15.3 Europe: 0 to a.d. 100  (Page 5/5)

Prince Caradoc, called "Caractus" by the Romans, was a Welsh leader who was not defeated until A.D. 50 after he was betrayed by Queen Cartimandus of the Brigantes (Ref. 18 ) and he was taken prisoner to Rome. In Wales, the Romans put in roads and worked copper and gold mines, but they could not pacify the Welsh who were not actually considered won for Rome until A.D. 78.

Scandinavia

There was a proliferation of various Germanic tribes throughout Norway and Denmark. The Swedish peninsula was dominated by the Suione tribe, while the island of Gotland and other Baltic islands were probably inhabited chiefly by Goths. Snorre Sturlasson, a learned Icelandic scribe, described the origin and ancestral home of the Scandinavian kings as on the border between Europe and Asia along the eastern shores of the Black Sea.

This work has been translated by Holtsmark and Seip

Rich Stone Age finds show that from prehistoric times the Finnish peninsula has been the meeting place of peoples from Russia, Scandinavia and central Europe. Ancient Lapp and Nordic stocks went north, as Finno-Ugrian speaking peoples came in from the east.

In the century under consideration there were three groups of people: The Karelians, who were a dark, short, brachycephalic people entering from the southeast; the Tavastians, with high cheek-bones coming across the Gulf of Finland; and the Finns, proper, from the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. (Ref. 95 , 61 ) All of these northern people were probably excellent seamen. A forty-two foot, slender, rowing canoe has been found in Denmark dating to this century.

Eastern europe

Baltic area

Estonians had already settled on the southern Baltic coast, while Goths inhabited the Baltic islands and perhaps some of the south shore, particularly in the Vistula River basin of Poland. Eastward were the Balts (Letts), who eventually became the Latvians, Lithuanians and the now extinct Old Prussians. The language was an individual, separate Indo-European group entity, neither Germanic nor Slavic. The Roman Tacitus, writing in this century, called the Estonians the "Aesti". (Ref. 48 , 175 )

Russia

Most of Russia was still sparsely inhabited but in the central, western part were chiefly Slavs and farther east and south there were Huns. In the Caucasus a new Sarmatian people, the Alans, may have been pushed there by the western expansion of the Kushans, whom we have met in Central Asia. These Alans, in turn, pushed the westward lying lazygians entirely out of Russia into the Theiss plain of modern Hungary and Yugoslavia. (Ref. 136 )

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