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Germani was an exonym used by the ancient Romans for peoples living in the areas north of the Danube and east of the Rhine. The singular form of the name is Germanus. The area inhabited by the Germani was called Germania by the Romans. The peoples called Germani by the Romans were mostly Germanic, although Germania was inhabited by non-Germanic peoples as well. The name Germani is probably of Celtic origin, and was initially applied for one tribe. It does not appear to have been used by the peoples of Germania themselves, although some of them may have designated themselves as "Germani" to distinguish themselves from the Romans. The name survives in the names of Germany and other entities.

Etymology

The etymology and original meaning of the term "Germani" is uncertain.

• One hypothesis is that it comes from a Celtic word meaning "neighbour", cf. Old Irish gair.
• Another Celtic possibility is that the name meant "noisy"; cf. Breton/Cornish garm "shout", Irish gairm "call".
• Others have proposed a Germanic etymology *gēr-manni, "spear men", cf. Middle Dutch ghere, Old High German Ger, Old Norse geirr. However, the form gēr (from PGmc *gaizaz) seems too advanced phonetically for the 1st century, has a long vowel where a short one is expected, and the Latin form has a simplex -n-, not a geminate.
• Classical writers believed that the origin might be Latin. In Latin the word "germanus" (plural germani) means brother or sibling.

History

Origins

The term Germani was taken over by the Romans from the Gauls

In about 222 BCE, the first use of the Latin term "Germani" is said to have been in the Fasti Capitolini inscription de Galleis Insvbribvs et Germ(aneis), but the record is difficult to interpret and may even be falsified. This may simply be referring to Gaul or related people; but this may be an inaccurate date, since the inscription was erected in about 18 BCE despite referencing an earlier date. The term Germani shows up again, allegedly written by Poseidonios (from 80 BCE), but is merely a quotation inserted by the author Athenaios who wrote much later (around 190 CE).

Usage by Julius Caesar

The first surviving detailed discussions of Germani are those of Julius Caesar, whose memoirs are based on first-hand experience, but were also intended as a political document to explain his expensive and dangerous actions in far-away countries. Within these explanations, the Germani are described as dangerous to Gaul and therefore Rome, being a constant pressure upon the Gaulish Belgae and Helvetians. There are reasons to think that Caesar twisted the terminology to suit these aims, in ways which had a permanent impact on later writers. Hence Caesar may have been the first to define the Rhine as the defensible boundary between Gauls and Germani. However, he also made it clear that the Rhine boundary had not been the historical boundary between Gauls and Germani, with the Helvetians having lived east of the Rhine, and several Germani tribes living west of the lower Rhine among the Belgae.

Later classical authors followed Caesar and came to use the term Germania as an vaguely defined, large geographical and cultural region, extending far into eastern Europe, though Celtic peoples continued living east of the Rhine and north of the Alps. Tacitus and others noted differences of culture which could be found on the east of the Rhine. But the abstract theme they continued to follow was that of Caesar: this was a wild and dangerous region, less civilized than Gaul, a place that required additional military vigilance.

As mentioned above, Caesar also used the term Germani for a very specific tribal grouping in northeastern Belgic Gaul, west of the Rhine, the largest part of whom were the Eburones. He made clear that he was using the name in the local sense. These are the so-called Germani Cisrhenani, whom Caesar believed to be closely related to the peoples east of the Rhine, and descended from immigrants into Gaul. Tacitus suggests that this was the original meaning of the word "Germani" – as the name of a single tribal nation west of the Rhine, ancestral to the Tungri (who lived in the same area as the earlier Germani reported by Caesar), and not the name of a whole race (gens) as it came to mean. However, Tacitus adds that in due time, the name Germani "gradually acquired a wider usage" and that "once they had got to know the name, they all called themselves Germani." Caesar described this group of tribes both as Belgic Gauls and as Germani. Gauls are associated with Celtic languages, and the term Germani is associated with Germanic languages, but Caesar did not discuss languages in detail (though he did say that Belgic Gaul was different from Celtic Gaul in language). The geographer Ptolemy described the place where these people lived as Germania, which according to his accounts was bordered by the Rhine, Vistula and Danube Rivers, but he also circumscribed into Greater Germania an area which included Jutland (Cimbrian peninsula) and an enormous island known as Scandia (the Scandinavian peninsula).

