Ptolemy map of ancient Germania deciphered

Berlin Researchers Crack the Ptolemy Code
All this offers up rather exciting prospects, since it makes half the cities in Germany suddenly 1,000 years older than previously believed. "Our atlas is a treasure map," team member Andreas Kleineberg says proudly, "and the coordinates lead to lost places in our past."

Archaeological interest in the map will likely be correspondingly large. Archaeologists' opinions on the Germanic tribes have varied over the years. In the 19th century, Germany's early inhabitants were considered brave, wild-bearded savages. The Nazis then transformed them into great heroes, and in the process of coming to terms with its Nazi past, postwar Germany quickly demoted the early Germanic peoples to proto-fascist hicks. [. . .] More recent research proves this view to be complete invention.

9 comments:

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Wanderer said...

it makes half the cities in Germany suddenly 1,000 years older than previously believed

The settlements have a long continuity: But not as "cities".

Ancient Germania did not have "cities" as we now think of them.

Whereas the multicultural city of Rome in the imperial period had well over over a million people (half of them slaves), it was rare for a Germanic settlement to have even 1,000 people. There were 4-million Germanics living in Europe in 1-AD, but they were scattered over settlements of usually only a few dozen people. An excavation of an Arminius-era town in Denmark uncovered a settlement that would have supported 350 people, which is considered a significant settlement of the time.

Germanics, by nature, create societies more rural and diffuse in character.

A lot's changed, but that hasn't: Even now, small Netherlands' biggest city has only 1 million out of the country's 16-million. Germany's largest (Berlin) is only 3.5-million, out of 82-million. The USA's unfortunate "suburbanization", sometimes attributed to flight from black-crime (and that is valid), must be partly the call of the Germanic spirit to get away from the bleakness of the mega-city. [The bulk of white ancestral stock in the USA is Germanic.]

Nordman said...

"makes half the cities in Germany suddenly 1,000 years older than previously believed."

There were no cities in Germania during the 1st Century CE except those founded by the Romans, only villages or trading posts.

From Tacitus' GERMANIA:

"It is well known that the nations of Germany have not cities, and that they do not even tolerate closely contiguous dwellings. They live scattered and apart, just as a spring, a meadow, or a wood has attracted them. Their village they do not arrange in our fashion, with the buildings connected and joined together, but every person surrounds his dwelling with an open space, either as a precaution against the disasters of fire, or because they do not know how to build." - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/tacitus1.html

Nordman said...

"The USA's unfortunate "suburbanization", sometimes attributed to flight from black-crime (and that is valid), must be partly the call of the Germanic spirit to get away from the bleakness of the mega-city. [The bulk of white ancestral stock in the USA is Germanic.]"

Excellent point Wanderer - you are correct.

Wanderer said...

Nordman wrote:
There were no cities in Germania during the 1st Century

Which makes you wonder whether the "cities" noted on the map were the most prominent Germanic settlements of the time (as the map implies), or not.

It is possible they weren't. It's possible, even likely, that they were about the same as thousands of similar villages spread out from Rhine to Vistula, from the Alps to the Fjords. The denoted "cities" being known because some roman trader or military expedition happened to visit and record them -- or a Germanic who wound up in Rome reported his hometown.

Then there is the case of the Germanic king Marobod of the Marcoman tribe. This tribe's lands were what is now Czechia. Around the Arminius era, Marobod was intimidated into becoming token-allies with Rome. It's possible the city denoted as "Eburodunum" or the one as "Casurgis" were his capital. As Marobod was a Roman ally for a time, Rome would naturally have known his capital's location. The same for the other tribes who at one time or another allied with Rome.

(Later in the article it speculates about how Ptolmey, living in Alexandria and never visiting Germania, got his information: They say he took whatever nuggets of information he could get.)

Wanderer said...

On the subject of large cities among European groups two milennia ago: Consider the tragic "Goetterdaemmerung" of the Celts in Gaul in the 50s BC.

The end of the Celts in Gaul can be traced to a single battle, in 52 BC.

Years of bitter campaigns by the Romans under Julius Caesar were resisted by the great king Vercingetorix. [He was the leader of one tribe, but was supreme military commander of all belligerent anti-Roman Celts: A Celtic Arminius, in effect].

Vercingetorix' military skill was unmatched. Caesar's legions were constantly stymied by Celtic by Vercingetorix' tactical skill. The Romans rarely faced a more worthy opponent in the field.

But still the Romans made progress. Why? Because there were major Celtic objectives to take: Each Gallic-Celt tribe had a large capital city, which, if it fell, broke tribal power. In the 50s BC, Rome managed to seize several capitals, where it practiced a scorched-Earth policy. Hundreds of thousands of Celts were massacred. (It is said that between 60 and 50 BC, one million Celts died, of 6 million living in Gaul at the time); a large share of Celtic assets were gone with each capital city to fall to the Romans.

Vercingetorix himself, in the Autumn of 52 BC, fell back to his own sprawling capital city, with a moderately-large army, to regroup for the next year's fighting, to rally remaining resisting tribes. The city was called Alesia, now in central France.

