Man, Past and Present

by A. H. Keane

Origin of the Nordic Peoples.

From the linguistic and botanical evidence brought forward by the Polish botanist Rostafínski[1213] the ancestors of the Celts, Germans and Balto-Slavs must have occupied a region north of the Carpathians, and west of a line between Königsberg and Odessa (the beech and yew zone). The Balto-Slavs subsequently lost the word for beech and transferred the word for yew to the sallow and black alder (both with red wood) but their possession of a word for hornbeam locates their original home in Polesie—the marshland traversed by the Pripet but not south or east of Kiev.

Although, owing to the absence of Teutonic inscriptions before the third or fourth century A.D. it is difficult to trace the Nordic peoples with any certainty during the Bronze or Early Iron Ages, yet the fairly well-defined group of Bronze Age antiquities, covering the basin of the Elbe, Mecklenburg, Holstein, Jutland, Southern Sweden and the islands of the Belt have been conjectured with much probability to represent early Teutonic civilisation. "Whether we are justified in speaking of a Teutonic race in the anthropological sense is at least doubtful, for the most striking characteristics of these peoples [as deduced from prehistoric skeletons, descriptions of ancient writers and present day statistics] occur also to a considerable extent among their eastern and western neighbours, where they can hardly be ascribed altogether to Teutonic admixture. The only result of anthropological investigation which so far can be regarded as definitely established is that the old Teutonic lands in Northern Germany, Denmark and Southern Sweden have been inhabited by people of the same type since the neolithic age if not earlier[1214]." This type is characterised by tall stature, long narrow skull, light complexion with light hair and eyes[1215].

The Cimbri and Teutoni.

The Bastarnae.

During the age of national migrations, from the fourth to the sixth century, the territories of the Nordic peoples were vastly extended, partly by conquest, and partly by arrangement with the Romans. But these movements had begun before the new era, for we hear of the Cimbri invading Illyricum, Gaul and Italy in the second century B.C. probably from Jutland[1216], where they were apparently associated with the Teutoni. Still earlier, in the third century B.C., the Bastarnae, said by many ancient writers to have been Teutonic in origin, invaded and settled between the Carpathians and the Black Sea. Already mentioned doubtfully by Strabo as separating the Germani from the Scythians (Tyragetes) about the Dniester and Dnieper, their movements may now be followed by authentic documents from the Baltic to the Euxine. Furtwängler[1217] shows that the earliest known German figures are those of the Adamklissi monument, in the Dobruja, commemorating the victory of Crassus over the Bastarnae, Getae, and Thracians in 28 B.C. The Bastarnae migrated before the Cimbri and Teutons through the Vistula valley to the Lower Danube about 200 B.C. They had relations with the Macedonians, and the successes of Mithridates over the Romans were due to their aid. The account of their overthrow by Crassus in Dio Cassius is in striking accord with the scenes on the Adamklissi monument. Here they appear dressed only in a kind of trowsers, with long pointed beards, and defiant but noble features. The same type recurs both on the column of Trajan, who engaged them as auxiliaries in his Dacian wars, and on the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, here however wearing a tunic, a sign perhaps of later Roman influences. And thus after 2000 years are answered Strabo's doubts by modern archaeology.

The Moeso-Goths.

Much later there followed along the same beaten track between the Baltic and Black Sea a section of the Goths, whom we find first settled in the Baltic lands in proximity to the Finns. The exodus from this region can scarcely have taken place before the second century of the new era, for they are still unknown to Strabo, while Tacitus locates them on the Baltic between the Elbe and the Vistula. Later Cassiodorus and others bring them from Scandinavia to the Vistula, and up that river to the Euxine and Lower Danube. Although often regarded as legendary[1218], this migration is supported by archaeological evidence. In 1837 a gold torque with a Gothic inscription was found at Petroassa in Wallachia, and in 1858 an iron spear-head with a Gothic name in the same script, which dates from the first Iron Age, turned up near Kovel in Volhynia. The spear-head is identical with one found in 1865 at Münchenberg in Brandenburg, on which Wimmer remarks that "of 15 Runic inscriptions in Germany the two earliest occur on iron pikes. There is no doubt that the runes of the Kovel spear-head and of the ring came from Gothic tribes[1219]." These Southern Goths, later called Moeso-Goths, because they settled in Moesia (Bulgaria and Servia), had certain physical and even moral characters of the Old Teutons, as seen in the Emperor Maximinus, born in Thrace of a Goth by an Alan woman—very tall, strong, handsome, with light hair and milk-white skin[1220], temperate in all things and of great mental energy.

Before their absorption in the surrounding Bulgar and Slav populations the Moeso-Goths were evangelised in the fourth century by their bishop Ulfilas ("Wolf"), whose fragmentary translation of Scripture, preserved in the Codex Argenteus of Upsala, is the most precious monument of early Teutonic speech extant.

Scandinavia.