XIV.] THE CAUCASIC PEOPLES. 517 



their aid. The account of their overthrow by Crassus in Dio 

 Cassius is in striking accord with the scenes on the Adainklissi 

 monument. Here they appear dressed only in a kind of trowsers, 

 with long pointed beards, and defiant but noble features. The same 

 type recurs both on the column of Trajan, who engaged them as 

 auxiliaries in his Dacian wars, and on the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, 

 here however wearing a tunic, a sign perhaps of later Roman in- 

 fluences. And thus after 2000 years are answered Strabo's doubts 

 by modern archaeology. 



Much later there followed along the same beaten track between 

 the Baltic and Black Sea a section of the Goths, whom 

 we find first settled in the Baltic lands in proximity G o^ s l 

 to the Finns 1 . The exodus from this region can 

 scarcely have taken place before the 2nd century of the new era, 

 for they are still unknown to Strabo, while Tacitus locates them 

 on the Baltic between the Elbe and the Vistula. Later Cassio- 

 dorus and others bring them from Scandinavia to the Vistula, and 

 up that river to the Euxine and Lower Danube. Although often 

 regarded as legendary, this migration is supported by archaeo- 

 logical evidence. In 1837 a gold ring inscribed with the oldest 

 runes was found at Petroassa in Wallachia, and in 1858 an iron 

 spearhead with a Gothic name in the same script-, which dates 

 from the first Iron Age, turned up near Kovel in Volhynia. The 

 spear-head is identical with one found in 1865 at Miinchenberg 

 in Brandenburg, on which Wimmer remarks that "of 15 Runic 

 inscriptions in Germany the two earliest occur on iron pikes. 

 There is no doubt that the runes of the Kovel spearhead and 

 of the ring came from Gothic tribes 3 ." These Southern Goths, 

 later called Moeso-Goths, because they settled in Mcesia (Bulgaria 

 and Servia), had all the physical and even moral characters of the 

 Old Teutons, as seen in the Emperor Maximinus, bom in Thrace 

 of a Goth by an Alan woman very tall, strong, handsome, with 



See p. 336. 



These first runes, it should be noted, were not confined like the later 

 forms to Scandinavia and Britain, but were current amongst the early Germanic 

 peoples, though apparently nowhere in extensive use. 



3 Monuments runiques in Mem. Soc. R. Ant. du Nord, 1893. 



