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 THE VENETI
TRADERS OF EARLY EUROPE

A New Approach to an Old Question -
 The Veneti and Ancient Europe From the Point of View
 of Trade and Commerce

by
Andres Pääbo

A)THE TRADITIONAL VIEWS IN ACADEMIA
The traditional academic community has interpreted the historical and archeological data as best they can, without getting into the ethnicity issues. It is known from Polybius that the Veneti had Gallic appearances (meaning they interracted with Gallic peoples to the north) but 'spoke their own language'. Because Polybius could not identify the language with any that he as a Greek historian would have known, academia has accepted that the language was somewhat exotic.
FINNIC THEORY RESPONSE:  My criticism of the traditional views is that in general traditional scholars have never considered that the interior of Europe may have had major long distance trading peoples analogous to the Phoenicians or Greeks on the Mediterranean and that the major Veneti could have been one such people - establishing colonies everywhere along their interior trade routes to assist their activities. Travelling from one colony to another, they kept their language uniform over perhaps the entire Europe. Insofar as associated peoples (manufacturers and marketplace managers) interracted with the traders, their language could have been a lingua franca. It is already generally agreed that western European originally had 'non-Indo-European' language (of which Basque is one, and it is believed Etruscan, Ligurian and Iberian were others). It could very well have been of a Finnic nature, since Finnic  is non-Indo-European too, and the Finnic traditions brought into into play skills for  making boats and riding them long distances for long periods of time - as needed for long distance trading. But in any case, it ought to be logical that there would be major traders inside Europe on the major rivers just as there were on the perifery seas, and that these peoples would have had many facilities to assist the activity (terminals, markets, portage trails, etc) After all, the seagoing traders (like Phoenicians) also had colonies large and small along the south Mediterranean coast and along the Atlantic coast down into Africa and up towards Britain. This is the absolute best explanation for the distribution of Vene-type names as well as the mysterious "Urnfield Culture"
TRADITIONAL VIEW ON THE ADRIATIC INSCRIPTIONS: The assumption from centuries ago - other than an initial thought that they were a 'northern Etruscan' - is that the inscriptions were INDO-EUROPEAN, possibly an ancestor of Latin, and not NON-Indo-European like neighbouring Etruscan and Ligurian. This view was motivated by the fact that  a number of inscriptions had words that seemed Latin - like .e.go and dona.s.to  paralleling Latin words meaning 'I' and 'give'. But after a couple of centuries interpreting the inscriptions  little headway has been made. At one stage it was thought to be in an ancient language called "Illyrian" because there is an ancient reference to Illyrian Veneti. Finally some linguists said - let's just assume it is generally Indo-European and force what is known about Indo-European onto the incriptions as much as possible, using lexicons and grammar that would have existed a over a couple thousand years ago. The result was summarized by LeJeune in the 1980's in  Manuel de la  Langue Venete. Being done in a scholarly way within academic frameworks, the academic world assumes without scrutiny that it represents the correct hypothesis and results.  Example: ENONI .  ONTEI . APPIOI . SSELBOI SSELBOI . ANDETIC OBOS ECUPETARIS is intepreted by Micheal Lejeune in Manuel de la Langue Veneté with (bracketed words assumed)  ‘Burial vault of Ennonios for (his brothers) Onts (and) Applios (and for) himself, (all three) sons of Andetios’.
FINNIC THEORY RESPONSE  The criticism of the latest traditional approach is that it assumed a priori that Venetic is Indo-European and thus the lexicon and grammar that results is really words and grammar from Indo-European models FORCED onto the Venetic.  Some results have been achieved, but in the nature of what one sees in obituaries, gravestones, today (a custom that appeared in Roman inscriptions too), in which there is only a few actual words, and then the remainder are proper names of people and deities. The example given above is an example. Note above that Ennios, Onts, Applios, Andetios  are names, without any meanings, and the the bracketed parts are assumed. The problem with assuming meaningless names is that - as any mother looking at books of baby names knows - names have always had meanings in their language of origin. For these names not to have meanings, they would have to come from other neighbouring language wherein they have meanings.  So what do we have? Almost nothing - a few assumed Indo-European words forced into the inscription, and the rest are meaningless names and assumed (bracketed) thoughts. And yet given the nature of inscriptions on gravestones and texts in obituaries, it seems possible. But it is a method that can be used to force ANY language family onto Venetic, with the same results -obituary-like, abbreviated, dedications or obituaries. However, having been made in academic environments by academics, everyone assumes, without investigation that these are acceptable. But note: this approach ASSUMES a priori the inscriptions are Indo-European, and forces it on the inscriptions. It does not reveal what it really is. It CAN still be NOT Indo-European, and produce other results, either like this, or hopefully better by not following this methdology.


B)THE 'SLOVENIAN-VENETI  VIEW' THAT THE VENETI BACK TO THE EARLIEST  WERE SLAVIC IN ETHNICITY.
This view of the Veneti has been clearly fuelled by Slovenian nationalism. The Slavic Slovenians acquired their own country only in the 1990's. Since the 1960's or so West Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Slovakians, etc) had decided that the West Slavs arose from the Venedi who occupied the Polish regions . Slovenians, located somewhat further south, and classified as South Slavs, were unhappily deemed South Slavic and supposedly arrived there by migrations in the 6th century.  But the Illyrian theory of the Veneti, abandoned by standard Academia, seemed to be a way of connecting Slovenians to the Veneti. What if they were descended from the Illyrians, and did not arrive as South Slavs, and were actually ethnically surviving Adriatic/Illyrian Veneti? What a concept! (The basic theory is presented in Veneti: Builders of European Civilization, 1996, Savli,Bor,Tomazic)  The Illyrians, moreover had been connected in past academic explorations with a wealthy archeological "Lusatian Culture" that existed in the Vistula water basin around 1200BC. Well then that was where the Slavic culture began!  They migrated this way and that, and even the Germans and Celts arose from them!  Meanwhile, Toponomic and inscription analysis was employed to find Slavic language everywhere. The Slovenian language was deemed to have archaic features, and therefore seen to be close to the original Slavic that spread everywhere.,
FINNIC THEORY RESPONSE:  Not long ago linguists took note of how Finnic language were filled with words related to boats and water-oriented life, and that their words related to farming came from Balt and Germanic languages.  At the same time the Balt and Germanic languages had  plenty related to farming and life in meadows and highlands, but their words pertaining to boats and seafaring appeared to come from Finnic origins.   The Balts (represented by Latvians and Lithuanians) according to archeology, originated from the higher grounds around Moscow, and migrated to the Baltic coast in late Roman times or later.  Thus I find it fascinating to read Slovenian writings contemplating the Veneti role in amber trade, east west travel from the Baltic to Brittany, and so on.  And yet Indo-European ethnicities do not have boats or even a nomadic trader life in their original lore or language. They are derived from agriculturalists and pastoralists.  In the book mentioned above Savli goes to great length to show that there are names in the mountains near Slovenia that have intricate meanings in Slovenian such as 'end of  small valley',  'prominent formation lower than the main peak', 'large solitary rock', 'field on steep slope that is worked with a hoe', 'snow-covered shady mountain slope',  'prominent formation below the main peak',  'field on  steep slope', 'dried-out bed of a mountain torrent', 'formation extending out of the main body', 'grassy slope without trees', 'sharp edged cliffs', and so on and on!! Such complex ideas about the mountain environment are reduced to single words!!  Savli uses this as evidence Slovenians have been there a long time, and that they were not originally people of the Pripet marshes where there are no mountains. And he has a point. The Pripet marshes from which the slavic migrations supposedly began, probably had Finnic peoples, the Venedi. They became Slavic speaking and then gave rise to the West Slavs, I agree that if Slovenians has complex mountain-related ideas condenced in single words, well Slovenians must have been mountain peoples. But that now leads to a contradiction:  if we view Veneti as trader peoples. How can you be high on the mountains tending to pasture animals, and also down at the rivers, and along the coasts? Clearly it is necessary for the Slovenians theory to permit TWO interdependent ethnicities to coexist, especially if the two ethnicities are so extremely different in their location and their way of life. One is water-oriented, nomadic, found in lowlands where water is, and the other is land-oriented, sedentary, and in highlands where water isn't. If one takes this dualistic perspective, then much of the Slovenian theory regarding a presence by Slavic ancestors here and there is acceptable. But only those parts stemming from the land-based people and not the boat-based people. There are two stories here, not one - a story for Finnic boat people traders and a story for sedentary farming Indo-Europeans. ORIGINALLY the Lusatian Culture was really a trade culture based on the wealth generated by the amber trade (originally up the Vistula to the Dneiper and Black Sea)  The time of the Lusatian Culture began the Golden Age of amber trade, It was the richest time. It would be at this time that the established Veneti traders would have expanded their activities and from that arose the many colonies with the Urnfield culture.  But this expansion would have occurred via the boat-peoples and speakers of Finnic language, and not Slavic. "Veneti" translates via Finnic as "people of the boats" (vene 'river boat' + t,d plural marker) which is more natural than alternative more abstract interpretations. Besides the above theory that deals with a deeper past, most of the Slovenian discussion relates to the post-Roman period, especially from about the 6th century onward. The arguments seem to imply that if one can prove that the Veneti (Vindo, Wends,etc) were Slavic say in the 7th century, that it means they were Slavic back back back to very ancient times. It does not allow for assimilation at any time. It treats language as if it were genetic.  This is not reality. You cannot backward-project. The Finnic theory has no problem with the various Veneti  peoples assimilating into Slavic in the south Baltic, Celtic in Brittany and Wales, and into Latin in northern Italy in the post Roman era. In fact it is even predictable. Trader people were always a minority and very genetically dilute because they were so spread out. We only need to ask similar questions regarding the fate of the Phoenicians. There too the Roman Empire destroyed their trade system, and the individual colonies merged into the dominant sedentary peoples. The Finnic theory says that the Venedi in the south Baltic had long assimilated into Slavs by the 7th century, and themselves become propogators of West Slavic.  The Slovenian theorists will expound endlessly on all the evidence of peoples with Venedi-like names in the era after the 6th century. But I already accept it - the Venedi assimilated into Slavs already centuries earlier, just as Veneti elsewhere assumed Latin, Celtic, even Germanic  etc.. The issue is the nature of the language before the Roman Age, not after. It would be similar if the discussion were about the ethnicity of Phoenicians.  Would we claim the Phoenicians spoke Latin back to ancient times if we find evidence that descendants of a Phoenician colony in Spain used Latin in the 7th century? One has to be very very careful about interpreting data from a post-assimilation period. There are always a number of generations after which a language has been lost, and yet the people still maintain their name and identity a while. (This can be seen in many places today where the identity is alive but the language is not - Livonians in Latvia for example: the original Finnic language is no longer in daily use, and yet there is so much pride in the identity Livonians have a place in Latvian parliament.  Similarly one can find in 17th century documents 'proof' that Curonians spoke Latvian, and yet also evidence that government was taking steps to outlaw the use of the Curonian language.  All in all the Slovenian theory is very simplistic, and does not address the realities of ethnic co-existence, the nature of the original peoples as reflected in the original language,  the fact that language should not be treated as if it were genetic, and that language is a tool that can be lost very quickly even as some larger sense of identity endures a while longer.  Language is fleeting and needs to be used, cannot have competing stronger languages,  to survive.
 SLOVENIAN-VENETIC  VIEW ON THE ADRIATIC INSCRIPTIONS:
Having advanced the theory that the Slovenians were descendants of the local Veneti, it was absolutely imperative for them to discover that the Adriatic Veneti inscriptions be revealed to be Slovenian-Slavic.  The Salvi-Bor-Tomazic book presented Bor's interpretations of a HANDFUL of the known inscriptions. I studied the interpretations carefully and really found no scientific methodology. I found results that seemed somewhat absurd or unnaturally poetic. The method is to listen to the inscription and hear a vaguely Slovenian sentence, and then first find common Slovenian words in some locations, and then begin filling in the awkward parts that are initially inexplicable (those parts that in the traditional methodology were treated as meaningless names) with ANYTHING available in dialects and other Slavic languages.  Even so, the result tended to be absurd, or ridiculously poetic (not just my own view, but also I came across the view of an unbiased archeologist on the internet who labeled them absurd and not likely to be inscribed on the objects they were on).  Unless one knows Slovenian well and the analyst is completely transparent, the distortions are invisible and your accepting the result is a matter of trust. The analysts may believe that what they have done is legitimate, and we do not accuse them of deliberate fraud - just naivete and lacking in scientific methodology - in particular statistical laws. . Example: ENONI .  ONTEI . APPIOI . SSELBOI SSELBOI . ANDETIC OBOS ECUPETARIS is intepreted by M. Bor in The Veneti Savli, Bor, Tomazic (English Edition 1996) by first this subdivision of the sentence to suit Slovenian : (J)ENO NI ON TEJ APPIOJ, SE L(E) BOJ, SE L(E) BOJ AN DETIC OBO S(E) (J)EKUPETARIS  and then the proposed translation: ‘And now, drunken as you are, have fear, have fear even of children around you, when you travel.’   This was on a lead container that the author thought was used to give water to a horse.
 FINNIC BOATPEOPLE THEORY RESPONSE
Referring to the above example, why would anyone spend the effort of inscribing this. (Unless it was inscribed by his wife to remind him not to drink) All the results are of this nature - on the surface absurd, but the analyst uses poetic inspiration to make it into  poetry, and like the traditional approaches tries to find a funerary or dedicatory slant to the meaning to make it seem valid..  This particular inscription given in my examples is one of the rare ones written in the Roman alphabet and using dots to mark word boundaries in Roman fashion. Analyst Bor failed to get anything using the apparent word boundaries so he decided, as he did with the other inscriptions, that all the dots were merely decorations, and one could ignore them. So he ignored what seems OBVIOUSLY to be word separation marks such as Romans used.   The methodology is so fraught with opportunities for fabrication, that by the scientific laws of probability you could use that method to extract a sentence in any language from it.  For example in English “Anon – on the – apply – sell boy sell boy – and ethic – oh boys – occupy taris” If the analyst were determined to get something, he could probably poetically massage this result to get a meaning that, still absurd, formed a ‘poetic’ sentence. "Anon, on the application to sell the boy, to sell the boy, and is it ethical, oh boys, I will occupy Taris." Contrived axplanation: The writer of the inscription is a slave trader who is concerned about the ethics of selling a boy and fears he will be punished in a hellish place called Taris. I am of course exaggerating. The Slovenian analysts try to get something better - anything that resonates with burials and  entering a new life in heaven would make it seem acceptable.  But as I say, no seasoned scientists of language will treat the Slovenian interpretations as anything more than 'hearing things' because the analyst does NOT cover the entire body of inscriptions equally to establish  a lexicon, and grammar and show that all the inscriptions follow the SAME rules words and grammar.  Language is an organized system, and the analyst must show that this system is demonstrated by the inscriptions. One cannot simply say these are all sorts of dialectic distortions of Slovenian and leave it at that.

