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By the 1st cen­tury CE, the writ­ings of Pom­po­nius Mela, Pliny the Elder, and Tac­i­tusin­di­cate a di­vi­sion of Ger­manic-speak­ing peo­ples into large group­ings who shared an­ces­try and cul­ture. This di­vi­sion has been ap­pro­pri­ated in mod­ern ter­mi­nol­ogy de­scrib­ing the di­vi­sions of Ger­manic lan­guages. Tac­i­tus, in his Ger­ma­nia, wrotethat Tac­i­tus also spec­i­fies that the Suevi are a very large group­ing, with many tribes within it, with their own names. The largest, he says, is the Sem­nones, the Lan­go­b­ardi are fewer, but liv­ing sur­rounded by war­like peo­ples, and in re­moter and bet­ter de­fended areas live the Reudigni, Aviones, An­glii, Varini, Eu­doses, the Suardones, and Nu­ithones. Pliny the Elder, on the other hand, names five races of Ger­mans in his His­to­ria Nat­u­ralis, not three, by dis­tin­guish­ing the two more east­erly blocks of Ger­mans, the Van­dals and fur­ther east the Bas­tar­nae, who were the first to reach the Black Seaand come...

Lin­guists pos­tu­late that an early proto-Ger­manic lan­guage ex­isted and was dis­tin­guish­able from the other Indo-Eu­ro­pean lan­guages as far back as 500 BCE. The ear­li­est known Ger­manic in­scrip­tion was found at Negau (in what is now south­ern Aus­tria) on a bronze hel­met dat­ing back to the first cen­tury BCE. Some of the other ear­li­est known phys­i­cal records of the Ger­manic lan­guage ap­pear on stone and wood carv­ings in Runic script from around 200 CE. Runic writ­ing likely dis­ap­peared due to the con­certed op­po­si­tion of the Chris­t­ian Church, which re­garded runic text as hea­then sym­bols which sup­pos­edly con­tained in­her­ent mag­i­cal prop­er­ties that they as­so­ci­ated with the Ger­manic peo­ples' pagan past. Un­for­tu­nately, this prim­i­tive view ig­nores the abun­dance of "pious runic writ­ing found on church-re­lated ob­jects" (rang­ing from in­scrip­tions in the door­ways of churches, on church bells and even those found on bap­tismal fonts) w...

Origins

Ar­chae­o­log­i­cal and lin­guis­tic ev­i­dence from a pe­riod known as the Nordic Bronze Age in­di­cates that a com­mon ma­te­r­ial cul­ture ex­isted be­tween the Ger­manic tribes that in­her­ited the south­ern re­gions of Scan­di­navia, along with the Schleswig-Hol­stein area and the area of what is now Ham­burg, Germany. Ad­di­tional ar­chae­o­log­i­cal rem­nants from the Iron Age so­ci­ety that once ex­isted in nearby Wessen­st­edt also show traces of this culture. Ex­actly how these cul­...

Early Iron Age

The ear­li­est sites at which Ger­manic peo­ples per se have been doc­u­mented are in North­ern Eu­rope, in what now con­sti­tutes the plains of Den­mark and south­ern Swe­den. How­ever, in even this re­gion, the pop­u­la­tion had been, ac­cord­ing to Wald­man & Mason, "re­mark­ably sta­ble" – as far back as the Ne­olithic Age, when hu­mans first began con­trol­ling their en­vi­ron­ment through the use of agri­cul­ture and the do­mes­ti­ca­tion of animals. Given this sta­bil­ity, the pop­u­la...

Pytheas

One of the ear­li­est known writ­ten records of the Ger­manic world in clas­si­cal times was in the lost work of Pyth­eas (fl.). It is be­lieved that Pyth­eas trav­eled to north­ern Eu­rope c.325 BCE, and his ob­ser­va­tions about the ge­o­graph­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment, tra­di­tions and cul­ture of the north­ern Eu­ro­pean pop­u­la­tions be­came a cen­tral source of in­for­ma­tion for later his­to­ri­ans - often the only source.[h] Au­thors such as Strabo, Pliny and Diodorus cite Pyth­eas in dis...

