Prasutagus

Authors

• Xavier Delamarre

Keywords:

Gaulish, etymology, names

Abstract

The name of the British king Prasutagus (Tacitus, Ann. 14.31) has not yet received a satisfactory etymology. A segmentation Pra-su-tagus led Pokorny to see in it a  «pre-Celtic Indo-European name». A bipartite segmentation Prasu-tagus and the comparison of the first member with British coin legends PRASV, PRASTO and Gaulish mortaria PRASSO allows us to reintegrate the name into the corpus of Old Celtic onomastics. The stem is *prastu- and the root *kwer- ‘to make, to create’, used metaphorically for the poetic creation and, by extension, for the practice of magic. The name Prasutagus denoted probably some sort of sacerdotal function : «Organiser of charms, spells, incantations ...» vel sim.