C)THE CELTIC VIEW. This is another reverse projection from relatively modern times.  It takes the apparent ethnicity of the Brittany Veneti of recent history and arbitrarily assumes they were Celtic in Roman times and earlier. This permits the theory to try to project Celtic backwards endlessly in time, to include the megalithic cultures that created the stone alignments and hill tombs. As  proof of Veneti being Celtic in Roman times the proponents pursue Celtic interpretations in some words given in Roman texts such as finding  Armorica meaning 'men of the sea' 
FINNIC BOATPEOPLE THEORY RESPONSE: In the Finnic theory the Brittany Veneti are seen as a colony in a trade system, in this case predominantly involved with fetching tin from Britain.   As for interpreting names with Celtic, it may always be possible for any language to find a meaning in ANY word - the issue is what meaning seems MOST LIKELY. The Finnic theory, that views all the Veneti as originally being FInnic, can translate Veneti as 'boat people; and Armorica with armu-riigid  meaning 'nations who support one another'  Notwithstanding what Finnic offers, proper science does not permit us to make pronouncements beyond what the data reasonably allows. 

D)OTHER VIEWS
Such as West Slavs seeing Vistula Venedi at the roots of West Slavic ethnicity, There are also some who believe in the Germanic regions the Wends were Germanic.
FINNIC BOATPEOPLE THEORY RESPONSE: Such theories are fine as long as the real proof is there, and they do not backward project an ethnicity back to Adam and Eve. The Finnic view thoroughly accepts that all the Veneti colonies assimilated into their surrounding peoples and customers after the Roman Empire disrupted the original civilization. If we were to look at the locations of ancient Phoenician colonies we would conclude the same!

E)THE FINNIC  VIEW BY A. PÄÄBO PRESENTED HERE
The Finnic view is the subject of the article that follows. Note that the Finnic interpretation of the example inscription given above (Using Estonian put in parallel) is: jänuni on teie appi. Selga, selga. Andelik (on) hobus. Jäägu-pida-reisi.
English parallel: ‘My thirst you have aided. Onto-the-back. Onto-the-back. Thankful (is the) horse. On-with-the-journey.’
    We accepted that the object was a container dedicated to the horse - perhaps a cannister for giving the horse some ale as the trailman came from out of a tavern to continue the journey. In our analysis the Roman-style word boundaries were respected.  And the fact we get anything decent at all is remarkable. Word boudaries greatly limit the possibilities. It has been the absence of word boundaries in MOST Venetic inscriptions that is the reason it is so easy to come up with fabricated results. Once there are word boundaries interpretation by a wrong hypothesis becomes practically impossible! The Slovenian intepretation of this inscription did not follow the obvious word boundaries and still the result was somewhat unlikely or absurd.   The entire process of A. Pääbo interpreting the inscriptions from the Finnic approach is covered in  Handbook of the Veneti Language

THE ARTICLE  - REVISED, IMPROVED, NOV 2009

A New Theory, a New Approach

    The following approach represents a complete change in direction, in that the traditional studies always assumed Veneti were sedentary farmers, and that Venetic was in the Indo-European language family. In our approach we assume that the Veneti-named peoples were long distance traders through Europe's rivers and that their language  was NON-Indo-European, specifically in the Uralic language family, Finno-Ugric branch, Finnic subdivision (the west part of the Finno-Ugric).  This represents a radical change in direction.

    In assuming Indo-European origins, previous studies viewed the Veneti in terms of agriculturally-based colonists who reached their various locations by deliberate migrations in search of new places to live. However, in our approach we see them as trader people (like the better known Phoenicians) who developed long distance trade routes, but in their case mainly through the interior regions, and established colonies to serve their trading activity at the ends of the trade routes and points in between. Because they operated on the rivers in the interior of Europe, they were not as visible nor as talked about by historians as were Phoenician and Greek traders on the Mediterranean; however, it stands to reason that the larger trader groups in the interior of Europe, following the major rivers, were no less organized, no less enterprising. The nature of interior trader peoples - that they may have been as organized as the Phoenicians, Greeks, and others on the seas - has not been considered previously. Historians have more or less taken the interior trader activity for granted, and consequently the interior merchant peoples have been arbitrarily viewed as a haphazard free-for-all of anyone who decided to be a merchant. But that is not reality. Humans are territorial, and there would have been as much large players as well as small, professional as well as amateurs, and there would have been just as much organization, competition, and territorialism in interior trade as there was among the sea-traders of the Mediterranean. History was simply not present to record what went on in the interior, and that is why we only know about Phoenicians and Greek traders and nothing much about the Veneti

    (Nonetheless we can infer that the Adriatic, Brittany, and Baltic Veneti were major trading peoples from a long list of indirect evidence ranging from Caesar's statement in his Gallic Wars that the Veneti sailed regularly to Britian and dominated seagoing peoples, to archeology showing that the main market of the Adriatic Veneti at Ateste was at the bottom of the route amber destined for Greece came down from the Jutland Peninsula, and that the Venedi at the mouth of the Vistula would certainly have handled amber from the other amber source that went south to the Adriatic on the east side where by interesting coincidence we found Tergeste (today's Trieste) relative to the northern Truso (earlier Germanic name for the port where Elblag is today) which was probably originally Tur(g)ese, which represents the same stem in a lower vowel level, thus giving us a north-south pairing based on a Finnic stem meaning market, the northern suffix giving the meaning 'pertaining to, in the nature of, a market' and the southern suffix giving the meaning 'arising from the market' (The -ese and -este endings are typical for place names in Estonia, for example silla- > Sillase and Sillaste. Still, the trader nature of the Veneti-named peoples is not obvious. No ancient writer explicitly talks about them being a trader people in the same way that they did the Phoenicians. Their visibility in the south was low.)

    Traders were naturally most interested in protecting their established trade routes, charging tolls for other users of facilities, etc. Unlike the farming peoples, they had no particular agenda to grab and govern large regions of land. Trader colonies were small - only as large as needed for the trade activity - and their presence depended on their role in trade. If they lost the role they could easily disappear into the surrounding people as clearly happened when the Roman Empire completely changed the original conditions. Control of trade routes was more important than possessing land. And if the trade collapsed, so did the colonies associated with the trade route.  Thus trader colonies could appear anywhere, small or large depending on requirements, and just as quickly vanish as trade conditions changed, or their people merge into the surrounding ethnicity while preserving for a while only their “Veneti” identity. Althought they were families they were businesses - family and even tribal businesses - and as is the case today businesses could thrive or fail depending on competition and many other factors.

     In general it is a well known truth that the language of long distance trade becomes the lingua franca, the international language, that crosses all smaller cultural, linguistic and economic boundaries. We can see this today in the use of English everywhere for international trade (and now also the entertainment industry). Consider how much an impact there is if a large consumer product company establishes an outlet ( a 'colony') in another nation. Soon consumers associate themselves with the culture attached to the product. For example a young person who purchased a pair of jeans in Russia, became a little more part of the worldwide English-American-based culture. What happens now certainly was going on a long time ago. Humans do not change, only the technology does. What may happen today in days may have taken ten years 3000 years ago, but it did eventually happen as long as there was contact. Northern words and myths went south along with amber necklaces and southern goods returned with Mediterranean words and myths.  And that is why some say that many of Homer's stories originated in the north - obviously brought south in the tales told by traders.

     It is not unusual for farming  peoples to have many languages, because they are tied to their lands and unable to communicate with one another beyond a small radius.  Lack of communication results in dialectic divergence and in the extreme so far apart they are different languages to one another. For the larger world, for use in the larger regional markets, there had to be a shared wider language regardless of local dialects. That language tended to be the language of the traders operating within that larger market area. Historical texts give us some sense of these larger market areas containing it own language. Caesar spoke of Gaul having three distinct areas of language, laws and institions - the Aquitani, Belgae, and Celtae. Tacitus wrote about the geographical region called Germania, that the tribes on the west side interior were large and organized (the real Germans like the Chatti) while the Suebi culture that occupied most of Germania (Jutland Peninsula eastward to the Vistula) was many tribes not politically organized but certainly united by marketing contact. Usually it is centered around a major market, which in this case was probably a large market at the mouth of the Oder, since the word "Suebi", in Finnic , suggests (in low vowel dialect suo-aba)  'estuary, bay, of the marshlands'. The next market was the one mentioned above at today's Elblag, the ancient Truso or TURUSE already mentioned. It was managed by people the Suebi called "Aestii", but archeological and historical information suggests it was the center of a market area that went north up to where Estonia is today. If the other market regions around major markets were large, this one had to be large too.  The Aestii language would have dominated that entire coast.

