[gothic-l] Fwd: Konow

[Ravi Chaudhary]

--- In JatHistory at yahoogroups.com, "Sunny" <sunnytjatsingh at y...> 
wrote:
Hi Ravi, please note my major mistake, I finally found the time to 
read it carefully – the Junnar Inscription was dated 2nd Century A.D. 
not 150 B.C.  Here is part of my synopsis on the article by Konow, 
you can post it on the Germanic groups:

In Panjabi language, the plural word for Jat is Jatan or Jutan; i.e. 
Jatan De Putra, means Son's of Jats.  One would think this form seems 
to represent a palatalized form of Gut or Gutan, which opens up 
lexical similarities to a tribe called Gutones, who traded in amber, 
per Pytheas, and situated near the mouth of the Vistula river.   
This leads us to an interesting article written by Sten Konow, 
entitled "Goths in Ancient India" in which he makes reference to some 
inscriptions found at Junnar in Western India dated around the second 
century A.D. (Konow 1912: 380).  These inscriptions make reference to 
a people characterized as "Gatana" and "Gatas", of whom Konow takes 
to be Goths based on the personal names attached to these – Irila and 
Cita (Konow 1912).  
Konow takes the name Irila to be a regular Gothic form for Swedish 
Erila, Anglo-Saxon eorl, English earl, Old Norse jarl, Old Saxon erl, 
and connected with the ethnic name erula or heruli (Konow 1912: 380-
381).   This etymology seems reasonable.  The name Cita, however, 
somehow, Konow translates to Helda, which appears to be somewhat of a 
stretch (Konow 1912: 381).  He summarizes with, "Both Irila and Cita 
are characterized as gatas, and this latter word is the regular 
Indian form corresponding to Latin goti, the Goths (Konow 1912: 
381).  He continues, "The Goths must accordingly have called 
themselves gutans or gutos and not gotans or gotos (Konow 1912: 
382)."  He is further convinced that the Indian "Gata" must have been 
inscripted correctly, as "Indians have always been keen observers of 
sounds
and those who wrote the word gata in the Junnar inscriptions 
can only have heard the original denomination from the mouth of these 
gatas themselves (Konow 1912: 383)."  
Now it is unlikely that the Goths proper would have migrated, even as 
traders, to India by pushing their way through Central Asia, as Konow 
suggests (Konow 1912: 385).  However, according to Shore, the Goths 
had trading networks as far as Samarkhand (Shore 1906: 55), so it is 
possible, though not likely that the Goths could have ventured into 
India.  It is even less conceivable that the Goths came through sea-
faring contact from the Indus delta.  What is more reasonable is that 
the "gatas" of Konow are actually the Getae, rather the Massagetae, 
of Central Asia, who probably existed in the form of Saka Satraps of 
India, or even members of Da Yuezhi/Yuti (Massagetae (Knobloch 2001)) 
or Kushan tribe, and, therefore, generically speaking the "gatas" 
must have been a tribe of the Indo-Scythians of the Greek writers.  
If we look towards the later Alani, we know from Marcellinus that 
they were once the Massagetae, and their territories flowed all the 
way to India (Rolfe 1956).  It is therefore, more plausible that the 
Massagetae were responsible for those inscriptions found at Junnar 
and that these "Gata" are now represented by the Indian Jats who live 
not to far from that region today.  Satya Shrava, in his 1981 work, 
Sakas in India, said, "The Jats are none other than the Massagetae 
(Great Getae) mentioned in Diodorus as an off-spring of the ancient 
Saka tribe.... a fact now well-known (Shrava 1981: 2-3)."
So what does Konow's view lead us to?  His view of the Goths being 
known as "Gutans" seems fairly strong, as Pytheas, Ptolemy, Tacitus 
and Pliny refer to a tribe near the Vistula river in modern Poland as 
Gutones, Guttones, and Gothones (Konow 1912).  Though not proven, 
these Gutones may very well be represented by the Wielbark 
archaeological complex, see Christensen (Christensen 2002).  Konow 
writes, "If I am right in identifying the gatas of the Junnar 
inscriptions with the Goths, the only theory which will suit the 
facts is, I think, that the various forms goti, Gotou, gatas, have 
all been taken from some Gothic dialect which agreed with most 
Germanic tongues in changing an old u to o when and a or o occurred 
in the following syllable (Konow 1912: 383)."  And further Konow is 
inclined to believe that his Indian Goths actually spread out from 
their location on the Vistula eastwards towards India, thus the 
Gutones of early classical writers, who were situated on the Vistula 
were the same as the Indian Gatas.  Now the actual case may be quite 
the other way around, or perhaps simultaneous movement.  I incline to 
take Konow's Gatas to be the Massagetae, who were also classified in 
later times as Sarmatians (McGovern 1939).  As we know that Poland 
was once termed Sarmatia – could this not represent the continuity of 
the Massagetae, at least in part, from Poland eastward to Central 
Asia, and quite possibly to Indo-Scythia?  In The Sarmatians, 
Sulimirski summarizes the contributions of the Sarmatians:

