I have been reading selected paragraphs of Claudius Ptolemaeus' Γεωγραφικὴ Ὑφήγησις, commonly known as
Geographia.
http://www.nifterlaca.nl/eigen_assets/Saksen/001_Saksen_Bron.htmlWhy is that interesting?
It is actually the only historical reference to
Saxons in the 2nd century, before they start to appear in the historical sources from the 4th century.
However, there are good arguments that this reference appeared as a copying error (through the Greek alphabet) from Aviones, lit.
Island People.
The oldest surviving copy of the Geografia was copied in the 13th century, so that was after more than 1000 years of copying the original.
Skipping a load of arguments and an exhausting historical source listing of the name Saxons in the first half of the 1st millennium, the hypothesis is that there was never a tribe of the Saxons. Instead, the word Saxon meant
knifebearer, and was used from the 4th century for various groups of aggressively operating Germani all over the Roman Empire, from the Balkans, Northern Italy, Southern Gallia and the coasts of the Southern North Sea.
In that last area a large group of such Saxons ended up, in part because of warring Roman factions who employed them, in Southern England, adopting their 'soldier's name' as the name of their nation. These soldiers originated mainly from the area of the Angles, and their Northern Jutish neighbours.
Once established as petty kings in Britain, the royal dynasties, or more probably their bards, started to create honourable histories on their past, thereby creating a myth of a Saxon tribe at the Elbe estuary. These myths got their own lives and became historical canon in Britannia. Which made the copying error by Mediaeval clerics a logical background.
Why is a tribe of Saxons at the Elbe estuary in the 2nd century problematic?
For one, the Germanic area was rather well investigated and documented in that time, and all other tribes there are mentioned in several places, but these Saxons only appear in that script from Egypt.
But more importantly, the Frankish chronicles from the late 7th century start to call all the Germanics to the North-East of their empire Saxons, and all of Northern Germany ended up as some form of Saxony. But these Lower Saxons (the Saxony in the East arose much later, and is a migrated name) are not descending from the tribes from which members migrated to England.
There is a hard language border between Lower Saxon and Anglian, the ancestor of Frisian and English. With a common tribal ancestry there would have been a dialect continuum between Frisian and Lower Saxon, as they would always have been neighbours with a common past. But there is no such continuum, they are two separate languages with differences that go very deep into time.
Is this somehow important? Well, for me living on the old border of Lower Saxons and Frisians it is somewhat interesting, but for the Anglo-Saxon identity it does change the origins myths quiet a bit.
