--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> Norman Davies thinks all southern Poles are undercover Celts :)
Well, there may be a grain of truth in that. At the time when the
southern two-thirds of modern Poland was Vandal territory, there were
still Celtic enclaves in the south, one of them in the area round
Kraków. The local Celts had their own distinctive culture, which only
partly absorbed Przeworsk culture influences (they even struck their
own gold coin, which suggests the existence of a political centre)
and maintained contacts with the Boii and other peoples on the other
side of the mountains. The enclave seems to have been engulfed by the
Przeworsk culture in the early Roman period (1st c.).
>
> Kraków occupies a very convenient location on the upper Vistula and
has attacted human settlers since the Palaeolithic; it has an almost
continuous record of settlement since the fifth millennium BC. It is
also a place easily reached by cultural and political trends from the
south. The Slavs (White Croatians?) possibly reached it about the 5th
c., and by the 8th it had become a fortress of the Vistulans and a
local political centre.
>
> Several questions can be asked at this point: What language was
spoken in the area of Kraków when the Slavs arrived? Truth is, we
don't know. It could be some form of Germanic, or a residual
Carpathian language related to Dacian, or (improbably) unassimilated
remnants of a Celtic language.
>
> Another local enigma is the name of the Tatra mountains (Pol.
Tatry, the highest range of the Carpathians, forming the border
between Poland and Slovakia, just south of Kraków). Old versions of
the name include <Tritri>, which suggests the reconstruction *trtr-(o-
) with branch-specific vocalisations like West Slavic *tartr- > *tatr-
by dissimilation or *tritr- (with syllabic *r > *ri as in Albanian).
A hill range in Ukraine is called Toutry (< *toltr- < *tortr- < *trtr-
with East Slavic vocalism). There are Balkan connections (the Trtra
upland in Herzegovina, perhaps Greek mythological Tartaros), and
maybe Celtic ones if French tertre 'hill' is of Gaulish origin.
>
> Piotr
>
Yes tr's gold in tr tr mountains.
Might it be possible to associate "local Celts" or the Przeworsk
culture with the gold-amassing Taurisci? To strike gold coins, you
need gold, of which the Taurisci had plenty. And one is reminded of
Axel Oxenstierna's "Your majesty, to wage war you need three things:
Money, money and money". Also, one is reminded of Odin's capacity to
see gold underground in the hills (or did they just plunder old
graves where their Cimmerian forefathers had once passed? That would
certainly give the Cimbri plenty of reason to attack the Taurisci,
their old family relationship notwithstanding.
À propos *tr-: My ole buddy Dionysos of Halicarnassus confirmed my
suspicion that Latin <turris> "tower" (and its cognates) were so
named because the *turs- (but now we're going back in time) lived in
them.
Torsten