Getae

The Getae or Getai (/ˈɡɛtiː/ or /ˈdʒiːtiː/,[1] singular Getan) were a large nation who inhabited the regions to either side of the Lower Danube in what is today northern Bulgaria and southern Romania, throughout much of Classical Antiquity.

The Getae first appear in historical records as fierce opponents of the Persian invasion in 513 BC, as described by the early Greek historian Herodotus.

He argued that the Dacians are "Getae or Thracians of Dacian race":[12] In ancient times, it is true, Moesians and Getae occupied all the land between Haemus and the Ister; but as time went on some of them changed their names, and since then there have been included under the name of Moesia all the tribes living above Dalmatia, Macedonia, and Thrace, and separated from Pannonia by the Savus, a tributary of the Ister.

Strabo, as well as other ancient sources, led some modern historians to consider that, if the Thracian ethnic group should be divided, one of this divisions should be the "Daco-Getae".

[citation needed] According to Glanville Price, the account of the Greek geographer Strabo shows that the Getae and the Dacians were one and the same people.

[27] Nevertheless, he chose to use the term "Geto-Dacians" as a conventional concept for the Thracian tribes inhabiting the future territory of Romania, not necessarily meaning an "absolute ethnic, linguistic or historical unity".

[27] Crossland suggested the two designations may refer to two groups of a "linguistically homogeneous people" that had come to historical prominence at two distinct periods of time.

[30] Lucian Boia took a sceptical position, arguing the ancient writers distinguished among the two people, treating them as two distinct groups of the Thracian ethnos.

[27] From the 7th century BC onwards, the Getae came into economic and cultural contact with the Greeks, who were establishing colonies on the western side of Pontus Euxinus, nowadays the Black Sea.

[36] In 313 BC, the Getae formed an alliance with Callatis, Odessos, and other western Pontic Greek colonies against Lysimachus, who held a fortress at Tirizis (modern Kaliakra).

In the mid-first century BC Burebista organized a kingdom consisting of descendants of those whom the Greeks had called Getae, as well as Dacians, or Daci, the name applied to people of the region by the Romans.

[25] Augustus aimed at subjugating the entire Balkan peninsula, and used an incursion of the Bastarnae across the Danube as a pretext to devastate the Getae and Thracians.

In his Epistulae ex Ponto, written from the northern coast of the Black Sea, he asserts that two major, distinct languages were spoken by the sundry tribes of Scythia, which he referred to as Getic, and Sarmatian.

[54][55][56][57][58] This confusion is notably expanded on in works of Jordanes, himself of Gothic background, who transferred earlier historical narratives about the Getae to the Goths.

[59] At the close of the 4th century AD, Claudian, court poet to the emperor Honorius and the patrician Stilicho, uses the ethnonym Getae to refer to the Visigoths.

During 5th and 6th centuries, several historians and ethnographers (Marcellinus Comes, Orosius, John Lydus, Isidore of Seville, Procopius of Caesarea) used the same ethnonym Getae to name populations invading the Eastern Roman Empire (Goths, Gepids, Kutrigurs, Slavs).

For instance, in the third book of the History of the Wars Procopius details: "There were many Gothic nations in earlier times, just as also at the present, but the greatest and most important of all are the Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, and Gepaedes.

[63][64] More recent authors, like Tadeusz Sulimirski,[65] Weer Rajendra Rishi,[66] and Chandra Chakraberty,[67][68] have also linked the Getae and Jats.

Less credible, however, are parallel claims by Alexander Cunningham that the Xanthii (or Zanthi) and Iatioi – mentioned by Strabo, Ptolemy and Pliny – may have been synonymous with the Getae and/or Jats.

Subsequent scholars, such as Edwin Pulleyblank, Josef Markwart (also known as Joseph Marquart) and László Torday, suggest that Iatioi may be another name for a people known in classical Chinese sources as the Yuezhi and in South Asian contexts as the Kuṣānas (or Kushans).