     In addition there would have been even larger trade areas, where the major markets communicated with one another, such as ships from the Aestii ports sailing all the way to Britain. These were the real long distance trade connections that the large players - analogous to the Phoenicians and Greek traders in the Mediterranean -  represented.  Those long distance contacts, over the longer term of decades even centuries, had some influence over language.  The language of the very largers trader powers would tend to influence that.  Over the long term - over decades even centuries - a lingua franca of the largest order would develop along the major trade corridors.  That leads to an interesting observation. When Tacitus described the Aestii, he wrote (in Ch 45, Germania) that they had Suebic customs but spoke a language 'closer to' that of the British. What does that mean? It means that all three - Suebic, Aestic and Brittanic - were similar, except that Aestic and Brittanic were closer to each other. (My study of the Suebic language revealed that it was Finnic, but used higher vowels  ( u>o, o>a, a>e, e>i, i>'h))  Three major languages of northern Europe similar? Yes that is possible if there was intense trading going on across the north. What about Belgic and Aquitani?  In the Roman accounts of Roman Britian, where it appears Belgic was greatly involved in southeast Britain, there is never any indication the Belgic language was a distinctively different language than British. Only Latin was different. That implies the Belgic language too was Finnic. Then there is Aquitani. Was it Finnic too?  The major tribe that Caesar dealt with was called Bituriges or alternatively Uituriges. The latter translates easily with Finnic (ie Estonian uide riigid 'floating nations'). The former was probably equivalent to Estonian viide riigid  'carrier nations'. The large city at the mouth of the Garonne, today Bordeaux,  was Bourdigala, Burdigala, Burdegala, etc (depending on the ancient texts chosen). This translates remarkably well with Estonian purdeküla  'town of sails (sailing ships)'.  We note that the Bay of Biscay has another name still ´Mar Cantabrico'   This translates with Estonian  Kandav Riigi Meri  'sea of the carrying nations'. The whole region around the Garonne is filled with modern or ancient Estonianlike words. (Another example the Pyrennes Mountains, resonates with Estonian Piirine 'in the nature of a boundary') Why is this so? Because the Phoenicians took control of the Strait of Gibraltar, and traders began to bypass the Iberian Peninsula by entering the Garonne from the  location still identified by the name Narbonne. This word too is Estonianlike, an exact parallel to Narva, Estonian, where a short river links Lake Peipus to the Gulf of Finland.  Narva and variations in many places  in Europe appear to identify places where there is a water-portage (ie boats are transferred and there is no need to carry something overland). The name 'Norway' originates for such a name applied to the passage between the Jutland Peninsula and the Scandinavian Peninsula. In any event, the traffic between Narbonne and Burdegala must have been enormous, and evidently the language used - before the Roman Empire - was Finnic in a very Estonian style. But it was not extremely like Estonian because there were peculiarities. The River Garonne was called Garunna or Garumna by Caesar (I,1). The earliest recorded name is Karunas  1st century BC Greek Agathadaimon. There was also an Aquitani tribe called Garunni.  It does not resonate well with Estonian in that the Estonian word karu 'bear' does not suit. The CAR- COR- stem appears often in Roman Britain (Albion). That stem could relate to Estonian korja, 'gather up'. Also significant is the modern English word carry.  We certainly could say "KORJANESE" and get meaning 'river of of the gatherers/carriers'. Perhaps there was a local dialect, or an older dialect, before the Veneti (with an eastern Finnic language closer to Estonian) moved west to fetch tin from Britain. Given that the Basque language is only modestly like Estonian, I tend to favour the idea of there having been an earlier dialect, and the overtly Estonian-like words were influenced directly by the long distance traders - Veneti - who crossed from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean via the Garonne.

    In any event, the point is that we can include the Aquitani into the Finnic languages of pre-Indo-European trade. (A final note, the word Aquitani is Latin and contains the word 'water'. That suggests a rough translating of the name of the dominant tribe (although the name implies a confederation of several tribes/nations who came together to oppose the Romans, much like the Brittany Veneti formed a confederation called Armorica ('nations who support one another'), the Uituriges.

    Caesar also mentioned the Celtae (Galli). Gaul in general was named after then not because they dominated western Europe (they didn't) but because Romans were intimately in war with the Celts for centuries and only dealt with them. Being Indo-European, they would have been settled agricultural peoples in the higher lands of central Europe.

     Language of long distance trade to become a second language that is more universal than one's mother language. The mother tongue may not survive if there isn't too much of a local culture to maintain it.  As much as nationalists may want language to be almost genetic, the reality is that language is a tool, and only as good as its use as a tool. If unused, it disappears. The fact that the Celtic and Germanic languages survived speaks to there having been quite large settlement areas that had their own relatively independent economy and had a large enough population to keep mating within the culture.

    Wherever there was trade, industry, and commerce over a larger region than local settlements, there was a lingua franca. Consider the English language today as used in Europe and beyond. Europe has numerous languages, but anyone wishing to participate today in the larger world of trade, scholarship, even international culture, also learns English to a suitable extent. This tendency  is certainly not new, but a natural one that has been around for a long time.  We know specifically that at the time of Ancient  Greece, there were numerous languages and dialects in  the eastern Mediterranean, but  anyone dealing with the larger regions became also proficient in Greek. In Asia Minor  too there were many languages, but everyone used Assyrian, the language of the traders, as the lingua franca.   Archeology and even history speaks of long distance trade in Europe (Herodotus wrote about amber and tin being brought from the ;ends of the earth' by the 'barbarians' who spoke of Cassiterides and Eridanus as the sources) . If we have to decide what language continental Europe used as its lingua franca, what would it have been?  The best  answer is always, the language of the traders.  The accumulating evidence seems to point to the Veneti  in the centuries before Roman era having a strong impact on the international languages along the major waterways of Europe.





     Archeology shows that the entire north, innundated by the melt of the Ice Age glaciers was a region of lakes, rivers, bogs, and marshes, and that from 10,000 an archeological culture starting with the "Maglemose Culture", spread across the entire north. They were a culture heavily dependent on the boat - the dugout canoe and towards the north the skin boat - for survival, and they roamed the wilderness in them. From common sense and from legend and myth within Finno-Ugric cultures themselves, the Finno-Ugric peoples emerged from these dugout boat peoples (and the term 'Finnic' is intended to refer to the eastern part of them in northern Europe), completely prepared for an adaptation that  permitted them to follow the same traditional ways, but carrying trade goods and visiting markets instead of their traditional annual cycle of  migrations from campsite to campsite. (see the other articles on this website for the more general story of the   origins and spread of the northern boat peoples

       There would have been all kinds of smaller players in the trading game (it would be similar to how local trade in today's France would be in French, but international trade uses the international English);  but as I point out above, the nature of the language used in the trading world is dictated by the largest players, and at least we have strong evidence of the Veneti being large players. Besides the references by the Greeks to the Adriatic Veneti being the source of trade amber, we see Julius Caesar in his The Gallic Wars actually describing the Veneti of Brittany as dominating all who sail the seas (around Brittany and Britain) and sailed regularly to Britain - considering nobody would be sailing regularly to Britain if they were not traders, putting it together, the Veneti were the dominant long distance traders (the certainly couldn't have been as described by being fishermen!!!). Our view is that the Brittany Veneti were strategically located at Vannes in order to hand goods over to river boats travelling up and down the Loire and their goods went all the way to the Rhone by river, and from there to the Mediterranean. We can presume that their large ships also went to Burdegala and goods went by the Garonne as well.

    Around 320BC a Greek Pytheas from Massilia, a city developed by Greek traders at the mouth of the Rhone, travelled into the north. His writing have not survived, and some of the content is known from references to it by other later Greek historians. All the evidence taken together - his first going to southern Britain, then going north and making references to the Orkney Island (Orcades), and then visiting the region at the mouth of the Vistula where he mentioned amber being collected from an island called Abalus.  Considering that southern Britain had the tin mines, northern Britain had the walrus herds from which tusks and walrus skins (carved up in a spiral to form leather ropes) (The Greek word Orca came to mean 'monster', but it may have originated from the walrus. According to Estonian orgad means 'spikes' and that would be an appropriate word for walrus, who had the spikelike tusks.)  And last but not least, Pytheas went to where the northern amber came from. Clearly it suggests that a Greek who probably recieved northern goods via the Veneti, asked the Veneti to take him north and show where the main trade items - tin, walrus ivory, walrus rope leather, and amber - came from. His hosts being Venetic, he would have recieved Estonianlike words.  Abalus, resonates with Finnic ABA-LA  'place of the lagoon or estuary' where ABA probably referred to the lagoon region behind the sandbars that run along the coast on both sides of the Samland Peninsula (which was originally an island as the land behind it is very low).  Pytheas' journey provides numerous words that translate with Estonian - for example thule (Greek th was like d), long thought to describe Iceland, interprets with Estonian tule (Estonian single T is close to D), which as a genitive is 'of the fire'. It would have been a stem that Pytheas herd, as in tule-saar 'fire island' or tule-mägi 'volcano'. But this is not a study of Pytheas' journey. We mention this to show just how strong the Veneti (or at least the Estonian-like trader language) language was apparent in western Europe around 300BC.

      Thus, the evidence is there in historical descriptions, archeological data, their geographical location on the best routes, of the large traders dominating the major trader routes through Europe has a very Estonianlike language and interestingly very strongly along the Atlantic coast. Their behaviour would have been no different from that of   Phoenicians and Greeks who established trader colonies everywhere - except here we are talking about INTERIOR routes, and INTERIOR trade colonies, something that scholars have till now completely ignored.

  The Venetic Language - What was its Nature?

       We therefore assume that Venetic indeed was a strong language in the tradeways through continental Europe and the northern seas. But we do not have a great number of examples of the language. Place names do not reveal anything about grammar, for example.

    The incriptions made by the Adriatic Veneti who lay at the south ends of two major north south amber routes, are special in that here we see the language actually written down. We must not assume that the languages of trade all around Europe was like this, but that the inscriptions demonstrate a more specific dialect in the same manner that the differences between Suebic, Aestic and Brittanic were dialectic. There certainly wasn't a single lingua franca for all of Europe, but that there were several trade languages as defined by the various configurations of trade routes, and trading companies (tribal businesses).

     But at least the Adriatic Veneti provided sentences in their dialect that have endured in a number of inscriptions that have survived on hard objects. There may be close to 100 complete ones (not fragments) that may be tackled.  They are written in a script resembling the Etruscan script, that have been preserved by having been written on hard objects made of bronze, stone, or ceramics. Will these prove to be a Finnic language? Will they confirm our theory that the long distance, international, traders of early Europe arose from the preadapted boat using Finnic nomads in the north?
   
