The Saxons

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As I know, the most known opinion is that they started from Samartia, an area North of the Black Sea, however they are many interpretations.

Any of you has a website dedicated to the Saxons? I would like to learn about their exact origin, the dates they spread to North Europe and Britain etc.

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Re: The Saxons

Ellinas wrote:

As I know, the most known opinion is that they started from Samartia, an area North of the Black Sea, however they are many interpretations.

Any of you has a website dedicated to the Saxons? I would like to learn about their exact origin, the dates they spread to North Europe and Britain etc.

I've some different information - and couldn't find a disproving opinion in recent litterature - namely that the Saxons origin in what is now Holstein.

(The Huns came from Scythia/Samartia I think.)

I don't know to what you refer when saying "they spread over North Europe and Britain etc".

They lived since the 3rd/2nd century in a region between what is now The Netherlands (Zuidersea) and the eastern parts of today's Lower Soxony.

Some of them, together with Angles, Jutes, Frisians and most probably with Franks as well invaded Britain.

Until now, to my knowledge, the rest stayed in their Germanic/German homeland.

(The later named political regions with 'Saxony' in it [besides Lower Saxony] have nothing to do with that Germanic tribe as well as the Transylvanian Saxons are no Soxans in this sense. [They are origianally from the Mosel region, at first named Hospites Theotonici .])

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The Celts dominated Europe from the British Isles right up to Asia (Sinkiang, China where mummified remains were discovered). The Romans destroyed the Celts as they were the Druids that Caesar found offensive as they burned their criminals and had no written code. All seemed to be held by the head Druid and when Caesar killed him the whole tribe was scattered.

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talk72000 wrote:

The Celts dominated Europe ...

There are some serious historical facts which describe this a bit differently ... :wink:

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Back to the Saxons:

the firts known written 'history' is by Widukind of Corvey, Res gestae saxonicae sive annalium libri tres, written about 950.

I've got at home a later history, by Hamelmann

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/1455/titelsachsenwestfalen4ev.th.jpg

which is part of

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/3074/titel6us.th.jpg

Online sites just mention a bit about Saxons, the (English speaking world) focus is more on the Anglo-Saxons.

I could, however, name some books - although in German only.

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Sorry, just should have said they occupied most of Europe as discoveries of burial mounds show they were Celtic.

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talk72000 wrote:

Sorry, just should have said they occupied most of Europe as discoveries of burial mounds show they were Celtic.

The Saxons were Celts?

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South of the Rhine. France, Balkans, Eastern Europe, Turkey to China.

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The Germans were derived from the Celts according to this site.

"While textbooks stress the descent of Europe from classical culture, the face of Europe throughout most of the historical period was dominated by a single cultural group, a powerful, culturally diverse group of peoples, the Celts. By the start of the Middle Ages, the Celts had been struck on two fronts by two very powerful cultures, Rome in the south, and the Germans, who were derived from Celtic culture, from the north. Through the period of classical Greece (corresponding to the La Têne culture in central Europe) to first centuries AD, most of Europe was under the shadow of this culture which, in its diverse forms, still represented a fairly unified culture. "

The Celts

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Here is more:

"The Celts then expanded to cover an area covering most of Western Europe and Central Europe. Around 400BC, the Celts lived in what is now called Britain, Ireland, France (i.e. Gaul), Luxemburg, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech and Slovak Republics. Celts also lived in parts of Spain (notable Galicia), northern Italy, The Netherlands, the southern half of Germany, and parts of Poland and Russia (source: "The Story of English", Faber and Faber; BBC books 1992)."

Another Celt website

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Before we get too heavily into this, may I mention that there is now an ongoing debate over whether it is justifiable to call the Iron Age Hallstatt and La Tene cultures "Celtic" at all. Certainly it is accepted in archaeological circles that there was far more diversity in European Iron Age cultures than used to be thought - the old idea of a wave of Celts rolling over Europe and bringing "Celtic culture" with them is no longer tenable.

One of the major proponents of the "debunking of Celtness" is John Collis, Professor of Archaelology at the University of Sheffield. This is his book on the question:
collis book
and here is a short discussion of his theories:
celtic fallacy

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So we are talking now about the Celts, since they became Saxons later.

I'm glad that I know now that I made my archeological excavations at a Celtic burial field and not a Saxon one.

And since they were no Celts at all according to the post above as well ...

I suppose, we'll have to close some dozen museums and history chairs have to step down.

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syntinen wrote:

Before we get too heavily into this, may I mention that there is now an ongoing debate over whether it is justifiable to call the Iron Age Hallstatt and La Tene cultures "Celtic" at all. [/URL]

Actually, that is not true.

The discussion is about that 'Celts' on ther British Isles predate the foundings of Hallstatt and La Tène.
The one opinion doesn't necessarily exclude the other.

Historical science isn't statuary. And we live for a some decades now in the post-Kossima time - even here in Germany Laughing

.
Something totally different might be discovered and new, different sources might be found found.

Nevertheless, I can't get the turn from here to the Saxons and there history.

Until this thread started, I'd thought to have solid evidence (=sources, own work and experiences) that their history was different.

But A2K really is a forum to learn.

Thanks for that.

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Quote:

The discussion is about that 'Celts' on ther British Isles predate the foundings of Hallstatt and La Tène.

But it is also about what culture can justifiably be called "Celtic". For example, Caesar used the word quite specifically to distinguish the inhabitants of one part of Gaul; for him all the other Gauls were non-Celts. Are we justified in taking this name and applying it in a way that to Caesar and his contemporaries would have been nonsensical? Another aspect is that we have a group of languages which we know as Celtic, and we call those peoples Celtic peoples; but we have no way of knowing whether all or even a significant proportion of the Hallstatt and La Tène people spoke these languages.

Quote:

Historical science isn't statuary. Something totally different might be discovered of new, different sources are found.

I absolutely agree - and archaeological science is even less static. As my old professor used to say, "in archaeology, any distribution map is no more than a map of what we don't know and haven't found".

Quote:

Nevertheless, I can't get the turn from here to the Saxons and there history.

Neither can I! But since the thread seemed to have taken that turn somehow, I thought I'd mention it

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Fine (and make that "Kossinna" in my above response) :wink:

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The Germanic peoples have no relation to the Celtic peoples whatsoever except that both speak/spoken Indo-European languages brought into Western Europe by cattle-herding nomads migrating from Ukraine in the Early Bronze Age mixing with the native farmers. One didn't give rise to the other.

The Saxons

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