Gaul In The Time Of Caesar

Gaul ( la, Gallia) was a region of Western Europe first described by the Romans. It was inhabited by Celtic and Aquitani tribes, encompassing present-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, most of Switzerland, parts of Northern Italy (only during Republican era, Cisalpina was annexed in 42 BC to Roman Italy), and Germany west of the Rhine. It covered an area of . According to Julius Caesar, Gaul was divided into three parts: Gallia Celtica, Belgica, and Aquitania.
Archaeologically, the Gauls were bearers of the La Tène culture, which extended across all of Gaul, as well as east to Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia, and southwestern Germania during the 5th to 1st centuries BC.
During the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, Gaul fell under Roman rule: Gallia Cisalpina was conquered in 204 BC and Gallia Narbonensis in 123 BC. Gaul was invaded after 120 BC by the Cimbri and the Teutons, who were in turn defeated by the Romans by 103 BC. Julius Caesar finally subdued the remaining parts of Gaul in his campaigns of 58 to 51 BC.

Roman control of Gaul lasted for five centuries, until the last Roman rump state, the Domain of Soissons, fell to the Franks in AD 486.
While the Celtic Gauls had lost their original identities and language during Late Antiquity, becoming amalgamated into a Gallo-Roman culture, ''Gallia'' remained the conventional name of the territory throughout the Early Middle Ages, until it acquired a new identity as the Capetian Kingdom of France in the high medieval period. ''Gallia'' remains a name of France in modern Greek (Γαλλία) and modern Latin (besides the alternatives ''Francia'' and ''Francogallia'').

Name

The Greek and Latin names ''Galatia'' (first attested by Timaeus of Tauromenium in the 4th century BC) and ''Gallia'' are ultimately derived from a Celtic ethnic term or clan ''Gal(a)-to-''. The ''Galli'' of '' Gallia Celtica'' were reported to refer to themselves as ''Celtae'' by Caesar. Hellenistic etymology connected the name of the Galatians (Γαλάται, ''Galátai'') to the supposedly "milk-white" skin (γάλα, ''gála'' "milk") of the Gauls. Modern researchers say it is related to Welsh ''gallu'', kw, galloes, "capacity, power", thus meaning "powerful people".

Despite superficial similarity, the English term ''Gaul'' is unrelated to the Latin ''Gallia''. It stems from the French ''Gaule'', itself deriving from the Old Frankish ''*Walholant'' (via a Latinized form ''*Walula''), literally the "Land of the Foreigners/Romans". ''*Walho-'' is a reflex of the Proto-Germanic ''*walhaz'', "foreigner, Romanized person", an exonym applied by Germanic speakers to Celts and Latin-speaking people indiscriminately. It is cognate with the names Wales, Cornwall, Wallonia, and Wallachia. The Germanic ''w-'' is regularly rendered as ''gu-'' / ''g-'' in French (cf. ''guerre'' "war", ''garder'' "ward", ''Guillaume'' "William"), and the historic diphthong ''au'' is the regular outcome of ''al'' before a following consonant (cf. ''cheval'' ~ ''chevaux''). French ''Gaule'' or ''Gaulle'' cannot be derived from Latin ''Gallia'', since ''g'' would become ''j'' before ''a'' (cf. ''gamba'' > ''jambe''), and the diphthong ''au'' would be unexplained; the regular outcome of Latin ''Gallia'' is ''Jaille'' in French, which is found in several western place names, such as, La Jaille-Yvon and Saint-Mars-la-Jaille