At different points in time their [Sarmatians] peoples and tribes 
were driven into almost every western European country, and they were 
forced eastwards as far as China.  The descendents of those who came 
to England in AD 175 probably still live somewhere in the country

Little remains to remind the modern world of their existence - the 
Ossetinians
.the names of a few Slavonic peoples
 some European place-
names
.a vague tradition of Sarmatian origin lingering among sections 
of Polish nobility
(Sulimirski 1970: 202-203).

Can we add the pro-generators of the Goths to the list?  Christensen 
writes, "Ptolemy has positioned them near the Vistula, even 
localizing them precisely on the right bank.  So might this mean that 
he did not see them as Germanic at all, but rather as Sarmatian? 
(Christensen 2002: 40)."  This suggestion may be of some weight.  The 
Alans, a late Sarmatian tribe, certainly spread to India, and we know 
they were once the Massagetae (Rolfe 1956), could the Gutones and 
the "Gatana" of Konow, who are represented today as Jats of India, be 
the tail ends of the same people?  This needs future examination.  
Until then we are left wondering about Arnold Toynbee's statement in 
his  A Study of History:

It may not be fantastic to conjecture that the Tuetonic-speaking 
Goths and Gauts of Scandinavia may have been descended from a 
fragment of the same Indo-European-speaking tribe as the homonymous 
Getae and Thyssagetae and Massagetae of the Eurasian Steppe who are 
represented today by the Jats of the Panjab (Toynbee 1934: 435).

Best Wishes,

Cited:

Ammianus Marcellinus. Translated by J.C. Rolfe, Volumes 2 & 3. 
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press: 1956.

Christensen, A.S. Cassidorus Jordanses and the History of the Goths 
Studies in a Migration Myth. Copenhagen.  Museum Tusculanum Press: 
2002. 

Knobloch, E. Monuments of Central Asia. London. I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd.: 
2001.

Konow, S. "Goths in Ancient India." In The Journal of the Royal 
Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. London.  Royal Asiatic 
Society: 1912.

McGovern, W.M. The Early Empires of Central Asia. Chapel Hill, North 
Carolina. University of North Carolina Press: 1939.

Shore, T. Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.  London. Kennikat Press: 
1971, first published in 1906.

Shrava, S. The Sakas in India. New Delhi. Pranava Prakashan: 1981.

Sulimirski, T. The Sarmatians. New York. Frederick A. Prager 
Publishers: 1970.

Toynbee, A. A Study of History. Vol. 2., London. Oxford University 
Press: 1939, First Published in 1934.
--- End forwarded message ---



------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get A Free Psychic Reading! Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Lj3uPC/Me7FAA/ySSFAA/wWMplB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

You are a member of the Gothic-L list.  To unsubscribe, send a blank email to <gothic-l-unsubscribe at egroups.com>. 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/