Tanausis was a legendary king of the Goths, according to Jordanes's Getica (5.47). The 19th-century scholar Alfred von Gutschmid assigned his reign to 1323 BC - 1290 BC.
The Goths were an East Germanic people, two of whose branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, played an important role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire through the long series of Gothic Wars and in the emergence of Medieval Europe. The Goths dominated a vast area, which at its peak under the Germanic king Ermanaric and his sub-king Athanaric possibly extended all the way from the Danube to the Don, and from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
Jordanes, also written Jordanis or, uncommonly, Jornandes, was a 6th-century Eastern Roman bureaucrat of Gothic extraction who turned his hand to history later in life.
De origine actibusque Getarum, or the Getica, written in Late Latin by Jordanes in or shortly after 551 AD, claims to be a summary of a voluminous account by Cassiodorus of the origin and history of the Gothic people, which is now lost. However, the extent to which Jordanes actually used the work of Cassiodorus is unknown. It is significant as the only remaining contemporaneous resource that gives the full story of the origin and history of the Goths. Another aspect of this work is its information about the early history and the customs of Slavs.
According to the Getica, he was the Gothic king who halted the advance of the Egyptian armies of the Egyptian king Sesostris (whom Jordanes calls Vesosis). At a battle on the banks of the river Phasis, Tanausis routed the Egyptian king who had already conquered the Ethiopians and the Scythians.
Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in the place that is now the country Egypt. Ancient Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3100 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Menes. The history of ancient Egypt occurred as a series of stable kingdoms, separated by periods of relative instability known as Intermediate Periods: the Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age, the Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age and the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.
Sesostris was the name of a king of ancient Egypt who, according to Herodotus, led a military expedition into parts of Europe.
The Rioni or Rion River is the main river of western Georgia. It originates in the Caucasus Mountains, in the region of Racha and flows west to the Black Sea, entering it north of the city of Poti. The city of Kutaisi, once the ancient city of Colchis, lies on its banks. It drains the western Transcaucasus into the Black Sea while its sister, the Kura River, drains the eastern Transcaucasus into the Caspian Sea.
The Getica states that Tanausis then pursued the Egyptians all the way back to the banks of the Nile, where the mighty river and the fortifications dissuaded him from slaying Sesotris "in his own land". The territory Tanausis had conquered in Asia was then bestowed upon his close friend Sornus, king of the Medes. Some of Tanausis' followers remained in the conquered lands, and Jordanes cites Pompeius Trogus as saying these were the origin of the Parthians, stating that in the Scythian language "Parthi" means "deserter" (5.48).
The Nile is a major north-flowing river in northeastern Africa, and is the longest river in the world, though some sources cite the Amazon River as the longest. The Nile, which is about 6,650 km (4,130 mi) long, is an "international" river as its drainage basin covers eleven countries, namely, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, Republic of the Sudan and Egypt. In particular, the Nile is the primary water source of Egypt and Sudan.
The Medes were an ancient Iranian people who spoke the Median language and who inhabited an area known as Media between western and northern Iran. Under the Neo-Assyrian Empire, late 9th to early 7th centuries BC, the region of Media was bounded by the Zagros Mountains to its west, to its south by the Garrin Mountain in Lorestan Province, to its northwest by the Qaflankuh Mountains in Zanjan Province, and to its east by the Dasht-e Kavir desert. Its neighbors were the kingdoms of Gizilbunda and Mannea in the northwest, and Ellipi and Elam in the south.
Parthia is a historical region located in north-eastern Iran. It was conquered and subjugated by the empire of the Medes during the 7th century BC, was incorporated into the subsequent Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BC, and formed part of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire following the 4th-century-BC conquests of Alexander the Great. The region later served as the political and cultural base of the Eastern-Iranian Parni people and Arsacid dynasty, rulers of the Parthian Empire. The Sasanian Empire, the last state of pre-Islamic Persia, also held the region and maintained the Seven Parthian clans as part of their feudal aristocracy.
Following his death, Jordanes writes that the Goths worshipped Tanausis as a god.
The story also appears in the earlier history of Justin, who also based his work on Pompeius Trogus. However, the opponents are described as Sesosis of Egypt and Tanaus, king of Scythia. Jordanes considered the Goths to be Scyths, and often did not distinguish them. Comparisons have also been made to a statement by Isidore of Seville to the effect that the river Tanais (now the Don) had been named for one "Tanus", an ancestral king of Scythia.
Justin was a Latin writer who lived under the Roman Empire.
Saint Isidore of Seville, a scholar and, for over three decades, Archbishop of Seville, is widely regarded in the Catholic Church as the last of the Church Fathers, as the 19th-century historian Montalembert put it in an oft-quoted phrase, "The last scholar of the ancient world."
