples living in Western or Central Europe would have called themselves Celts. That name came from the Greeks, who made their first contact with a “barbarian” people they called the Keltoi in 540 B.C. on the southern coast of France. The ancient Celts were never a single kingdom or an empire, but a collection of hundreds of tribal chiefdoms with a shared culture and distinctive language. …

The Celts may have been one of the first Europeans to wear pants. …

By David Roos, for History.com