Jurate Rosales

Rosales was born on 9 September 1929 in Kaunas, Lithuania and lived with her parents, at least partly in Paris, until 1938. Her father, Jonas Statkus, was head of the State Security Department of Lithuania until he was arrested on 6 July 1940 along with Augustinas Povilaitis, General Kazys Skučas, and several other high officials after the Soviet ultimatum to Lithuania. He was sent to Butyrka prison in Moscow where it is presumed he died on an unknown date. After the end of the Second World War Rosales moved to France where she learned Latin and French, receiving a degree as a teacher of French. She continued her studies at Columbia University in New York, where she taught English, Spanish, and German. In 1960 she married Venezuelan engineer Luis Rosales; they raised five children—Luis, Juan, Sarunas, Rimas, and Saulius—in a multi-lingual household, using both Spanish and Lithuanian. Starting in 1983 she held the position of editor-in-chief of the Venezuelan opposition magazine Zeta, in addition to writing for Venezuelan daily paper El Nuevo País and the Cleveland-based Dirva.[1] She holds an honorary doctorate from the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences.[2]

Rosales has published studies in the US, Spain, Venezuela, and Lithuania supporting the idea that the Goths were a Baltic, not Germanic people.

Rosales traces her research on the controversial hypothesis back to 17th-century Prussian scholar Matthäus Prätorius who is thought to have first proposed the idea, which was supported by several Lithuanian historians including Simonas Daukantas and Česlovas Gedgaudas as well as linguist Kazimieras Būga.[3]

Most of what is known of the Gothic language is from the sixth-century Codex Argenteus, the only substantive text in the Gothic language. The surviving Codex is a translation of part of the Bible; it contains the greater part of the four Gospels. It was written for a small Gothic population living on the banks of the Danube surrounded by a much larger Germanic population. Rosales's controversial theory is that this latter fact was not taken into account by the Swedish linguist Johan Ihre when he determined that in 1769 that this work was in a Germanic language. Rosales states that instead the people for whom it was translated—referred to by Jordanes as the "little Goths", distinguished from the Ostrogoths and Visigoths—spoke a mix of Gothic (a Baltic language, according to Rosales) and an exogenous Germanic language.[4]

According to Rosales, prior to Ihre's work, the non-German inhabitants of northeast Europe were referred to as Getas or Gethes in medieval chronicles; she adduces several examples from those gathered by Būga and Aleksandras Račkus, like:

• Gethas id est Letwanos, Chronicon polonisilesiacum, around 1278 (Goths, that is, Lithuanians)
• Gete dicuntur Lithuani, Prutheni et alias ibidem gentes, W. Kadlubek, XII century (Goths are called Lithuanians, Prussians and other peoples like them)[5]

Rosales maintains that from the middle of the second millennium BCE and into the first millennium BCE, the territory of the Baltics was in Central and Eastern Europe, from which Goths (which she identifies as being the same people as these Getas), the largest and most southern tribe, made incursions into Asia, going as far as India. She considers the Getica (Jordanes circa 551 A.D. book on the Goths and self-described as a summary of a now lost work by Cassiodorus), and the 13th-century Estoria de España or Primera Crónica General of Alfonso X of Castile (Alfonso El Sabio, "The Wise") to be basically accurate. The island of Scandza, the place of origin of the Gothic people, is usually presumed to be Scandinavia, but Rosales says that the Curonian Spit (a thin strip of land along the Baltic Sea that joins modern-day Lithuania with the Kaliningrad Oblast, now a Russian exclave), is more congruent with the description in the Primera Crónica General, based on the Spit's nearness to the lower portion and mouth of the Vistula. She proposes that the Gulf of Codano is the Gulf of Gdansk. According to Rosales, Lithuanian name of the spit, (Kuršių) nerija, means the same as Scandza, "that which submerges".[6]

She concurs with Gedgaudas's date of 1490 BCE for the departure of the Goths from Scandza.[7] Asserting that the Crónica mentions (without naming) the Battle of Kadesh (between the Ancient Egyptians and Hittites in the 13th Century BCE), she identifies the Egyptian king Uesoso named in the Crónica with Ramesses II; the Crónica recounts the Gothic king Thanauso handing Uesoso a major defeat in battle. Subsequently, Thanauso (king in 1290 BCE) continued eastward, arriving 15 years later in India, where some of his warriors settled and became the Parthians and Bactrians; the mythological Amazons, she states, would have been Gothic women.[8]

On the linguistic front, she concurs with Gedgaudas according to which the etymology of Goth is from the Baltic verb gaudo, "to catch" or "to trap", which could refer to a man who captures a cow/bull or, equally, a slave, so either a rancher or a warrior and further proposes that the German Gott (English "God") is the same word, owing to the Goths deifying some of their kings after they died; the Crónica relates, "so good was this Thanauso, king of the Goths, that after his death they counted him among the gods." .[9] She proposes that Scythia means "place of passage" (a place one passed through) and Scythian means "transient" (one who is passing through), related to the Baltic aisčiai (from the root eiti, "to go").[8]

She suggests that millennia-long continuity of a population in northeastern means that the Balts are one and the same as the first Indoeuropeans, and that this region was the source of the various migrations that created the Indoeuropean domain.[10]

On the base of the finding of names like Sembus and Neuri in inscriptions gathered by Julien Sacaze in the French area which belonged to the Visigothic Kingdom, Rosales sustains that among the Visigoths there was a contingent of Sambians, whose origin was the North of Poland, and other of Neuri, who had lived in the area embraced by the upper Volga, Moscow and Kiev, the dialects spoken by them are extinct, although the dzukas dialect, still alive in Lithuania, seems to be the last remain of the old Prussian language spoken by the sambians. She also believes that Baltic languages significantly influenced the phonetics of Latin in the Iberian Peninsula, attributing to it the arising of the palatalization and the characteristic diphthongs of the Spanish, Leonese and Galician-Portuguese and indicates that some Spanish words and surnames are of Baltic origin.[11]

• Getae
• Gutians
• Jutes
• Kushans
• Massagetae
• Jat people
• Yuezhi

• Rosales, Jurate (2004). Los godos (in Spanish). Barcelona: Ariel. ISBN 9788434467170.