    But attempts ot interpret the inscriptions have already been done for centuries now culminating in the most recent work that  ASSUMED the inscriptions were Indo-European and then tried to force the inscriptions to comply.  The approach led to some results, only because a)the inscriptions are written continuouosly without word breaks thus allowing some leeway in where to partition the inscriptions, and b)an assumptions was made that the portions of the inscription for which some Indo-European word could not be found were names of people (deceased and relatives) or deities. Half the lexicon is names of people and deities, but it should be pointed out that ancient naming was always descriptive. Today we have an illusion that names can be meaningless because we now use names from other cultures. But at their origins, the names had meanings - as mothers looking for names for their baby know from books that describe origins and names. Thus we cannot say that the traditional approach has achieved any results at all, and that it seems similar results can be achieved by presuming Venetic is anything else, like Chinese, and using the same methodology with leftover fragments becoming names. Note that this method also allowed abbreviation so that some ideas were assumed altho not explicitly there, giving  results  something like this '(I am) Fritpuk Mifpik' or '(here lies) Mikdip Mupfip (remembered by) Kroptop Pufpik (and).....' 

    Recently in the last decades there has been another effort to decipher the mysterious Venetic inscriptions, this one appearing to be inspired by Slovenian nationalism (Slovenia being located in a part of the north Adriatic area through which a trade route from the Baltic - from the Vistula or Oder Rivers - came down). While Slovenians could claim some affinity with Venedi of the post-Roman era, can they reverse-project the Slavic language back to the pre-Roman Venedi  (as if language was genetic). There is no basis for backward-projecting the ethnicity back interminably in time. If the Adriatic Veneti assimilated into Latin, then the possibility exists that the Veneti towards the east and towards the north, assimilated into Slavic. How can we assume that when Romans expanded into Venetia, that Veneti assimilated into Latin, but when Slavs expanded north, west, and south in the post Roman era that another group somehow escaped?  The assumption that the original Adriatic Venetic language was Slavic is very small if we acknowledge the possibility of assimilation.

     There seems to be proof that the Vistula Venedi were vulneratble to assimilate into Slavic, in Chapter 46 of Germania.  Tacitus, an observer of the region at the mouth of the Vistula in the first century,  remarks that the Venedi (on the Vistula beyond the sharp bend), appeared to be compromising themselves by taking on some Sarmatian customs and wives. (Sarmatia was the region to the east of the Vistula and north of the Black Sea - exactly the region associated with Slavic language). A century or two later historical texts speak of the Venedi being associated with Slavs, namely the Sclaveni  Clearly Tacitus was seeing the beginnings of this assimilation that saw the traders between the Baltic and both Black and Adriatic Seas becoming Slavic speaking.  I acknowledge that the matter is complicated by the fact that the peoples along the coast were called Aestii.by Tacitus. (Earlier writers like Agathadaimon identified Venedi on the coast too, and no Aestii name was given.)

    On the surface of it, a Slovenian may think that yes indeed, the amber could have been handled by someone else - like the Aestii - and that the Venedi were a separate neighbouring people. However, it can be shown that the Aestii name was what the Suebic called the same people Greeks preferred to call Venedi in general. (Ptolemy used Venedae races and made no mention of Aestii)  Tacitus' distinction between the coastal Aestii and interior Venedi, is caused by the fact that there were two trade routes - one went up the Vistula and then at the bend crossed over to the upper Oder and continued south, and the other went up the Vistula towards the Black Sea (and the region the Romans called Sarmatia). Thus it was possible for such distinctions to be made. The Suebi certainly had no dealing with the Vistula Venedi up the river and around the bend. Their Aestii name would not have been extended to them. 
   
    Although the evidence supports the notion that the post-Roman Venedi (Wends, etc) were probably Slavic in the region between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, there is no basis for projecting this fact backward in time as if language is genetic and that assimilation could not possibly occur. In order to find evidence from the pre-Roman era, the proponents of the Slovenian-Veneti theory turned to the Adriatic inscriptions to try to demonstrate that they were in a Slovenian-style language. Imagined Slovenian-style sentences were forced on the Venetic. In terms of linguistic rationalization, it went to the other extreme in that it lacked any linguistic rationalization at all. There has not been any attempt to identify word stems, or identify any grammar across the inscriptions. No scholar of linguistics can accept their subjective interpretations.  This approach too took advantage of the fact that Venetic had no word-divisions, thus allowing the analyst  to divide it into words their own way. Although they did not look for pieces to arbitrarily view as names of people and deities like the traditional methods, it used all the Slavic languages and dialects in search for  SOMETHING  that fit the slot. They allowed the sentences to take any form possible, and then massage the results in order it did not seem too bizarre. And then give lengthy explanations as to how to interpret the seemgly poetic results. For example 'Bird, fork, lifted, eat' could be massaged and explained as (bracketed parts give thoughts assumed by writer and reader) -  '(we give you this) eating fork (as an offering into your tomb as you are )lifted like a bird (into the heavens)'  (I exaggerate the silliness of the approaches I give, to better illustrate the flaws of the technique)

    The new approach to interpreting Venetic as Finnic takes up half of the content of the author's  Handbook of the Veneti Language  after discussions about ancient languages and the flaws in current and past analysis. Clicking this link will cause a page giving scanned images of the entire book that can be browsed. (The resolution is too low for continuous reading)

    The author's new Finnic approach is supported on many many many fronts, both linguistic and non-linguistic.  The author, thus, assumes Venetic was not even an Indo-European language, but Finnic (as we theorize Europe's early long distance trader peoples were), and this theory produces much better results without resorting to tricks or distortions.  Anyone who compares the different theories and methodologies will see this clearly. For example our approach looks at ALL complete inscriptions and does not pick and choose ones that work best for the hypothesis, and the results are astoundingly what one expects for the objects the inscriptions are written on.  One of the central laws of science is that a hypothesis must work on ALL the items governed by the hypothesis.

        If the northerners carrying trade goods south were  Finnic, it follows that the Finnic language was established in  trade colonies  at the south ends of major enduring trader routes. That was what traders did - establish colonies, markets, and other facilities supporting trade routes. It explains the wide distribution of the Veneti name, and if we link them to the Urnfield culture, the wide distribution of that culture.  It is  a simple concept that is hard argue against, especially when we consider that the major rivers flowed southward and that the Finnic peoples originated from far-ranging boat-using hunter-fishers.  The first contacts could have been made by accident  by northern hunter-fishers just floating down a major river like Danube, Dneiper or Volga. (One only need to look at  Hungarian - a language located in southern Europe and yet ultimately originating from  Ugric fur traders from near the north end of the Ural Mountains)

The Adriatic Veneti were located at the south ends of trader routes that brought amber down from their two major sources - the Jutland Peninsula and the southeast Baltic. Nobody has previously considered the relevance of this, the fact that the Adriatic Veneti were cities oriented around recieving trade goods, particularly amber, from the north, and distributing it further into the Mediterranean.

At the South Terminuses of Amber Trade Routes

    The main argument for northern origins of peoples with the Veneti name is simple. I touched on it briefly above. Boats and their long distance use was already established in the north among the nomadic hunter-fishers from as much as 10,000 years ago (archeological Maglemose Culture and descendants). Skin boats emerged from them, and there were migrations along coast, even to North America. It is the subject of my  UI-RA-LA series of articles.

      Boats first emerged in the north beneath the melting glaciers of the Ice Age, from about 10,000BC, and are archeologically identifiable with the “Maglemose” culture. Finding it impossible to move about in the northern swampland, the hunter-fishers developed the dugout canoe; but once they mastered it, they could travel five times faster and further and spread across the north from Britain to the Urals. As hunter-fishers, they moved from campsite to campsite in an annual cycle where they would come back to the same place only in the following year. The Finno-Ugric peoples emerged from them, and continued a highly mobile life using boats, even when they became oriented to permanent settlements.

    When farming people first became established in Europe, there would have been a zone of interaction which produced mixed races and cultures. Those among the “secondary Neolithic” cultures whose way of life remained largely aboriginal (living off the land more than producing farming), retained the original “Finnic” language and culture. The others who managed to settle in good farmlands and become primarily farmers, would have retained more of the immigrant culture, but note the immigrant culture must be established substantially and be successful for marriages to remain within the langauge and culture and not over time dissolve into the aboriginal Finnic background. Thus for example it is possible that farmer culture knowhow could enter the Finnic world from the immigrant farmers not being large enough in number to prevent intermarriage and eventually assimilating into the indigenous Finnic language, even if they continued some of the farmer hard culture. (That is to say, for those who are obsessed with the Lusatian Culture - that culture could have had some Indo-European component, but the reality of life - the need for men and women to marry within the culture to preserve the culture - saw the language use go to that of the indigenous Finnic people (who in purest form were the Fenni of Tacitus Ch 46, Germania)

  . Thus  intermediate groups developed in the zone between farmers and aboriginals. In due course, the settled peoples, the sedentary farming peoples, would have shown a special interest in trading for exotic goods from far away, and some of the nomadic hunter-fisher tribes evolved into professional full-time traders. Instead of traveling in a annual cycle of hunting, they began to travel an annual cycle of trading, coming back to the same market only the following year. Aside from substituting trading for hunting, there was absolutely no difference in the way of life, especially if the entire tribe moved. (In reality, there developed groups of men, bachelors, without familial commitments, who made it their life, finding sexual fulfillment, like sailors,  anywhere along the route - and perhaps that is why the same y-chromosome is appearing along the trade routes - see below.)

    There should be no great argument with this concept. If the original Europe consisted of dense forests, but there were major rivers cutting through it, then the best candidates for traders would be people already accustomed to making dugout boats and traveling for days and weeks in boats along rivers.  These people had both the boats and mentality to make long distance journeys up and down the Ebro, Garonne, Loire, Sienne, Rhine, Elbe, Danube, Rhone, Po, Adige, Oder, Vistula, Dneiper, Volga, etc – all of which became the highways for the traders. Thus, while the more northerly of Finnic-speaking aboriginals remained in their traditional nomadic life, moving through the wilderness in canoes, those towards the south mixed with arriving farming cultures, produced mixtures of genetics and material culture, but which continued in the Finnic culture rather than that of the immigrant. It is from these mixed races and cultures, who were in contact with farmer peoples,  that the traders of Europe would have arisen. In western Europe, they would have produced the Megalithic Culture, proto-Basques, Ligurians, and Etruscans even before the emergence of the Veneti in their midst.

    By this new theory, the Adriatic Veneti colonies who were known as the source of amber and who made the famous inscriptions, emerged gradually from only about 1000BC,  from the north-south trader peoples, identified first by Greeks as Eneti,  originally perhaps carrying Baltic amber to the Black Sea who then also moved west to seek sources of tin, and exploit a second source of amber in the Jutland Peninsula.

Evidence of Finnic Language in Southern Terminals

    We have no historical information from the early Jutland Peninsula area, but more about the peoples of the southeast Baltic at the mouth of the Vistula. There we find plenty of evidence of north-south trade, instigated from the north, that reached the Black Sea, Asia Minor, the Balkans, and Greece even before the emergence of Veneti colonies in the lower Adige region. According to the ancient Greeks (Ptolemy and others) the people at the southeast Baltic were called Venedi a name that can be considered to be  a dialectic deviation from the name Veneti.  

    While many of the trade goods that came down from the north, like furs, were perishable, one item was not. Amber could deteriorate but if dropped in dry places would survive to be found by archeologists. It is through this dropped amber that archeology has been able to identify trade routes on which amber was carried.

    The dropped amber reveals that from earliest times (as early as 3000BC) trade took place between the east and southeast Baltic and the civilizations of the Black Sea, Asia Minor, Balkans and Greece. Hellenic Greece became an especially strong consumer of Baltic (as spectroscopic evidence proves) amber. Since in any enterprise it is ideal if your own people are handling your products as much as possible, it is likely these northerners themselves established trade colonies at the south ends of the trade routes, to handle further distribution of goods. There is some evidence that the “Goths” (Geti) north of Greece, described in a lost work by Cassidorius, but cited by Jordanes, were such southern terminuses of traders from the Finnic north.

