In AD , two large groups of people β The Tervingi and the Greutungi β gathered on the northern banks of the Danube near Silistra ancient Dorostorum asking for asylum among the Romans. We are well-informed about the following events through the writings of Ammianus Marcellinus c.
And yet, among 20th-century historians, it became unfashionable to imagine that such groups of people might have a well-worked idea of their ethnic or tribal ancestry, or even a sense of identity, which might exist before the establishment of their successor-kingdoms in the 5th and 6th century. The question remains, however, when did a distinct people come to be identified as Goths? And not least, when did they come to identify themselves as such? The first allusion may be found in Tacitus, who wrote about a people called Gutones or Gotones living near the Baltic.
Ptolemy followed up on this by locating them at the mouth of the river Vistula in present-day Poland. Linguists are not in doubt that it was the same people, which later in the middle of the 3rd century lived on the Pontic Steppe, showing off a distinct material culture reminiscent of that dominating the Vistula region a hundred years earlier. From these new settlements to the north and east of the Lower Danube, these people β called Goths by the Romans β conducted numerous land-borne and sea-borne raids into the Roman Empire.
Later, these raids turned into regular invasions followed by war. In the end, however, Rome abided, and a period of coexistence ruled from AD β Recent studies [1]of Swedish place-names have demonstrated that the ethnonym was not just a label affixed by the Romans to the Goths.
It must have been introduced to them by the people themselves. What this heritage meant to them and at different times in their migratory history is quite another matter. Likely, these people were engaged in the very profitable trade with amber and skins leading to their gradual movement south along the ancient amber-route between the Baltic Sea and the Roman Empire. In the 3rd century, we meet them once more in the sources carrying out substantial raids and waging war on the Eastern Roman Empire The Gothic Wars, AD β However, their formation of a later kingdom settled in the Garonne Valley at Toulouse has its roots in the events following AD However, were these later people Goths at all?
