Rauriker
The Rauriker or Rauraker / Rauracher ( Latin : Raurici, Rauraci) were a tribe of the Celts who had been around since the 2nd century BC. BC populated the area of the southern Upper Rhine . His name appeared as a regional toponym during antiquity and was taken up again in the 1790s for the French subsidiary, the Raurak Republic .
history
The Rauriks were a neighboring tribe of the Helvetii and settled in the area of Basel , Jura and Alsace. Archaeologically they have been around since the middle of the 2nd century BC. Demonstrable. The remains of a highly developed, structured city, which was discovered in Basel in 1911 and named after the place where it was found, “ Basel-Gasfabrik ” come from this period . There is evidence of workshops and imported goods from Roman areas, as well as an actual pottery district with the remains of ten Celtic pottery kilns, some of which are very well preserved. A burial ground with rich finds was also found, u. a. numerous human skeletal parts. These suggest ritual burials. Basel gas factory was probably founded in 58 BC. Abandoned when the Rauriks joined the exodus of the Helvetii to Gaul. After the defeat in the Battle of Bibracte , they returned to their original settlement area and founded a fortified place (oppidum) on the Basel cathedral hill .
In the course of the conquest of the Alpine region since 25 BC The Romans needed the strategically important terrain spur at the knee of the Rhine for a fort. It is possible that the Raurak population of the cathedral hill moved to Augusta Raurica in the last decade of the first century BC . Augusta Raurica was nominally already 44 BC. Was founded by Lucius Munatius Plancus , but the actual expansion only began three decades later. Almost nothing is known about the Roman organization of the Rauriks in a tribal district ( civitas ) apart from the name of the main town Argentovaria (possibly near Biesheim and Oedenburg in the Vosges ).
The designation of the southern Upper Rhine or the area at the bend in the Rhine as "Raurikisch" continued until the turn of the 5th century, but with increasing competition from the toponym "Basilia", which is first attested in 374. The Castrum Rauracense near Kaiseraugst as a replacement for the unpaved Augusta Raurica was created after the fall of the Upper Germanic-Rhaetian Limes in 259/60. The fort still appeared in the Notitia Galliarum (390-413), but it has now been compared to Basel (Civitas Basiliensium) as a place of central importance. In the year 346 a provincial synod took place in Cologne on the Rhine, in which a bishop Justinianus Rauricorum ("Justinianus [bishop] the Rauric") took part. After that, you don't learn anything about a Raurican diocese that seems to have perished. In the first half of the 7th century a local bishop reappeared, Ragnacharius Augustanae et Basileae [civitatis] , but now with reference to Augst and Basel.
Raurak Republic
The Raurak Republic , which existed from 1792 to 1793 , was founded from parts of the Duchy of Basel and named after the Rauriks, and like other French subsidiary republics, its name was derived from ancient history.
literature
Georg circle , Beat von Wartburg (ed.): Basel - history of an urban society. Basel 2000, pp. 12-18.