       We can argue that northern traders systematically established colonies at the south ends. Small colonies eventually disappeared, but only large powerful colonies left their mark, and drew surrounding people into them. The origins of modern Hungarian situated to the northeast of the ancient Adriatic Veneti location is the perfect example. The Hungarian language came from northern Russia according to linguists, probably via the fur trade that came down the Kama and Volga causing a colony to be created on the north side of the Black Sea. (People from the Baltic and Gulf of Finland too would have established colonies at the north side of the Black Sea, and they would be the origins of the Jordanes assumption they were Goths. - in reality via the Finnic language KOTI means 'home' and was commonly used everywhere by Finnic peoples to name places they lived - usually with(to use the Estonian form) kodula, etc. 'place of the home') (Estonian is related to Finnish and is on the south side of the Gulf of Finland) But let us leave the question of the colonies of the north side of the Black Sea for the moment, and look at the colonies at the south ends of the amber route. While Baltic amber reached the Danube at the same place, east of Vienna, after that, it could either go south to the Adriatic and make its way along the east coast to Greece, or it could go down the Danube, then Vardar, then be transferred where Macedonia has been to the Axios and make its way to the mouth at Thessaly. Let us look at Macedonia. Cassidorius via Jordanes seems to suggest that Macedonia was originally inhabited by there KOTI peoples, who by Cassidorius time are called Geti.

      The work of the amateur 6th century historian, Jordanes, can be broken into three sections a)introductory gobbledygook he takes from numerous folkloric sources and weaves together in a terrible fashion, b)recounting what was written about the “Geti” by the real historian Cassidorius about peoples north of Greece, in the Balkans and near the mouth of the Danube, and c)telling the fresh (in his time) story of the wars between the Romans, Huns, Gepidi, and “Goths”, forming two opposing camps.

    Of special interest is the second (b), the work of Cassidorius, which seems to describe a  people who, by their location, were a southern terminal colony of Finnic trade from the east Baltic. The Geti name cited, certainly originated from the Finnic word KOTI (Estonian: kodu ‘home’. It would be natural for many of the southern trade colonies to call themselves either kodula (Estonian ‘home region’) or kodumaa (Estonian ‘home land’).

      A specific reference made by Jordanes, citing the lost work by Greek historian Cassidorius, contains names that can be interpreted via Estonian.

Then Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, made alliance with the Goths and took to wife Medopa, the daughter of King Gudila, so that he might render the kingdom of Macedon more secure by the help of this marriage.(Jordanes X,65)

     It was common in ancient times to achieve peace and union through marriage in the ruler families. From an Estonian point of view the above sentence is slightly in error. In Estonian kodula is ‘home-land’, “Medopa” is obviously maadepea ‘head, chief, of the lands’. Thus, it makes more sense that the king was called  Medopa (Estonian Maadepea) as he was ‘head of the lands’, and that the land itself was called Kodula,  and his daugher's name was in fact not cited. (While this one reference by itself may be attributed by some to coincidence, there are a few more references where names make sense when interepreted with Estonian. Thus, the above quote is very interesting  because it suggests that Alexander the Great had a mother who spoke an ancient Finnic language similar to Estonian! It could explain why there has been a lingering debate about the origins of the Macedonian language - it is a mixture of Finnic and Greek perhaps. But the subject is beyond the scope of this study. Our intent here is to show other examples of the amber traders establishing colonies. Amber from the Baltic did not always travel to Greece via the Adriatic, but came down from the Danube as described the colonies were called KODU

      Returning to the colonies at the north side of the Black Sea at the mouths of the Danube, and Dneiper mainly, which Jordanes also assumes were "Goth" in the Germanic sense - those too were clearly Finnic. Thus my view is that the described Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Huns settled there, were colonies of northern fur trade clans/tribes, the Huns being a manifestation of people speaking an Ugrian language, preceding those who eventually made their way to Hungary.  Seeing the Roman Empire push into their territories - so far free of the Roman Empire - they decided to unite against the Romans. Jordanes assumes that the Visigoths changed sides, and were replaced by the Gepidi (from an island at the mouth of the Vistula), but in actual fact - if we do the complete analysis- the Goths who united with the Romans, were real Germanic, and probably identifiable with the Chatti and subgroup Batavi described by Tacitus in his Germania of 98AD.  The Visigoths at the Black Sea simply came under a new name Gepidi. In my view they were a special tribal group of men derived from all the Aestii nations at the mouth of the Vistula, who were perhaps put on the island in the mouth of the Vistula to train to be warriors. Tacitus described the Aestii in his Germania, and noted that they used only clubs in war. Well it is interesting that in modern Estonian the word keppid means 'sticks, batons' and could apply to formally constructed war clubs. If this is true, then Gepidi is Keppid (note Finnic K is softer almost like G)  'The Batons, Clubs'.  So the original "Visigoths" were in fact fur traders from the Aestii who were also known by the Greeks earlier as Venedi, and the "Ostrogoths" were traders who came down perhaps from the Gulf of Finland, and perhaps were identifiable with the descendant Votes, east of the Viru Estonians. And  the later "Visigoths" who joined with the Romans were the real Germanic Goths, and identifiable with the Chatti of Tacitus. (Tacitus even says that the Batavi who were a mercenary army for Rome, were an offshoot of the Chatti. Although Tacitus wrote a little earlier than the wars mentioned, it stands to reason that Chatti serving in mercenary roles for Rome would  have continued. When fully discussed, including more evidence, the idea that most of the "Goths" cited by Jordanes were really Finnic fur trade peoples,. is crystal clear and obvious!! But our intention here is only to give evidence that the northern Finnic traders established colonies everywhere at the south ends of their routes.

More Evidence of Finnic language in Southern Terminals of Amber Routes: Ancient Greece

     Let's look now more closely at trader colonies serving Greece. The great amounts of Baltic amber in Hellenic Greece is proof traders went there steadily, and doing so must have developed major colonies (and identifiable as the Geti of Cassidorius' texts)

    There is more to reveal a north-south connection than what we have described above. Let us consider Herodotus’ account of the journey of the Hyperborean Maidens to carry the first fruits of the harvest to the Greek island of Delos, as an offering to the shrine of Artemis and Eilythia. Herodotus wrote in his work of 420BC, that the Adriatic was the most westerly point of their journey, so they could not have come from northeast Europe. They went annually, Herodotus recounts, accompanied by young men named perpherees  (which could interpret via Estonian as pere-vere ‘family-blood’, ie men who were relatives).

    These “Hyperborean” (from ‘beyond the north wind’) maidens could have been responsible for the Greek mythology of Apollo being born of Leto on Delos, with the aid of Eilythia. Pytheas said amber came from Abalus an island, that is identifiable with the Samland Peninsula when there was water behind it (now it is marshy). Abalus is interpretable in Finnic with ABALA ‘region of the bay, lagoon’ referring to the region behind the long sand bars that run parallel to the coast. From this we get Apollo. Next the Estonian  word for ‘action of water depositing sand’ is leet-  so that the story of Apollo being born from Leto, is in fact the story of ABALA being created by a personified ‘action of water depositing sand’, or a giantess named LETO. (And there exists still among people on the long sandbar along the coast a legend of a 'Giantess' who created sandbars by carrying sand in her apron - not a giant, but a giantess - a female giant! That in itself has significance. A deity named LEETO may have existed there until relatively recent times when people were assimilated into Latvian or Lithuanian language.)

    The Greek myth of the birth of Apollo was obviously a northern myth created by northern peoples who preferred to personify their natural environment than create artificial gods. This brings to mind the fact that, as Herodotus wrote, the people at the foundations of Greece, the Pelasgi, were “barbarians” and came with “gods with no name”. We can continue, and propose that the Greek Titans were actually northern personification-deities. Even Mt. Olympus can be interpreted via Estonian ülim pea ‘highest peak’. Finnic language and mythology - particularly that of the southeast Baltic amber traders - lies at the foundations of Greek civilization.

    It would be incorrect, however to imagine that there was a flood of immigration from the north into Greece and other areas. As we can see from Phoenician and Greek examples, traders only sought to establish practical colonies to handle their trading. But even a small trader colony (like the Pelasgi colony) could have a major impact on an indigenous population by inspiring manufacture and exchange. The stimulus is analogous to how today advertising promotes consumer excitement which then snowballs throughout the society. Today, small companies  can alter the culture and behaviour of millions, if their products have an impact. The trader colony was instrumental in promoting trade, and hence causing regions to become economically organized and energized, such as Greece and the eastern Mediterranean became, in spite of being made up of rocky islands from around 3000BC onward. Herodotus did not speak about trade and commerce, but noted that the Pelasgi never grew in number, but their impact was great.

    What more evidence is there of northerners establishing colonies in the south?

    Everyone knows of the story of Troy, the subject of Homer’s Iliad. Its latest incarnation was in a 2005 movie. Archeology has discovered that it lay at the entrance to the connecting route between the Aegean and Black Seas. But the filmmakers of the 2005 movie, by their own admission, made Troy ten times its actual size and stature. We believe it had a very ordinary purpose in terms of trade. According to Homer’s Iliad, Eneti from Paphlagonia to the east, came to the aid of Troy. This suggests that Troy was all about trade, and inhabited by trader peoples. If that is the case, Trojans would have spoken the same language as the Veneti- a Finnic or Finno-Ugric language (Already we can interpret place names like “Troy” with TUR(G)U ‘market’. And we can even see Estonian pea valla-konna ‘main stronghold community’, in Paphlagonia).

    The story of the Iliad, is structured around the entry of the war-minded Indo-Europeans known as the Myceneans, into the pre-Indo-European area and embarking on systematic conquests, starting with bringing the tribes of the Greek region under its Indo-European sway, and then expanding their campaigns of conquest.  But certainly the recent theories that Homer got many stories from the north can be entertained too. Homer, a poet was producing entertainment. He needed to have some basic elements from southern history that people knew about, but then he could embellish from any stories he had heard. If he had visited ports where Finnic traders from the north spent their time, he could collect stories from them. I believe that Homer's Odysseus voyage is actually a poetic device whereby he could string together the many stories he had heard from amber-carrying traders two came down from the Baltic and lingered at ports and markets before returning. I therefore do not have difficulty with the theory that  Homer's stories came from the Baltic - because of the  amber trade between the Baltic and Greece, and earlier Babylon that would have been a conduit for the legends.

It is Hard to Argue Against the Influence of Trade Activity.

    History has been entirely about wars, and yet trade has always had as much or more influence than wars. We can see it in modern times - the economic growth of China, stimulated by their providing cheap labour for Western manufacturers. Or how about the way just a couple of centuries ago the European desire for furs energized North American fur trade, or even earlier how in Europe a blocking of the Silk Road, the trade route to China, prompted a quest for ways of reaching China by crossing the Atlantic. We could go on and on - yes when you think about it, trade has shaped humankind far more than wars - far, far, far more. But history speaks only about wars, and gives the impression only war and politics shapes humanity.

      Thus the presence of trader colonies in the south, maintained from the north like any company with a branch plant, is not a wild idea, but has a basis in reality. The best reality of all is of course what is known about Mediterranean traders - the Phoenician and Greek traders established colonies wherever they went, Phoenicians generally dominating the south shore of the Mediterranean, and Greeks the north shore. Interior trader people MUST have done the same thing. It is impossible to imagine otherwise.

