Germania

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ealabor said:
Well, if we can get the DeLorean up to 88 mph, we can find out for sure!

:mrgreen:

This discussion is getting pretty interesting, though.  I did know that "gae" was "spear" in Old Irish (Cu Chulainn's Gae Bulg, anybody?), and that it came from some sort of Celtic root... but I didn't know that people were trying to relate it (or other Celtic words) to the term "German".  Then again, the word for "German" in German has never really been "German", has it?  At least, not that I'm aware of.  The dictionary seems to trace the root of the word to Latin, "germani" and Greek "germanoi".  I wonder, how do we know the word came from the Celts or the Germans at all?  This isn't a rhetorical question, I really don't know and since it's relevant to the topic here I would love to learn more.

As for the "Garman" bit, I have one of those in my car.  Pretty handy.
 
As a german myself I find this discussion particularly interesting.
But as far as I can tell, *german* was never a celtic word in any form, but rather the roman/latin word meaning, as stated here already, *brother*.
They never gave themself an overall name, till somewhere around ~650 AD, since the many tribes only came together in dire situations, to fight side by side under one Leader and then they would still be called cimbri, chatti, ambrones, etc and not germans.
Today we call ourself *Deutsche*, which means *people* in the old High German Language.


*Goes home to watch all three BttF Movies in a row again*  :mrgreen:
 
Uhh It's been a while since I last checked this thread. so are there plans to add the Cimbri and their Teutones and Amburones allies? Latter on in a patch? This thread from the TWC (from Roma surrectum) may help http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=215507 . I'm sure if you asked to use their "preview" as a source of visual and written information then i'm sure they'd be more than willing.

 
Were they allies before the Cimbrian War?  None of them seem to have been very important around 268 B.C. Read below.

[EDIT]
I had edited this post before, but I thought a better explanation would be in order.  Like E said in the OP, the point was to find some well-known tribes of varying cultural background, and to fill out the troop tree.  Here's a few reasons he might have chosen the tribes he did:

1. Sweboz - large group of many tribes, covers a lot of area and has good and numerous levies
2. Cherusci - famous for annihilating the legions of Varus, decent skirmishers
3. Chatti - famous for their elite, highly professional and organized infantry
4. Tungri - good Gallo-Germanic component, good weapons and armor
5. Tencteri - good horsemen, forced a numerically superior Roman cavalry unit into a retreat

Also, all of these tribes are in a good position relative to each other.  They all pretty much border each other, the Chatti bordering the Tencteri, who in turn border the Suebi, who then border the Cherusci.  The Tungri, on the other hand, are in Gaul, making their position equally interesting.  The tribes represented thus far are probably the best in terms of gameplay balance, and represent a broad range of Germanic cultures.  It may be a good idea in a future release to add another Germanic culture in the north to fill out that part of the map and give the Suebi somebody to duke it out with, but that's for a future release.  The factions and troops that are in for this release are listed already -- the troop names aren't necessarily finished, but the trees pretty much are.
 
Swiss more or less got the reasoning correct in his post.

Of course there are other reasons as well, such as the troop trees just a five for each faction. Any more would be too much work, considering the 5 per is enough as it is.

As mentioned earlier, there are Cimbri centers included for the faction, just as there are a whole host of different Celtic centers included for Gaul, despite the fact there are only 5 represented.
 
SwissHalberdier said:
  Then again, the word for "German" in German has never really been "German", has it?

Nope, never.

The Sweboz are probably the closest to a self-descriptive name for Germans, since I remember reading that it comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning "true blood" or something to that effect.  The Germans had no names for themselves as they generally didn't see themselves as one people.  Interestingly they did, however, denote other people who were not of their blood.  This is why the Welsh, Walloons, and several other people that I am blanking on have a similar root in their name.
 
I think that similar language, religion and culture did make them see themselves as one people, as an people can be divided. Just look at the ancient Greeks, I'm sure they saw themselves as Greeks but they were devided as well.
 
