The Egtved Girl

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep10431
The Egtved Girl (c. 1390–1370 BCE) is a Nordic Bronze Age girl whose well-preserved remains were discovered outside Egtved, Denmark in 1921. Strontium analysis suggests that the girl originally lived in the Black Forest region in what is now southern Germany, but perhaps married and moved to Denmark. She is believed to have traveled back and forth between the two areas and was buried in Denmark after her death.

Aged 16–18 at death, she was slim, 160 cm tall, had blond hair and well-trimmed nails. She was discovered together with cremated remains of a child in a barrow approximately 30 metres wide and 4 metres high. The cremated cranial bones of the child buried alongside the Egtved girl revealed he or she spent much time in the same distant region as the Egtved girl. Only the girl's hair, brain, teeth, nails and a little of her skin remain preserved.

She was buried fully dressed on a cowhide in the coffin. She wore a loose bodice with sleeves reaching the elbow. She had a bare waist and wore a short string skirt. She had bronze bracelets and a woolen belt with a large disc decorated with spirals and a spike. Figurines from the Bronze Age show women in similar dress, with spiral symbols associated with a sun cult. By her head there was a small birch bark box which contained an awl, bronze pins and a hair net.

Before the coffin was closed she was covered with a blanket and a cowhide. Flowering yarrow (indicating a summer burial) and a bucket of beer made of wheat, honey, bog-myrtle and cowberries were placed atop. Her distinctive outfit is the best preserved example of a style now known to be common in Northern Europe during the Bronze Age. At the time of her burial, the people in Scandinavia would have been speakers of Indo-European idioms with Pre-Proto-Germanic characteristics.

Several historical linguists have pointed towards the apparent material and social continuity connecting the cultures of the Nordic Bronze Age (1800–500 BCE) and the pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe (500 BCE–1 CE) as having implications in regard to the stability and later development of the Germanic language group.

The development of Proto-Germanic from its ancestral forms, beginning with its ancestor Proto-Indo-European, began with the development of a separate common way of speech among some geographically nearby speakers of a prior language and ended with the dispersion of the proto-language speakers into distinct populations with mostly independent speech habits.

Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken after c. 500 BCE, and Proto-Norse from the 2nd century CE and later is still quite close to reconstructed Proto-Germanic, but other common innovations separating Germanic from Proto-Indo-European suggest a common history of pre-Proto-Germanic speakers throughout the Nordic Bronze Age.

Early Germanic expansion in the Pre-Roman Iron Age places Proto-Germanic speakers in contact with the Continental Celtic La Tène horizon. By the 1st century, Germanic expansion reaches the Danube and the Upper Rhine in the south, and the Germanic peoples first enter the historical record. At about the same time, extending east of the Vistula (Oksywie culture, Przeworsk culture), Germanic speakers come into contact with early Slavic cultures originating between the northeastern rim of the Carpathian mountains, along the middle Dnieper, the Pripet, and the upper Dniester river, as reflected in early Germanic loans in Proto-Slavic.

Fragmentary direct attestation exists of (late) Common Germanic in early runic inscriptions (specifically the second-century Vimose inscriptions and the second-century BCE Negau helmet inscription), and transcriptions of individual words in Tacitus' Germania.

By the 3rd century, Late Proto-Germanic speakers had expanded over significant distances, from the Rhine to the Dniepr spanning about 1200 km. The period marks the breakup of Late Proto-Germanic.

The earliest coherent text in Proto-Norse becomes available c. 400 in runic inscriptions. The delineation of Late Common Germanic from Proto-Norse about then is largely a matter of convention. Early West Germanic becomes available in the 5th century with the Frankish Bergakker inscription.

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