The Development of Cities

[JDR Dragoon]

Rune if you are suggesting that unless we have a written record of title, or a written account of events then yes your original argument is entirely valid, I can’t argue against that. :curse:

I am suggesting it is the only way to objectively (although imperfectly)date a city/town. Otherwise you have to resort to settlement continuity and in that case New York is thousands of years old ;)

I may have picked this up wrong but it appears we may have fundamentally different way of looking at history, you more from Ranke's empiric historiography, me more inclined to the Annales type historiography, in which case this would not be so much a discussion, more of a sectarian war! one regrettably I just ain’t got the time to do justice to, so I will Chicken out and ‘Surrender my Sword’ so to speak. :bow:

Perhaps. I see myself more as a Hermenuetic anyway.

bit, something that popped into my head afterwards did not one of the Gothic tribes ? Osteogoths ? specifically appeal to Rome for asylum from the tribes to the East of them ie off the Steppes ?

That is the one positive case (the Greutungi, while Valens was emperor) where this can possibly be proven to have been the case, but it is only described as such by one source (Ammianus Marcellinus. The rest of our sources seems to think they did it for the plunder). Besides, it was mostly meant as a rebuttal of your statement that the climatic changes drove specifically named ethnically defined people on long treks across geographical boundaries towards their eventual destinations.

Would not the movement of say the Turks form North East China to modern day Turkey belie that,

That presupposes an ethnic continuity which we cannot prove. Besides, you are dealing with an entire language family here that is (and was) spread out over most of Central Asia. There is (again) no reason to presuppose that the turks who eventually did move 9nto the east Roman empire) did so without a purpose and moved a long distance. In fact we positively know that this was not the case.

or the movement of the Finns from the Urals to modern day Finland;

We are again dealing with languages (and their spread) here. Not necessarily with any physical movement of peoples. And again we have no way of knowing why they moved or how far they did so. As a sidenote: It is not even certain that the Finns come from the Urals.

the Celts march across Europe to the Atlantic Ocean is another example nearer the Pre-history period.

I extend the same observations as above.

As I see it Humans have always had a certain Migratory habit for one reason or another, but usually I would suggest, based on basic survival, ie feeding growing populations, or, move out of the way of bigger hitters!

I see no support for that position. Indeed, it is only with the arrival of modern food conservation methods and mass transport systems that large scale migrations have become physically feasible. Throughout (pre)history most people tended to stay where they were (or close by), even in the case of nomads.