When Beach was still a green blogger – before he had learnt about spiders, search engine optimization and RSI feeds – he spat out a little post about a group of Celtic hoodlums who, as mercenaries, travelled around the Mediterranean causing havoc everywhere they went.
Beach sold this as a Wrong Place post: an example of Celts ending up surprisingly far from home and so, in a modest kind of way, it was. But recently he has come across an example that is far more dramatic: a Celtic militia who apparently wandered from North Western Europe and ended up half a world away on the Silk Road to China.
The evidence is admittedly not all that it could be. In fact, it is one lonely word in Ptolemy’ Atlas. Ptolemy, the ancient geographer, gives a series of placenames relating to the Europe-China trade route recorded originally by a Macedonian merchant named Maes, who may have actually travelled the road in question.
Describing the tribes of ‘Scythia’, a word that can mean anything in ancient and medieval sources from Scandinavia to Central Asia, but that probably here means Kazakhstan, he lists one group called the Tektosakes.
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