How would they recognize another people as kindred?  Physically they were similar to the Celts and Gauls, so it would be hard to believe that they could distinguish from look.  Religion is debatable...many of the tribes worshiped the Vanir gods and others the Aesir.  For example the Sweboz had high esteem for Nerthus (Vanir) whereas the Goths preferred Tiwaz (Aesir).  Later these pantheons were amalgamated, but there is no evidence of it being so at the time of this mod.  Culture, maybe, but once again there was much cultural intercourse between the Celts and Germans.  Language, there were 3 general German categories at this time: north, west, and east...but ultimately varied from tribe to tribe.  Also, many words were borrowed from the Celts.  Perhaps the only finitely distinguishing characteristic is the hair style worn by the Sweboz (Suebian Knot)...but once again that is a tribe or group of tribes stating relation and that was only of the Sweboz.  The Chatti, Cherusi, etc were all not in this group and thus would not necessarily be seen as kin.
 
Agreed.

Religion won't help the case for a homogeneous group of self-identified proto-Germans.  There's really no reason to believe they would worship the same gods the same way or even agree on certain issues of theology that other tribes or groups believed.  It's the rule rather than the exception to have various different ways to worship the same god, or to prefer one god over the other.  Religion could cause conflict even if it is similar.  Catholics worship the same deity and have the same very basic belief in Jesus as Protestants, but the differences are such that they are almost completely irredeemable in the eyes of some on both sides.  Muslims, too, worship the same god, yet often you hear of one radical group of one Muslim sect killing another.  In shinto, there is a general understanding of what the gods are, but it's not uncommon for one shinto shrine or another to claim that it's better to stick with preferring to worship a single god than several.  In the end, people with similar faiths that disagree on one thing or another are as likely to find common ground as they are casus belli.

As for similar language, there's no reason to believe that was all that similar either.  Before the advent of modern, standardized languages, local dialects could sometimes vary so much from region to region... even from town to town, as to not be mutually intelligible.  Look at Oscan, for example.  Compare it with Latin.  Is it similar?  In some ways, yes... But I can't understand it in sentence form without hitting the vocab cards HARD.  Similar as they may have been... linguistically, religiously, culturally and all that... The Samnites absolutely hated the Romans, and the feeling was very much mutual.  Do you think they would have identified themselves as being "fellow Italians" in a cultural sense?  I don't.  I doubt they'd want to think of Romans as fellow... anything.  If anything, the Romans tried to distance themselves genetically from the other Italic tribes via the Aeneas myth.  Similarly, it's worth noting that Aetolians and Macedonians were culturally and geographically Greek (in b4 "ZOMG!! MACEDONIANS WEREN'T GREEK!!", I disagree but that is entirely irrelevant to this), but were both considered "barbarians" by other Greeks at one time or another.

Either way, even if Italians did think of each other as fellow Italians and Greeks did see each other as fellow Greeks, and everything was all happy in the world... the Germans wouldn't have had such neat, clear geographic to contain this concept.  The Italians and Greeks had one thing in common - they both lived on their respective peninsulae, relatively isolated and protected by the Mediterranean on both sides.  So, what of the people on the Gaulish border?  Certainly there would have been a certain exchange of ideas, language and culture, along with the exchange of goods and coin.  Skot noted that Sweboz meant "true blood", and was a good word for the Germans... Assuming that is the meaning, since he did seem unsure, it appears to me as if the intent was to differentiate themselves from their perceived differences with other tribes, rather than relate to them.  It sounds pretty exclusive to name your group of tribes the "true blood".  I'll readily admit that I'm not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of the early Germans, but I can't help but take note of these things.
 
I just wanted to clarify my own memory (which turned out to be pleasantly close to correct) on the meaning of Sweboz....apparently where I got it from was the endnotes of a translation of Tacitus's Germania.  It says that Sweboz means "of our kind, of the same blood"  or "the pure ones".  Similarly, some others have suggested that Germani was a Latin translation of bastarnae, or mixed bloods (bastards)...but that is debatable.  Actually, all of it is, guess we will never know.  However, the part about the Sweboz does have logic behind it.

Also, stumbled across a comment in the same book's endnotes that most evidence suggests that the Roman Germani was predominantly a geographical term and not of race or blood.  In other words, the Romans simply labelled all tribes east of the Rhine "German" without much thought, unless there was a particular tribe that might have been so blatantly Celtic that it was labelled as such.
 
That doesn't explain reports by Caesar of Germans on the Gaulish side of the Rhine, though.  Commentarii de Bello Gallico mentions this.  It also mentions the notion of some Belgae being Germanic, some not.
 
