Celtic, The Lingones Tribe in Gaul
Potin 20mm (4.53 grams) Struck circa 100-50 B.C.
Reference: Sear 142
Bucranium between S and S.
Ostensibly a bear standing right, devouring serpent.

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The Lingones (Gaulish: “the jumpers”) were a Gallic tribe of the Iron Age and Roman periods. They dwelled in the region surrounding the present-day city of Langres, between the provinces of Gallia Lugdunensis and Gallia Belgica.

ThThey are mentioned as Língōnes (Λίγγωνες) by Polybius (2nd c. BC), Lingones by Caesar (mid-1st c. BC), Pliny (1st c. AD) and Tacitus (early 2nd c. AD), Díngones (Δίγγονες) by Strabo (early 1st c. AD), and as Lóngōnes (Λόγγωνες) by Ptolemy (2nd c. AD).

The Gaulish ethnonym Lingones literally means ‘the jumpers’. It stems from the root ling- (‘to jump’), itself from the Proto-Celtic verbal base *leng- (‘to jump’; cf. Old Irish lingid ‘he jumps’), extended by the suffix –on-es. could be interpreted as ‘good at jumping (on horseback)’, or else as ‘the dancers’.

The city of Langres, attested ca. 400 AD as civitas Lingonum, is named after the Gallic tribe.

The territory of the Lingones was situated on the border separating Gallia Lugdunensis from Gallia Belgica, between the Senones and the Sequani.

Their capital Andematunnum (present-day Langres, Haute-Marne) is attested from 43 AD on boundary markers (abbreviated as AND). It was built on a Bajocian limestone promontory, overlooking the Marne valley to the east and north, and the Bonnelle valley to the west. Only the southern part, open to the Langres plateau, did not possess natural defences. Archeological evidence have demonstrated a continuity between the La Tènecivitas of the Lingones was located at the crossroad of the modern départments of Aube, Haute-Marne, Côte d’OrYonne.

The Cathedral St-Mammes, built in the Burgundian Romanesque style for the ancient diocese that was referred to as Lingonae .

SoSome of the Lingones migrated across the Alps and settled near the mouth of the Po River in Cisalpine Gaul of northern Italy around 400 BC. These Lingones were part of a wave of Celtic tribes that included the Boii and Senones (Polybius, Histories primary source needed The Lingones may have helped sack Rome in 390 BC.

The Gaulish Lingones did not participate in the battles of the Gauls against Caesar. They gained Roman citizenship at the end of the first century AD. They were caught up in the Batavian rebellionn (69 AD) described by Tacitus.

The strategist Sextus Julius Frontinus, author of the Strategemata, the earliest surviving Roman military textbook, mentions the Lingones among his examples of successful military tactics:

In the war waged under the auspices of the Emperor Caesar Domitianus Augustus Germanicus and begun by Julius Civilis in Gaul, the very wealthy city of the Lingones, which had revolted to Civilis, feared that it would be plundered by the approaching army of Caesar. But when, contrary to expectation, the inhabitants remained unharmed and lost none of their property, they returned to their loyalty, and handed over to me seventy thousand armed men.

Bremenium, the 2nd cohort of Lingones is attested at Ilkley Roman Fort by their Prefect, and the fourth cohort built part of Hadrian’s Walll During the Roman period, Mars Cicolluis was the main god of the Lingones.

The Celts or Kelts were an ethnolinguistic group of tribal societies in Iron Age and Medieval Europe who spoke Celtic languages and had a similar culture, although the relationship between the ethnic, linguistic and cultural elements remains uncertain and controversial.

  Diachronic distribution of Celtic peoples:
    core Hallstatt territory, by the 6th century BC   maximal Celtic expansion, by 275 BC   Lusitanian area of Iberia where Celtic presence is uncertain   the six Celtic nations which retained significant numbers of Celtic speakers into the Early Modern period   areas where Celtic languages remain widely spoken today

The earliest archaeological culture that may justifiably be considered Proto-Celtic is the Late Bronze Age Urnfield culture of Central Europe, which flourished from around 1200 BC. Their fully Celtic descendants in central Europe were the people of the Iron Age Hallstatt culture (c. 800-450 BC) named for the rich grave finds in Hallstatt, Austria. By the later La Tène period (c. 450 BC up to the Roman conquest), this Celtic culture had expanded by diffusion or migration to the British Isles (Insular Celts), France and The Low Countries (Gauls), Bohemia, Poland and much of Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula (Celtiberians, Celtici and Gallaeci) and northern Italy (Golaseccans and Cisalpine Gauls) and, following the Gallic invasion of the Balkans in 279 BC, as far east as central Anatolia (Galatians).

Beginning in 2010, it was tentatively proposed that the language of the Tartessian inscriptions of south Portugal and southwest Spain (dating from the 7th-5th centuries BC) is a Celtic one; however, this interpretation has largely been rejected by the academic community.

The earliest undisputed direct examples of a Celtic language are the Lepontic inscriptions, beginning in the 6th century BC. Continental Celtic languages are attested almost exclusively through inscriptions and place-names. Insular Celtic is attested beginning around the 4th century through ogham inscriptions, although it was clearly being spoken much earlier. Celtic literary tradition begins with Old Irish texts around the 8th century. Coherent texts of Early Irish literature, such as the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), survive in 12th-century recensions.

By the mid 1st millennium AD, with the expansion of the Roman Empire and the Great Migrations (Migration Period) of Germanic peoples, Celtic culture and Insular Celtic had become restricted to Ireland, the western and northern parts of Great Britain (Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall), the Isle of Man, and Brittany. Between the 5th and 8th centuries, the Celtic-speaking communities in these Atlantic regions emerged as a reasonably cohesive cultural entity. They had a common linguistic, religious, and artistic heritage that distinguished them from the culture of the surrounding polities. By the 6th century, however, the Continental Celtic languages were no longer in wide use.

Insular Celtic culture diversified into that of the Gaels (Irish, Scottish and Manx) and the Brythonic Celts (Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons) of the medieval and modern periods. A modern “Celtic identity” was constructed as part of the Romanticist Celtic Revival in Great Britain, Ireland, and other European territories, such as Portugal and Spanish Galicia. Today, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton are still spoken in parts of their historical territories, and Cornish and Manx are undergoing a revival.