Dear Piotr,
No. They were not all steppe cowboys riding swift horses, but did they
care to go up in the mountains? Does any group care to take bigger risk
when in the (high) plains one can find anything needed with a lot less
risk?
Best regards,
Paul Alesu
Paul Alesu wrote:
> 5. As this scenario puts it, proto Romanians and their language
survived in the high mountains South and Southwest of Danube protected
of Greek and Roman influence and shielded from barbarians. The same
thing could be accomplished, with no travel at all, in the high
Carpatians North of Danube. No Greek or Roman influence. The migrating
barbarians could not reach them because their big and swift horses, very
good in the plains, were worthless in the mountains.
Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:
The "barbarians" were not all steppe cowboys riding swift horses.
Consecutive waves of Celtic, Germanic and Slavic migrations penetrated
the Carpathians without much difficulty. Some of the "free Dacians"
apparently lingered on in the northern Carpathians but were
linguistically absorbed by the Slavs in the end. It seems, however, that
until the tenth century Slavic colonisation was sparse in mountainous
areas southwest of the Danube, so that the the Proto-Romanians and the
Proto-Romanians were able to maintain their linguistic identity there.