Ancient Germanic Tribes and Their Classification

During the last few centuries B.C. the Germanic tribes inhabited the western coast of

the Baltic Sea and the southern part of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The first mention of the

tribes is found in a description of a voyage to the Baltic Sea made by Pitheas, a Greek

historian and geographer, in 325 B.C. Julius Ceasar, in his History of the Gallic War,

described some militant Germanic tribes, whose attacks he had to beat off; some hundred

years later Pliny the Elder, a great Roman scientist and writer, described them in his

Natural History; in the first century of our era all the data available at the time was

incorporated by Tacitus in his voluminous work Germania.

Pliny the Elder gave a classification of Germanic tribes, which has been basically

accepted by modern historians. According to Pliny, Germanic tribes in the 1st century A.D.

consisted of the following groups:

1. the Vindili. They inhabited the eastern part of the Germanic territory.

2. the Ingvaeones. These inhabited the northern part of the Germanic territory

(Netherlands ).

3. the Jscaevones. These inhabited the western part of Germanic territory, on the

Rhine.

4 the. Hermiones. They inhabited the southern part of the Germanic territory ( southern

Germany)

5. the Peucini and Bastarnae. These lived close to the Dacians, close to what is now

Rumania.

6. the Hilleviones, who inhabited Scandinavia.

Friedrich Engels, quoting Plane's classification, accepted it as a whole and introduced

only one amendment. He pointed that group 5 should be included into group 1.

The mutual relation between classification of Germanic tribes based on Plane's work

and that of Germanic languages based on analyses made by nineteen-century linguists

appears in the following shape: