Tribal Europe, Germanic tribes
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By 1000 BC - 500 BC the Germanic tribes had a bronze age
civilization, while the Celts were in the iron age by the time of
the Hallstatt culture. Their cultures next collided with the
military and agricultural practices of the Romans, two millennia
ago. But the time and resources which are needed to conduct science
had to build up gradually.
The Germanic peoples are the nations speaking Germanic languages,
idioms descended from Proto-Germanic (spoken during the final
centuries BC, the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe).
The concept of "Germanic" as a distinct ethnic identity was hinted
at by the early Greek geographer Strabo, who distinguished a
barbarian group in northern Europe similar to, but not part of, the
Celts. Posidonius, to our knowledge, is the first to have used the
name, around 80 BC, in his lost 30th book. |
Our knowledge of this is based on the 4th book of Athenaeus, who in
ca. AD 190 quotes Posidonius as saying that "The Germani at noon
serve roast meat with milk, and drink their wine undiluted".
By the 1st century A.D., the writings of Caesar, Tacitus and other
Roman era writers indicate a division of Germanic-speaking peoples
into tribal groupings centered on:
the rivers Oder and Vistula (Poland) (East Germanic tribes),
the lower Rhine river (Istvaeones),
the river Elbe (Irminones),
Jutland and the Danish islands (Ingvaeones).
The Sons of Mannus Istvaeones, Irminones, and Ingvaeones are
collectively called West Germanic tribes. In addition to this those
Germanic people who remained in Scandinavia are referred to as North
Germanic. These groups all developed separate dialects, and
literature styles with little regard for conventional punctuation,
the basis for the differences among Germanic languages down to the
present day.
The division of peoples into West Germanic, East Germanic, and North
Germanic is a modern linguistic classification. Many Greek scholars
only classified Celts and Scyths in the Northwest and Northeast of
the Mediterranean and this classification was widely maintained in
Greek literature until Late Antiquity. Latin-Greek ethnographers
(Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy, and Strabo) mentioned in the
first two centuries AD the names of peoples they classified as
Germanic along the Elbe, the Rhine, and the Danube, the Vistula and
on the Baltic Sea. Tacitus mentioned 40, Ptolemy 69 peoples.
Classical ethnography applied the name Suebi to many tribes in the
first century. It appeared that this native name had all but
replaced the foreign name Germanic. After the Marcomannic wars the
Gothic name steadily gained importance. Some of the ethnic names
mentioned by the ethnographers of the first two centuries AD on the
shores of the Oder and the Vistula (Gutones, Vandali) reappear from
the 3rd century on in the area of the lower Danube and north of the
Carpathian Mountains. For the end of the 5th century the Gothic name
can be used - according to the historical sources - for such
different peoples like the Goths in Gaul, Iberia and Italy, the
Vandals in Africa, the Gepids along the Tisza and the Danube, the
Rugians, Sciri and Burgundians, even the Iranian Alans. These
peoples were classified as Scyths and often deducted from the
ancient Getae (most important: Cassiodor/Jordanes, Getica approx.
550 AD).
In the 1990s and the 2000s there has been debate about exactly what
"tribe" or "people" meant to these groups, whose fluidity and
willingness to sometimes blend is seen while at the same time forced
mergers as a result of war were taking place and the tribe as it had
been known vanished. The late classical sources are especially clear
in the matter of the blended nature of the Alamanni. The idea of a
unified German people, or Volk, was expressed openly in print by
19th century Ethnic Nationalist writers and thinkers after the
Napoleonic Wars. Such an identity, however, had existed more
implicitly since the Middle Ages, helping to fuel the Protestant
Reformation, when many Germanic lands pulled away religiously and
politically from the Roman Catholic Church.
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