Hercynian Forest
Many agree that the Black Forest, which extended east from the Rhine valley, formed the western side of the Hercynian, except, for example, Lucius of Tongeren.
Proto-Celtic regularly loses initial *p preceding a vowel, hence the earliest attestations in Greek as Ἀρκόνια[5] (Aristotle, the e~a interchange common in Celtic names), later Ὀρκύνιος (Ptolemy, with the o unexplained) and Ἑρκύνιος δρυμός (Strabo).
The latter form first appears in Latin as Hercynia in Julius Caesar, inheriting the aspiration and the letter y from a Greek source.
[7] The assimilated *kwerkwu- would be regular in Italo-Celtic, and Pokorny associates the ethnonym Querquerni, found in Hispania in Galicia, which features an Italic-Venetic name.
Proto-European *perkʷu- explains ɸerkuniā, later erkunia, with regular shift kʷ > ku that occurred before the assimilation *kwerkwu-.
He refers to the Arkýnia (or Orkýnios) mountains of Europe, but tells us only that, remarkably in his experience, rivers flow north from there.
[13] Caesar's references to moose and aurochs and of elk without joints which leaned against trees to sleep in the endless forests of Germania, were probably later interpolations in his Commentaries.
[15] He also gives us some dramaticised description[16] of its composition, in which the close proximity of the forest trees causes competitive struggle among them (inter se rixantes).
The impenetrable nature of the Hercynia Silva hindered the last concerted Roman foray into the forest, by Drusus, during 12..9 BCE: Florus asserts that Drusus invisum atque inaccessum in id tempus Hercynium saltum (Hercynia saltus, the "Hercynian ravine-land") [18] patefecit.
[21] The wild bull which the Romans named the urus was present also, and the European bison and the now-extinct aurochs, Bos primigenius.
[23] By the middle of the first century BC, the Hercuniates were a minor tribe that was located along a narrow band of Celtic settlement close to the Danube, on the western side of the river a little way west of modern Budapest.
[25] The German journal Hercynia, published by the Universities and Landesbibliothek of Sachsen-Anhalt, pertains to ecology and environmental biology.
