From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 3535
Date: 2000-09-03
----- Original Message -----From: Håkan LindgrenTo: CybalistSent: Sunday, September 03, 2000 12:33 PMSubject: [tied] Goths 'R' UsThe ancient historians may all be right in a way, since the Goths were rather mobile and not quite homogeneous. Jordanes's report (which is in fact only an abridgement of the regrettably lost monumental History of the Goths by Cassiodorus, secretary to King Theodoric of the Ostrogoths) has been confirmed -- quite spectacularly, and in considerable detail -- by the archaeological discoveries of the last decades, at least as regards the post-Scandinavian part of the narrative.The oldest identifiable area of Gothic settlement (from the second century BC onwards) is the Lower Vistula valley, from which the Wielbark culture, now very well studied and unequivocally attributed to the Goths, spread all over N Poland (Jordanes's Gothiskandza = *gutiska- + *andija- 'Gothic End'). Subsequently, the Goths colonised SE Poland, Belarus and NW Ukraine (AD 180-200), and eventually set out towards the Black Sea (ca. AD 230).Jordanes says that the Goths, or at least the Ostrogothic royal clan, the Amals, led by Berig, landed on the Bay of Gdansk in three ships, having sailed "from the Isle of Scandia" (Gotland? mainland Sweden?) "as if from the forge of nations, or from the cradle of peoples". The Gepids, who according to Jordanes controlled the delta of the Wiskla (Vistula) at the time, allowed the newcomers to settle nearby (in sparsely populated Middle Pomerania, as archaeological sources suggest).The Amals regarded themselves as descendants of Gaut, the divine ancestor of the Scandinavian Gauts, and therefore close cousins of the Anses (Aesir). A likely possibility is that a Scandinavian elite with an energetic leader subjugated some of the "continental" Germanic tribes as well as earlier arrivals from Scandinavia, and organised them into a political confederation (to counter the growing power of the Vandals and their allies, who dominated central and S Poland). Trans-Baltic contacts were quite intensive during that period. The expedition of King Berig, if real, took place about AD 100 or slightly later, which means that the people who were to become the historical Goths had already been living in N Poland for more than two centuries.Piotr
Håkan writes: Ancient historiographers like Ptolemaios (150 BC) and Jordanes (a Goth himself) have said that the Goths were a people who lived in/came from "Scandinavia". But where was "Scandinavia"? Names of distant countries and foreign tribes were not used with a lot of exactitude in those days (all foreigners were Bastarns anyway). According to some ancient sources, "Scandinavia" was an island. Tacitus said the Goths lived around the Wisla / Weichsel river in Poland.