From: malmqvist52
Message: 11670
Date: 2001-12-05
--- In cybalist@..., george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
>
> --- malmqvist52 <malmqvist52@...> wrote:
> > Hi George,--- In cybalist@..., george knysh
> > <gknysh@...> wrote:
> > > *****GK: The Getae
> > (not the Goths who at that time
> > > were still in "Scandzia")
> >
> > What's Your source for this information?
> >
> > Is it archaeological evidence? If so, I think I just
> > read the
> > opposite somwhere. I. e. that the Goths NEVER were
> > in Scandinavia!
> > I will of course look this up.
> > Best wishes
> > Anders
>
> Hello Anders,
> Are you perhaps referring to the comment made by Dirk
> on the Gothic list with references to two recent
> (?)German studies?
It might have been somewhere on gothic-l, yes.
Let me say from the outset that I
> have absolutely no axe to grind on this issue.
Ok.
My
> current view derives from a combination of (gasp)
> Jordanes
But Jordanes says that the Goths left Scandza in 1490 BCE!
See message 9803 and follow-ups:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/9803
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/10086
As pointed out in these threads there is of course reasons to
question this information of Jordanes , as is also shown in my quote
from Cunliffe below.
Additionally, Jordanes also refers to Josephus, which he think is
trustworthy, and says that the Goths comes from the Scythians and are
relatives to Magog.
It seems that Jordanes cannot make up his mind in this case.
and the latest discussions of Polish
> archaeologists available to me. There are few if any
> problems in tracing the trek of the Goths from ca. 50
> AD: "follow the Welbark culture".
I'm sorry that I'm no expert on Welbark culture but, the first
mentionings of the Goths in Barry Cunliffe's "The oxford Illustrated
history of Prehistoric Europe" is in text and on maps regarding the
attacks of Gepids, Goths and Heruli between 250 and 280 AD. They then
appear to come from directly north of the Black Sea, around Dnepr.
Further on page 450:
" In eastern Europe too, there were movements of population and
shifts in the political geography of the Germanic peoples and their
nomad and semi- nomad neighbours.
From late in the second century, contacts had been developing between
the population of the Vistula basin and the mixed peoples of the
Black Sea hinterland and the steppe fringes. A major migration of
people to the south-east probably *did not occur* ( my emphasis), but
it is clear that war bands did enter the Black Sea littoral, there
gathering allies and resources which were to enable them to attack
the eastern Roman world. These new groups were referred to by Roman
writers as 'Goths', a term which embraced a wide range of ethnic
elements and which bestows a spurious air of unity upon a
heterogenous congeries of tribes, war bands, and other groups. The
power base wich arose north of the Black Sea in the third century
was thus culturally extremely mixed, bringing together various
nomadic peoples, eastern Germans, and the populations based in and
around the old Greek and Roman citties of the Black Sea shore. In
such circumstances, we need not look for any distinctively 'Gothic'
culture, for it did not exist. The military threat posed to Asia
Minor and the Balkans by this emergent power, however, was real
enough. From 238 onward, Gothic armies harried the lower Danube lands
with considerable success. Under the recourceful leadership of their
king Kniva, they won a resounding victory over a Roman army at
Abrittus in 251 killing the Roman emperor and extracting huge
payments of money from his successor. Later the range of gothic
assaults was widend to include Asia Minor, which had known no major
warfare for centuries., and the Aegean. These attacks were
necessarily mounted from fleets, a new departure for barbarian
raiders, and the resulting devastation was widespread. An invation of
Greece by several gothic forces in 257 marked the high point of their
successs at this period. It was beaten off eventually and thereafter
the series of invations ended quite suddenly. Relations between the
Goths and Rome were given stabilityby a traty of 332, which provided
annual payments to the barbarians in return for manpower, military
service, commerce: the Goths as federates of the Empire had arrived."
From this I conclude that there perhaps was no ethnogenesis of the
goths as they consisted of many peoples buched together by the Roman
writers.
And if there was any ethnogenesis in spite of this it was around Dnepr
and not in present-day Poland.
The problem concerns
> the genesis of this culture. There was a big
> discussion about it in 1979 at Slupsk in Poland (the
> materials of the symposium were published in 1981).
> Subsequently (as late as 1990)nothing emerged to
> change the perspective. The dominant view of
> archaeologists then was that the Welbark culture was
> formed by the fusion of an earlier "Pomorian" culture
> (perhaps already partly Germanic) with that of an
> "incoming Scandinavian population".
Was this "incoming Scandinavian population" defined more elaborately
in terms of archaeology? Finds etc.?
Perhaps we should
> look up the most recent German literature, but Tore
> thinks that it doesn't affect the case made by Polish
> archaeology.
Who is Tore, and what is his arguments?
=== In any event, my basic comment about
> "Scandzia" (deliberately left in quotation marks) was
> that in 50 BC there were no Goths in the areas
> controlled by Burebista and his Diceneus, either, we
> can say, because they did not yet exist as the result
> of the "fusion" mentioned above,
Ok, but I guess the question wasn't about Burebista from the start,or
was it?
(Although I don't see it as impossible that one reason for the Romans
calling the bands and tribes attacking them 'Goths' might have been
because the resitance from that same side only a couple of hundred
years before was from the similar sounding Get-tribe. Perhaps there
were even relatives to Burebista and the Getes in this 'Goth'-
federation.)
If I remember it correctly it was Torsten's(Snorri's) 'Odin' that
was discussed.
And since I don't think that he was a 'Goth' ( see the above, If he
existed I think it was more around the first century BC , or
something)
I think it could be relevant if he had contact with Burebista.
It looks like right now we only have speculations about this
Diceneus.
But I certainly think that one can allow oneself to speculate once in
a while.
Some time it may pay off, who knows.
or because they had
> not yet migrated across the Baltic (from Gotland or
> elsewhere).******
See the above. And I don't belive for a minute Tore Gannholms
assertions of the alleged relatedness of the Gothic and Gutnish
languages. See the discussions in gothic-l.
Best wishes
Anders