Attacotta

The historian Ammianus Marcellinus writes ^[1] about the troubled situation in Britain between 364–369, depicts a local administration mired in corruption and betrayal, the collaboration of local British troops ( en: Areani ) with barbarians, and also the sad situation in the Roman forces, from where soldiers deserted and joined the local bandits. This situation arose as a result of the failure of the attempt to seize power by Magnesium ten years before what followed the bloody, often arbitrary repressions that Pavel Katena led in an attempt to eradicate potential Magnan supporters in Britain. The situation was aggravated by the political fraud of the Roman administrator Valentine .

Ammian describes the attackers as armed groups wandering from place to place in search of a living. They managed to kill one Roman officer in an accidental collision and another ambushed. Since there were no reliable forces left in the province, reinforcements were sent from Gaul under the command of the Theodosius committee, who managed to quickly and mercilessly restore order.

Ammianus only occasionally mentions in his essay various tribes of Britain (Attakott, Picts, Scott, etc.), without giving detailed information about them.

Page of a medieval copy of Notitia Dignitatum .

The manuscript Notitia Dignitatum is a list of institutions of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the 5th century. It includes indications of the whereabouts of institutions and their personnel (including military units). The names of some of the compounds resemble the name of the tribe Attacotti , previously mentioned by Ammianus. In his 1876 work, the historian Otto Seeck collected various spellings, as he imagined, of the same tribe name ("Atecotti", "acecotti", "atecocti", "attecotti", "attcoetti", " [ unreadable ] ti ”and“ arecotti ”) in the manuscript of Notitia Dignitatum . ^[2] The manuscript referred to 4 compounds associated with attakotti:

• Atecotti
• Atecotti juniores gallicani
• Atecotti honoriani seniores
• Atecotti honoriani juniores

The discovery of the funerary dedication of the “ Ate [g, c] utti ” soldier in the Roman diocese Illyric (Pannonia), dating back to the same time, is evidence in support of this reconstruction ^[3] , since Notitia Dignitatum places the Attakot connection in this diocese.

Saint Jerome , a Christian apologist , mentions the Attacottes twice in passing. His data are of particular interest, since he was in Roman Gaul in 365–369/70, while it is known that until 368 the Attacottes were in Britain and could soon enter Roman military service. Thus, it is very likely that Jerome personally saw a soldier from the Attacott family, and possibly heard the stories of the Romans about the recent battles in Britain.

In his “Letter to the Ocean,” Jerome calls for a responsible attitude to marriage, noting that one should not behave like the attacott, Scottish, and Platonic people of the State , who are not promiscuous. ^{[4] [5]}

Attacottas are also mentioned in his treatise Against Jovinian ^[6] in the passage, which caused a lot of debate among historians. In this passage, he says that people in different regions have different eating habits, because different food sources are available in different regions. In particular, he writes the following:

Among historians, there are various interpretations of this text. The following issues are debatable about cannibalism:

1. in this passage, Jerome claims to have witnessed cannibalism.
2. “ Vidirem ” should be understood more as “I know” than as “I saw it myself.”
3. the passage seems meaningless and not contextual; it is possible that the problem is a copyist error. If meat were not referred to as “ humanis ” (human), but “ inhumanis ” (non-human, that is, animal), in this context “ pastorum nates ” would mean “hips of fatty animals”, and not “buttocks of shepherds,” but “ fœminarum papillas "would mean" the peritoneum of a sow "or" cow's udder "and not" shepherds' nipples. In this case, the whole fragment would sound meaningful and quite in the context of the story of the food addictions of different peoples ^{[9] [10]} . In general, the text quite reliably describes the customs of the shepherd peoples living in Roman Britain of that time.

en: De Situ Britanniae is a fake record of the peoples and places of Roman Britain. It was first published in 1757, shortly after it was "discovered" in London in 1749. For almost a century, the document was considered reliable and served almost the only source on the history of ancient Scotland of the Roman period, historians often quoted false information from this document. The Attacott tribe was mentioned in this chronicle, where ^{[11] [12] the} area north of the Firth of Clyde near the southern tip of Loch Lomond , in the territory of the modern Scottish county of Dumbertshire, was indicated .

The information from this fake record was used by a number of nineteenth-century historians, including E. Gibbon , in combination with reliable information from Roman sources, on the basis of which the latter put forward a hypothesis about the "race of cannibals" who once allegedly lived in the vicinity of modern Glasgow .

Historians of the New Age

Beginning from about the 17th century, and especially in the 18th century, a number of Irish scholars advanced the Irish origin of the Attacottes. The hypothesis was based on the similarity of the Latin name of the tribe Attacotti with the Old Irish aithechthúatha - the general designation of a number of groups of the population of Ireland, which meant roughly “taxable population” or “vassal population”. Combined with information about Irish raids on the British coast in the late Roman period, it was assumed that one of these groups remained in Britain and was the ancestor of the people mentioned by Ammianus.

