The linguistic study of Celtic divinities attested on Latin inscriptions has proved instrumental
in disclosing a number of facts about ancient religion, the relationship with the Roman rule, and
the spread of indigenous or syncretic cults. In fact, minor divinities were worshipped on a local
basis only, but even under such unfavourable circumstances they managed to become partly
integrated in the religious system of the Roman Empire: they acted in the sphere of the higher
gods for a time before they vanished for ever, and they must have been much more common than
our fragmentary sources suggest. Crucially, the study of their names also provides priceless clues
about the early stages of Celtic phonology and morphology, it also helps illuminate insuffi ciently
known aspects of the evolution of Continental and Insular Celtic and their interaction with Latin.
In this work, the authors focus on several hitherto misinterpreted Celtic divine names from
Britannia and Gaul and try to test their relative importance for
Indo-European language reconstruction, distant cultural relationship of ancient populations,
ancient religion with special attention to the interaction of major Roman divinities with minor
Celtic ones, Latin and Celtic phonetics and morphology, loan phonology and the spread and
adaptation of the Latin alphabet to write texts in the indigenous Celtic languages and foreign
names in Latin epigraphy.
