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Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Roman historian Tacitus described germans have blue eyes and red or blonde hair

The Germania begins with a description of the lands, laws, and customs of the Germanic people (Chapters 1–27); it then segues into descriptions of individual tribes, beginning with those dwelling closest to Roman lands and ending on the uttermost shores of the Baltic, among the amber-gathering Aesti, theFenni, and the unknown tribes beyond them.

Tacitus says (Ch. 2) that physically, the Germanic peoples appear to be a distinct nation, not an admixture of their neighbors, as nobody would desire to migrate to a climate as horrid as that of Germania. They are divided into three large branches, theIngaevones, the Herminones and theIstaevones, deriving their ancestry from three sons of Mannus, son of Tuisto, their common forefather. In Chapter 4, he mentions that they all have common physical characteristics, blue eyes (truces et caerulei oculi = "sky-coloured, azure, dark blue, dark green), reddish hair ( rutilae comae = "red, golden-red, reddish yellow") and large bodies, vigorous at the first onset but not tolerant of exhausting labour, tolerant of hunger and cold but not of heat.[2]


http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germania_(book)

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