The fact of this tract being known so much earlier than the interior of Gaul, known too to the Greeks who first, and more than others, used the term Kelt, confirms the view of its non-Gallic origin. At any rate, it makes it either Iberian or Ligurian, and, consequently, only so far Keltic (in the modern sense of the term) as the Ligurians were Keltæ.
This is the point now under notice. I think that the Ligurians were Kelts.
In the first place, the name seems to have a meaning in the Keltic tongue; since Prichard suggests that it may have been derived from Llygwyr,[5] which means in Welsh coastman.
In my mind it is a native name also; a point upon which Prichard expresses a doubt, since he writes that, “it does not prove that the people were Kelts, since the designation is one more likely to have been bestowed upon them by a neighbouring tribe than assumed by themselves.” Who, however, could have bestowed it? Scarcely any population of the interior, since it is Greeks from whom we get it, and the coast was the part with which they were chiefly acquainted. Had the name been a late one, and derived from Roman sources, Dr. Prichard’s inference would have been legitimate. As it is, however, we have nothing but Ligurians and Iberians from the Pyrenees to the Arno, and as it cannot be both Iberic and Keltic (in the modern sense of the word), it must, if Keltic, be Ligurian.
Against it lies the evidence of Strabo, who separates the Ligyes from the Kelts as a distinct race; differing, however, but little from the Kelts in their mode of life. Now with this qualification, and with the belief that the Kelts whom he contrasted with the Ligyes were, to a great extent, Iberian, I lay but little stress on the evidence of Strabo.
Against it, also, in the eyes of more than one good writer, is a very questionable etymology; which I will give in full, as a lesson of caution. Pliny says that the river Po in the Ligurian language was called Bodencus, or bottomless. Prichard suggests, in a note, that the true reading may have been Boden-los, and asks whether anybody will venture hence to conjecture that the Ligurians were Germans? Sir Francis Palgrave, taking Prichard’s suggestion as a bonâ fide reading, does this; and that with a great degree of confidence. Yet the termination -nc is found in the country of the Allobroges, or Dauphiné, e.g., Lem-incum, Durot-incum, Vap-incum, and is also Gallic, e.g., Aged-incum. It is British as well—Habita-ncum.
The reasons, then, against the Keltic origin of the Ligurians are thus exceptionable. Yet those in favour of it are weak. One thing, however, they must have been: a. Kelts; b. Iberians; or c. members of a wholly new, and now extinct, stock. I incline to the first of these views rather than the second, and the second rather than the third. At the same time, they were a well-marked variety; otherwise the Romans would not so invariably have separated them from the Gauls of both Gaul and Italy.
The primary population, then, of Gaul (supposing the Ligurians to have been Keltic) was of a twofold character:—
1. Iberic, in Aquitania, and
2. Keltic (in the modern sense of the term) elsewhere—the Keltic falling into three divisions:—