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 Pervalian 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, whereas Gothic groups had only begun to cross the passes into southern Hendalarsk by c.750 BC.

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.