Yeah, I know....its typical that things get blurred along the borders.  There could have been genetically Germanic tribes with Celtic cultures and Celtic tribes with Germanic cultures (less likely though).  Nevertheless, what is described as Germanic during Caesar's time is probably not accurate since at his time they only just began describing what that might be.  By the time of Tacitus it was better understood.  Really, the only group of people I, personally, would consider Germanic in all his descriptions were the Suebi (Sweboz) under Ariovastus (or however you spell his name). The others were probably tribes of mixed Celtic-Germanic traits.

Personally, I think the notion of Germanic was really formed by the Romans from the time of Christ onwards.  The Nordic Bronze Age of 1700 B.C.-600ish B.C. certainly laid a foundation for the Germanic peoples, but that is just the raw clay, not the pot or dish (so to speak).
 
Skot the Sanguine said:
How would they recognize another people as kindred?  Physically they were similar to the Celts and Gauls, so it would be hard to believe that they could distinguish from look.  Religion is debatable...many of the tribes worshiped the Vanir gods and others the Aesir.  For example the Sweboz had high esteem for Nerthus (Vanir) whereas the Goths preferred Tiwaz (Aesir).  Later these pantheons were amalgamated, but there is no evidence of it being so at the time of this mod.  Culture, maybe, but once again there was much cultural intercourse between the Celts and Germans.  Language, there were 3 general German categories at this time: north, west, and east...but ultimately varied from tribe to tribe.  Also, many words were borrowed from the Celts.  Perhaps the only finitely distinguishing characteristic is the hair style worn by the Sweboz (Suebian Knot)...but once again that is a tribe or group of tribes stating relation and that was only of the Sweboz.  The Chatti, Cherusi, etc were all not in this group and thus would not necessarily be seen as kin.

Havign similar mythologies. I believe many tribes believed to be descended from heroes, some having similar ancestor heros. Many would have the Germanic mythology.

Ofcourse there would be dialects, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be able to understand eachother.

Their culture, the Gauls themselves saw the Germanic peoples as an peoples apart. Many apparantly Germanic tribes outside of Germania claimed Germanic descent. How else to know about their descent then by their culture, similar languages and religion?


Seeing a lot of Pan-Celtinism lately. Everyone is Celt somehow. Only Sweboz true Germanics? You're joking right?
 
Phalanx300 said:
Their culture, the Gauls themselves saw the Germanic peoples as an peoples apart. Many apparantly Germanic tribes outside of Germania claimed Germanic descent. How else to know about their descent then by their culture, similar languages and religion?

Storytelling, oral tradition.  "We came from Germania" ≠ "We're kin with Germanic tribes"
 
Phalanx, I think you missed the point.  With regards to me saying the Sweboz were the "true blood", that was in response to your comment about Germanics seeing themselves as kin.  My description of the Sweboz was to illustrate that they didn't see themselves as such, not that there is only one true Germanic people....since all of them came from Denmark and Scandinavia at some point in prehistory.

As for the Gauls seeing the Germans as a people apart, I challenge that.  Do you have proof or written record of them saying so?  Is it coming to us from a Roman who perceived a difference?  We can't go on assumptions.

Mythology....Norse/German mythology is primarily a reflection of the Migration Period or later (circa 200 A.D. or later).  My comment on the fact that some worshiped Vanir gods and others Aesir gods is that at this time there wasn't similar myths.  As far as we can tell the Norse mythology of later has reflections of events that occurred after this time.  For example, the early (timeline wise) myth of the war between the Vanir and Aesir gods is probably a reflection of some historic situation where tribes of the Aesir cult supplanted those of the Vanir at some point in pre history.  Nevertheless, statements from Tacitus (400 years after the setting of this mod) finitely state that Vanir gods were being worshiped regularly.

As for heroes, most of the houses from the Viking period claim ancestry from a god or hero, but, generally speaking, each one of the names can be historically attested to within a few generations....but once again those are from the later Migration Period.

Hell, the gods worshiped during the Proto-Germanic/Nordic Bronze Age period were very different....apparently being a sun god and an earth mother goddess (the later possibly being an early form of Nerthus, the Vanir goddess).

