Ancient Goths

Ancient Goths (Hendalarskisch: Urgóten) is a historiographical term referring to the cultural predecessors of the modern Gothic peoples 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.

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.