[gothic-l] Re: Era of Great Migration

[malmqvist52]

Dirk,
I think Bertil's question is a legitimate one.
Wasn't it You btw that wrote that Bierbrauer has been criticised for
asserting that Wielbark culture=the Goths?
In front of me I have Barry Cunliffe's  The Oxford illustrated
history of prehistoric Europe.


"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 bunched 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.

I sent in this quote to another list and if I may very briefly
summarize the answer I got it sounded like that the Wielbark culture
spread progressively southeastwards into  today's
Volynian region of Ukraine and that there was an intermediate
Wielbark-Cerniakhov phase also.
Is this correct?

In my eyes it appears that all arguments on the origin of the Goths
are built upon Tacitus Ptolemaios menioning of two g-t people one in
Scandinavia and one in Poland and on the Tacitus one in Poland. And
then that Jordanes says the Get-people comes from Scandinavia in 1480
BC( where this date of course is incredible, but still).

Oh, I almost forgot I have read one more thing about this:
The similarities of the <domarring>:s from Gotland and from Poland.

Are these also found spreading southeastwards into Ukraine?

Are there e. g. any  indications on what language that was spoken in
the Wielbark culture?

Now Dirk's rune-find list and Ingemar's ring-name map enter my mind.

Perhaps it wasn't gothic, God forbid. Isn't it possible that even
though it might be correct that the G-t (Ptolemaios, Tacitus)name
might be identical to the one later assigned to the Black Sea goths,
the gothic *language* came from one of the other ethnic groups there?

Best wishes
Anders

for --- In gothic-l at y..., "faltin2001" <dirk at s...> wrote:
> --- In gothic-l at y..., "Bertil Haggman" <mvk575b at t...> wrote:
> > And where is the evidence of that ethnogenesis?
> >
>
> The evidence is set out - among others - in the contributions on
the
> Goths by Walter Pohl, Volker Bierbrauer and others in the
Reallexikon
> der Germanischen Altertumskunde. I know you viewpoint on this and
> there is no need to repeat the discussion. Anybody interested in
this
> question should study carefully the above-mentioned texts which
hold
> most of the answers.
>
> Dirk


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