06-04-2009, 07:43 PM
Interesting. I had never heard of "Quirites" before, so I learned something new today. And thanks for the link; I see they discussed that situation with the Frisians you posted on your web site recently.
Do you know anything about the suffix -getae in ethnonyms, as in "Massagetae" and "Thyssagetae"? I'm just wondering if the similarity could imply that the Getae were originally an Iranian people. But it seems nobody really knows anything about the Massagetae or Thyssagetae aside from Herodotus' work, so it's really hard to follow this up.
I know that the Dacians spoke a language that was an obscure branch of the Indo-European language tree, and Strabo says the Dacians and Getae spoke the same language, but Strabo was writing around the time of Caesar.
It would seem to me a reasonable hypothesis that if the Getae were among the Iranian peoples (like the Scythians) who expanded into the steppes before the time of Homer, they might have been pushed down toward the Wallachian Plain by the hostile northern tribes (Herodotus does mention such tribes, I don't have the book on hand at the moment) and that during the several centuries that passed before Strabo wrote, they adopted the language and religion of their more powerful Dacian neighbors who lived inside the Carpathian mountain range.
This would account for the two different ethnonyms for peoples who lived in the same area.
The Getae became vassals to the Odrysian kingdom in Thrace (so says Thucydides if memory serves correctly), but the Odrysian kingdom only went as far as the Danube and not into the Carpathian Mountains, which would harmonize with the notion of the Getae and Dacians being separate peoples.
IF the Getae were, in fact, a separate people. I don't know anything about the archaeological evidence that might support or debunk this theory.
I did, however, download a really long piece of work by a linguist named Oswald Szemerényi that seems to have a lot of information on ethnonyms of the ancient steppe peoples. Have you by any chance ever heard of his work? He had some of his research published by John Benjamins over there in Amsterdam.
Do you know anything about the suffix -getae in ethnonyms, as in "Massagetae" and "Thyssagetae"? I'm just wondering if the similarity could imply that the Getae were originally an Iranian people. But it seems nobody really knows anything about the Massagetae or Thyssagetae aside from Herodotus' work, so it's really hard to follow this up.
I know that the Dacians spoke a language that was an obscure branch of the Indo-European language tree, and Strabo says the Dacians and Getae spoke the same language, but Strabo was writing around the time of Caesar.
It would seem to me a reasonable hypothesis that if the Getae were among the Iranian peoples (like the Scythians) who expanded into the steppes before the time of Homer, they might have been pushed down toward the Wallachian Plain by the hostile northern tribes (Herodotus does mention such tribes, I don't have the book on hand at the moment) and that during the several centuries that passed before Strabo wrote, they adopted the language and religion of their more powerful Dacian neighbors who lived inside the Carpathian mountain range.
This would account for the two different ethnonyms for peoples who lived in the same area.
The Getae became vassals to the Odrysian kingdom in Thrace (so says Thucydides if memory serves correctly), but the Odrysian kingdom only went as far as the Danube and not into the Carpathian Mountains, which would harmonize with the notion of the Getae and Dacians being separate peoples.
IF the Getae were, in fact, a separate people. I don't know anything about the archaeological evidence that might support or debunk this theory.
I did, however, download a really long piece of work by a linguist named Oswald Szemerényi that seems to have a lot of information on ethnonyms of the ancient steppe peoples. Have you by any chance ever heard of his work? He had some of his research published by John Benjamins over there in Amsterdam.