Law

Com­mon el­e­ments of Ger­manic so­ci­ety can be de­duced both from Roman his­to­ri­og­ra­phy and com­par­a­tive ev­i­dence from the Early Me­dievalpe­riod. A main el­e­ment unit­ing Ger­manic so­ci­eties was king­ship, in ori­gin a sacral in­sti­tu­tion com­bin­ing the func­tions of mil­i­tary leader, high priest, law­maker and judge. Ger­manic monar­chy was elec­tive; the king was elected by the free men from among el­i­gi­ble can­di­dates of a fam­ily (OE cynn) trac­ing their an­ces­try to...

Warfare

His­tor­i­cal records of the Ger­manic tribes in Ger­ma­nia east of the Rhine and west of the Danube do not begin until quite late in the an­cient pe­riod, so only the pe­riod after 100 BCE can be ex­am­ined. What is clear is that the Ger­manic idea of war­fare was quite dif­fer­ent from the pitched bat­tles fought by Rome and Greece. In­stead the Ger­manic tribes fo­cused on raids. War­fare of vary­ing size how­ever was a dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of bar­bar­ian culture. The pur­pose of these w...

Economy

Traces of the ear­li­est pas­toral­ism of the Ger­manic peo­ples ap­pear in cen­tral Eu­rope in the form of elab­o­rate cat­tle buri­als along the Elbe and Vis­tula Rivers from around 4000–3000 BCE. These ar­chae­o­log­i­cal rem­nants were left by the Glob­u­lar Am­phora cul­ture who cleared forests for herd­ing cat­tle and some­time after 3000 BCE began using wheeled carts and plows to cul­ti­vate their lands. Cen­tral to sur­vival for their as­sis­tance in till­ing the soil and sup­ply­ing...

It is sug­gested by ge­neti­cists that the move­ments of Ger­manic peo­ples has had a strong in­flu­ence upon the mod­ern dis­tri­b­u­tion of the male lin­eage rep­re­sented by the Y-DNA hap­logroup I1, which is be­lieved to have orig­i­nated with one man, who lived ap­prox­i­mately 4,000 to 6,000 years ago some­where in North­ern Eu­rope, pos­si­bly mod­ern Den­mark (see Most Re­cent Com­mon An­ces­tor for more in­for­ma­tion). There is ev­i­dence of this man's de­scen­dants set­tling in all of the areas that Ger­manic tribes are recorded as hav­ing sub­se­quently in­vaded or mi­grated to.[x] Hap­logroup I1 is older than Ger­manic lan­guages, but may have been pre­sent among early Ger­manic speak­ers. Other male lines likely to have been pre­sent dur­ing the de­vel­op­ment and dis­per­sal of Ger­manic lan­guage pop­u­la­tions in­clude R1a1a, R1b-P312 and R1b-U106, a ge­netic com­bi­na­tion of the hap­logroups found to be strongly-rep­re­sented among cur­rent Ger­manic speak­ing peo...

The Re­nais­sance re­vived in­ter­est in pre-Chris­t­ian Clas­si­cal An­tiq­uity and only in a sec­ond phase in pre-Chris­t­ian North­ern Europe. The Ger­manic peo­ples of the Roman era are often lumped with the other agents of the "bar­bar­ian in­va­sions", the Alans and the Huns, as op­posed to the civ­i­lized "Roman" iden­tity of the Holy Roman Em­pire. Early mod­ern pub­li­ca­tions deal­ing with Old Norse cul­ture ap­peared in the 16th cen­tury, e.g. His­to­ria de gen­tibus septentrionalibus (Olaus Mag­nus, 1555) and the first edi­tion of the 13th cen­tury Gesta Dano­rum (Saxo Gram­mati­cus), in 1514. Au­thors of the Ger­man Re­nais­sance such as Jo­hannes Aventi­nus dis­cov­ered the Ger­manii of Tac­i­tus as the "Old Ger­mans", whose virtue and un­spoiled man­hood, as it ap­pears in the Roman ac­counts of noble sav­agery, they con­trast with the deca­dence of their own day. The pace of pub­li­ca­tion in­creased dur­ing the 17th cen­tury with Latin trans­la­tions of the Edda (no...