>
>
> Alright then. Proposal: The Igylliones were Uralic-speaking
> charcoal-burners, seen by their neighbors as vermin (living on
> meadows?), and they disappeared at some time after Ptolemy mentioned
> them.
>
>
> ****GK: With Ptolemy, problems of orthography and localization
> abound (Gudmund Schutte has pointed out a great many). So far I
> worked on the assumption that the Igylliones (Igulliones,
> Igolliones)--Kostoboki--Transmontani "up to the Peuce mountains"
> sequence was an -->east/southeast sequence like that of the Venedae
>--Galindae-- Sudini-- Stavani-- Alani (unfortunately I don't have
> access to the maps themselves). But what if it's more of a
> north/south sequence? Also, a sequence that is actually northeast of
> the major "border" ("above Dacia") sequence Bastarnae--Carpiani--
> Peucini (which Schutte would likely reduce to simply Bastarnae--
> Carpiani, since he considers "Peucini" to be a "doublet" (cf.
> Tacitus). And there is the further complication that the
> ethnonym "Kostoboki" may have been repeated, the Tyras being the
> boundary of Prolemy's "Dacia" and "Sarmatia", and the Kostoboki
> occupying both banks of the river, thus being at the same time in
> Dacia and in Sarmatia...
>
> On this alteranate scenario the Igy(gu,go)lliones would not have
> been Bastarnae. As between the Stavani and Kostoboki, they might fit
> the new "Late Zarubinian" culture which emerged on the southern
> Boh(g) river after the catastrophic end of classical Zarubinia in
> Farzoi's time, and which was a mixed affair, Zarubinian traditions
> coexisting with incoming Przeworsk elements and northern
> infiltrations from the area of the Belorusan Shaded Ware culture
> (about a 60:20:20 split in discovered sites). Perhaps Pachkova's
> study will help to clarify things. Whoever these Igylliones were,
> (and vassals of the Aorsan/Alani to boot) they were pushed northward
> by the Goths, and eventually fused with the early Slavic Kyivan
> culture.
>
> Don't know about the language, but there was nothing Uralic about
> the material culture. Nor BTW along the Vistula where Ptolemy
> located his "Finni".*****
1) What would be characteristic archaeologically of a Uralic culture?
2) Is there any archaeological culture which would match Tacitus' description of the destitution of the Fenni?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenni#Material_culture
Eg. with bone arrow tips?
Gyula Décsy
The Uralic Protolanguage
pp. 9ff
'Also the forebearer at least of the following (linguistically extinct) groups spoke Proto-Uralic: Kamass, Koibal, Taigi, Khakas, Karaghas, Motor, Tuva, Merja, Muroma, Meschchera, Valdai-Finns, Ryazan-Pskov-Finns, North Latvians. For the original status of affiliation of the most important of these peoples see the family trees on pp. 12 and 13. In the following chart, the place of their original homeland, the name of the integrating language and the approximate time of assimilation of the groups in question are given:
home area to what latest
Kammass Sayan-Mountain area Turkicized 18th-20th cent
Koibal West Sayan/Abakanin Turkicized 18th century
Karagas Upper Course of Yenisei Turkicized 18th century
Taigi Upper Course of Yenisei Turkicized 18th century
Khakas East Alatau, Abakan Turkicized 17th-18th cent
Motor Sayan Turkicized 18th century
Tuva Tuva ASSR Turkicized 18th century
Merja Nero/Pleshcheyevo Lake Russified 13th century
Muroma Oka-Volga confluence Russified 13th century
Meschchera Oka Russified 14th century
Valdai-Finns Valdai-Novgorod Russified 7th-10th cent
Ryazan-Pskov Between Ryazan/Pskov Russified 10th-llth cent
Vots Ingermanland Russified 16th-20th cent
Livonian North of Dvina/Riga Latvianized 13th-18th cent
A considerable part of the present-day Russian nation and of the East European Turkic population thus have a strong Finno-Ugric ethnic component. It is also assumed that certain groups among the Tatars and Bashkirs (today Turkic speaking) in the Volga-Ural area may be of Hungarian origin: they live in territories which were called in Western sources of the 13th century "Magna Hungaria" and may have been inhabited by ethnic Magyars who remained in this ancestral Finno-Ugric area. They became Islamicized and Turkic (Tatar, Bashkir) speaking by the 16th century many hundred years after the main stock of the Hungarians migrated to the West. The Livonians were Latvianized after the Teutonic Knights invaded and missionized (christianized) their land north of the Western Dvina (Düna) river in the 13th century.
The family trees (Figure 1, 2, and 3) inform us about the affiliation and subbranches of the Uralic, Samoyed, and Finno-Ugric protolanguages (see pp. 12-13).
The speakers of the Uralic Protolanguage were fishermen and hunters in the forest / waterland area of Northeast Europe and Northwest Siberia. Up to about 500 A.D., they probably controlled some of the waterways between Scandinavia, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea and the western Siberian rivers. They developed and practiced a remarkable "inland sailing/boating" technique on the lakes and rivers of the water rich Northern Eurasian forest zone; this technique made it possible for them to migrate to and occupy distant territories and to assimilate there large groups of the previous aboriginal (apparently, non-Uralic) population mainly in the forest zone, and further to the north in the arctic regions. The inland sailing/boating made the Uralic groups extremely mobile and helped to spread their language as a kind of lingua franca along the major rivers and in the lakelands of Northern Eurasia. Because of their skill in inland sailing/boating they can be called "fluvial nomads".1 The fluvial sailing technique of the Vikings coming from East Sweden to the south (Novgorod, Kiev) in the 9th century A. D. may represent a borrowing from the Finns. All of the Uralic groups remained in the Forest Zone and/or in the arctic regions except for the Hungarians who left the northern areas around 2,000 B.C. and became "mounted nomads" in the steppe living in a Turkic ethnic environment between the 4th and the 9th centuries A. D.
...
1 A term was coined by OMELJAN PRITSAK 1981: The Frisians "like the eastern Iranians and the later Baltic and east Finns can be regarded as classic examples of a type of socioeconomic society that we might call «fluvial nomads».
The Origin of RuÅ.
Volume One.
Old Scandinavian Sources other than the Sagas.
Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press/Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute 1981,
p. 21.
If the people of the Uralic and Finno-Ugric epochs were really fluvial nomads, then the ancestors of the Baltic Finns may have arrived in their present-day homelands much earlier than generally supposed. Their migration to new territories did not lead necessarily to the interruption of linguistic contact with the groups of the ancestral homeland and thus to a dissolution of the Proto-Finno-Ugric linguistic unity.'
Here are today's Uralic-speakers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fenno-Ugrian_people.png
The 'Southern Karelian' here is wronmg, it should be Mordvinic)
So until the 13-14th centuries there were Finnic speaking peoples
on the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oka_River
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Okarivermap.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Muromian-map.png
The Oka has a tributary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugra_River_(Oka)
Romania also has a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugra_River_(Trotu%C5%9F)
So, under no circumstances can Finnic tribes have lived closer to where Tacitus places the Fenni?
Torsten