Exiled Trojans or the Sons of Gomer: Wales’s Origins in the long Eighteenth Century

From December 2007 to March 2014, the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff hosted an exhibition on Wales’s origins. Covering a period from the dawn of the ‘homo’ genus to the Middle Ages, the exhibition defined those living within modern political boundaries as Welsh.² There was no attempt to construct a monolithic narrative of Welshness, but rather the exhibition linked cultural discontinuities within physical space and common humanity, reflecting a modern multicultural construction of Wales. This was particularly interesting given the exhibition’s physical contexts. It was hosted by Wales’s oldest national museum which was established in 1907, at a time