The Boii Confederation
We can use this thread to start accumulating information on the Boii and other central Celtic tribes.
I'll start by copying over the text I posted in the date thread, and then add more as I can find it.
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OVERVIEW
BOII (perhaps ="the terrible"), a Celtic people, whose original home was Gallia Transalpina. They were known to the Romans, at least by name, in the time of Plautus, as is shown by the contemptuous reference in the Captivi. At an early date they split up into two main groups, one of which made its way into Italy, the other into Germany.
Some, however, appear to have stayed behind, since, during the Second Punic War, Magalus, a Boian prince, offered to show Hannibal the way into Italy after he had crossed the Pyrenees (Livy xxi. 29).
The first group of immigrants is said to have crossed the Pennine Alps (Great St Bernard) into the valley of the Po. Finding the district already occupied, they proceeded over the river, drove out the Etruscans and Umbrians, and established themselves as far as the Apennines in the modern Romagna.
According to Cato (in Pliny, Nat. Hist. iii. 116) they comprised as many as 112 different tribes, and from the remains discovered in the tombs at Hallstatt, La Tene and other places, they appear to have been fairly civilized.
Several wars took place between them and the Romans. In 283 they were defeated, together with the Etruscans, at the Vadimonian lake; in 224, after the battle of Telamon in Etruria, they were forced to submit. But they still cherished a hatred of the Romans, and during the Second Punic War (218), irritated by the foundation of the Roman colonies of Cremona and Placentia, they rendered valuable assistance to Hannibal. They continued the struggle against Rome from 201 to 191, when they were finally subdued by P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica, and deprived of nearly half their territory.
According to Strabo the Boii were driven back across the Alps and settled on the land of their kinsmen, the Taurisci, on the Danube, adjoining Vindelicia and Raetia. Most authorities, however, assume that there had been a settlement of the Boii on the Danube from very early times, in part of the modern Bohemia (anc. Boiohemum, " land of the Boii").
About 60 B.C. some of the Boii migrated to Noricum and Pannonia, when 32,000 of them joined the expedition of the Helvetians into Gaul, and shared their defeat near Bibracte (58). They were subsequently allowed by Caesar to settle in the territory of the Aedui between the Loire and the Allier. Their chief town was Gorgobina (site uncertain). Those who remained on the Danube were exterminated by the Dacian king, Boerebista, and the district they had occupied was afterwards called the "desert of the Boii" (Strabo vii. p. 292).
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Boii----------------------------------------------It would appear that these wealthy Celts, based from Bavaria to Bohemia, controlled trade routes along the river systems of the Rhone, Seine, Rhine, and Danube and were the predominant and unifying element among the Celts. In their westward movement the Hallstatt warriors overran Celtic peoples of their own kind, incidentally introducing the use of iron, one of the reasons for their own overlordship.
For the centuries after the establishment of trade with the Greeks, the archaeology of the Celts and Celtic civilization can be followed with greater precision. By the mid-5th century BC the La Tene culture, with its distinctive art style of abstract geometric designs and stylized bird and animal forms, had begun to emerge among the Celts centred on the middle Rhine, where trade with the Etruscans of central Italy, rather than with the Greeks, was now becoming predominant.
Between the 5th and 1st centuries BC the La Tene culture accompanied the migrations of Celtic tribes into eastern Europe and westward into the British Isles.
Although Celtic bands probably had penetrated into northern Italy from earlier times, the year 400 BC is generally accepted as the approximate date for the beginning of the great invasion of migrating Celtic tribes whose names Insubres, Boii, Senones, and Lingones were recorded by later Latin historians. Rome was sacked by Celts about 390, and raiding bands wandered about the whole peninsula and reached Sicily. The Celtic territory south of the Alps where they settled came to be known as Cisalpine Gaul (Gallia Cisalpina), and its warlike inhabitants remained an ever-constant menace to Rome until their defeat at Telamon in 225.
Dates associated with the Celts in their movement into the Balkans are 335 BC, when Alexander the Great received delegations of Celts living near the Adriatic, and 279, when Celts sacked Delphi in Greece but suffered defeat at the hands of the Aetolians. In the following year, three Celtic tribes crossed the Bosporus into Anatolia and created widespread havoc.
By 276 they had settled in parts of Phrygia but continued raiding and pillage until finally quelled by Attalus I of Pergamum about 230. In Italy, meanwhile, Rome had established supremacy over the whole of Cisalpine Gaul by 192 and, in 124, had conquered territory beyond the western Alps--in the provincia (Provence).
The final episodes of Celtic independence were enacted in Transalpine Gaul (Gallia Transalpina), which comprised the whole territory from the Rhine River and the Alps westward to the Atlantic. The threat was twofold: Germanic tribes pressing westward toward and across the Rhine, and the Roman arms in the south poised for further annexations.
The Germanic onslaught was first felt in Bohemia, the land of the Boii, and in Noricum, a Celtic kingdom in the eastern Alps. The German assailants were known as the Cimbri, a people generally thought to have originated in Jutland (Denmark). A Roman army sent to the relief of Noricum in 113 BC was defeated, and thereafter the Cimbri, now joined by the Teutoni, ravaged widely in Transalpine Gaul, overcoming all Gaulish and Roman resistance. On attempting to enter Italy, these German marauders were finally routed by Roman armies in 102 and 101.
http://www.lost-civilizations.net/ce...ilization.html
CULTURE/COMMERCE
----------------------------------------------Thanks to its deposits of precious metals, the Boii were excellent artisans, metalworkers, smiths, jewelers and metallurgists. Thanks to the spectrographic analysis of the discovered precious metals, carried out in the Nuclear Physics Institute in Mladá Boleslav, it has been found out that the Celtic jewelry and objects found in the Mladá Boleslav and the Jizera regions contain 92% of copper, which points not only at the skills of the Celtic artisans, but also at the exceptional workmanship of their furnaces. The reputation of the Boii artisans was really excellent and their products, jewelry as well as working tools, were desired articles of trade in the whole Europe, but also in parts of Asia and Africa; they were also a much-appreciated war booty.
Merchants constituted an important par of the Celtic society. The Romans coveted Celtic raw materials (British tin), furs, cattle, grains and slaves. In addition to the exchange business, the Celts already used their coins for payments; they were plate-shaped circular gold pieces with a diameter of 18 to 22mm, with various depictions on them. Because of the frequent findings after rainfalls, they are also called “rainbow coins” today. The rainbow coins seem to have been fairly popular “hard” money at that time, as they were found even in countries very distant from the Celtic empire.
http://www.medpovrly.cz/en/Default.aspx?CatID=121
LOCATION
Boii (a Latin plural) is the Roman name of an ancient Celtic tribe, living in Transalpine Gaul (modern France) and Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy), and later in Pannonia (today Western Hungary), Bohemia, Moravia and western Slovakia.
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TRIBES
They persuade the Rauraci, and the Tulingi, and the Latobrigi, their neighbours, to adopt the same plan, and after burning down their towns and villages, to set out with them: and they admit to their party and unite to themselves as confederates the Boii, who had dwelt on the other side of the Rhine, and had crossed over into the Norican territory, and assaulted Noreia.
In 225 BC an alliance of Gallic tribes (Taurini, Taurisces, Insubres, Lingones, Salasses, Agones, and Boii) and mercenaries (Gaesatae) from Transalpine Gaul moved into Etruria through an unguarded pass in the Apennines.
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