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The term Germanic peoples or Germanic tribes applies to the ancient Germanic peoples of Europe.
The Germanic tribes spoke mutually intelligible dialects and shared a common mythology (see Norse Mythology) and story telling as testified by for instance Beowulf and the Volsunga saga. The existence of a common identity is testified by the fact that they had a name for non-Germanic peoples, Walha, from which the local names Welsh, Wallis, Walloon, and Wallachia have been derived.
In the absence of large-scale political unification, such as that imposed forcibly by the Romans upon the peoples of Italy, the various tribes remained free, led by their own hereditary or chosen leaders.
Regarding the question of ethnic origins, evidence developed by both archaeologists and linguists suggests that a people or group of peoples sharing a common material culture dwelt in northwestern Germany and southern Scandinavia during the late European Bronze Age (1000-500 B.C.). This culture group is called the Nordic Bronze AgeThe Nordic Bronze Age is the name given by Oscar Montelius to a period in Scandinavian pre-history, ca 1700 BC 500 BC. Even though, it became part of the European Bronze Age cultures fairly late, it presents rich and well-preserved objects made of wool an. The long presence of Germanic tribes in southern Scandinavia (a Proto-Indo-EuropeanThe Proto-Indo-Europeans are the hypothetical speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language a prehistoric people of the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. Culture and Religion See also Proto-Indo-European society, Proto-Indo-European religi language probably arrived ca 2000 B.C.) is also testified by a lack of pre-Germanic place names. This cultural grouping, which emerges and spreads, without sudden breaks, can be distinguished from the culture of the Celts inhabiting the more southerly Danube and Alpine regions during the same period. Cultural features at that time included small, independent settlements and an economy strongly based on the keeping of livestock.
Linguists, working backwards from historically-known Germanic languagesThe Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family, spoken by the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire. They are characterised by a number of unique linguistic feature, suggest that this group spoke proto-GermanicProto-Germanic the proto-language believed by scholars to be the common ancestor of the Germanic languages, includes among its descendants Dutch, Yiddish, German, English, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Old Norse, Swedish, Icelandic and Danish. There are no extant, a distinct branch of the Indo-EuropeanIndo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. By extension, it became a collective name for cultures and religions associated with these languages. Hypothetically, these cultures arose from the expansion of language family.
By the late 2nd century, B.C., Roman authors recount, GaulGallia (in English Gaul is the Latin name for the region of western Europe occupied by present-day France, Belgium, western Switzerland and the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine river. In English the word Gaul commonly ref, Italy and Spain were invaded by migrating Germanic tribes, culminating in military conflict with the armies of republican Rome. Julius Caesar, six decades later, invoked the threat of such attacks as one justification for his annexation of Gaul to Rome. By the 1st century A.D., the writings of Caesar, Tacitus and other Roman and Mediterranean writers indicate a division of Germanic-speaking peoples into tribal groupings centred on:
The Istvaeones, Irminones, and Ingvaeones are collectively called West Germanic tribes. In addition to this those Germanic people who remained in Scandinavia are referred to as North Germanic. These groups all developed separate dialects, the basis for the differences among Germanic languages down to the present day.
As Rome advanced her borders to the Rhine and Danube, incorporating many Celtic societies into the Empire, the tribal homelands to the north and east emerged collectively in the records as Germania, whose peoples were sometimes at war with the Empire but who also engaged in complex and long-term trade relations, military alliances and cultural exchanges with their neighbours to the south.
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