Jastorf

George Knysh mentioned some time back that one might even argue
coherently that the Scythians spoke a Germanic language. To dispel
possible lingering myths: it wasn't me. The earliest possibly
Germanic language we know of in that direction is Bastarnian (which
contemporary historians call mixed) and the only words we know of
that language are three names mentioned by Gibbons in "The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire" (and his sources seem unrecoverable),
and they don't look anything Germanic.

I should mention that the Jastorf culture, which conventionally is
supposed to be the immediate predecessor of the Germanic culture,
and which comprises West Germany (minus Nordwestblock territory)
down to Thuringia, plus Jutland and Fyn, isn't mentioned in any text
in Danish that I'm aware of. Almost all German texts I've seen that
mention it, after noting its geographic extension then goes on to
describe the present German portion of it, no Jutland and Fyn
description. The one exception is Jochen Brandt: "Latène and
Jastorf"; he describes the Jutland portion as a series of east-west
oriented stripes/bands of related cultures, of which the
northernmost are related to similar cultures in the rest of
Scandinavia.


Torsten