Getae and Dacians? Are they the same? Or is this unknowable?

[Rumo]

Hi everyone,

I ran into this thread while searching for Sarmatians, so I registered to drop few comments.

And that is precisely what bothers me. We have an idea where the term 'Daci' came from, but not Getae, and there also happens to be two other ancient peoples with similar ethnonyms, the Thyssagetae and Massagetae.
But it appears that no historians, modern or ancient, know where the term 'Getae' originated, as far as I know.

I'm not sure if related, there's an Edonian king named ????(?) having his name inscribed on some early 5th century BCE coins. Perhaps he was one of those rulers of Thrace allied with the Persians, however his coins testify also for some local cultural traditions: the Edoni were a Thracian/Macedonian tribe, the royal title is Greek (basileus) and the coin inscription is in Greek also.
Getae, Thyssagetae and Massagetae may look similar in form, but we should keep in mind that "ae" is merely a Graeco-Latin morphological ending, so we are left only with *get-. We are not sure how these names, if genuine, sounded in their original languages, we only know how they were adapted in Greek and Latin (e.g. the Persian name ?išpiš is ??????? in the text of Herodotus). Considering the shortness of both *da(k)- and *get- I think a healthy skepticism should be maintained about any etymology or connection.

Or maybe there's nothing to this, and they are actually just two names for precisely the same people?
Or maybe this is unknowable?
I'm leaning toward the latter.

Perhaps you're right in doing so. But we should note that some ancient authors claimed the Getae and the Dacians spoke the same language (Strabo) or regarded them as the same people (Cassius Dio, Justin). We may witness here only a literary topos, not a genuine ethnographic information, however we should consider all the evidence.

The Massagetae/Alans controlled the steppe and built a huge empire (coveted by Cyrus) which lasted for six hundred years. The Dacii were a small tribe (in the greater scheme).

If I reckon correctly there's no solid evidence on such a long-lasting and vast Massagetic empire in the steppes. And near the Danube the Dacians/Getae had powerful kings such as Burebistas/Boirebistas (subduing many West-Pontic Greek colonies and campaigning against Celts on Middle Danube) or Decebalus (an arch-enemy of Rome) whereas Sarmatian and most other Iranic speaking nomads had some lesser rulers with arguably little authority. Even in late Antiquity I know of no Sarmatian "empire" or "kingdom", but of Huns and Avars.

I guess that at some point "Sarmatian" became (as "Getae") an anachronic exonym hiding many tribes fighting or looking the "Sarmatian style" (on horseback, probably armored, etc.) and living in "Sarmatia".

I hope you see what I'm trying to explain. This group, through language and custom, were the Getae to Herodotus but they were simply one of the three branches of Indo-European culture. The other two branches were the Indians (Hindus) and the Europeans (Greeks, Romans, Celts, etc.)

There's no "meta-Getic" union in Herodotus, this confusion belongs to later authors such as Jordanes. For Herodotus Getae were a branch of the Thracians (Histories, 4.93 and 5.3), while the Massagetae were mostly regarded as a "Scythian race" (1.201). Thracians were as European as the Celts, they were Greeks' northern neighbours.

The Cimmerians were Indo-Iranian and existed before the Dacians arrived within the continuum.

Several scholars argued that Cimmerians never really existed north of Black Sea, their presence there being just a Greek legendary account and a geographical confusion. Robert Drews forwarded some nice arguments in Early Riders, chapter 5. Also Sergei Tokhtas’ev gives an overview of the problem here: http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles ... 6a004.html