Tuihanten

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Tuihanten or Tuihanti were a Germanic tribe or group from today's Dutch landscape of Twente in the province of Overijssel . The name is only passed down in two inscriptions from the 3rd century from Housesteads ( Northumberland ) in northern England . The Tuihanten are considered to be proto-Franconian clientele who lived with other groups and tribes ( Chamaver , Chattwarier ) in the eastern Dutch geest of the 3rd / 4th centuries. Century settled and in the Franconia .

Inscriptions

RIB 1594

At the end of the 19th century and in the 1920s, two votive stones were found during excavations in the temple area of ​​the former Roman fort Vercovicium (RIB 1593, RIB 1594). The stones donated by Germanic soldiers of Roman auxiliary units for the Germanic god Mars Thincsus show in the inscription form an ethnic and geographical assignment to Germanic peoples from the Civitas of the Tuihanten who served in a Frisian cuneus . On a third votive stone from the same site, another unit is named, which was led by a Frisian officer. The naming of the emperor Alexander Severus allows an exact dating of the inscriptions to the period from 222 to 235 AD. Here is the inscription of the first votive stone (RIB 1593):

"Deo / Marti et duabus / Alaisiagis et N (umini) Aug (usti) / Ger (mani) cives Tuihanti / cunei Frisiorum / Ver (covicianorum) Se (ve) r (iani) Alexand / riani votum / solverunt / libent [es ] / m (erito). "

"To the god Mars and the two Alaisi sagas and the divinity of the emperor, the Teutons from the tribe of the Tuihanten, from the Cuneus the Frisians from Vercovicium, loyal to Alexander Severus, who willingly and gladly fulfilled their oath."

Surname

Günter Neumann sees a two-part possessive compound with a -ja- suffix in the name of the Tuihanten . In the first member there is the clearly recognizable Germanic word for the cardinal number from Germanic * tviha- / tvīha- from * twò (u) = "two". For the second link, he joins older research results that put -hanti in Old High German hansa = "war band ". Similar evidence within Germania is in Gothic hansa = "group, crowd" or Old English hōs = "entourage". As a result, the inscribed group name was initially expanded to an ethnonym and later changed to the designation of the Twente landscape (Dutch Twenthe from older Tuchenti ). An analogous formation exists in the northern Dutch province of Drenthe , whose name is documented in the 8th century as Thrianta from (West) Germanic * Dri-hanti . Neumann sees the group name of the Tubanten (= "two districts comprising"), which are occupied for the same room, as synonymous with the Tuihanten . Non-Germanic , the Celtic ethnonym Tricorii , “consisting of three armies”, would be comparable to Tuihanti in terms of educational type .

Alexander Sitzmann has a different and new approach. It also starts from the basic word * tviha- / tvīha- , in contrast to the previous explanations, sees a one-part formation with an nt suffix in the name and compares it with Old High German two (h) o , Old Saxon twe (h) o , Old English twēo for "doubt". Furthermore, he compares with Gothic tweihnai = "both" and the phrase tweihnós paidós = "each two skirts" as well as with Old English be-twēonum and Old Frisian twīne to Old Indian dvikaḥ = "consisting of two". He therefore sees the h ( Tui-h-ant (i) , - h-anti ) as a regular shift from Indo-European / k / to Germanic <h> and in the nt -suffix the expression of a collective, individualizing and affected function without a related function to offer (new) overall meaning of the ethnonym.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ RIB 1593
  2. ^ RIB 1576
  3. ^ RIB 1594
  4. ^ Jacob Grimm : History of the German language. 4th edition, S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1880, p. 412. Rudolf Much : Die Südmark der Germanen. In: Contributions to the history of German language and literature 17 (1893), p. 147. Ders .: Tuihanti. In: RGA 1, Vol. 4, p. 366 .
  5. ↑ Manfred Mayrhofer : Brief Etymological Dictionary of Old Indian. Volume II. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 1963, p. 83.