While saying that the Germani had ancestry across the Rhine, Caesar did not describe these tribes as recent immigrants, saying that they had defended themselves some generations earlier from the invading Cimbri and Teutones. (He thereby distinguished them from the neighbouring Aduatuci, whom he did not call Germani, but who were descended from those Cimbri and Teutones.) It has been claimed, for example by Maurits Gysseling, that the place names of this region show evidence of an early presence of Germanic languages, as early as the 2nd century BCE. The Celtic culture and language were however clearly influential also, as can be seen in the tribal name of the Eburones, their kings' names, Ambiorix and Cativolcus, and also the material culture of the region.

The term Germani, therefore, probably applied to a small group of tribes in northeastern Gaul who may or may not have spoken a Germanic language, and whose links to Germania are unclear. It appears that the Germanic tribes did not have a word to describe themselves, although the word Suebi, used by Caesar to broadly classify Germanic speakers, was likely Germanic in origin.

Legacy

Use of the modern term German or Germanic is the result of 18th and 19th century classical philology which "envisioned the Germanic language group as occupying a central branch of the Indo-European language tree."

See also

• Theodiscus
• Gaut
• Suebi#Etymology
• Barbarian
• Vlachs
• Walhaz

Notes

1. In these early records of apparent Germanic tribes, tribal leader names of the Cimbri and Sigambri, and tribal names such as Tencteri and Usipetes, are also apparently Gaulish, even coming from the east of the Rhine.
2. See: L. Rübekeil, Suebica. Völkernamen und Ethnos, Innsbruck 1992, 187–214.

References

1. Heather 2012, pp. 5–6.
2. Hoad & 1997 192. sfn error: no target: CITEREFHoad1997192 (help)
3. Partridge 1966, p. 1265.
4. Mallory & Adams 1997, p. 245. sfn error: no target: CITEREFMalloryAdams1997 (help)
5. Wolfram 1997, p. 4.
6. Schulze 2001, p. 4.
7. Stümpel 1932, p. 60. sfn error: no target: CITEREFStümpel1932 (help)
8. Heather 2012, pp. 5–8.
9. Caesar 2019, p. 45, 2.4.
10. Tacitus 2009, p. 38 .
11. Manco 2013, p. 207.
12. Caesar 2019, pp. 45–46, 2.4.
13. Lamarcq & Rogge 1996, p. 44.
14. Lamarcq & Rogge 1996, p. 47.
15. Burns 2003, p. 19.

Sources

• Burns, Thomas (2003). Rome and the Barbarians, 100 B.C.—A.D. 400. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-7306-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Caesar, Julius (2019). The War for Gaul: A New Translation. Translated by James O’Donnell. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-69117-492-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Heather, Peter (2012). Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-989226-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lamarcq, Danny; Rogge, Marc (1996). De Taalgrens: Van de oude tot de nieuwe Belgen [The Language Border: From the Old to the New Belgians] (in Dutch). Leuven: Davidsfond. ISBN 978-90-6152-960-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Manco, Jean (2013). Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings. New York: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-05178-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hoad, T. F., ed. (1996). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-283098-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Partridge, Eric (1966). Origins: Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. London: Routledge & K. Paul. ISBN 978-0-7100-1934-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Schulze, Hagen (2001). Germany: A New History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00545-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Wolfram, Herwig (1997). The Roman Empire and its Germanic Peoples. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-08511-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Tacitus, Cornelius (2009). Agricola and Germany. Translated by Anthony R. Birley. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19953-926-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Further reading

• Clay, Cheryl Louise (2008). "Developing the 'Germani' in Roman Studies". Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal. 1. Open Library of Humanities: 131–150. doi:10.16995/TRAC2007_131_150. Retrieved January 17, 2020. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |layurl=, |laydate=, |nopp=, and |laysource= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
• Zachrisson, R. E. (1928). "Germani, The Name and Its Early History". Studia Neophilologica. 1: 18–33. doi:10.1080/00393272808586722. Retrieved January 17, 2020. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |layurl=, |laydate=, |nopp=, and |laysource= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)

• Exonyms
• Germania
• Germanic peoples
• Latin words and phrases