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The House of Israel 67

the bones of a younger woman, who seems to have been tuted “a new, significant and increasingly important
done in by the two heavy grinding stones weighing down geopolitical entity within Asia Minor” and this “can
her upper body. In the same pit, the bones of two young hardly be attributed to a marginal, and politically, so-
children were mixed in an apparently deliberate way. cially and economically unsophisticated people.” On
Among other switches, the jaw of an older child was the contrary, they wrote: “The fact that their polities
placed with the cranium of the younger one. survived to be incorporated into the Roman empire
would indicate the existence of highly developed so-
Archaeologists concluded that all of these people were cial structures bound together by shared value systems.
presumably “sacrificed.” They might have been war cap- The European Galatians successfully adapted to their
tives. Traces of wood in the base of a skull suggested that a new environment, changing it and being changed by
person’s severed head had been mounted on a pole for dis- it.” The authors of the article are Dr. Gareth
play. Some victims might have been killed as part of Celtic Darbyshire of the Oriental Institute in Oxford, Eng-
divination rituals. Texts recount that Celtic religious lead- land; Dr. Stephen Mitchell of the University of Wales
ers, the druids, were prophets who killed humans in order in Swansea, and Dr. Levent Vardar of the Turkish De-
to discern the future as revealed by the dying victims partment of Monuments and Museums in Ankara.
movements.
But they and other researchers, including Dr. Voigt
In another part of the lower town, archaeologists came and her colleagues at Gordion, concede that the
upon the largest bone deposit, holding more than 2,000 an- Galatians and their culture remain poorly understood.
imal bones and those of a few dismembered humans. And no one can be sure what happened to those Euro-
Three individuals -- a man of about 40, a woman of 35 and pean settlers in the city of Midas and Alexander.
a child under 8 -- might have been a family. This might
have been the scene of a feast associated with the Celtic Through intermarriage with indigenous people, the
celebration of Samhain, around November 1. Based on originally tall and blond Galatians probably blended in
their age at death, the animals were probably slaughtered with others around them. “I don’t know how Celtic
in the fall, the time for culling herds before winter. Some they would have looked, even in the time of Paul,” said
humans could also have been cooked for the feast. Dr. Hicks, the Celtic specialist.

“It may not be too far a stretch to associate Bone Cluster 3 But the Galatians were still speaking a form of the
with this Celtic festival, which we still celebrate as Hal- Celtic language for several centuries after Paul. In the
loween,” Dr. Voigt and her colleagues wrote. fourth century, St. Jerome observed that the Galatians
used a dialect similar to one spoken in the Gallic town
The discoveries at Gordion have already contributed to of Trier, back in the Europe they had left in the third
changes in views of Galatian culture in Asia Minor. The century BC.
Celts as politically and socially primitive barbarians who
lived on raids and plundering had considerable basis in -- John Noble Wilford
fact, which had been stressed in Greek and Roman texts. The Dunrobin Piper
But at least in Anatolia, the new excavations suggest, the April 2002
Celts succeeded in settling down, marshaling resources
and labor for building and operating a prospering city -- Israel Emblems in the Netherlands
not the behavior of primitives.
I n seeking heraldic evidence of the Israelitish origin
In an article last year in the British journal Anatolian of the Celto-Saxons of Europe, we turn now to the
Studies, English and Turkish scholars said the Galatian Netherlands. In the central position of their emblem
communities established in the third century BC consti- we see a shield on which appears a tawny rampant and

The Berean Voice March-April 2003