The discussions of the 18th century were mostly speculative. In addition, historians of that time did not know about the primitive Irish language , and based their assumptions on the basis of a much later form of the language - Old Irish .

A breakthrough in the study of the Irish language in European linguistics occurred only in the second half of the 19th century, and is largely associated with the name of the linguist R. Tourneisen (1857-1940). In an article on a completely different issue, Tourneisen noted in passing that the terms Attacotti and aithechthúatha are apparently not related to each other. He suggested that in the Proto-Irish language the word aithechthúatha would correspond to the preform * Ateûiācotōtās, which, in his opinion, was too unlike the word Attacotti in later Roman sources.

Modern historians

The contemporary historian Philip Rance has resumed his discussion of the Irish origin of the Attacott. ^[15] Rance, however, did not rely on the etymology of the word, but rather examined historical and literary sources for possible confirmation of his hypothesis, in particular, in connection with historically recorded raids of the Irish to the west of Britain and their settlements in this part, especially in the south Wales . Rance notes that both early medieval Irish and Welsh (British) literature speak of the migration of certain groups of Irish during the indicated period, namely, the Dacians , who, according to his assumption, can be identified with the aithechthúatha mentioned above. Rance dates their migration around 350–450. (for comparison, mentions of attacottes in Roman sources date back to 360-400).

• Pre-Celtic Population of Western Europe

• Ammianus Marcellinus (379), Gardthausen, T., ed., Ammiani Marcellini Rerum Gestarum Libri Qui Supersunt , vol. Prius, 1874 , < https://books.google.com/books?id=1iAAAAAAYAAJ&printsec=titlepage >  
• Anonymous (1903), "Cannibalism Among the Scoti" , Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland , vol. XXXII (Consecutive Series), Dublin: Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, p. 192 - 193  
• Bertram, Charles (1757), Hatcher, Henry, ed., The Description of Britain, Translated from Richard of Cirencester , London: J. White and Co, 1809 , < https://books.google.com/books?id= OwJIAAAAMAAJ & printsec = frontcover >  
• Greaves, CS (1879), "Cannibalism in England" , Archaeological Journal , vol. XXXVI, London: The Council of the Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, p. 38 - 55  
• Lezius, Friedrich (1900), Der Toleranzbegriff Lockes und Pufendorfs, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gewissensfreiheit , Leipzig: Dieterich'sche Verlags-Buchhandlung   (available at books.google.com )
• O'Conor, Charles (1783), "Second Letter to Colonel Vallancey, on the Heathen State, and Antient Topography of Ireland", Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis (by Charles Vallancey) , vol. III, Dublin: Luke White (published 1786), p. 647-677   (available at books.google.com )
• O'Curry, Eugene , ed. (1855), The Battle of Magh Leana; together with The Courtship of Mormera. With Translation and Notes. , Dublin: Celtic Society   (available at books.google.com )
• O'Curry, Eugene (1859), Sullivan, WK, ed., On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish. A Series of Lectures , vol. III (Lectures Vol. II), London: Williams and Norgate, 1873   (available at books.google.com )
• O'Donovan, John , ed. (1844), The Genealogies, Tribes, and Customs of Hy-Fiachrach, commonly called O'Dowda's Country , Dublin: The Irish Archaeological Society   (available at books.google.com )
• Rance, Philip (2001), "Attacotti, Déisi and Magnus Maximus: the Case for Irish Federates in Late Roman Britain", Britannia , vol. 32, p. 243 - 270  
• Schaff, Philip, ed. (1893), St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works , vol. 6, 2nd, New York: The Christian Literature Company , < https://archive.org/details/selectlibraryofn06schauoft > . Retrieved April 3, 2008.  
• Scharf, R. (1995), Aufrüstung und Truppenbenennung unter Stilicho: Das Beispiel der Atecotti-Truppen,, vol. 10, p. 161–78   (in German)
• Seeck, Otto, ed. (1876), Notitia Dignitatum Accedunt Notitia Urbis Constantinopolitanae et Laterculi Prouinciarum , Berolini   (available at books.google.com )
• Todd, James Henthorn (1870), "Descriptive catalog of the Contents of the Irish Manuscript, commonly called" The Book of Fermoy. "", Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Irish MSS. Series. , Dublin: MH Gill   (available at books.google.com )
• Yonge, CD, ed. (1894), The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus , London: George Bell & Sons   (available at books.google.com )
• Freeman, Philip (2002), 'Who Were the Atecotti?' in JF Nagy (ed.), Identifying the “Celtic” ([ Celtic Studies Association of North America Yearbook 2] Dublin, 2002), 111-114.
• MacNeill, Eoin , “Early Irish Population Groups: their nomenclature, classification and chronology” , in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (C) 29 . 1911. pp. 59-114