on faces on Gaulish coins.[42] Tattooing, painting, and scarifying the body are varieties of one general custom, and little stress can be laid on Pictish tattooing as indicating a racial difference.  Its purpose may have been ornamental, or possibly to impart an aspect of fierceness, or the figures may have been totem marks, as they are elsewhere.  Finally, the description of the Caledonii, a Pictish people, possessing flaming hair and mighty limbs, shows that they differed from the short, dark pre-Celtic folk.[43]

The Pictish problem must remain obscure, a welcome puzzle to antiquaries, philologists, and ethnologists.  Our knowledge of Pictish religion is too scanty for the interpretation of Celtic religion to be affected by it.  But we know that the Picts offered sacrifice before war—­a Celtic custom, and had Druids, as also had the Celts.

The earliest Celtic “kingdom” was in the region between the upper waters of the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Danube, where probably in Neolithic times the formation of their Celtic speech as a distinctive language began.  Here they first became known to the Greeks, probably as a semi-mythical people, the Hyperboreans—­the folk dwelling beyond the Ripoean mountains whence Boreas blew—­with whom Hecataeus in the fourth century identifies them.  But they were now known as Celts, and their territory as Celtica, while “Galatas” was used as a synonym of “Celtae,” in the third century B.C.[44] The name generally applied by the Romans to the Celts was “Galli” a term finally confined by them to the people of Gaul.[45] Successive bands of Celts went forth from this comparatively restricted territory, until the Celtic “empire” for some centuries before 300 B.C. included the British Isles, parts of the Iberian peninsula, Gaul, North Italy, Belgium, Holland, great part of Germany, and Austria.  When the German tribes revolted, Celtic bands appeared in Asia Minor, and remained there as the Galatian Celts.  Archaeological discoveries with a Celtic facies have been made in most of these lands but even more striking is the witness of place-names.  Celtic dunon, a fort or castle (the Gaelic dun), is found in compound names from Ireland to Southern Russia. Magos, “a field,” is met with in Britain, France, Switzerland, Prussia, Italy, and Austria.  River and mountain names familiar in Britain occur on the Continent.  The Pennine range of Cumberland has the same name as the Appenines.  Rivers named for their inherent divinity, devos, are found in Britain and on the Continent—­Dee, Deva, etc.

Besides this linguistic, had the Celts also a political unity over their great “empire,” under one head?  Such a unity certainly did not prevail from Ireland to the Balkan peninsula, but it prevailed over a large part of the Celtic area.  Livy, following Timagenes, who perhaps cited a lost Celtic epos, speaks of king Ambicatus ruling over the Celts from Spain to Germany, and sending his sister’s sons, Bellovesus