Tanais was an ancient Greek city in the Don river delta, called the Maeotian marshes in classical antiquity. It was a bishopric as Tana and remains a Latin Catholic titular see as Tanais.
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The Battle of Abritus, also known as the Battle of Forum Terebronii, occurred near Abritus in the Roman province of Moesia Inferior in the summer of 251 between the Roman Empire and a federation of Scythian tribesmen under the Goth king Cniva. The Roman army of three legions was soundly defeated, and Roman emperors Decius and his son Herennius Etruscus were both killed in battle. They became the first Roman emperors to be killed by a foreign enemy. It was one of the worst defeats suffered by the Roman Empire against Germanics, rated by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus as on par with the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, the Marcomannic invasion of Roman Italy in 170, and the Battle of Adrianople in 378.
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Ermanaric was a Greuthungian Gothic King who before the Hunnic invasion evidently ruled a sizable portion of Oium, the part of Scythia inhabited by the Goths at the time. He is mentioned in two Roman sources; the contemporary writings of Ammianus Marcellinus and in Getica by the 6th-century historian Jordanes. Modern historians disagree on the size of Ermanaric's realm. Herwig Wolfram postulates that he at one point ruled a realm stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea as far eastwards as the Ural Mountains. Peter Heather is skeptical of the claim that Ermanaric ruled all Goths except the Tervingi, and furthermore points to the fact that such an enormous empire would have been larger than any known Gothic political unit, that it would have left bigger traces in the sources and that the sources on which the claim is based are not nearly reliable enough to be taken at face value.
Agathyrsi were a people of Scythian, or mixed Dacian-Scythian origin, who in the time of Herodotus occupied the plain of the Maris (Mures), in the mountainous part of ancient Dacia now known as Transylvania, Romania. Their ruling class seems to have been of Scythian origin.
The Gothic-Byzantine historian Jordanes described Scandza as a "great island" in his work Getica, written in Constantinople around 551 AD. This island was located in the Arctic regions of the sea that surrounded the world.
He discussed the area in order to set the stage for his treatment of the Goths' migration to Gothiscandza, the island at the mouth of the Vistula river. Composed of information from several sources, his account contains several accurate descriptions of the mouth of the Vistula. It is possible that Jordanes was describing Scandinavia. Prominent Swedish archaeologist, Göran Burenhult, regards Jordanes' account as a unique glimpse into the tribes of Scandinavia in the 6th century.
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The War of Vesosis and Tanausis is described in Jordanes' semi-historical account of the Goths as happening in remote antiquity when Vesosis, king of the Egyptians, made war against them. Their king at that time was Tanausis.
The Greuthungs, Greuthungi, or Greutungi were a Gothic people of the Pontic-Caspian steppe in the 3rd and the 4th centuries. They had close contacts with the Thervingi, another Gothic people, from west of the Dniester River. They may be the same people as the later Ostrogoths.
The Antes or Antae were an early Slavic tribal polity which existed in the 6th century lower Danube, on the regions around the Don river and northwestern Black Sea region. They are commonly associated with the archaeological Penkovka culture.
Balamber may have been a ruler of the Huns, mentioned by Jordanes in his Getica. Jordanes simply called him "king of the Huns" and tells us the story of Balamber crushing the kingdom of Ostrogoths in the 370s, somewhere between 370 and more probable 376 AD.
Boz was the king of the Antes, an early Slavic people that lived in parts of present-day Ukraine. His story is mentioned by Jordanes in the Getica (550–551); in the preceding years, the Ostrogoths under Ermanaric had conquered a large number of tribes in Central Europe, including the Antes. Some years after the Ostrogothic defeat by the invading Huns, a king named Vinitharius, Ermanaric's great-nephew, marched against the Antes of Boz and defeated them. Vinitharius condemned Boz, his sons, and seventy of his nobles, to crucifixion, in order to terrorize the Antes. These conflicts constitute the only pre-6th century contacts between Germanics and Slavs documented in written sources.
Vithimiris was a king of the Greuthungi, ruling for some unspecified time in the area of present-day southern Ukraine. He succeeded to Ermanaric, meaning that he probably reigned in 376. Ammianus Marcellinus, the only known source on him, states that after Ermanaric´s death he tried to resist the Alani, who were allied with the Huns, with the help of other Huns hired as mercenaries. He did so "for some time" (aliquantisper), but eventually, "after many defeats", he died in battle. It is then assumed that he most probably ruled in 376, possibly also in 375.
Athanaric or Atanaric was king of several branches of the Thervingian Goths for at least two decades in the 4th century. Throughout his reign, Athanaric was faced with invasions by the Roman Empire, the Huns and a civil war with Christian rebels. He is considered the first king of the Visigoths, who later settled in Iberia, where they founded the Visigothic Kingdom.
