纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 028巴斯伊于特酒壶（5）

So, who were these drinkers who could make such wonderful things? We don't know what they called themselves because they didn't write. The only name we have to go on is one given to them by foreigners, the Greeks. They called them 'KELTOI', and that's the first written reference to the peoples we know as Celts. And this is part of the reason that we call the new art style seen on these flagons Celtic art - although it is very doubtful that the people who made or used this art called themselves Celts, or indeed called the language they spoke a Celtic language. Professor Barry Cunliffe is a leading expert on the Iron Age and the Celts:

"The relationship between Celtic art and people we call Celts is very, very complex indeed, and I think one can simplify it by saying that in most of the areas where Celtic art developed and was used, people spoke the Celtic language. That doesn't mean to say that they necessarily thought of themselves as Celts, or that we can give them that sort of ethnic identity, but they probably spoke the Celtic language, and therefore they could communicate with each other. We could go a bit further and say that the area in which Celtic art developed - and that is roughly sort of eastern France, southern Germany, that kind of region - in that area, people had probably been speaking the Celtic language for quite a long time."

The people we now call Celts live far to the west of the Rhine Valley where our flagons were made - in Brittany, Wales, Ireland and Scotland - but throughout these Celtic lands we find artistic traditions that echo the decoration on the Basse Yutz Flagons. It's what since the nineteenth century has been called Celtic art. Celtic art connects our two ornate, if rather over-the-top, flagons with the 'Celtic crosses', the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels, made in Ireland and Britain more than a thousand years later. In metalwork and stone-carving, inlays and manuscript illumination, it's possible to trace the legacy of a language of decoration across much of Western and Central Europe, including the British Isles.

But this is no easy lineage. The problem of studying the ancient Celts is that we are looking at a fifth-century Greek stereotype, compounded by a much later nineteenth-century British and Irish one. The Greeks constructed an image of the 'Keltoi' as a barbaric, violent people. That ancient typecasting was replaced a couple of hundred years ago with an equally fabricated image of a brooding, mystical Celtic identity, that was far removed from the greedy practicalities of the Anglo-Saxon industrial world - the romanticised 'Celtic Twilight' of Ossian and Yeats. Since then, being Celtic has taken on further constructed connotations of national identity - just look at the Celtic clovers and the crosses that for many Scots, Welsh and Irish are visible statements of their tribal identity, or the fact that visitors are welcomed to modern Edinburgh with greetings in Gaelic, a Celtic language never historically spoken there.