Earliest records of Germanic tribes

The records of ancient Germanic tribes are based on testimonies by Greek and Roman travellers and geographers. The earliest of them refers to the IV c. B.C. made by Phytheas, a Greek astronomer and geographer who sailed from Gaul (France) to the mouth of the river Elbe. He described the tribes of the Teutons.

The next major description of the Teutons came from Julius Caesar, the Roman general and statesman which he left in his book ‘Commentaries on the War in Gaul’ (1 c. BC.)

A century later (1 c. A.D.) Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist, gave a classification of the Germanic which until quite recently had basically been accepted by modern researchers. According to it, the tribes in 1^st c.A.D. comprised 5 major groups which fell into 3 subgroups: Eastern Germanic, Western Germanic and Northern Germanic. They were 1) the Vindili 2) the Ingaevones 3) The Istsaevones 4)the Hermiones 5) the Hilleveones. Table 2 illustrates this division.

A few decades later the Roman historian Tacitus compiled a detailed description of the life and customs of the ancient Teutons where he reproduced Pliny’s classification of the Germanic tribes. Having made a linguistic analysis of several Germanic dialects of later ages, F. Engels came to the conclusion that Pliny’s classification of the Teutonic tribes accurately reflected the contemporary dialectal division.

The traditional tri-partite classification of the Germanic languages was reconsidered and corrected in some recent publications (Rastorgueyva). It appears that the development of the Germanic group was not confined to successive splits; it involved both linguistic divergence and convergence. It has also been discovered that originally PG split into two main branches and that the tri-partite division marks a later stage of its history.

The earliest migration of the Germanic tribes from the lower valley of the Elbe consisted in their movement north, to the Scandinavian peninsula, a few hundred years before our era. This geographical segregation must have led to linguistic differentiation and to the division of PG into the northern and southern branches. At the beginning of our era, some of the tribes returned to the mainland and settled closer to the Vistula basin, east of the other continental Germanic tribes. It is only from this stage of their history that the Germanic languages can be described under three headings: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic.