Some 1,700 years ago a man from the Near East settled in a Germanic village in present-day Thuringia – and rose into its elite. His grave and the finds from Frienstedt tell a surprisingly cosmopolitan story about the Germanic peoples.
Frienstedt, today a western district of Erfurt, was in the Roman Imperial period a Germanic settlement in the fertile Thuringian Basin. For some 25 years the Thuringian State Office for Heritage and Archaeology has been excavating the site – and struck a whole series of small sensations.
The place is famous for an antler comb bearing a runic inscription from the 3rd century AD. It counts as the oldest evidence of West Germanic language – a tiny everyday object that opens a whole chapter of language history.
In 235 AD the emperor Maximinus Thrax led a punitive campaign deep into Germania. On the march back, Germanic forces ambushed the Romans at the Harzhorn in southern Lower Saxony. Three-bladed arrowheads on the battlefield suggest that Parthian archers from the Roman province of Osrhoene (today the Turkey–Syria borderland) fought there – a standard auxiliary unit of the legions.
In grave „Bf. 40" the researchers found a man whose DNA analysis showed Near Eastern origin. He lay at a cult place, right among the local elite – neighbouring graves held bronze vessels, silver arrowheads, a gold finger-ring; one person had a gold coin placed in the mouth. Was he one of the archers from the Harzhorn? A captive, a defector, a trader? We do not know – but he was a fully integrated part of this elite.
The astonishing thing: the Frienstedt upper class was no classic extended family. Apart from two half-sisters and a second cousin, no kinship could be established. At least one person probably came from Norway, and a costume points to the Baltic. They imported Roman goods in bulk and adopted a Roman lifestyle – a clay doll pierced with holes even stands in the tradition of Roman love-magic.
The Únětice Culture · The Battle of Zülpich · Donar’s Oak.
GEO Geschichte (report on the Frienstedt site). Thuringian State Office for Heritage and Archaeology; Christoph Schmidt (dissertation). On the comb: R. Nedoma et al. on the Frienstedt runic inscription. Harzhorn: Lower Saxony State Office / Harzhorn project.