    Thus viewing the Adriatic Veneti cities to have been similarly colonized by traders, to serve as the southern terminus of trade activity - particularly the amber trade - is not a radical notion. The evidence is strong.  If all the evidence shows there was a contant flow of amber to the Adriatic Veneti cities, then obviously we MUST consider the idea that ethnically these Veneti cities may have had a relationship to the peoples at the source of the amber, and those actually carrying it south. While the traffic was slow, we have to bear in mind it went on for a thousand years!!!

    All evidence, as well as common sense, suggests the evolution of north-south trade was basically very simple. Trade was initiated from the north primarily because the north had mastered the art of the river-boat and long journey. Also major rivers flowed south, and the south was a pleasant direction considering the cold in the north. It is far easier to imagine northern peoples migrating south, and indeed many choosing to remain there and not return, than the other way against the current and increasingly harsher climate. The very idea of traders from the north being enticed to remain in the wealthier and warmer southern climes may even suggest that pre-Indo-European southern Europe actually was largely shaped by such continuous immigration. We bear in mind that it would have begun generally as much as 5000 BC when the first evidence of items from the Mediterranean appear in the archeological remains of the north. That date suggests a very long period during which northern boats, with trade in mind, made their way south and portions of the visitors remaining in the south.

    How can anyone argue against this theory? It is completely obvious. In the beginning, groups of men would have broken out of their regular routine of hunting-fishing in the north, to travel south via the Dneiper and other rivers, to trade.  After doing this for some generations, they would have established colonies at the southern terminals of their trade routes to handle their wares (like modern branch offices in foreign lands) and then after many centuries the region of colonies at the southern terminuses -if successful - became highly developed and assumed their own identities and agendas. Some settlements may have drifted away, their language and culture changed (The Etruscans may be an example of northerners whose language and culture drifted as a result of reduced north-south contact.)  The southern colonies that were successful would have drawn surrounding peoples into it, thus turning the southern colony into a form similar to that of the native southerners as the genes of the original founders became a smaller and smaller portion. (A modern example of a region that has in this way diluted the genes of the original founders is Hungary. Genetically looking very indigenous, yet the language originated with fur traders that came south via the Volga from the north end of the Ural Mountains! Something similar can be applied to north Adriatic, north of Greece, and other examples mentioned above. The cessation of the Finnic language would occur only when there was a cessation of the trade routes that maintained the contact (We can compare it to how in the 17th century British settlers on the American coast remained in touch with British language and culture even though a ship might visit only once a year. Had that one ship never come, the colony would have drifted off in its own way and perhaps even assimilated into the indigenous natives. The existence of a conduit for culture was more significant than the frequency of visits. Indeed the rarer the visit the greater need NOT to allow one's language to diverge - which may be why we find in the Venetic inscriptions the OEKA tablets which I interpreted with the Estonian õige or Finnic oikea  'correct'

     I believe that those peoples, like the Adriatic Veneti, who remained handlers of northern amber, were least likely to diverge linguistically and culturally from the peoples in the north from where the amber came because of the great value of amber and that it had only two origins in the north, and that is the reason why our studies seem to  show a strong similarity of the Adriatic language as written in the inscriptions and the Estonian language of today, Estonian being the closest surviving language to the languages at the sources of amber, as discussed in  Handbook of the Veneti Language 

North-South Trade in General

    We have looked at the southern terminals of amber trade. But it was similar with other northern goods - from furs to tine.

    Even if we look only at continental Europe, we look at a large region for the source of Finnic traders from among the indigenous boat peoples of the marshlands and unfarmable forests from Jutland Peninsula east, west and north.. Thus considering all the trade routes and possible southern trade colonies, is quite a broad task. Let us narrow our focus again on the Adriatic Veneti colonies that were developed in the plain at the north end of the Adriatic, where the Venetic inscriptions have been found.  The importance of the Adriatic Veneti region is, as mentioned, the fact that their language was actually written down and is available for analysis to help us determine if  our theory is true - that the inscription presents a Finnic language.

     The north Adriatic region where the Veneti cities were located, was established, in our theory through it being at the south end of two amber trade routes.  The largest cities, institutions, and most of the inscriptions were located on the west side, in the north end of the Italic Peninisula. This area was at the southern terminus of the amber route that came from the Jutland Peninsula. Archeology has traced dropped amber and identified a route that went up the Elbe, across the Danube valley, through the Brenner pass and down the Adige (ancient Atesis).  I call this route the Western Amber Route. The Middle Amber Route was the one that came directly south from the mouth of the Vistula and impacted the east side of the north Adriatic as well as Greece,  and the Eastern Amber Routes  that headed for the Dneiper and Black Sea and impacted Asia Minor.  Baltic amber found in ancient Babylonian  tombs probably came by this route. We will here, however , focus on the  Western Amber Route that  influenced the language which appears in the inscriptions.    It is  the past of the Jutland Peninsula that most interests us, as it is the most likely source for the colonization of the lower Adige, at the south terminus of the Western Amber Route. Indeed we point out that Atesis (Adige) and Ateste are words interpretable by Estonian OTS ‘end, terminus’ as ‘in the nature of a terminus’ and ‘arising from the terminus’.

    Business connections are strong ones in maintaining linguistic convergence.  Business absolutely needed good communication as there was an ongoing interdependence.  In the case of the Veneti, as long as there was an exclusive connection in the amber trade, linguistic connections would have endured  regardless of changes in the genetics at the south end.

    In terms of time, the distance between the Jutland Peninsula and the north Adriatic was only a week or two travel. This is not much considering that not long ago, contact between England and New England (east coast of America), involved crossings of the Atlantic that took a month.  Linguistic and cultural  maintenance seems to have less to do with distance, and more to do with some dependency - especially in terms of trade  - between the two locations.

    In the ancient north-south trade, amber was not the only trade item, obviously. We know that the Veneti expanded to Brittany and Britain, for procuring of tin for southwest Europe. Tin had to be added to copper to produce bronze. Also, fur was always a major product that came down from the north. The Aestii, for example, are recorded by history to have been strong dealers in furs as well as being the marketers of amber. The Aestii name can be considered to have been the Suebi name for the same people the Greeks (ie Ptolemy) called Venedi.  Handbook of the Veneti Language describes how the word Aestii meant 'Buyers, Merchants' in Suebic. Tacitus (Germania Ch 45) found the  Aestii on the coast and at the market because that was where the Suebi went to sell their furs, etc. Tacitus found the old word the Greeks used - Venedi (Ouenedi)(Agathadaimon of Tyros and Ptolemy) around the bend of the Vistula (an area Polish archeology has found was not influenced by Suebi like the coast was). Tacitus's description can be interpreted to indicate these Vistula Venedi trapped and/or collected furs from the surrounding wilderness, to carry to Sarmatia. It is discussed in great detail in  Handbook of the Veneti Language

    The picture that seems to emerge, when we take all the manifestations of Veneti (Eneti, Venedi) around ancient Europe into consideration, is that after they expanded their activities westward from about 1000BC, probably marked by the spread of the "Urnfield Culture", the acknowledged major Veneti  became major players, adding their activities to the existing trade activities of Ligurians, Etruscans and others already active in western Europe trade. Note that we cannot assume that western Europe was empty of traders when the Veneti became strong there, but that there already was an earlier generation of traders that connected the north and south via the Rhine and Rhone, whose descendants were the probably the Belgae at the north end and the Etruscans at the south, with Ligurians and Rhaetians being facilitators of transfers of goods between the rivers.  The language would have been Finnic, and that is reflected in the names  - Etruscan names  have the stem ET meaning 'terminus' (Estonian ot) and RA='way'. Ligurians, in Greek Liigos, resonates with Est liigu and suggests 'mover peoples'. Tacitus identifies a similar name on the Oder. The Rhaetian name resonates with Est. rada 'path, route' (to carry goods over mountain passes)   The evidence is there that although the Finnic is more elusive to Estonian or Finnish ears, it can be found - especially along the major routes like Garonne (as described earlier).

    The name for ancient Greek was  Eneti  and Veneti in Latin (note early Latin V sounded like W, hence "WENETI" which is not greatly different from Eneti. The inscriptions themselves seem to express it as .e..n.ned where I discovered that the dots represent palatalization which around vowels introduces J-sounds or H with high tongue.) It  appears in historical documents dating back to Homer, who mentioned Eneti coming to the aid of Troy in his Iliad. The fall of Troy has been dated to about 1200BC and Homer lived about 800BC.  By about 500BC the largest center of their activity was in northern Italy, the people we refer to above as the Adriatic Veneti. Greek writings describe a wealthy people who were the Greek source of amber.  With the stimulus of amber trade, Finnic-speaking traders developed into intrepid traders through the riverways of Europe, following paths such as those shown in the map presented earlier. (Routes along the coasts of the seas are excluded for simplicity.)

    With the rise of the Roman Empire, the Adriatic Veneti became Romanized. Elsewhere, they assimilated into the most useful language for their continued trading. For example the Venedi who carried goods between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas, were from about the fourth century AD speaking Slavic as with the expansion of the Slavs, it was the dominant language of their customers.

    Language in the end is only a tool, and people use that tool that is most practical in their lives. If immigrant people find that they do not use their own language, then how many generations will it last? If the population of immigrant people is small, how is intermarriage and eventual assimilation prevented. That is why past linking of archeology and language has caused the worst distortions of the past. For example in the 1960's Lithuanian archeologists assuming that the Corded Ware Indo-European immigrants sustained their ethnicity wherever archeology found their objects (when in reality the only place that would support their ethnic continuation was where farming culture was most supported - in fertile hills of the interior of Germany, and farmlands in the interior of France (giving the Germanic and Celtic languages)) Everywhere else,  the original indigenous pre and non Indo-European languages, including the farmer languages, continued, and the weaker immigrants (weaker from smaller groups settling in poorer farming locations) assimilated. That is why sweeping theories of a great original Indo-European civilization simply fails to hold water. Moreover the original European civilization was non-Indo-European in that it was goddess worshipping and egalitarian whereas all Indo-European cultures were male deity worshipping and heirarchal.  (This idea is significant for the southeast Baltic area - perhaps there were Corded-ware farming people there, but over time the whole area melted into the indigenous Finnic)  Another example is how German academics looked at the data and decided that the Germanic language was already established in the south Baltic since 500BC. But all the evidence is archeological (If they used the name Gothones, a tribe in the vicinity of the amber source at the mouth of the Vistula, which seems to have "Goth" (German) in it, then did they consider the very common Finnic word KODU  'home' (koti, kodu, etc) or more specifically Estonian kodune 'in the nature of home'. Or perhaps they made the mistake everyone makes, that the geographical region the Romans called Germania and its inhabitants the Romans called Germani, were actually ethnically German!!!???  In my book,  Handbook of the Veneti Language . I analyze Suebi tribe names and discover that the Suebi language is Finnic with a high vowel tone - exactly what I find in the Venetic at the south end of the amber route from the Jutland amber source (where presumable Suebic was spoken). Tacitus's description of the region called Germania is that in his time, the real Germans were located where we would expect Indo-European farming peoples to be located - in the interior hills of what is today Germany, notably under the name Chatti (see the discussion in my book)

    The inclination for even seasoned scholars in the fields, who should know better, to make ethnic assumptions purely from nationalistic biases, is almost a disease. It is if nationalism has spawned an insane desire to consider language to be a genetic trait -- all in spite of the fact that if we open our eyes to our current world it is obviously not so - you do not have to be genetically Chinese to speak Chinese, nor have to speak Chinese to use a Chinese imported product.
    

The European Trade System Before the Roman Empire and its Fate

    Traders needed customers among sedentary peoples. Who were the customers? There was an economic order, with a lingua franca; but what about a political order? Was there anything before the Roman Empire?

