Making a sturdy, watertight wooden barrel out of staves and hoops is not all that simple. What is the first recorded instance in history of a barrel being used?
Barrels show up in the Bible, 1 Kings 18:33:
However, God only knows what word it was that got translated into ‘barrel’.
This short History of Cooperage credits the Celts with inventing the modern barrel:
The photo of a “Gallo-Roman bas-relief showing a Gaulish boat carrying two wooden barrels” is pretty convincing, still, it is just a photo on a website.