Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/169

163 organized in gentes up to the time of the great migrations. The territory between the Danube, the Rhine, the Vistula and the northern seas was evidently occupied by them only a few centuries before Christ. The Cimbri and Teutons were then still in full migration, and the Suebi did not settle down until Cesar's time. Cesar expressly states that they settled down in gentes and kins (gentibus cognatibusque), and in the mouth of a Roman of the gens Julia this term gentibus has a definite meaning, that no amount of disputation can obliterate. This holds good for all Germans. It seems that even the provinces talien by them from the Romans were settled by distribution to gentes. The Alemanian code of laws affirms that the people settled in gentes (genealogiae) on the conquered land south of the Danube. Genealogia is used in exactly the same sense as was later on Mark—or Dorfgenossenschaft (mark or village community). Kovalevsky recently maintained that these genealogiae were the great household communities among which the land was divided, and from which the village communities developed later on. The same may be true of the fara, by which term the Burgundians and Langobards—a Gothic and a Herminonian or High German tribe—designated nearly. If not exactly, the same thing as the Alemanian genealogiae. Whether this is really the gens or the household community, must be settled by further investigation.

The language records leave us in doubt, whether all the Germans had a common expression for gens or not, and as to what this term was. Etymologically, the Gothic, kuni, middle High German künne, corresponds to the Grecian genos and the Latin gens, and is used in the same sense. We are led back to the time of matriarchy by the terms for "woman" which are derived from the same root: Greek gyng, Slav zena, Gothic qvino, Norse kona, kuna.