    There have been attempts in the past by various scholars with personal nationalistic motives, to picture an earlier civilization before the Roman Empire to be related to their own nationality. Notably there has been in the past the myth of a Celtic empire, based on the widespread presence in pre-Roman Europe of arts and crafts of a Celtic style as well as historical references to Celtic war campaigns and conquests. However war campaigns by themselves do not form large scale political order. This is clear from earlier history in southeast Europe, where peoples fought each other for centuries. The best the earlier conquests achieved was a central government with one army, whose empire or kingdom did not reach further than that army could easily travel to suppress insolence. Empires like that of Myceneans or Hittites were like that, and so were Celtic kingdoms.

    For a large scale political organization, it was necessary to have many levels of government - below the central government, provinces, below the provinces, counties, and only below that the actual original tribal settlement areas. And there would be many armies stationed everywhere within easy reach of any place in the Empire. The Romans were probably the first to properly achieve it, and as a result they created a vast empire that covered most of Europe.  After the Romans it was copied, such as by the Germanic speaking war-tribes who were closely associated with Rome.

    As Tacitus reveals in his Germania, Germans called Chatti (the Germanic “Goths”?) and associated Batavi  appear to have been closely associated with Roman war campaigns and learned the art of war from them, and no doubt the art of creating multilevel governments and achieving large scale political order. It is with this skill, acquired from the Romans, that a relatively small region of true German-speakers, managed to expand their language and culture across the north starting from the mid-Roman Age, just as the Romans had themselves done, starting as a small tribe in the Italic Peninsula. But before the Romans, individual conquerors dominated and taxed their foreign-speaking subjects, only within the range of their army; and the citizens were not pressured to alter their language or way of life. If you look at actual history you will find that there needs to be about 400 years of rule for the subject people to adopt the language and culture of their ruler.

    Thus, any theory about an earlier European empire than that of the Romans, as some have suggested, is simply impossible. When Julius Caesar saw the Europe he conquered for Rome, he found countless tribes, countless cultures, countless languages. Pre-Roman Europe was in reality much like North America as the Europeans found it in the 16th century - about 500 languages in over 5 language families. There was nothing comparable to the Roman Empire, in earlier times. Caesar did not find any organized empire Celtic or otherwise. The three divisions of Gaul he mentioned - Belgae, Aquitani, and Celtae - were based on unification in customs and language around trade, not any large scale political organization, because Caesar never faced any large Belgae, Aquitani, or Celtae army but rather individual tribes (or small confederations) within these divisions. Tacitus too, when describing the Suebi towards the east, did not find any unified Suebi nation but said that the Suebi consisted of numerous independent tribes sharing customs and language. As I noted above, the Suebi were defined by the market area to which they belonged.

    Thus, in early Europe, the larger social order was determined not by political order enforced by armies, but in a more natural way by long distance trade. Trade brought independent tribes in  contact with one another, and promoted a single regional language and ‘consumer culture’  Early large scale unity, a sense of the larger social order of humanity, was achieved by the contacts throught trade. Trade not only carried goods, but also culture and news, from afar. It served the role that mass media serves today. The marketplace was the mass media center. One saw goods from everywhere and the merchants told stories.

     While the people of numerous farming settlement regions could not travel far from their farm fields and settlements, professional traders could go everywhere. Thus the goods the professional traders carried, the stories associated with the goods, and news the traders brought, created the larger social consciousness among the 500 or so diverse independent tribes. This is not hard to understand. Even today we find a popular culture involving movies, music, and new products like computers and cars, that cuts across all political nations. The whole world today is involved in this large-scale culture and one’s nationality is irrelevant. Perhaps human nature needs it, and always tries to achieve a consciousness about humanity as a whole. Accordingly, archeology (for periods after the establishment of trade) presents cultural styles for each period - Celtic styles, Roman styles, Germanic styles, etc. Because a people obtained Celtic-style goods, does not mean they were themselves Celtic, no more than the Japanese use of automobiles today makes them American (where the automobile culture evolved). Our world culture today follows the trends of primarily American culture and we all participate. Sometime in the future it will evolve into something else.

    The world of trade and commerce, versus the world of political organization, are distinct from one another, with their own histories. And yet the world of trade, industry and commerce, has traditionally been ignored by historians. It dominates our culture today, and yet history has never addressed its manifestations in the past!! History has always been about wars and conquests, about political leaders, and the creation of kingdoms and empires. But while all the wars and conquests were going on, human society continued to trade, to gather and spread news, to indulge in cultural fads, etc. When we consider this to any depth, we suddenly see that what we call history, is not particularly relevant in the larger picture of human development. It seems that human society on the large scale is and will always be shaped by trade, industry and commerce. For example, the Soviet Union perhaps collapsed becaus Handbook of the Veneti Language e “Western Culture” penetrated the walls of the Iron Curtain, and made people (esp young people) want to participate in the vibrant larger culture in the West. We can even point to the “discovery” of North America as an example of how trade determined history. It was driven by the quest for an alternative route to China and India, to obtain goods like silk and spices, when traditional routes were blocked.  Whatever historical event we look at, we find that real events are determined more by trade, industry and commerce which also affected the culture. Consider today, with the Olympics in China - western values are there now, and it will alter China like no political development ever could. Politics always follows, it does not lead. And yet history looks at the former and not the latter.

      The period we have looked at is the pre-Roman period. The reader should be clear on that. We have been entirely speaking above about the millenium before the Roman Empire.

      The decline of the  Veneti and Finnic traders in general and trade language in general is paralleled with the rise of the Romans.  In the centuries before the rise of Rome, Greece, the major consumer of amber, went into decline. Then with the rise of the Roman Empire, Rome became a major customer. Along with the rise of Rome was the assimilation of former Veneti colony areas into the Roman Empire. After the Adriatic Veneti became Romanized, clearly the long-enduring family and business ties with the southeast Baltic became compromised, and in those changing times, the southeast Baltic tribes originally known as the Venedi nations (see Ptolemy) became oriented in new ways according to other trade patterns.  The coastal Venedi of the southeast Baltic  now looked east-west and received a large number of immigrants from the West Baltic who spoke Suebic. The name Aestii, which I determined to be a  Suebic descriptive name for the coastal Venedi, appeared. Only those Venedi on the Vistula trade route, unaffected by Suebic immigration, retained their name. These Vistula Venedi people, according to Tacitus (in chapter 46 of his Germania) were starting to assimilate into Sarmatian language and culture. Sarmatia, the name given by the Romans to the region north of the Black Sea and south of Scythia can be identified with Slavic language origins.  Tacitus, thus, in the first century AD, documented the beginnings of the conversion of Vistula (interior, river traders) Venedi into Slavic language users. Of all professions, it is the merchant, the trader, who is most succeptible to learn a new language to be agreeable to customers.
    The text from Tacitus, which describes the  Vistula Venedi looking much like Sarmatians by his time, is the following:

Whether amongst the Sarmatians or the peoples of Germania I ought to account the Peucini, the Venedi, and the Fenni, is what I cannot determine; . . .(the Peucini)  are corrupted into the fashion of the Sarmati by the inter-marriages of the principal sort with that nation: from whence the Venedi have derived very many of their customs and a great resemblance.. . .

(Tacitus, Germania, ch 46)


    Indeed, the best interpretation of historical data is that several centuries after Tacitus wrote of these observations of Slavicization, the populations in the entire region between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, became  Slavic-speaking. Tacitus’ Vistula Venedi now dealt with a Slavic world.

    Trader people, seeking always to be agreeable to their customers, would tend to easily adopt culture and language of their customers. And if the original Venetic trade systems had been fragmented by the Roman Empire, and there no longer was a Finnic lingua franca to uphold, then the various Venetic trader families/tribes were free to assume another language most practical for trading activity in their regions.

    We have looked at Tacitus' evidence of the Vistula Venedi beginning to assimilate into the Sarmatians (where the Slavs were). The following description from Greek historian Polybius similarly describes the Adriatic Veneti outwardly showing affinities with the Galli, who were no doubt their customers. Had the Romans not conquered the Celts, Veneti may have continued to assimilate into the Celts.

The part of the plain near the Adriatic had never ceased to be in the possession of another very ancient tribe called the Veneti, differing slightly from the Gauls in customs and costume and speaking another language

(Polybius, The Histories, 2, 16, 5-7)


    Another quote by Tacitus also suggests a trading people assuming outward appearances of their customers. Here Tacitus described the Aestii having custom and appearances of the Suebi, yet speak differently.

. . .the Aestii nations who have  religious observance and  demeanour of the Suebi, but a language  more like to that of  Britain.. ..
(Tacitus Germania ch 45)

     Can we then assume that the Aestii eventually assimilated into the Suebi?  Not in this case, since the Suebi and Aestii had similar languages. The result of the merging of two similar languages/cultures is a true mixed language and culture. For example, to use a modern example, an Estonian community with more than 50% Finnish immigrants would eventually speak a new dialect of “Finnstonian” because there is a mixing of language of the same linguistic family, but an Estonian speaking community with more than 50% Swedish speakers will have to basically assume one language or the other (Swedish if it is dominant) and incorporate only some words and phrases from the other one.

    Thus, dramatically different languages cannot merge like similar languages can.  Consequently the Aestii original language could not vanish as a result of  even a significant influx of Suebic speakers from the west Baltic - an event revealed by Polish archeology. Instead, Suebic words and grammar would mix into the original ancient Estonian (which was the original Venedic). It is possible  that modern Estonian is 70% the language of the original coastal Venedi and  30% Suebic, mixed up. It would explain a similar mixing in other aspects of Estonian culture.

    Thus history records how different Veneti-Venedi named people had their own language but displayed culture and costume of the peoples who were their customers. Thus when the Roman era brought an end to the original Venetic trade system,  the individual colonies went their separate ways, assimilating into the dominant Indo-European language of their customers.

     The decline of a major institution such as the original pre-Roman trade networls is a messy business. We note today that we are still involved with the decline of the Roman Empire - institutions established in the Roman Age are still alive today. Thus we can expect that perhaps even institutions of trade established before the Romans are still alive today as well. Major institutions in humankind come appart and evolve very very slowly!

     Thus we have above described the early period, which most scholars assume had NON-Indo-European peoples like Etruscans, Ligurians, Iberians, etc. It is generally accepted that early Europe was NON-Indo-European. This Finnic theory is not radically new. We only propose that the NON-Indo-European languages were Finnic in origin on account of the forested Europe needing boats to travel rivers, and not carvans through deserts like the Assyrian traders used in Asia Minor. And the skills for travelling long distances in  boats on rivers was all available in the north. Northern tribes saw opportunities and assumed professional trader roles. (The sudden expansion of the Comb-Ceramic Culture in the east Baltic to about twice the length and breadth, with amber finds far from their origins, suggest there were professional traders there in 3000BC - and of course amber workshops dating to at least 2000BC affirm the manufacture of goods especially for trade as well.)

The Nationalist Illness of Backward Projection of Ethnicity

     The Finnic approach to the Veneti matter, is not concerned with the post-Roman conversion of Veneti into Latin-speakers, Slavic-speakers, Germanic-speakers, or Celtic-speakers. We only look at the original Veneti before the damage the Roman Empire caused the original trade systems of the Etruscans, Veneti, Ligurians, Aquitani,  Belgae, Suebi, Aestii, etc. all of which were NON-Indo-European, and rooted in the original female-oriented egalitarian civilization.