Alesia was to be the final stand for the Celtic resistance. Rome unexpectedly went on the attack, encircled the city, and weeks of siege warfare wore the defenders down. Attempts to lift the siege from outside failed. Vercingetorix could have done it, but he was trapped inside and could not direct the attacks from outside. The city finally fell. "And that was that".

Celtic resistance collapsed after the metropolis of Alesia fell. Romanization and latinization of Gaul began; Roman immigrants began to pour in. After several generations, Celtic speech only survived in isolated pockets, and then went extinct. Breton is the only holdout of Celtic speech in modern France. [post-script: Proud Vercingetorix was captured and taken to the city of Rome. He was made to fight in gladiator combat, where he was killed some years later.]

The fate of the early-1500s Aztecs is similar. Cortez took the mega-city of Tenochtitlan, and that was that.

Compare the tragic fate of the Celts under Vercingetorix to that of Germania of the same approximate era. When the Romans were making incursions into Germania, they continuously failed because there were no major objectives to take, all-or-nothing mega-cities to take, as in Vercingetorix' huge capital at Alesia and the other Celtic tribal capitals.

If the Romans had taken and burned to the ground the twenty biggest "cities" in Free Germania, that probably would've represented maybe 2% of total Germanic assets in Europe. It would've cost lots to the Romans in blood and treasure to do so, too. The fall of the sprawling capital at Alesia represented a far worse blow for the Celts under Vercingetorix than anything the Romans could do to Free Germania.

In summary. The Germanics were too spread out and too rural to be subdued. The terrain advantage for the Germanics is very well-known, but the rural, decentralized character of Germanic civilization was equally important for their successful resistance over those centuries.

Nordman said...

Yet another brilliant post Wanderer.

Your summary bears repeating:

"The Germanics were too spread out and too rural to be subdued. The terrain advantage for the Germanics is very well-known, but the rural, decentralized character of Germanic civilization was equally important for their successful resistance over those centuries."

In modern times people are even more dependent on The System than in times past. To quell any trouble all the authorities would have to do is just flick a switch at a power plant and the entire city goes without power, or shut off the water supply, stop the trucks and trains from bringing food in, cut off the oil, etc.

This is exactly what the Soviets did - forcibly crowd the population (which formerly were independent farmers, ranchers, villagers, etc) in to the cities to make them hyper-dependent on the communist system for all their basic needs.

Also, cities are and always have been engines of mass-miscegenation and racial degeneration.

If you live in a big city you are a dependent of the anti-White macro-system of control, pure and simple. And we all must admit The System is currently getting very wobbly. The last place you'd want to be during a massive disruption of The System is in a city where you are dependent on the importation of all necessities and the exportation of waste for basic survival.

Cities are also parasitic, and they've always been the preferred settlement for parasitic organized Jewry and other culture distorting money grubbers to centralize exchange in commodities and tighten their grip over a nation's money, media, political system, etc. However, not much is produced in many cities these days, at least not in the USA, the UK, and many other Western nations since manufacturing has been largely exported to Asia. Virtually everything must be imported in to them for them to function, while all the waste and sewage is pumped out. In modern times nearly all the jobs are just paper-shuffling and non-productive: again, parasitic. Cities at their current scale and size are headed for a slow decline, even a major crash in the coming decades as oil becomes more scarce.

The German model seems best. Decentralize populations to prevent centralized tyranny and protect all territorial boundaries. Especially in a place like the USA which is so huge, why should 75%+ of the population continue to crowd in to the top 100 metro/urban areas (including their suburbs) where nearly all commerce, media, education, politics, etc is controlled from top to bottom?

A main problem though is that in modern times many of the basic skills needed for true economic independence and survival - farming, ranching, construction, energy procurement, transport, water and waste management, etc - have been lost to the vast majority of people during the industrial shuffle and the rise of the urban age. And without those skills you are pretty much a resigned to be a helpless dependent cog of the macro system of control like everyone else, powerless to resist mass-urban/suburban dependency, international plutocracy, and the inevitable and eventual mass-miscegenation centered in the cities and radiating outward therefrom. The very skills needed for freedom and independence on a multitude of levels have been stripped away from people during the 20th Century, what is often called the 'Jewish Century.' Again, this strategy was a central tenet of Soviet communism and it would seem that mass-urban/suburban crypto-communism is alive and well in the modern USA.

Wanderer said...

Your remarks, Nordman, remind me of the fascinating and little-known story of Walther Darre from the 1930s. German Agriculture Minister with some radical ideas about how society should be.

The "Blood and Soil" movement attempted to implement many of your suggestions back 75 years ago.

The modern "Green" movements are but pathetic shadows of the "original Green movement". After all, without the blood, what is the soil?

Wanderer said...

in modern times many of the basic skills needed for true economic independence and survival - farming, ranching, construction, energy procurement, transport, water and waste management, etc - have been lost

Not to mention the loss of organic communities.

Most modern residents of the USA couldn't imagine living in a town of not more than a hundred people, in a social order where a town of 3,000 in the region is considered "The City"! They're too "atomized", too isolated, too used to rootless anonymity.

And so people are trapped in Metropolitanism.

I don't know how to solve this problem.