Ancient Celtic Placenames in Europe and Asia Minor, Number 39

Early Celtic–speakers left their traces in place names from Ireland to Anatolia, from Scotland to the Apennines, and from Andalusia to the Black Sea. This original study reveals their full extent for the first time, exploiting a dataset of over 20,000 names recorded by Greek and Latin authors such as Polybius, Caesar and Tacitus and by early geographers such as Strabo, Pliny, Ptolemy and the Ravenna Cosmographer. Patrick Sims–Williams’s results are significant for archaeologists, historians and philologists studying the early distribution of Celtic and other Indo–European languages, while linguists will be interested in the novel methods he applies to linguistic geography.

List of maps. Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. A Database Approach. 3. The Long Arm of Coincidence. 4. Selected Celtic–Looking Strings and Elements. 5. The distribution of the Selected Celtic–Looking Elements. 6. The Extent of Celtic Names: i. Northern Europe (above 48 latitude) . 7. The Extent of Celtic Names: ii. Central Europe (latitudes 44–47). 8. The Extent of Celtic Names: iii. Southern Europe (latitude 43 and southwar. 9. The Extent of Celtic Names: iv. Asia Minor (west of longitude +35) with v. Note on Remaining Areas around the Mediterranean (north of latitude 35 and west of longitude +35). 10. The Extent of Celtic Names: vi. Africa and Asia (south of latitude 35 and east of longitude +35). 11. The Extent of Celtic Names: Summary. 12. Prospects for Further Research. Abbreviations. Bibliography. Index of Place–Names

Patrick Sims–Williams is Professor of Celtic Studies in the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and was formerly Reader in Celtic and Anglo–Saxon in the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Religion and Literature in Western England, 600–800 (1990), Britain and Early Christian Europe (1995), and The Celtic Inscriptions of Britain: Phonology and Chronology, c. 400–1200 (2003). He is a co–editor of Ptolemy: Towards a Linguistic Atlas of the Earliest Celtic Place–Names of Europe (2000) and New Approaches to Celtic Place–Names in Ptolemy’s Geography (2005), and he edits Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies . He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1996.

"Taken as a whole, this book is a triumphant vindication of the value of philology applied in a systematic and discerning fashion to a major historical problem." Antiquity