Also, North Germanic, West Germanic, and East Germanic languages might have some mutually intelligible words, but it wasn't just a matter of dialect.  For example, Norwegian and German are both Germanic languages, but I doubt that much can really be mutually intelligible between them.  Technically English is a Germanic language....but try comparing it to its closest relative (Frisian)....  This is beyond dialects.  In some cases they might be able to make each other out, but have a Frisian try to understand a Visigoth and you will probably have moderate luck at best.
 
Is there any evidence that any sort of koine dialect was in use at that time for commerce in Gaul or Germany?  I'm curious.
 
Skot the Sanguine said:
How would they recognize another people as kindred?  Physically they were similar to the Celts and Gauls, so it would be hard to believe that they could distinguish from look.  Religion is debatable...many of the tribes worshiped the Vanir gods and others the Aesir.  For example the Sweboz had high esteem for Nerthus (Vanir) whereas the Goths preferred Tiwaz (Aesir).  Later these pantheons were amalgamated, but there is no evidence of it being so at the time of this mod.  Culture, maybe, but once again there was much cultural intercourse between the Celts and Germans.  Language, there were 3 general German categories at this time: north, west, and east...but ultimately varied from tribe to tribe.  Also, many words were borrowed from the Celts.  Perhaps the only finitely distinguishing characteristic is the hair style worn by the Sweboz (Suebian Knot)...but once again that is a tribe or group of tribes stating relation and that was only of the Sweboz.  The Chatti, Cherusi, etc were all not in this group and thus would not necessarily be seen as kin.

Phalanx300 said:
Havign similar mythologies. I believe many tribes believed to be descended from heroes, some having similar ancestor heros. Many would have the Germanic mythology.

I think this is a very modern, pan-Germanic view though. Their mythology is something we know next to nothing about, and what we do know suggests that religion varied massively across the Germanic world, with hundreds of local names for gods - Tuihantes, Nehellania, Nerthus and others are all purely local cults. It is not just Viking religion knocked back a few hundred years. Also, that mythology is startlingly similar to the mythology of all other Northern European peoples, including the "Celts" and Britons - so much so that the Gundestrup cauldron, found in Denmark, is usually referred to as a piece of "Celtic" art and the scenes have been interpreted as references to Celtic mythology, but presumably they were just as understandable to the Danish islanders who used the vessel. Similarly we have bog deposits, worship in groves, the belief that the gods cannot be represented in human form, the concept of a "horned" figure representing a god or divine possession, all of which occur in both Celtic and Germanic areas. There's no reason to believe two Germanic tribes would have a noticeably more similar mythology than any given Germanic and Celtic tribes who live next door to one another.

Phalanx300 said:
Ofcourse there would be dialects, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be able to understand eachother.

Sadly we just can't know this. Two hundred years ago England had local dialects so impenetrable that outsiders couldn't understand the locals, and that's in a much smaller country with dictionaries, relatively widespread literacy and an official language. Imagine the situation somewhere as large as Germania.

Phalanx300 said:
Their culture, the Gauls themselves saw the Germanic peoples as an peoples apart. Many apparantly Germanic tribes outside of Germania claimed Germanic descent. How else to know about their descent then by their culture, similar languages and religion?

Traditions about origin are fairly meaningless when it comes to ancient people. The ancient Irish believed they were descended from Greeks and Spaniards, while the Picts came from Scythia and the gods came from Norway. Similarly, many British histories of the "Dark Ages" claim that the Britons were descended from the Trojans. I consider this to be somewhat unlikely. Almost all origin myths involve an element of travel from the ancestral homeland.

Skot the Sanguine said:
Seeing a lot of Pan-Celtinism lately. Everyone is Celt somehow. Only Sweboz true Germanics? You're joking right?

I think it's fairer to say that everyone is a northern European somehow, in Northern Europe at least. These cultures are all fairly similar, but with significant differences as well, and simplistic labels like "Celt" or "Germanic" are not helpful because they automatically set certain ideas about people in stone before you even start looking at the evidence.
 
I just fail to see how somehow the Germanic peoples with similar languages, mythologies and culture wouldn't think of themselves of an people. While Greeks and Celts somehow do manage to do just that.  :roll:

I believe the Gauls themselves spoke of the Germanic peoples as large men with their scary eyes with scary warcries, at least I've read that they told the Romans that. They definately didn't identify them as just another Celtic peoples, which all Germanics somehow seem to be.

We know what happens when Celts get cocky  :razz::

sanctuairedcapnb0.jpg
 
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