Hercynian Forest

Herkynischer forest (Latin: Hercynia silva, Greek: ορη Αρκύνια or Ορκύνια ) is the ancient generic name for the north of the Danube highlands east of the Rhine.

Etymology

The etymology of the name is disputed. Thus, some believe it is derived from the Celtic Gabros ( = Capricorn, Latin: caper = goat ), others recognize the rather also Celtic root word erchynn ( = high, exalted ). The Innsbruck linguist Wolfgang Meid suggests a derivation from Proto -Celtic * perkuniā before (from Indo-European * perk ʷ us " oak ". ) This derivation is confirmed by Old High German firgunna for Herkynischen forest, derived from the same word, with the Indo-European p in has dwindled the Celtic languages, while it has shifted in the course of the Germanic sound shift to f.

Location

The exact extent of the Herkynischen forest is unclear. Although he is mentioned in the Meteorologica of Aristotle, a more detailed description but is only us in Gaius Julius Caesar's comment on the Gallic War ( Commentarii de Bello Gallico ) narrated, where undertaken in the framework of an excursus on the habits of the Germans to him. The passage (25-28) is one of those that are questionable and likely to be seen in its authenticity as subsequent insertions, but also apply in this case as additives, which were interpolated already in ancient times in the text. In the representation in question in which it is, the forest is in the north-south direction about nine days 'march wide, which takes place over sixty days ' march to the east, from the territory of the Helvetii to the settling in present-day Romania Dacians, the Anarten, the banks of the the Tisza River in Hungary today populated, and even far beyond. If one sets a day's march of 25 kilometers, which gives a total for the Herkynischen forest of more than 337,500 square kilometers.

History

With the increasing acculturation of this vast territory, the Romans found in the centuries after Christ in a less sweeping geographical terminology and distinguished future for example mons Taunus, saltus Teutoburgiensis, Silva Gabreta and Carpates montes. The settlement and clearing done by the Frankish conquest and the Merovingian and Carolingian clearing waves in the 7th to 10th centuries. In a second clearing wave in the 11th century the Slavs should be subjected by Frankish settlers.

Flora and Fauna

The forest was up to the upper mid- mostly of spruce, beech and silver fir.

In the De bello Gallico of Gaius Julius Caesar three supposedly typical species of the Hercynian forest are described after a digression on the lifestyle of the Gauls and the Teutons. For a long time it was believed that Caesar was the author. Today, the research assumes that these chapters do not come from Caesar himself, but a recent insertion are. are portrayed

To explain this somewhat abstruse information zoological research has long been assumed, the author of Passage (pseudo - Caesar ) were here Jägerlatein again, that could have foisted on his two trips across the Rhine him Germanic scouts. However, the classical scholar Otto Seel was able to prove in 1967 that the history of the hingeless animals in a Byzantine addition to the Physiologus, a handbook of animal symbolism, is reported almost the same, but not moose, but of elephants. Here the report is also somewhat less nonsensical, because their knee joints are actually not easy to recognize. Since the Greek words ελεφας - the elephant and ελαφος - distinguish the deer by only two vowels, the presumption that he is close to his knowledge, that the absurd story of moose without knee joints originate here, because pseudo - Caesar itself states, moved through the forest Herkynischen not from personal experience, but from ( now lost ) writings of Eratosthenes and other Greek ethnographer. So this is not about tall tales, but the decoration of a Greek ethnographic text, which has become incomprehensible for a scribal.