Ancient Goths

Ancient Goths (Hendalarskisch: Urgóten, East Gothic: Urgoten, Altgoten or Vorgoten) is a historiographical term referring to the cultural predecessors of the modern Gothic people prior to approximately 500 AD. The term has been the subject of much historiographical controversy - chiefly between those who, on the one hand, have understood the Ancient Goths as a homogeneous race or ethnicity which irrupted into and ultimately supplanted the pre-existing autochthonous peoples of "Gothica", and those favouring a more inclusive interpretation in which the "Ancient Goths" were in fact a disparate array of groups from multiple ethnic and cultural backgrounds connected by little more than a shared proto-Gothic language. The latter interpretation is favoured in contemporary Hendalarsk, although it is by no means hegemonic across the Gothic world.

History
The history of the Ancient Goths is shrouded in myth and legend. The direct textual base is extraordinarily poor, with even neighbouring ancient Gaelic and Nünsyak cultures producing little in the way of corroborative written evidence - or, at least, little which has survived down to the present day. Historians must instead depend heavily on archaeological and toponymic evidence (with later input from geneticists ), as well as critical engagement with traditional stories of uncertain provenance which survived through oral culture until their eventual entry into the written record. Meagre as this corpus of evidence is, it is nevertheless possible to sketch a rough portrait of early Gothic history.

Origins
Northern and western Levantia were rendered uninhabitable by the last great Ice Age, with much of the region covered in an ice cap hundreds or thousands of metres thick and the rest reduced to a barren, cold desert; whatever human groups (or other hominids) had previously lived in the region were forced south, only to return after the ice had melted. In the aftermath, a dramatically different geography took shape; the land gradually rebounded from its compression under the ice, cutting off what had previously been a long, narrow bay into an isolated sea-lake - the Vandarch. The narrow Ereglasian Isthmus formed a new land bridge between the two regions, which would in time become a migration route of major importance. The ice's retreat was gradually followed by many migrating Paleo-Levantine peoples, entirely culturally and linguistically unrelated from both each other and the proto-Occidentals who form the ancestors of most modern Levantine cultures.

These peoples were gradually supplanted across much of northern Levantia by the branch of the proto-Occidentals who would go on to become the Ancient Gaels. The Ancient Goths, migrating from their presumed Urheimat in what is now southern Carna in response to pressure from their south and east, were mostly restricted to the Odoneru-Kilikas littoral. Constrained by the punishing mountainous terrain that has divided Ultmar into Ocean-facing and Vandarch-facing regions down to the present day, and by the stiff resistance of various Paleo-Levantine groups along the southern Vandarch watershed, the Ancient Goths were only gradually able to make their way northwards. Archaeological evidence suggests that Ancient Goths - or people adopting the cultural forms of the Ancient Goths - became the ruling elite in western Yonderre and eastern Eldmora-Regulus by no later than 1000 BC.

Conquests
In the course of their settlement along the western shore of the Odoneru, the southern Ancient Goths appear to have become a seafaring people, although whether their shipbuilding technology was their own invention or adopted from prior autochthonous peoples remains a matter of debate to this day. At this early stage these ships were small vessels containing a few crew which were only fit for coastal fishing and river navigation, far removed from the ocean-capable reaver ships which spread such terror among Gael and Latin alike from the seventh century AD onwards. The southern Goths' turn to the sea nevertheless opened up new opportunities, making it possible for them to explore the far northwestern coastline of Ultmar without having to surmount the rough terrain of the interior and also allowing participation in the small-scale and primitive trade in luxuries across the eastern Odoneru. The seaborne settlement of the Ereglasian Isthmus, which seems to have taken place from no later than 500 BC, set the stage for the much later Gothic settlement of Vithinja, and the emergence of a Northern Gothic culture very different from the "mainstreams" in Gothica.

