Naming the Bastarnians (Was Re: More on Bastarnian archaeology)

For some reason this wasn't mailed to me. I retrieved it from the cybalist website...

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
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> I think Pekkanen already answered the question of the name type status for 'Bastarnae' by pointing out that it occurs double names like 'Scytae Bastarnae', which would then mean "Bastard Scythians".
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/66972

****GK: I prefer the meaning "Bastarnian Scythians" where "Scythian" has become an omnium gatherum and the real specification is "Bastarnian" in a non-insulting sense.****
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> Note 'γαλάτας..., βαστέρναι καλου~νται' "Galatians, who are called Basternae". Again, they have a name, and then they are called something (nut not to their face).

****GK: Same thing. One might think of "Galatians who are called Scordisci" or "Galatians who are called Taurisci" or the like.****
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> The translations in the text sometimes translate 'γαλάται' as "Gauls", I've kept that, you should compare with the original.
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> As you see in the beginning of that posting I have proposed a Germanic *ga-lin-d- "ge-bund-en, bound, tied" as an etymology for the Galindai, and since the Northern West Germanic unfree underclass is called laeti (Low German, like North Germanic and Modern English has no equivalent of ga- in such past participles), I propose that the Galatians are from an n-less *ga-lae-t-, another descendant of the Proto-Germanic(?) word from which also Galindai stems.


*****GK: The historical Galindi are a Baltic (in the sense of Letto-Lithuanian) tribe. There's nothing particularly "unfree" about them. And, interestingly, their easternmost group resided in the Moscow area, as late as the 12th c. (=Golyad' in Slavic).****
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> Thus, the Sciri and Galatians of the Protogenes decree is actually that eternal duality Sciri and Bastarnae.

****GK: My view is that the later "Bastarnae" = Sciri+Galatians, "bound" in the non-derogatory sense, and still clearly distinguished in the Decree. The Galatians were not too numerous it seems. Some place names remain, and a few material objects. There were less of them than of symbiotic Illyrians (or Venedics) whose contribution to toponyms and hydronyms is even more noticeable than that of the Yastorfers.****
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> And more generally, this means that whenever we meet the derogatory exonym 'Bastarnae' in the ancient sources,

****GK: I don't know of any such clearly derogatory use of the term (other than latter day reinterpretations).******


we can never be sure that it is not referring to a people we know from elsewhere, under an endonym, their 'real' name. And, mutatis mutandis, similarly for 'Sciri' and its relatives.
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> Torsten
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