    But we have to mention these later conversions of Venedi-Veneti named peoples in the post-Roman era, because there are academics -amateurs and otherwise - who will take relatively recent data, sometimes from as late as the 16th century, and project it back to the PRE-Roman era, and sometimes even back to Adam and Eve. It would be like using American texts from the 16th century to claim North America was English-speaking for many millennia earlier. When such a blatant extension is made backward in time, all nonlinguistic data from earlier times is appropriated and even used as “proof”. It would be like claiming arrowheads from 1000 years ago in North America were made by English-speakers because Natives now speak English. It would be like modern Native nations who know only the English language, claiming that English was always their language. There is a strange inclination in humanity to want to treat language as if it is a genetic trair.

    It is silly to avoid dealing with the spectre of assimilation in any scientific study; and yet nationalism tends to insist that their people never assimilated - the notion of assimilation or language change is not even discussed. Nationalism also turns a deaf ear to even out discussion of how language is not genetic. And the nationalist fantisizers will fight tooth and claw against it . The very idea that the language in the region where you live is not the one that was originally there is utterly unacceptable to the nationalist. The nationalist wants language to be 100% genetic.

    Not all modern people are nationalistic about their roots. Many Asian immigrants to North America cannot wait for their children to speak English and become part of the good life in Canada. We see assimilation constantly in North America. For example a Chinese man, descendant of powerful Chinese civilizations, can move to America and within a  couple of generations become American.

    Fact is, it is so so so easy to lose your original language. In ancient times there was no nationalism. People spoke what they were taught as a child or whatever other language was practical. Language was never a matter of nationalistic identity like it is today.

     We must study language quite objectively, without subliminal nationalistic biases. It is clear that the Veneti language was originally pursued from the Indo-European perspective simply because everyone who looked at it  was Indo-Europeanistically biased - since there are far far far more scholars whose mother language is Indo-European that Finnic or even Finno-Ugric. In fact, the Venetic language has never even been looked at in depth as anything other than Indo-European of some form, before this author's study as documented in Handbook of the Veneti Language

      Our actual study of the Venetic inscriptions, in which we decipher all the complete sentences from the Finnic perspective - identifying a great amount of word stems and grammar - is beyond the scope of this general article describing the general theory of an earlier trade-based civilization facilitated by boat peoples descending from the north.  The interpreting of the Adriatic inscriptions forms the back half of my Handbook of the Veneti Language.  The book is an improvement on the the first version entitled The Veneti Language - An Ancient Language from a New Perspective. The first four chapters cover, and expand on what has been discussed above (in fact the above has been adapted from it) and then the remaining chapters up to chapter 18 proceed to the interpreting of the inscriptions. The work is written in as plain a language as possible (like the above) but all steps have been taken to have scientific integrity. The errors made by traditional analysis of the inscriptions, as described earlier, are not repeated. We go to great lengths not to repeat all the flaws in methodology we have singled out and noted. Most of all we systematically tackle ALL the complete inscriptions even if some of the results end up uncertain and awkward.  We go to basic scientific principles, particularly statistical laws, to avoid the excessive freedoms to invent false results, that have plagued previous studies.

   
The Slovenian-Veneti Question

    Since some Slovenians have in the last few decades become obsessed with identifying themselves with the Veneti, we need to address the Slovenian question.

    Our  Finnic theory of traders between Baltic and Adriatic suggests that if the Venedi along the Baltic-to-Adriatic trade route assimilated into Slavs in the post-Roman era they would have continued to follow the traditional route which came down through Slovenian region. Just because the Roman Empire messed up the whole, does not mean that traditional routes were not still usable. There is endless evidence that trade continued vigorously between the Baltic and the Adriatic, but mainly trade that connected with Scandinavia. It came south by the Oder River, and then followed the traditional amber route.  But these Venedi (Wend) traders were no longer using Finnic, but Slavic. Therefore at the south end, as the west side of the North Adriatic assimilated into Latin, the east side assimilated into Slavic. The sedentary component of the trade activity was not going to continue speaking the original Finnic Venetic if all the traders who are arriving from the north are speaking Slavic  was it? No. If the Venedi traders arriving from the north were speaking Slavic, then the maintainers of warehouses, market managers, tavern owners, and so on interracting with them would speak Slavic too would they not.  Thus whatever was established in the Slovenia area formerly Finnic, converted to Slavic. This theory does not need to even imagine any immigration. The trader coming and going was enough. (Indeed much movement of language in culture in human history does not involve movement of people - as well proven by the creation of the Roman Empire that tended to make everyone Latin)

    Therefore the Slovenians INDEED could be descendants from the original Finnic Veneti and Venedi, and they INDEED need not have arrived as immigrants nor be identified with the South Slavs. In the post Roman era, the traders found no use for the original Finnic and now spoke the language that dominated the region between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas. The Vistula Venedi not only participated in the evolution of the West Slavs, but also the Slovenians insofar as they continued to make a living by carrying furs, etc down to the Adriatic. If the Slovenians were Venedi/Veneti who simply adopted Slavic because that was the new language of trade,  therefore their language is the product of that assimilation - cultural and linguistic features that existed in the original Suebic or Aestic Veneti dialect would survive within the Slavic they used.

    Adopting a new language does leave traces of the old. Today we call it an accent. We note here that linguists have puzzled over the Celtic spoken in the Vannes area where the Brittany Veneti were located. Their  dialect Vannetais has peculiarities not found in neighbouring Celtic dialects. Why? perhaps because of the influence of the original language. Similarly there used to be an unusual dialect of Lithuanian in the Samland Peninsula - was it a unique early Balt language, or Aestii who assimilated into Lithuanian settlers?

    It seems that when one acquires a new language, the 'accent' one has from one's previous language can become entrenched and endure. And that is why the high tone palatalized way Danes speak German is interesting - it seems to reflect both Suebic and indeed the Venetic at the bottom of the the amber route from there. (see Handbook of the Veneti Language for more discussion of this). Therefore, it is almost obvious that Slovenian is the dialect assumed by the Venedi as they acquired Slavic, and contains peculiarites. I have not investigated Slovenian to any great extent at this stage, but I noted in some translations that some of the words resembled Estonian words. Cultural features may also exist that point north into Finnic culture - reverence for the dugout or the native tree from which it was made, for example.

    It is also interesting to note that trade has two kinds of people - the shippers, and the static people who maintain facilities along the trade routes including taverns!. It is quite possible, and even likely that the shippers in east Europe were Finnic, and those who maintained infrastructure were derived from the sedentary peoples. This it is possible that in eastern Europe south on the Vistula, there was a close relationship between the Vistula Venedi and certain Slavic families or tribes, assisting one another carry goods to further destinations. It trherefore becomes interesting that a historical text speaks of Venethi allied with Sclaveni Is it possible that the Venethi were the boat people, the shippers, and the Sclaveni from the tribe along the route - perhaps where a portaging was needed from the Vistula into rivers leading to the Black Sea?  If so, then in the course of history, the Sclaveni could easily have expanded their role, and positioned themselves also at the terminus of the other route, the amber route to the Adriatic. It would explain the closeness of the word Slovenia to Sclaveni  They would not have assumed the name Venethi, if that word described the shippers. The Sclaveni would have been the static component. We saw this at the Baltic amber coast, where Pytheas identified Gotones already in 320 BC. The Estonian word kodune means 'people who stay about home' - 'home-bound', and so it makes sense that people who maintain the facilities of the region are are named in a different way from the ones who are mobile. The Aestii name would have referred to the static component, while the Venedi the mobile. While Tacitus looked at the Vistula Venedi, the amber route still had its Veneti too, they were known to the Romans as Vandali  (Vened-ala 'people of the place of the boat people'). Not long after Tacitus, the Vandali were attacked by the Goths (Chatti?) and a component of them began marching everywhere to Rome, to Spain, to Africa. Those who stayed probably joined a Germanic ethnicity that was associated with Vienna. (The Roman Age name of Vienna, Vindobono, contains the Germanic word for Venedi---Vindo, and in Finnic form Vindobono was probably Venede-peane  'Main town of the Venedi'  The Vandali becoming Germanic vanished into Vienna, while the Vistula Venedi  vanished - in all but name - into West Slavs and Slovenians at the south end of the traditional amber route.

    The above may be the actual REALISTIC non-fantastical truth - that Slovenians have Veneti genes, like the Italian Veneto do, but since language is not genetic, they have suffered a loss of the original language. Language is only a practical tool and when it was no longer practical to have, it vanished in favour of the more practical language. I happens all the time and has been happening since tribes began to interract with tribes in trade, industry, commerce, and larger scale culture.

    What they (the proponents of the current Slovenian perspective) say about the Veneti having great impact on civilization, may be true (and we suggest it is,  but viewed in the context of the impact of long distance trade), but the trouble is they keep putting the Slavic ethnicity into it, as if language was genetic, and if you have it in the 4th century, you must have had it in the 4th millenium BC!!

     So our Finnic theory can embrace everything that the Slovenian Venetic papers are presenting, but we have to subtract the presumptions that treat language as if it were genetic and can be projected back in time like a big nose. The Finnic theory does not naively assume that language is genetic. We only observe what trade practices produce (lingua francas arising from the dominant traders, like the Assyrians in Asia Minor), and we then propose it was Finnic, because the northern boat peoples were most pre-adapted for long distance journeys on rivers. We then look for evidence of Finnic in toponomy at major trade routes, tribe names at terminal colonies, and in the inscriptions made at the Adriatic. We allow realistic variation in dialect, and the existence of small languages in sedentary communities.

    Our interest is in the fate of the boat peoples that arose from the flooded landscapes of northern Europe at the end of the Ice Age (a study we began before 2000, and outlined in my  UI-RA-LA series of articles. ) . We looked at how they ventured across the Atlantic, but we wondered how they impacted southward into civilization. After all they were not an island relative to the emerging sedentary peoples in southern Europe. That is out motive in this theory. And we DID find Estonianlike language in the Veneti inscriptions, and the places we would expect, if there was a northern origin.

    Ironically, the least interested in my theory has been Estonians. It seems far too exotic to be connected to Veneti, far away. Estonians relate more easily to amber and the Aestii who bore their own name (Eesti).  Some Finns have shown interest in the Finnic-Veneti theory, but mostly it has been the Veneto, who look for some alternative to being told they were once speaking Slovenian (a patronizing notion).

    If the Slovenian-Venetic  theory were merely to recognize that the Adriatic Veneti spoke the Finnic language of the amber trade, and assimilated into both Latin and Slavic (and Celtic in Brittany) then all the factions wishing to backward project language as if it was genetic, can live in peace again. (:

Postscript

There have recently been attempts to use population DNA analysis to prove language movements. There is one y-chromosome study that actually seems to describe a line down the amber routes to the Adriatic, and then onward to Albania, on their way to Greece. (Evidence of traders settling along the route or simply having sex with local women along the way and producing male babies with y-chromosomes) The authors of the study were not looking for anything like this, but I saw it, and informed the authors. "Signature of recent historical events in the European Y-chromosomal STR haplotype distribution"  by Lutz Roewer, Peter J.P Croucher, Sascha Willuweit, Tim T. Lu, Manfred Kayser, Rüdiger Lessig, Peter de Knijff, Mark A. Jobling, Chris Tyler-Smith, and Michael Krawczak, which was published in Human Genetics 116(4):279-91 in Jan 2007.  I never heard back from them, and presume the number of people actually interested in the ancient world of traders is quite small.  Originally on this page, I had a discussion of the results of that study and further paragraphs on how one cannot use genetics to determine language movements, when the language in question is a lingua franca that crosses archeological and genetic boundaries (such as English use throughout the world today)