Along the southern Vandarch, the Goths continued to make gains. Gothic hegemony across almost all of modern Eldmora-Regulus and Yonderre was secure by approximately 600 BC, although the region would remain politically fragmented long into the future; historians increasingly believe it was this southern wave of Gothic settlement which led to the Gothic conquest of eastern Hendalarsk, in a process entirely distinct from the movement into southern and western Hendalarsk. Gothic groups there had only decisively forced the Scherna Pass, the key to southwestern Hendalarsk down to the present day, by 750 BC, and only gradually spread up the Stederau and the Zalgis, presumably due to determined resistance from the Nünsyak and other Paleo-Levantine groups. The Stederau watershed nevertheless seems to have become Gothicised much more quickly than the Zalgis, according to the shift in grave goods to stereotypically Gothic markers in time, although this was most likely at least in part due to acculturation among peoples less organised than the Nünsyak rather than solely conquest, let alone displacement. In any case, it seems clear that the Stederau and the low plains of [country to Hendalarsk's northwest] had become part of Gothica well before most of western and northern Hendalarsk. Burn layers and weapons deposits along the lower Zalgis suggest that Gothic raiding in the region had become endemic by around 300 BC, in line with a broader decline in the influence of the Old Nünsyak civilisation, but Gothic settlement at the river's mouth around modern-day Zalgisbeck has not been securely dated to any earlier than 50 AD ±50 years, a full millennium after the first Gothic push into modern-day Yonderre.

Historiography
As outlined above, the nature and composition of the ancient Gothic groups who took part in the Great Wanderings has been a subject of much controversy. Nineteenth-century historians, even those who were not particularly nationalistic or inclined to pan-Gothism, had a pronounced tendency to conceive of the ancient Gothic tribes as homogeneous groups, rigidly separated culturally and racially from those they conquered and otherwise came into contact with. This had baleful consequences across Gothica in the twentieth century - not least in Hendalarsk, where "Volkism" (Hendalarskisch: Folkismis), the governing ideology of the State of Hendalarsk, sought to entrench this belief in the primordial racial separateness of the Goths through segregation and Gothic supremacy.

The 'homogeneous' model of Ancient Gothic development has, despite its association with the State of Hendalarsk's crimes by its detractors (and indeed some of its proponents), continued to exert influence across Gothica to the present day. Its durability is in no small part aided by both its relative simplicity as an argument and the difficulty many people experience in imagining how ethnicity functioned prior to the existence of the nation-state, as well as the prestige of its original nineteenth-century proponents, many of whom were (and still are) considered great scholars in many other respects. It has nevertheless come under attack in recent decades from an alliance of revisionist archaeologists, geneticists and historians.

Religion
Ancient Gothic religion has been a subject of keen interest to Gothic historians and anthropologists since both fields' emergence as academic disciplines in Gothica. The late Christianisation of most Gothic peoples has made the old Gothic faith easier to study than many other pre-Christian belief systems in Levantia, as by the time of its demise neighbouring civilisations had largely developed both writing and historiographical traditions, while the Catholic Church had developed a strong interest in a mission to the Goths and accumulated a paper trail to match. Most surviving historical accounts of the Gothic religion are nevertheless very partial, coloured both by their neighbours' distaste for pagan ways and by Gothic neophytes' desire to prove themselves as having decisively broken with the pagan past, although sagas and similar tales seem to have survived in oral collective memory long after Christianisation and offer an alternative perspective on the old ways.

The Ancient Goths seem to have been polytheists, worshipping a wide pantheon of gods, although there appears to have been little consistency over which gods were the most revered at any given time. The pantheons worshipped by particular tribes of gods also seem to have evolved over time, a function of both different Gothic tribes' interaction with different pre-existing pantheons and the differing geographies within which different groups found themselves. The ancient Hendalarskara pantheon, for example, shifted over time to have its strongest emphasis on the worship of water deities, most of which were not found in other Gothic cultures, although it retained the reverence for trees characteristic of many other branches of the faith; sacred groves remain a feature of most Hendalarskara settlements down to the present day. The Werdascher, in eastern Hendalarsk, seem to have developed a particular reverence for both bogs and the amber within them, as the amber was of considerable economic importance. Human sacrifice in bogs, in an effort to ensure a continued supply of amber, therefore became one of the most distinctive features of Werdascher paganism, and drew particular horror and ire from those missionaries who encountered it centuries later.